Fun fact, some contemporary feminists actually praised Samantha’s character for not being content with passively whining about how much being married sucked while doing nothing about it. As in, they wrote whole essays contrasting her and her mum with other female leads at the time. That‘s kind of the thing about Bewitched. Whenever Darren’s a domineering dickhead, he’s not meant to be in the right, he’s meant to learn a lesson about being less shit. Samantha doesn‘t avoid using magic because she’s afraid of losing Darren or whatever, she does it because she thinks doing things the hard way is fun. It makes sense honestly. Samantha is basically immortal and has godlike powers. Why not spend sixty or seventy years trying something different with someone she loves?
Obviously, there’s plenty of stuff in Bewitched that doesn’t match up with current values. There’s a whole episode about how dumb broads who keep returning to violent idiots have it coming, or how sometimes you should shield the male ego even when its owner is being a moron. And that’s fine. The worth of any story or piece of art, even a silly sitcom, isn’t in how well it conforms to modern standards. Everything ages, and we’ll all seem like monsters to someone, someday. What determines their worth is whether or not they’re fucking funny.
God, now I wish Quinton and YouTube and the entire vapid cultural commentary scene were a thing centuries ago. I want a video of 1500s Quinton talking about how problematic Odysseus‘ adultery and pagan beliefs were. A four hour retrospective on Mort De Arthur. Gilgamesh beds every woman and boy in the city? Yikes, not a good look.
The central message of everything Quinton and his ilk produce is that morality varies wildly across all space and time, but it just so happens him and his mates got it exactly, objectively right in Current Year, and we we were all fools not to realise this from the beginning.
