It's a new month, and I'm hoping for a less bumpy one. October is a sort of packed month for me in terms of family stuff, with my wife's birthday, our anniversary, and Halloween all crammed together. I don't think I had a normal week at all. Instead of backing off and trying to rest or conserve or anything smart like that, I've decided November will also be packed to the gills with stuff, but it will be more "me"-related stuff. Boy, doesn't that make me sound gross? Hopefully we all will calibrate to that.
I've decided to pick up National Novel Writing Month again, for the first time since 2014 when I got 35,000 words into a rambling, incoherent mess of a western novel that I called "The Spoil" at the time. Starting today, I owe myself 2,000 words a day for the next thirty days if I can adhere to it, and that means things are going to get quieter around Media Sandwich, blog-wise. I still plan to drop a podcast of some kind every week or every other week if possible, and the newest prose feature by my good dude Chris Pranger will continue to post. But Letterboxd Reviews and Crossing the Stream might fall by the wayside.
I do plan on going to the gym during the month, though. The trip to the gym during my lunch break every day has gotten easier and easier, to the point where the silly writing project is probably no longer necessary as motivation. I like to keep it up anyway, since it's also motivation to write a TV review in the first place. But the damage is done to my mental block about exercising, it comes a little more naturally to me as a daily chore. Watch this, before the end of November I'll be complaining about writing and using the gym as an excuse to not be writing. It's a good win-win scenario: either I buckle down and write like I am supposed to, or I use the gym as an excuse and hopefully lose a few more pounds in the process of being a procrastinating doofus. Sounds great.
Let's see, I guess I could talk about all the Halloween sweets I've been wantonly stuffing in my trap, or then again I could talk about how my Halloween costume is just a regular human size XL for the first time in forever. Or that I showed up to work today in a Lucky Charms t-shirt that hasn't fit since Bush the Lesser was in office. At this point, it's a real toss-up between the good, lasting feelings I have about losing the weight that I've lost, and the ever-present little mind killer that reminds me how much sugar is in a bite-size Snickers. You have to take the good with the bad, as long as you can recognize the difference.
Oh, a McRib! I ate a dang McRib. It felt wrong through the entire process. I have...shame. That piece of meat had marks on it from where the jockey was hitting it. Yikes. And that sauce they put on it? I swear it was Spaghettios sauce. Anyway, that was a food crime. Let's talk about television!
"The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" Season 1, Episodes 1-10
This show has just the right tinge of camp to it, much like "Riverdale," but I think it succeeds off the back of the willingness to engage with the more genuinely terrifying aspects of witch lore. It's fun to think of Sabrina as essentially a superpowered bobbysoxer who uses her familial connection to the supernatural to help her everyday teen life, sure. But we've seen that show, back in 1996. It worked great, as a sort of "Boy Meets World" crossed with "Bewitched" with a talking animatronic cat. This show is a little more earnest, a little more eager to take the plunge into a fantasy world where Greendale and its forgotten coven of Satanics and their arch power struggles and puffy shirts can exist, while the timeline-nebulous world of mortal normies can have plenty of drama and intrigue on its own.
Kiernan Shipka stars as the titular Sabrina, a sixteen-year-old born of the High Priest of the Unholy Church of Night and a mother from the mortal world. Shipka started her career with throwback material, and she fits right in with the Archie Comics style of gee-whiz teen affability while also maintaining a semblance of real-world awareness. I could easily picture her in a poodle-skirt sharing a malt with her favorite big lug while listening to Billie Holliday...but I can just as easily picture her campaigning for a safe space for women in a 2018 high school and contemplating the patriarchy of--yes, even him!--Satan, whose dominion over her and her family rubs Sabrina the wrong way in the same way the gross football team's lack of consequences for monstrous behavior rubs her the wrong way. Shipka's acting choices have always carried a naturalistic streak; her reactions and her line delivery have always tried to convey an honesty, a lack of filter or reserve. It serves her very well when trying to sell a lot of the season's earlier "best friends forever" material with mortals Harvey, Susie, and Roz. That material totally works as a teen angst show, but it also all threatens to deflate if it leans too far toward a winking self-awareness. Her naturalist choices fare a little worse when having thundering jousts of supernatural will with Robert Coyle's Father Blackwood, or Miranda Otto's cold pragmatist Auntie Zelda. And it's hard, it's really impossible to make that material sound like normal teenage American speech, so I can't lay the blame for the occasional wonky bit on her. By around Episode 6 or so, it becomes easy to accept that Sabrina Spellman is a teenage girl whose immediate reaction to almost everything includes suspicion against authority and a desire to immediately fix injustices.
