Darrin Stephens
[played by Dick York] [to wife Samantha]: “You took a cat, and
turned it into a girl? I can't believe that!” [Stops, then reconsiders]
“Why can't I believe that? I'm married to a witch, and a witch can do
anything with anything. So she took a cat and turned it into a girl, and my
friend Wally fell in love with her. What's so hard to believe about that?”—Bewitched,
Season 1, Episode 21, “Ling Ling,” original air date Feb. 11, 1965,
teleplay by Jerry Davis, directed by David Orrick McDearmon
It may have been inspired by the success of films like
I Married a Witch and Bell, Book and Candle that featured lissome
blondes who hooked up with hapless mortals, but Bewitched left
its own enduring imprint on American culture, as you might expect from a sitcom
that lasted eight seasons.
In a prior post, I already considered how this
series first aired on TV with two other series, The Addams Family and The
Munsters, that had a comic take on the supernatural. But watching the
episode from the first season of Bewitched that I quoted above has
sparked some additional considerations.
*Watching the show as a child, I found it pleasant and
amusing; viewing it as an adult, I see it as slyly subversive. Darrin Stephens,
the breadwinner of this nuclear family (completed with the arrival of babies
Tabitha and Adam), is so—well, stupid.
*Most episodes in the show’s run were in color, but
this particular one was in black and white. I found that I didn’t miss color a
bit, even though its use here—for an ad campaign for a hunt for a female Asian
model—would have made sense because of the high fashion used.
*For health reasons, Dick York had to be replaced with
Dick Sargent in 1969. Elizabeth Montgomery remained friendly with Sargent
for years after the show left the air, but I remain a firm York advocate. It
has to do with his ears. What better outward sign of Darrin’s inherent
dorkiness?
*The wide variety of supporting characters also
appealed to many viewers, then and now. A longtime friend, for example, used to
refer to a nosy neighbor as “Mrs. Kravitz.”
*Rather than offer a head-on comparison with the show
through a straight remake, Nora Ephron took a meta view of the source
material with her 2005 film Bewitched: an egocentric actor takes on the
role of Darrin Stephens, only to find that the actress playing Samantha
actually is a witch.
*Affection for the show continued to be high enough
that a statue of Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha became quite a tourist draw
when TV Land donated it to Salem, Mass., in 2005.
