The Teenage Witch Gets a Hell of a Makeover

Hollywood’s reboot cycle has been grinding for years—Roseanne, Full House, Ghostbusters—old properties dragged back into production while the originals slowly lose their shape in memory. The success rate hovers somewhere near zero. The worst outcomes don’t just produce bad television; they actively damage the source material, which is a specific kind of violence.

Sabrina the Teenage Witch was genuinely good. Melissa Joan Hart was genuinely good. The show had that very specific late-nineties sitcom warmth—the laugh track, the questionable fashion, the aunts bickering over crystal balls, Salem delivering deadpan commentary from a couch cushion. I watched it constantly. There was nothing complicated about it and that was entirely the point.

The new version, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix, has no interest in any of that. It draws instead from the original comic source material by George Gladir and Dan DeCarlo—a much darker world than the sitcom ever touched. Kiernan Shipka plays Sabrina as something genuinely dangerous and morally compromised. Ross Lynch, Jaz Sinclair, and the rest of the cast are surrounded by production design that leans hard into horror. It shares obvious DNA with Riverdale: the same heightened teenage dread, the same commitment to looking expensive while being completely unhinged.

Those who wanted the laugh-track version can find it somewhere deep in the late-night schedule. This one goes somewhere else entirely. I’m not sure it’s better—the original was doing something the new show can’t replicate—but it’s at least doing something, which puts it ahead of most reboots on effort alone.