Shipka is definitely up to the task of carrying the show as the lead, but even if she weren't, the supporting cast is absolutely loaded with charisma. Lucy Davis and Miranda Otto are fantastic as the mismatched Aunties Hilda and Zelda, engaged in the darkest of lifelong abusive relationships but unified in their purpose. Davis seems happy to bring some effervescent dippiness to Hilda to break the tension, while Otto is clearly having a blast playing Zelda only a few degrees off from Cruella DeVille, alternating between muted, cutting glances and glorious bits of vamping. Similar praise should go to Michelle Gomez, Bronson Pinchot, and Coyle as Sabrina's various school and coven authority figures. Each gets plenty of time to play around, and they all play it to the rafters.
Ambrose, Sabrina's cousin who is confined to the Spellman household by law and magic (magic law?) is a great character to add to the proceedings. Clearly, he was included at first to provide another voice to the Spellman household, what with Salem the cat lacking a sardonic voiceover. I feel the family scenes around the breakfast table would be unbearable with Otto's ice queen, Davis's bubbly nervous energy, and Shipka's straight-faced delivery and no one else. Chance Perdomo lends the character a coiled-spring exuberance veiled behind a smirking serenity. He's doing some great work, and I can't wait to see more of him.
As the show started to spread out, I was surprised and a little delighted that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and the writer's room endeavored to make major plot contributors out of Sabrina's mortal school chums. Jaz Sinclair and Lachlan Watson provide a lot of heart and soul as Roz and Susie. Each has their own interior life and problems, traumas, and struggles. Eventually, when each prove to be a valuable ally in the fights Sabrina picks with supernatural forces, it feels earned and there is connective tissue between the fantastical surface adventures and the personal journeys for each. Ross Lynch plays Harvey Kinkle, faithful and attentive boyfriend, with a refreshing vulnerability and also gets rewarded with a more extensive character arc than I would have imagined.
As far as the rebooted plot takes us, Sabrina is positioned (disappointingly, for me) as your typical Chosen One with some great, terrible purpose attached to her talents for spellcraft via that cornerstone of lazy fantasy writing...the secret prophesy. The Dark Lord wants her allegiance, and it becomes frustratingly apparent even within the first two episodes that her loyalty to Lucifer is more valuable than the average Child of Night. So, we have to slog through the ploddingly paced bits of Sabrina's family and various vested parties glancing at each other and manipulating events to keep her mystical importance in the background until we need it to solve a problem at a desperate hour. This is the weakest portion of most fantasy stories, so thankfully it hangs around in the background while the majority of Netflix's ten episodes occupy themselves with extended A-plot shenanigans like Witch Thanksgiving or Roz's crusade against banning books in school.
On its face, this is a show about teenage girls confronting injustices. Being that she's a teenage girl, Sabrina faces most injustices head-on with a naive but righteous outrage, and the narrative link between her background as a half-blood hedge witch and her real-world persona as a social justice warrior (or social justice mage, I guess) is an apt metaphor that the show isn't shy about pointing out. Witchcraft's depiction in pop culture has always contained at least a twinge of feminist perspective, and "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" gets a lot of kicks reminding the audience how systemically ingrained misogyny is, both in the real world and the silly theatrical world of the immortal Devil worshipper.
I don't think it's out of line to say that "Sabrina" is one of the more structurally sound series runs to come out of Greg Berlanti's blank check written by Warner Bros. for his comic book adaptation shows. Even the typical Netflix glitch of one or two superfluous, ponderous extra episodes doesn't apply. It's a svelt ten episodes that gets a lot of plot taken care of without sacrificing the natural growth of almost every regular character. It still has a few that feel gimmicky, leftovers from previous genre shows like "Buffy" or "Supernatural." Having an episode where everyone's worst nightmares become real is a bit tired and hokey, but it's also a great way to efficiently illustrate each character's motivations and point of view. "Sabrina" also happens to pull it off with tremendous flair, serving up equal parts existential despair and plenty of viscous gore.
That's another real triumph. The show looks every bit as wicked as it should, eschewing the typical Berlanti comic book shows by involving a lot of natural or antiquated lighting to give a properly aged and organic look to the Spellman Mortuary, or even to Greendale and the surrounding woods and countryside. Because of the more gothic plot involving the early settlement of the town and the hallowed days of the coven, it's necessary to adopt a more pastoral look that jives with the traditional pagan motif of the supernatural elements of the show, and it also manages to look fabulous. There's a real pretty young chic thing going on with this show, especially considering it spends a lot of time in spooky wooded clearings and cemeteries. Costume supervisor Kelly Allyn Gardner really pushes the "vintage cool" look to sell the older comic book visuals, and that includes putting Shipka in various Jackie Onassis looks and lots of stark whites, reds, and blacks. The lacy Puritan collars on Sabrina and the Weird sisters have a feisty irony to them, of course, but they also feel visually at home in Greendale's land that time occasionally forgets, fashion-wise.
