NBC declares sitcoms about witches are finally back, baby

After too many Bewitched-less years, NBC has started development on Something Wicked, from June Diane Raphael and Dickinson's Alena Smith

By William Hughes  |  March 7, 2024 | 3:43am
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NBC declares sitcoms about witches are finally back, baby
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Left: June Diana Raphael (Photo: Emma McIntyre/Getty Images for The Colton Underwood Legacy Foundation), Right: The opening credits of Bewitched (Screenshot: YouTube)

It’s been a minute—give or take an obvious, meta homage like Disney+’s deliberately throwback WandaVision—since TV addressed that most basic of situation comedy situations, i.e., the one where a regular man is married to an omnipotent magical witch. With the occasional exception of a Sabrina The Teenaged Witch—but not its Netflix revival, which was spooky—or a Wizards Of Waverly Place, witchcraft has largely moved from comedy on TV into the realm of drama or action. Despite the fact that, as the glory days of Bewitched once proved, having the ability to have your main character wiggle her nose and un-do all problems in less than a second can prove to be a pretty handy storytelling tool in the sitcom writer’s toolkit.

Well, someone has finally seen reason, as Deadline reports that NBC has put into development Something Wicked, a new TV series that will see the very funny June Diane Raphael (maybe best known for her work on Grace And Frankie) play a totally normal and standard sitcom heroine who also has the power to magically re-write reality at a whim. (The logline for the show insists that, even then, you can’t balance everything in life, but that sounds like a problem for more aggressive magical nose-wiggling, to us.) The series is being developed by Raphael and Alena Smith, who’s making the jump from her Apple TV+ comedy Dickinson to the world of magical multi-cam situation comedy.

(NBC is going hard on multi-cam stuff at the moment, by the way; the network just ordered another old-school-style show starring Reba McEntire, who is magical only in a more prosaic, “Isn’t she a treat?’ sort of sense.)

Honestly, though, we couldn’t be happier: Sitcom reality is already plenty elastic, and adding literal witches to the mix can only make it more likely for someone—possibly Raphael’s husband, Paul Scheer, if Smith is taking pitches—to show up as a long-lost magical relative doing a Paul Lynde impression, a.k.a. the absolute apex of TV situation comedy. We can’t wait.

 
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