The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

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Remember Sabrina the Teenage Witch?

Netflix rebooted it as a dark fantasy series where casual cannibalism and ritualized dark magic are played for laughs. The satanic coven is basically Catholicism inverted, there's a lot of somewhat obscure mythology referenced, and the human world is (initially) presented as being stranger and more frightening than anything that the witches have going on.

Some of it is pretty damn spooky, with an effective sense of malevolence slowly spreading throughout the show's world. Some of it is just silly, which kind of works to undercut the tension and allow you to breathe.

Salem doesn't talk, but is an actual, adorable, black cat rather than a robotic puppet. Sabrina's aunts and the rest of the earlier show's characters are nearly all present in some form. But there's something a little twisted up about everybody.

The entire first season (in two parts) can be binge-watched and apparently there is more coming - it seems this show is a companion to something called Riverdale which seems to be some kind of mashup between the Archie comics characters, the X-Files, and Scooby-Doo.

Has anybody else seen this? If you haven't, then you should at least watch the first half a dozen episodes. I'll admit, I wasn't sold on the premise initially. Especially when I learned that the cat wasn't going to provide a sarcastic running commentary. But the series will slowly draw you in, and over the course of the season you'll come to genuinely care about at least two of the characters.