From Samantha Stephens on “Bewitched” to Sabrina Spellman on “Sabrina the Teenage Witch,” the concept of a TV show about witches is an old (pointed) hat. And it’s not a trend that will soon disappear, if there’s any indication from buzzy shows like the upcoming “Harry Potter” TV series on HBO and the second season of Netflix’s “Wednesday.”
But our historical depictions of witches and interpretations of the pagan beliefs are both steeped in arts and culture. And this means they come with good, bad and even conflicting tropes. When developing a TV show, it’s often up to the creators and their creative teams to decide which way something wiccan is coming for their projects.
‘Agatha All Along‘ cast (L-R) Sasheer Zamata, Joe Locke, Kathryn Hahn, Patti LuPone, Debra Jo Rupp and Alice Wu-Gulliver
Chuck Zlotnick
Agatha All Along
Kathryn Hahn’s Agatha Harkness acts as though she doesn’t need a coven in the Disney+ series, only because she desperately wants to be part of one. Similarly, series creator and showrunner Jac Schaeffer says she loves “the allegory” that comes with tales of the supernatural, but they can also “be so reductive.” This sets the tone for a show where characters can have powers and fly on brooms, but only in an ironic way.
The writers had conversations about actual Wicca and made sure not to include any real spells. But they also had another major entity to battle with: how all of this fit into the complicated yet precise canon of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“I had the pleasure and the privilege of creating witchlore, witch rules and witch identity inside of a preexisting universe,” Schaeffer says. “Because of that, I felt we were allowed to be a mishmash of all things.”
“Mayfair Witches” starring Alexandra Daddario and Jack Huston
Mayfair Witches
Esta Spalding, co-creator and showrunner of the AMC drama, says that her series is influenced by much of author Anne Rice’s source material — and not just the books in the “Lives of the Mayfair Witches” series. Rice was “building a whole universe of magical characters,” says Spalding, and “any number of those powers … can be considered witchy.”
She continues, “We also felt free to explore witchcraft all over the world and to look for different aspects of witchcraft. We have a character named Arjuna [played by Suleka Mathew] and she’s drawing on witchcraft from South Asia.”
Rosamund Pike in ‘Wheel of Time‘
Courtesy of Prime Video
The Wheel of Time
In most other shows, witches are women who are “disempowered in their society” who turn to “earthly or natural powers” in isolated areas, says creator and showrunner Rafe Judkins. In the Amazon show, based on the Robert Jordan book series, some women have abilities to manifest magical powers. But, also, Judkins says, women as a whole “are in power in society.”
He says that, because women “are the queens and the generals of the armies and the people in power,” things like magic “have a centered place within society.”
‘Wizards Beyond Waverly Place‘ starring, (L-R) David Henrie, Janice Leann Brown and Selena Gomez
Disney
Wizards Beyond Waverly Place
“The original show crossed over with vampires and monster tropes … so the idea is how can we trade on some of those tropes for fun,” says Jed Elinoff says of his “Wizards of Waverly Place” spinoff for Disney+. “That’s our universe; we’re making a family sitcom that happens to be about wizards.”
These wizards use wands and can cast spells, but also, “pagan things [like the] history of Halloween and drawing from some of these older traditions do bleed a little bit into this mythology,” adds co-showrunner Scott Thomas.
He says that when we see the alternate wizard universe, it’s “a little bit darker” and “a little bit spookier.” Meanwhile, Janice LeAnn Brown’s Billie, a young wizard joining the mortal world, “is supposed to be kind of a troublemaker … so it’s leather jackets and it’s darker colors,” says Thomas. Conveniently for Billie, these tend to blend in better at human middle schools than pointy hats and black cats.