Of course, "Riverdale" did a lot of the early scouting into how to make a 2018 teen show look perfectly normal and also in perfect fidelity to the malt shoppe era from which the story originates. What "Sabrina" does to distinguish itself is to also capture something pulpy and adolescently naughty about all the satanic imagery and depictions of traditionally "evil" supernatural forces. In the same way a heavy metal album might appropriate this material to sell younger audiences on how hardcore the band is, "Sabrina" uses the same angle to sell younger (decidedly more feminist) audiences on how much of a fierce, righteous queen the titular witch can be. I support that. It's fun. It's empowering. And it's just the slightest bit kitschy, just to remind you that Halloween season is supposed to be about outlandish fun.
Notes & Quotes:
There's an exquisite amount of vamp and camp to every member of the coven murmuring little epithets to the Devil. Among my favorite witch curses are "Unholy shit!" and "Thank Beezlebub!" and of course Lucy Davis' demur little "Oh, dear Lucifer."
The show certainly throws in a healthy dose of PG-13 sexual situations that simultaneously would intrigue a tween or teen audience without causing their parents too much alarm. I suspect Netflix allowed more than, say, the CW would allow in terms of Sabrina stripping down to her slip several times or the witch orgies and bondage introductions depicted.
"Anything could happen to you down there in the mines! You could break your ankle...or get eaten by a demon!"
Michelle Gomez, as the duplicitous and rakishly evil Ms. Wardwell, is positioned as the Big Bad of the season only to be moved to the side and given the much smarter role of being Sabrina's pot-stirring adviser and chief corrupter. It's one of the few bits of table-setting that doesn't pay off, but it does set up Season 2 nicely.
Ambrose, begrudgingly: "Ugh, just give me a bit of her hair and I'll make all her teeth fall out."
True to Berlanti fashion, this show is chock-a-block full of veteran Vancouver actors, including "Battlestar Galactica" alumni Alessandro Juliani and Michael Hogan.
"Ginnie Woolf? Hmm...she could throw a dinner party!"
The finale episode's denouement notifies me twice through dialogue that Sabrina's hair has changed dramatically after the climactic events in Greendale Woods. Clearly, someone behind the scenes of the show was convinced that no one would notice the change without help.
Rating: A
I've decided to pick up National Novel Writing Month again, for the first time since 2014 when I got 35,000 words into a rambling, incoherent mess of a western novel that I called "The Spoil" at the time. Starting today, I owe myself 2,000 words a day for the next thirty days if I can adhere to it, and that means things are going to get quieter around Media Sandwich, blog-wise. I still plan to drop a podcast of some kind every week or every other week if possible, and the newest prose feature by my good dude Chris Pranger will continue to post. But Letterboxd Reviews and Crossing the Stream might fall by the wayside.
I do plan on going to the gym during the month, though. The trip to the gym during my lunch break every day has gotten easier and easier, to the point where the silly writing project is probably no longer necessary as motivation. I like to keep it up anyway, since it's also motivation to write a TV review in the first place. But the damage is done to my mental block about exercising, it comes a little more naturally to me as a daily chore. Watch this, before the end of November I'll be complaining about writing and using the gym as an excuse to not be writing. It's a good win-win scenario: either I buckle down and write like I am supposed to, or I use the gym as an excuse and hopefully lose a few more pounds in the process of being a procrastinating doofus. Sounds great.
Let's see, I guess I could talk about all the Halloween sweets I've been wantonly stuffing in my trap, or then again I could talk about how my Halloween costume is just a regular human size XL for the first time in forever. Or that I showed up to work today in a Lucky Charms t-shirt that hasn't fit since Bush the Lesser was in office. At this point, it's a real toss-up between the good, lasting feelings I have about losing the weight that I've lost, and the ever-present little mind killer that reminds me how much sugar is in a bite-size Snickers. You have to take the good with the bad, as long as you can recognize the difference.
Oh, a McRib! I ate a dang McRib. It felt wrong through the entire process. I have...shame. That piece of meat had marks on it from where the jockey was hitting it. Yikes. And that sauce they put on it? I swear it was Spaghettios sauce. Anyway, that was a food crime. Let's talk about television!
