Well, there’s something that’s for the best in the long run but a little disappointing in the short term. Having been a huge fan of Riverdale so far on The CW, the news that a series for Sabrina, the Teenage Witch was being put together for the 2018-19 season as a companion project had me excited for what it could do. That’s now changing as the spinoff series will be a Netflix Original and is getting the two-season pickup with Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa writing the pilot for it. The show does not have a formal title at the moment and we don’t expect it to use the time period of The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
The show is being designed as two ten-episode seasons with the first season being filmed from February through June of next year and then going right into the second season after that through October. No premiere plans have been set for it yet or and we doubt there’ll be any actual crossover side with Riverdale, which gets huge presence and viewing on Netflix which in turn boosted The CW broadcast.
According to Deadline, “The new project reimagines the origin and adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a dark coming-of-age story that traffics in horror, the occult and, of course, witchcraft. Tonally in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist,this adaptation finds Sabrina wrestling to reconcile her dual nature — half-witch, half-mortal — while standing against the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit.”
The current comics work this dark magic angle but sets it back in the 1950’s period with a lengthy history that’s being explored in a slow moving but engaging way. The hope with it originally being on The CW was that it could tie it into the modern with it able to touch potentially upon Riverdale from time to time could make for a lot of fun. Hell, just being able to bring Afterlife with Archie to life as a dream/alternate world sequence for a crossover event of some sort would be thrilling.