Tag Archives: Bewitched

Will a new Bewitched TV show be set in a similar looking suburbia?

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A new Bewitched show is in the works:

Photo by Burak The Weekender on Pexels.com

The Bewitched update would focus on Tabitha Stevens, the 13-year-old daughter of witch Samantha and human Darrin. She juggles two lives attending middle school while also being secretly enrolled in a magical academy run by her grandmother, Endora — D’Ambrosia describes the premise as “Hannah Montana meets Harry Potter.”

The only mention of the setting of the show involves school settings: a middle school and a magical academy. The original Bewitched, a very popular show in the 1960s, was set in the suburbs of New York City. Samantha stayed at home while Darrin worked in the city. They live in a single-family home. They had a nosy neighbor. They have children.

Will the new Bewitched also include any of suburbia or will it primarily focus on schools? Interestingly, the two comparison TV shows mentioned above also include suburban settings. Hannah Montana was primarily set in Malibu, California while Harry Potter included scenes in and around the Dursley’s house on Privet Drive.

If the new version does include the suburbs, there is an opportunity for the suburbia depicted to look quite different than that of the 1960s. The suburbia often depicted on television then often portrayed nuclear family life in single-family homes on quiet streets. The suburbs today are more complex, diverse, and varied. There is an opportunity here to depict not only updated characters and storylines but also settings.

From pop culture to your baby’s name

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An article from the Chicago Tribune examines the impact of pop culture on baby names. According to the story, the names of some of the characters in Twilight have become more popular:

Bella, the name of the love-struck heroine of Stephenie Meyer’s vampire novels, hadn’t quite cracked the Social Security Administration’s list of the top 200 girls’ names in America when the first “Twilight” book was published in 2005. Today, it’s at No. 58, higher than Miley, Kingston or Maddox. Cullen, the last name of Bella’s vampire beau, Edward, is in the top 500 boys’ names for the first time in more than a century.

Other pop culture characters have supposedly influenced naming including Piper from Charmed and Samantha from Bewitched.

To look at the changes in baby names over the years, visit this page from the Social Security Administration. It is very interesting to look at how some names move in and out of popularity.