Genres: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Comedy, Family
Themes: Special gifts, Channeling, Manifesting, Time Travel, Witchcraft, Magic,
Created by: Sol Saks
Starring: Elizabeth Montgomery, Dick Sargent, Agnes Moorehead
Seasons/Episodes: 8/254
First aired: September 17, 1964 Last air date: March 25, 1972
Runtime: 25
Networks: ABC
Production Companies: Columbia Pictures Television, Screen Gems
Short description: Samantha Stephens is a seemingly normal suburban housewife who also happens to be a genuine witch, with all the requisite magical powers. Her husband Darrin insists that Samantha keep her witchcraft under wraps, but situations invariably require her to indulge her powers while keeping her bothersome mother Endora at bay.
Pop Rating: I give this series Five Stars
Interesting item:
ABC’s Bewitched took racism head on with an episode in 1970 entitled “Sisters at Heart,” which aired on Christmas Eve, not only found the usually frothy fantasy acknowledging real life with a story about racism, it also incorporated the issue by having it written by an entire class of inner-city tenth graders.
The idea was hatched when Marcella Saunders, a young English teacher at L.A.’s Thomas Jefferson High School, reached out to several TV shows looking for a way to connect her students to reading and writing through prime time. Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery and producer William Asher (Montgomery’s then-husband) responded with an invitation for the class to come to the set. As a thank you, the group collaborated on a storyline for the show about black-and-white friendship that was spun by staffer Barbara Avedon into a 1970 holiday episode. Set on Christmas Eve, twin stories revolve around 6-year-old Tabitha Stephens’ friendship with a black girlfriend whom she calls her sister, and Tabitha’s ad-exec father Darrin dealing with a bigoted client who comes to mistake the “sister” for Darrin’s actual child and thus the product of a mixed-race marriage. Disapproving, he cuts business ties with Darrin, referring to him as “unstable.” (In true TV fashion, the client comes to recognize and learn from his prejudice.)
Montgomery introduced the episode, telling viewers it evoked “the true sprit of Christmas …conceived in the image of innocence and filled with truth.” And while “Sisters at Heart” serviced the show’s cartoony legacy
(novice witch Tabitha conjures up black polka-dots for her skin and white ones for her friend’s, so they’ll look more alike), it also offered up fairly in-your-face storytelling for its time. Literally. One scene featured the white cast in blackface to underscore Darrin’s client’s racism. The end-credits read “Story by: 5th Period English – Room 309 Thomas Jefferson High School [Los Angeles, California].” All 26 students were listed.
Praised by critics and educators, the episode was given the Emmy Governor’s Award in 1971.
Bewitched, about the oft-protested marriage between a witch and a mortal, was one of many light-hearted other-worldly sitcoms zapped up in the mid-1960s, but it seemed to rest on a basic premise of tolerance for all of its eight seasons. (The show has been considered a civil-rights allegory.) It skirted reality with topics from trick-or-treating for UNICEF to the paranoia of the 17th-century Salem Witch Trials. Montgomery, who died in 1995, called “Sisters” her favorite of Bewitched’s 254 episodes.
