Image Credit: Everett Collection
Bewitched (CBS)
What: Another 1960s revival. Beleaguered executive has hot suburban witch wife and awful mother-in-law.
Status: In development, with Marc Lawrence (Miss Congeniality).
Pros: Imagine if Hermione moved to the States and married a muggle named Darrin. It’s Harry Potter meets Desperate Housewives!
Cons: Can a magical nose-wiggle charm CBS’ Two and a Half Men fans and … Actually, you want a non-pithy and sincere answer? There are two other sitcom reboots on this list (The Munsters and The Muppets) that face the same challenge as Bewitched. Once upon a time, hit broadcast comedies had wacky fantasy elements, from the The Addams Family to Gilligan’s Island to Alf. That’s because kids and adults all watched the same three channels (the Golden Age of TV, some say; like being stuck on a Disney cruise every night for decades, I say). Now kids have their own cable channels with fantasy comedies like The Wizards of Waverly Place starring young actors, rather than watching a bumbling 30-year-old Gilligan. Adults decide what’s popular on broadcast, tuning in for comedies grounded in the real world, with grown-up characters who go to work, fight with their lovers, and have sex (then complain about their jobs, lovers and sex lives). So child and adult TV viewing is far more segregated now, which is good for viewers because it provides a vast range of engaging choices, but bad for efforts to recapture the magic of all-ages classics like Bewitched on a network like CBS (Hawaii Five-O worked because it was a grown-up show in the 1970s and still is now). All that said: Bewitched would get buzz.