"The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" Season 1, Episodes 1-10
This show has just the right tinge of camp to it, much like "Riverdale," but I think it succeeds off the back of the willingness to engage with the more genuinely terrifying aspects of witch lore. It's fun to think of Sabrina as essentially a superpowered bobbysoxer who uses her familial connection to the supernatural to help her everyday teen life, sure. But we've seen that show, back in 1996. It worked great, as a sort of "Boy Meets World" crossed with "Bewitched" with a talking animatronic cat. This show is a little more earnest, a little more eager to take the plunge into a fantasy world where Greendale and its forgotten coven of Satanics and their arch power struggles and puffy shirts can exist, while the timeline-nebulous world of mortal normies can have plenty of drama and intrigue on its own.
Kiernan Shipka stars as the titular Sabrina, a sixteen-year-old born of the High Priest of the Unholy Church of Night and a mother from the mortal world. Shipka started her career with throwback material, and she fits right in with the Archie Comics style of gee-whiz teen affability while also maintaining a semblance of real-world awareness. I could easily picture her in a poodle-skirt sharing a malt with her favorite big lug while listening to Billie Holliday...but I can just as easily picture her campaigning for a safe space for women in a 2018 high school and contemplating the patriarchy of--yes, even him!--Satan, whose dominion over her and her family rubs Sabrina the wrong way in the same way the gross football team's lack of consequences for monstrous behavior rubs her the wrong way. Shipka's acting choices have always carried a naturalistic streak; her reactions and her line delivery have always tried to convey an honesty, a lack of filter or reserve. It serves her very well when trying to sell a lot of the season's earlier "best friends forever" material with mortals Harvey, Susie, and Roz. That material totally works as a teen angst show, but it also all threatens to deflate if it leans too far toward a winking self-awareness. Her naturalist choices fare a little worse when having thundering jousts of supernatural will with Robert Coyle's Father Blackwood, or Miranda Otto's cold pragmatist Auntie Zelda. And it's hard, it's really impossible to make that material sound like normal teenage American speech, so I can't lay the blame for the occasional wonky bit on her. By around Episode 6 or so, it becomes easy to accept that Sabrina Spellman is a teenage girl whose immediate reaction to almost everything includes suspicion against authority and a desire to immediately fix injustices.
Shipka is definitely up to the task of carrying the show as the lead, but even if she weren't, the supporting cast is absolutely loaded with charisma. Lucy Davis and Miranda Otto are fantastic as the mismatched Aunties Hilda and Zelda, engaged in the darkest of lifelong abusive relationships but unified in their purpose. Davis seems happy to bring some effervescent dippiness to Hilda to break the tension, while Otto is clearly having a blast playing Zelda only a few degrees off from Cruella DeVille, alternating between muted, cutting glances and glorious bits of vamping. Similar praise should go to Michelle Gomez, Bronson Pinchot, and Coyle as Sabrina's various school and coven authority figures. Each gets plenty of time to play around, and they all play it to the rafters.
Ambrose, Sabrina's cousin who is confined to the Spellman household by law and magic (magic law?) is a great character to add to the proceedings. Clearly, he was included at first to provide another voice to the Spellman household, what with Salem the cat lacking a sardonic voiceover. I feel the family scenes around the breakfast table would be unbearable with Otto's ice queen, Davis's bubbly nervous energy, and Shipka's straight-faced delivery and no one else. Chance Perdomo lends the character a coiled-spring exuberance veiled behind a smirking serenity. He's doing some great work, and I can't wait to see more of him.
As the show started to spread out, I was surprised and a little delighted that Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa and the writer's room endeavored to make major plot contributors out of Sabrina's mortal school chums. Jaz Sinclair and Lachlan Watson provide a lot of heart and soul as Roz and Susie. Each has their own interior life and problems, traumas, and struggles. Eventually, when each prove to be a valuable ally in the fights Sabrina picks with supernatural forces, it feels earned and there is connective tissue between the fantastical surface adventures and the personal journeys for each. Ross Lynch plays Harvey Kinkle, faithful and attentive boyfriend, with a refreshing vulnerability and also gets rewarded with a more extensive character arc than I would have imagined.
As far as the rebooted plot takes us, Sabrina is positioned (disappointingly, for me) as your typical Chosen One with some great, terrible purpose attached to her talents for spellcraft via that cornerstone of lazy fantasy writing...the secret prophesy. The Dark Lord wants her allegiance, and it becomes frustratingly apparent even within the first two episodes that her loyalty to Lucifer is more valuable than the average Child of Night. So, we have to slog through the ploddingly paced bits of Sabrina's family and various vested parties glancing at each other and manipulating events to keep her mystical importance in the background until we need it to solve a problem at a desperate hour. This is the weakest portion of most fantasy stories, so thankfully it hangs around in the background while the majority of Netflix's ten episodes occupy themselves with extended A-plot shenanigans like Witch Thanksgiving or Roz's crusade against banning books in school.
