[This week marks the 60th anniversary of the debut of the Batman TV show & the 50th of The Bionic Woman. So I’ll AmericanStudy those shows & three others from the 60s & 70s, all of which happen to start with the letter ‘B’! I’d love your responses and other TVStudying thoughts for a crowd-sourced weekend post that needs no “Applause” sign.]
On how Salem both inspired and was inspired by the 60s sitcom, and why that’s profoundly problematic.
According to Walter Metz’s 2007 history of Bewitched, the show’s creator Sol Saks was inspired by two films featuring witchy romance in a contemporary setting. The more famous, Bell, Book, and Candle (1958, but an adaptation of John Van Druten’s 1950 Broadway play of the same name), features Kim Novak as a modern witch who uses a love spell on Jimmy Stewart. But to my mind the more telling is I Married a Witch (1942, an adaptation of James Thorne Smith’s posthumously published 1941 novel The Passionate Witch), in which Veronica Lake’s modern witch seeks revenge on Fredric March’s descendent of Salem Witch Trials accusers but ends up falling in love with him instead. When we take these two cinematic predecessors together, we can see the origins of a show largely focused on sitcom problems (marriage and parenting, home and work conflicts, neighbors, and so on) but with an interesting layer of a multigenerational magical family (main character Samantha Stephens’s mother and later her and her husband Dick’s daughter, both fellow witches, in particular).
If Salem played a small role in the show’s origins, Bewitched would eventually play a very significant role in Salem’s evolving late 20th-century histories. As that hyperlinked Smithsonian magazine article (itself based on Witch Trials historian Stacey Schiff’s New York Times piece) notes, it was when the show filmed special episodes in Salem in 1970—including one episode where Samantha travels back in time and becomes one of the accused in the Witch Trials—that the city first began to lean into the possibilities of using these controversial and painful histories as a vehicle for tourism. That possibility gradually became not just a reality but the city’s defining one in the 21st century, to the point where most of its public signage, marketing, and even institutions like the police call it “The Witch City” and—most strikingly when it comes to the influence of Bewitched on this process—since 2005 one of its central public parks features a life-size statue of actress Elizabeth Montgomery in character as Samantha.
I’ve already written a good bit in this space about why that “Witch City” emphasis is at best seriously complicated and at worst deeply frustrating, and I don’t want to rehash all those arguments here. Instead, I’ll just note that it’s particularly fraught to connect this particular sitcom, with its central emphasis on the wacky hijinks that befall a witch and a non-witch who are also a married couple, to the histories of Salem and the Witch Trials. After all, one of the most famous pairs of Witch Trial victims were Martha and Giles Corey, a woman who was executed after her husband testified against her at her witchcraft trial—and after which he subsequently was accused and executed (in the admittedly badass moment with which I began that hyperlinked post) as well. I don’t have any problem with Bewitched’s premise on its own terms, and as those prior pieces indicate I have long since made my peace with the contradictions of Salem. But this seems to me to be a case where life and art should stay quite fully distinct from one another.
Last TVStudying tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Other 60s and/or 70s TV you’d highlight?
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