Teenage witch Sabrina is approaching her 16th birthday and the Dark Baptism which will mark her ascension to a full witch. But is she ready to leave her friends and ‘normal’ life behind and give herself to the Dark Lord?

Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a show I was peripherally aware of, growing up and I can vaguely recall watching the odd episode. It was a fairly standard 90s family comedy with bright colours, cheap laughs and an animatronic talking cat. Being based on the 2014 ‘dark’ reboot of the character in Archie Comics’ Archie Horror imprint, this is none of that.

Sure, in the original TV show there were references to various aspects of witchcraft but it was all done in a terribly homely way – aunts Zelda and Hilda were charming middle-aged women who could have been any teenager’s well-meaning, slightly overbearing but always loving aunts, and overall the emphasis was more on the ‘teenage’ than the ‘witch’ aspect. Here, Zelda is a dedicated, stern figure; Hilda the lighter, nicer one. Sabrina herself doesn’t suddenly discover her powers but rather has grown up knowing about them and as for Salem – well he’s a cat, mostly.

There’s a lot of emphasis on the ‘dark’ part of all this. Constant references to Satan, the Dark Lord and so on, and the show isn’t messing around or using this stuff as a punchline the way Melissa Joan Hart’s version did – when Zelda talks of Sabrina’s duty to swear herself to the service of the Dark Lord she really means it. Where that gets confusing is how tonally dissonant it starts to become.

Sabrina – as far as we can tell in this opening episode – is a good person. She has friends, sticks up for the oppressed, has a loving relationship with boyfriend Harvey. But she’s also a witch, living with aunts who are also witches, running their own funeral parlour from their home. It’s strongly implied that Zelda at the very least is partial to eating bits of the corpses they deal with when closed casket services are done, and even Hilda (played-by-the-impossible-to-not-like Lucy Davis) is quite a dark figure. Cousin Ambrose, also living with the witches and apparently under some sort of house arrest, is all kinds of shady, while at the same time clearly being a nurturing presence in Sabrina’s life.

Why this becomes difficult as a viewer is that our villain here is also some sort of witch or other Dark Lord servant (it’s not quite clear) and aside from the fact that this episode leaves their intentions with regards to Sabrina a little murky, I found it hard to work out how I am supposed to be rooting for the one side over the other, aside from the fact that Sabrina is a young, perky blonde, albeit one on the verge of becoming a witch like her aunts. The fact that the show has Sabrina questioning whether or not this is something that she wants would seem to be the answer but that leaves me wondering where the aunts will fit in, in this incarnation.

As well as being dark, it’s also quite bloody and graphic – arachnophobes will struggle with one scene in particular and it’s definitely not something that is recommended for younger viewers, if the trailers have not already tipped you off. It’s not a bad opener – I like what they’ve done with Salem, it’s nice that Sabrina the school kid is so concerned with helping out her friends and protecting the vulnerable and I feel like Ambrose will rapidly become everyone’s favourite character with his dry delivery and streak of mischief, but I wonder who, beyond fans of the 2014 comic, this show is aiming itself at. I can’t imagine fans of the previous TV show finding much here to delight them, and the weird tone it strikes makes me suspect that horror fans won’t find enough here to satisfy them either. As a TV show, it feels like something that will have a niche appeal at best, and something that will confuse anyone not aware of the comic book source material whose only source of reference is a sitcom from two decades ago.

Verdict: Dark, bloody and intriguing while also being frustratingly tonally inconsistent. There are good ideas here and I look forward to seeing where they take them, but I have a feeling that beyond a niche audience this will struggle to find a foothold. 7/10

Greg D. Smith