ABC has handed out a pilot production commitment for a new reboot of the iconic 1960s series Bewitched, which hails from Black-ish creator Kenya Barris. This continues the small-screen trend of rebooting and/or reviving shows from various TV eras, with CBS debuting their Murphy Brown revival and Magnum P.I. reboot, not to mention The CW rebooting Charmed, just this fall alone. Since there doesn’t seem to be an end to these reboots in sight, ABC is digging deep into its catalog once again.
Bewitched first debuted in 1964, starring Elizabeth Montgomery as a housewife named Samantha Stephens. While she may seem like a typical doting housewife, caring for her hard-working husband Darrin (Dick York) and their daughter Tabitha (Erin Murphy), Samantha is hiding a surprising secret: she’s actually a witch. While she’s often reluctant to do so, Samantha often finds herself using her magical powers (which she unlocks through a wrinkle of her nose) to fix her family’s problems, while her magical mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead) often tries to use her own magic to cause Darrin to leave her daughter. The original series. created by Sol Saks, ran for eight seasons between 1964 and 1972.
This new version of Bewitched will put a much different spin on the show, with Deadline reporting that the show will follow a bi-racial family. Barris will write the pilot script alongside Black-ish writer/producer Yamara Taylor, which follows Samantha, a “hard-working black single mother” who marries Darren, a white mortal who is described as “a bit of a slacker.” The couple struggles to reconcile their differences as Samantha begins to realize that, even though she can literally conjure magic, “she’s still not as powerful as a decently tall white man with a full head of hair in America.” There is no indication as to whether or not Samantha and Darren will have a daughter in this incarnation.
Sony Pictures Television, which owns the rights to the original series, has been trying to reboot Bewitched for the last couple of years. During the 2011-2012 TV season, CBS had a reboot of the series in development, and in 2014, ABC was part of a bidding war for a Bewitched sequel series that ultimately was given a pilot production commitment at NBC, but it was never given a series order. Barris sold this project to ABC Studios just days before his overall deal with the studio was terminated last week, a day before it was announced that Barris had struck a new, three-year overall deal with Netflix.
What sets this Bewitched reboot apart from all of the other reboots and revivals is that it’s actually trying to do something different with the material. Plus, the fact that Barris could sell the Bewitched reboot to the very studio he was already leaving certainly speaks volumes on the strength of his take on the show. It will be interesting to see how this modern take on a classic series will be received as the project heads into development.
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Source: Deadline
