Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina has ended, and as I slogged through Part Four (season two), I found myself really disappointed at how a show with so much promise and such great aesthetics managed to not do anything worthwhile with it—a problem that tends to be at the core of many witch-centric shows.

The most successful and long-lasting shows about witches are Sabrina: The Teenage Witch, Charmed, and Bewitched. All have been rebooted in some form with … various ranges of success. But all of these shows depict witchcraft and magic in a very banal, flick of the wrist-type way with very little development of concepts within paganism or other magical practices. By keeping it very Wicca-lite, it can be non-religious, more of a superpower than actual faith. Because when faith gets mixed into witchcraft, the results can sometimes be, well, Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

From the start of the series, the show really had a message of Satanism patriarchy being a mess and Sabrina coming in as a type of female entity that would push against that—an Aradia-type figure, and I loved that idea—but then the series could not commit to what kind of magic and mythology we were dealing with. Witchcraft is not random. To use magic comes from an emotional place with intent and purpose.

When Sabrina’s coven decided to worship the dark goddess Hecate, I was excited. The triple goddess is deeply connected to witchcraft and one of my own personal patrons, but in CAOS, she gets tied to things like … childbirth and just general triple goddess mythology. Maiden, Mother, and Crone archetype is not something historically tied to Hecate, especially since that is more a 20th-century conception that has been a big part of modern neopagan faith.

Despite having the connection to dogs, thresholds, death, necromancy, etc., none of that is used in the battle against the Eldritch terrors in Sabrina. It is mostly just used for traditional aspects of maternity and protection—not bad things, but it makes it seem like that is all she is capable of as a deity.

The show’s covens are run like Catholic churches; there is no sense of unity around nature except on a superficial basis. Deities and figures from other faiths pop in and out without any real grounding in what their witchcraft means. When Prudence went to New Orleans to seek out Mambo Marie LeFleur’s Haitian Voodoo magic, I thought it would lead to more exploration of non-Western magic, but it was just a one-and-done adventure. When Roz is revealed to be a witch in this season, it could be a place to explore the Black American tradition of Conjuring magic and Hoodoo, but that doesn’t happen. She just does the same things she has always done with no cultural connection to where her magic comes from.

Sabrina illustrates an issue a lot of media has when dealing with witches: They think of it as something without faith, without a cultural history, and it has one. Even in making it more fantastical, it doesn’t mean that we can’t spend some time to make sure that if we are going to have a coven of witches worship Hecate, that we can’t actually get the lore right and not just lump together Greek religious ideas of Hecate with neopagan concepts of the Triple Goddess, or that we can’t avoid taking historical African religions and throwing it all together.

That inconsistent inability to understand others’ religion and mythology, let alone its own, made Sabrina a very perplexing show to watch at almost every level. From magic to morality to any sense of sisterhood, the show was all glamour with nothing below the depths.

(image: Diyah Pera/Netflix)

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The post Chilling Adventures of Sabrina: Why Is It So Hard to Make Good Witch Content? first appeared on The Mary Sue.