On its face, this is a show about teenage girls confronting injustices. Being that she's a teenage girl, Sabrina faces most injustices head-on with a naive but righteous outrage, and the narrative link between her background as a half-blood hedge witch and her real-world persona as a social justice warrior (or social justice mage, I guess) is an apt metaphor that the show isn't shy about pointing out. Witchcraft's depiction in pop culture has always contained at least a twinge of feminist perspective, and "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" gets a lot of kicks reminding the audience how systemically ingrained misogyny is, both in the real world and the silly theatrical world of the immortal Devil worshipper.
I don't think it's out of line to say that "Sabrina" is one of the more structurally sound series runs to come out of Greg Berlanti's blank check written by Warner Bros. for his comic book adaptation shows. Even the typical Netflix glitch of one or two superfluous, ponderous extra episodes doesn't apply. It's a svelt ten episodes that gets a lot of plot taken care of without sacrificing the natural growth of almost every regular character. It still has a few that feel gimmicky, leftovers from previous genre shows like "Buffy" or "Supernatural." Having an episode where everyone's worst nightmares become real is a bit tired and hokey, but it's also a great way to efficiently illustrate each character's motivations and point of view. "Sabrina" also happens to pull it off with tremendous flair, serving up equal parts existential despair and plenty of viscous gore.
That's another real triumph. The show looks every bit as wicked as it should, eschewing the typical Berlanti comic book shows by involving a lot of natural or antiquated lighting to give a properly aged and organic look to the Spellman Mortuary, or even to Greendale and the surrounding woods and countryside. Because of the more gothic plot involving the early settlement of the town and the hallowed days of the coven, it's necessary to adopt a more pastoral look that jives with the traditional pagan motif of the supernatural elements of the show, and it also manages to look fabulous. There's a real pretty young chic thing going on with this show, especially considering it spends a lot of time in spooky wooded clearings and cemeteries. Costume supervisor Kelly Allyn Gardner really pushes the "vintage cool" look to sell the older comic book visuals, and that includes putting Shipka in various Jackie Onassis looks and lots of stark whites, reds, and blacks. The lacy Puritan collars on Sabrina and the Weird sisters have a feisty irony to them, of course, but they also feel visually at home in Greendale's land that time occasionally forgets, fashion-wise.
Of course, "Riverdale" did a lot of the early scouting into how to make a 2018 teen show look perfectly normal and also in perfect fidelity to the malt shoppe era from which the story originates. What "Sabrina" does to distinguish itself is to also capture something pulpy and adolescently naughty about all the satanic imagery and depictions of traditionally "evil" supernatural forces. In the same way a heavy metal album might appropriate this material to sell younger audiences on how hardcore the band is, "Sabrina" uses the same angle to sell younger (decidedly more feminist) audiences on how much of a fierce, righteous queen the titular witch can be. I support that. It's fun. It's empowering. And it's just the slightest bit kitschy, just to remind you that Halloween season is supposed to be about outlandish fun.
Notes & Quotes:
There's an exquisite amount of vamp and camp to every member of the coven murmuring little epithets to the Devil. Among my favorite witch curses are "Unholy shit!" and "Thank Beezlebub!" and of course Lucy Davis' demur little "Oh, dear Lucifer."
The show certainly throws in a healthy dose of PG-13 sexual situations that simultaneously would intrigue a tween or teen audience without causing their parents too much alarm. I suspect Netflix allowed more than, say, the CW would allow in terms of Sabrina stripping down to her slip several times or the witch orgies and bondage introductions depicted.
"Anything could happen to you down there in the mines! You could break your ankle...or get eaten by a demon!"
Michelle Gomez, as the duplicitous and rakishly evil Ms. Wardwell, is positioned as the Big Bad of the season only to be moved to the side and given the much smarter role of being Sabrina's pot-stirring adviser and chief corrupter. It's one of the few bits of table-setting that doesn't pay off, but it does set up Season 2 nicely.
Ambrose, begrudgingly: "Ugh, just give me a bit of her hair and I'll make all her teeth fall out."
True to Berlanti fashion, this show is chock-a-block full of veteran Vancouver actors, including "Battlestar Galactica" alumni Alessandro Juliani and Michael Hogan.
"Ginnie Woolf? Hmm...she could throw a dinner party!"
The finale episode's denouement notifies me twice through dialogue that Sabrina's hair has changed dramatically after the climactic events in Greendale Woods. Clearly, someone behind the scenes of the show was convinced that no one would notice the change without help.
Rating: A