Original Sabrina Melissa Joan Hart doesn't think a reboot could bring the same magic
Sabrina The Teenage Witch originally ran from 1996-2003
If you’ve scrolled through HBO or Netflix any time in the past year or so, you may have noticed a strange phenomenon taking hold. Suddenly, colors seem brighter! Hair is spikier! And why are you feeling the sudden urge to dig out those jelly sandals from the back of your closet and pop on a Weezer record?
If this feels familiar to you, you may have fallen victim to the latest television craze: pure, unapologetic nostalgia. Between HBO Max’s Gossip Girl reboot, Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin, How I Met Your Father, the iCarly reboot, Bel-Air, and even Netflix’s Wednesday, it is truly starting to feel like every other show is a remake or spinoff of something that was popular a decade ago—to varying degrees of success.
One person who definitely hasn’t fallen under the spell of this particular trend is Melissa Joan Hart, who played Sabrina Spellman on Sabrina The Teenage Witch for almost a decade.
“I just don’t think it would be as great as the original,” Hart said of a potential remake in a recent interview with E! News. “I just don’t think there’s any way. People are nostalgic for what they had. Trying to recreate that can be really difficult, as we’ve seen.” (Cough, cough. Gossip Girl.)
Plus, as Hart pointed out, it’s kind of already been done by Netflix’s Chilling Adventures Of Sabrina. (Twice if you count the literal revival of Kiernan Shipka’s version of the character on Riverdale.)
So, Sabrina fans, we’re sorry to be the ones to tell you, but it seems like everyone’s favorite young sorcerer and her talking cat won’t be returning to our screens any time soon. In the meantime, you can scratch that witchy remake itch with The CW’s Charmed, or Hocus Pocus 2, or the constant stream of Wicked casting updates, which have started to feel like a dramatic spinoff in themselves.