October is over. The long, cold winter has begun. It’s always a sad time for me, leaving the Halloween season behind. And lately that has essentially meant the shuttering of this website. I enjoy 31 Days of Halloween quite a bit, but doing 31 blog posts in 31 days is no easy feat. For a lot of blogs, that approaches a year’s production all by itself. This year, I’m going to try to be better. We’ll see. For now, some short thoughts.
I started watching the Chilling Adventures of Sabrina on Netflix recently. I’m only a couple episodes in but I gotta say, so far I’m disappointed. The characters are either unlikable or so poorly developed that they are little more than cardboard cutouts. There’s no real narrative flow at all, and the division between the mortal world and the witching world is jarring. Harvey is awful, just awful, as are the rest of Sabrina’s mortal friends. The main story line in the mortal world to this point is so trite, so cliche as to be eye-rollingly bad. Far more compelling is what’s going on in the witching world, but we keep getting yanked out of that in favor of whatever is going on at the local high school.
Fortunately, there is hope things will get better. The show is from the creators of the CW’s Riverdale, a shockingly good teenage drama with more than a little bit of a horrific undercurrent. Seriously, Riverdale must be the foggiest city in America. And there is a rich vein of horror to mine in Sabrina. That’s part of the problem, as the creators have attempted to ram too much information and plot into the first few episodes.
It’s probably a little unfair of me to criticize the show so early on, and I am reserving judgment. But things need to improve, and fast, or Sabrina will be a massive disappointment.
Beware The Shadows 