Bewitched

Previous Criticism of Bewitched

34 Bewitched love Tabitha and want her to become a series regular. Larry wants Tabitha to go on and increase ratings to make the client happy, but Tabitha soon tires of working on the show and wants to quit. Samantha solves the problem by magically convincing the client that his daughter, an aspiring actress, would be perfect to do the show instead. Both these shows involving Tabitha working for Darrin ’s advertising clients on the air are critical of television. Ho Ho the Clown is a jaded actor when not on the air, similar to The Simpsons’ Krusty the Clown, while the Punch and Judy show is needlessly violent. Furthermore, in the Ho Ho episode, Darrin is horrified when Tabitha wins the studio audience prize. He screams that he is going to end up in jail as a result of an FCC investigation (a clear reference to the quiz-show scandals of the 1950s). In all these examples, television is shown as a corrupt and corrupting influence on society . Previous Criticism of Bewitched The current state of Bewitched criticism consists mostly of reductive analyses that typically focus on one representative episode, usually the pilot. A useful example is media scholar Christina Lane’s entry on the show in the Encyclopedia of Television, which emphasizes Bewitched’s formulaic nature: “Bewitched’s formula typically involves a disruption created by either Samantha’s or Darrin’s family, or Darrin’s boss Larry” (180). While many of the Bewitched episodes do in fact deal with disruptions caused by family members, such an analysis misses what I find most useful about a show such as Bewitched. What makes television interesting is not the formula itself, but television’s capacity to deviate, restructure , and explode that formula within the realm of one tex- 35 Previous Criticism of Bewitched tual universe we call a series. The 254 episodes of Bewitched present a plethora of such diverse situations, despite the popular perception of it as a “formula” show. While academic television criticism has tended to be reductive, television fans, by contrast, obsess over the nuances of individual episodes and how they relate to the series as a whole. Pick up any fan book about a television show, or log onto any fan Web site, and one finds extensive discussions of individual episodes or aspects of a show (to wit, sound specialist Bill Lane’s Web page on the evolution of the harp sound effect in Bewitched’s last five seasons). Now certainly , such discussion is often itself reductive, revolving around whether an episode passes muster with the fans or disappoints them. Regardless, the intensive method is still worth considering: fusing the formidable critical tools of academic criticism with the labor-of-love analyses by the viewing public can bring to light a rich tapestry of culture woven by the episodes of Bewitched. Christina Lane is, of course, writing a short encyclopedia entry, and is careful to use the caveat of “typical” in presenting a formula for the Bewitched episodes. But her entry also offers another strategy that characterizes television studies ’ often reductive argumentation. Lane discusses the pilot as her textual example of the show as a whole: “The series premier remains one of the series’ most memorable episodes in many ways” (181). Film analysis techniques are overlaid onto the discussion of the television text and, unwittingly, the television show is reduced to its most cinematic equivalent , the pilot (the “pilot film,” it is often called). Such an analysis is necessarily incomplete, as it leaves undiscovered the eight years of character and cultural exploration that follow that initial show. An examination of other Bewitched criticism reveals that most essays also follow a model inherited from the analysis of film and literature. David Marc, one of the most 36 Bewitched prolific and accomplished academic television critics, devotes only a few pages to his analysis of Bewitched in his book Comic Visions: Television Comedy and American Culture. Again reducing the show to one episode (#2, “Be It Ever So Mortgaged,” 9/24/64), Marc notes, “In [the episode] much of the series’ cosmos is delineated” (136). Marc presents Bewitched as a critically manageable unit with a stable political cant—it is a conservative show in its gender representations —and moves on to analyze other television shows. Indeed , not a single academic article or book has been published that is solely devoted to the analysis of Bewitched. The academic work...