The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
starring Kiernan Shipka, Ross Lynch, Miranda Otto
Netflix
Well, it’s been a week chock-full of events and happenings, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped us from enjoying some of the mindless dribble from this particular golden age of mindless dribble.
We finished The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. It’s taken a couple of weeks at our pace, and all this time I’ve been waiting for news of some moral or conservative organization protesting this show. While the show’s title shares the main character’s name with a comic from the Archie Cinematic Universe, only one of these has a wide representation of LGBTQ characters and social justice themes, presented under the guise of obsessively researched witchcraft and Satanism. Not too long ago (okay, over 30 years ago), parents were losing their marbles over Dungeons and Dragons, a game based in no small part on the mythology of The Lord of the Rings, a beloved fantasy epic written by an openly Christian author.
In contrast, Sabrina references Satanism as if it were just another pop-culture touchpoint; the campy attempts to present this particular group of witches as some sort of Bizarro anti-Christian family (like the substitution of “Holy” for “Unholy” wherever possible) does little to mask the fact that the names and history the show references are carefully and accurately researched.
Which makes it very strange that so far, the only organization to have objected to the show is The Satanic Temple, who claim one of the props from the show, a statue of Baphomet, is a copyright violation of their intellectual property. Indirectly objecting is the Church of Satan, who are quite miffed about this lawsuit bringing misdirected attention to their (unrelated) organization, plus that TST Baphomet is all wrong, it’s supposed to have boobs.
So overall, Sabrina was fun. I am willing to accept this vision of bucolic small-town American covens and family-owned-and-operated mines and look forward to the next outing.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: https://www.netflix.com/title/80223989
