Bewitched

A Sample Run of Bewitched Episodes

39 A Sample Run of Bewitched Episodes syndicated shows in television history, showing not only in the United States but also internationally. When I drafted the manuscript for this book in Berlin, the show was airing every weekend on Kabel 1, a particularly Americanized German cable television channel, as Verliebt in eine Hexe [In Love with a Witch]. The dubbing of the show’s third season was done in 1966, and these episodes have been playing, intermittently, on German television ever since. The contemporary reviews of Bewitched predict the academic response quite well. TV Guide’s Cleveland Amory responded to the pilot favorably: “The dinner party at Dick’s old girl friend’s was, in every sense of the word, pure magic— the season’s high, in our opinion, in comedy shows so far” (A-54). Notably, Amory goes on to worry about the show quickly falling into formula, relying too much on witchcraft as a gimmick: “A little flies a long way and we like it used sparingly—for a special witching hour. Too much could start a witch hunt, and, who knows, we certainly wouldn’t want the season’s most diverting new show to end up having to call in a witch doctor” (A-54). By two seasons later, Ronald Searle was definitely not bewitched: “I know that the canned laughter underscoring these mournful lives in Bewitched is the laughter of lost souls. Who else would applaud so hysterically the words, ‘What’s for breakfast, Sam?’ They know what’s for breakfast. We are: sunny-side up” (18). In the popular criticism of the day, as in much of the academic criticism that was to follow, Bewitched was predictable formula, through and through. A Sample Run of Bewitched Episodes While I discuss many episodes thematically throughout the rest of this book, I want to begin my analysis with a different 40 Bewitched method for establishing the variances of series television. Here I examine a string of episodes from the middle of the first season, whose nuanced shifting of the show’s basic structure demonstrates the elegant possibilities of television textuality. While these episodes certainly represent a continuation of the narrative begun in the pilot, they also each engage a different set of questions posed by the show’s initial premise, often contradicting other episodes in terms of the key features of the narrative universe. Episode #22 of the first season, “Eye of the Beholder,” in which Darrin purchases the antique “Maid of Salem” painting bewitched by Endora to show Samantha, provides a fruitful starting point. When Darrin realizes that Sam was just as youthful during the Salem witch trials in 1692, he questions the future of his marriage as he realizes that witches live for hundreds of years. The episode concludes with Samantha agreeing to not use her witch heritage to remain youthful, instead preferring to age “naturally” with Darrin. In one sense, this episode links back to the pilot, which asked the basic question of whether a marriage between a witch and a mortal could work at all. Samantha reveals herself to Darrin as a witch during the couple’s honeymoon . “Eye of the Beholder” then continues this theme, asking the question of how such a relationship can endure as the (age) difference between them grows. Via this concern for things yet to come, “Eye of the Beholder” links to a set of episodes in Bewitched that project the show’s characters into the future. The most recognizable of this grouping of episodes is “Samantha’s Old Man” (#210, 12/3/70), in which Endora punishes Darrin by magically aging him until he is seventy-three years old. Samantha reassures Darrin by changing herself into a seventy-three-year-old woman, a scene for which the show received an Emmy award nomination for best makeup (Pilato 206). Here again, the show, now 41 A Sample Run of Bewitched Episodes six seasons later, returns to the basic question of how this mixed marriage can possibly work. The invocation of Salem links “Eye of the Beholder” to another grouping of Bewitched shows that grapple with the past. Bewitched is a show obsessed with history, featuring historical figures (Napoleon, Julius Caesar, Ben Franklin, and the like) zapped into the present, and main characters winking back into the past. In “Samantha Goes South for a Spell” (#142, 10/3/68), a vengeful witch sends Samantha as an amnesiac...