‘The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina’ takes a while to cast its spell, but the magic is still there

Teen dramas often revolve around the universal experience of growing up and being forced, for the first time, to make choices that have an impact on the rest of one’s life. Whereas children don’t often have control over their futures, teens face choosing the right classes, picking the right friends, and the looming threat of college applications coming for their necks. It’s a scary and essential part of life.

In a lot of ways, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina explores this theme to its limit and winds up being a spooky and thoughtful exploration of a young woman’s discovering her agency while also fulfilling her cosmic destiny. It just...takes a while to get there.

Far from the family friendly adventures of Sabrina The Teenage Witch, The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina sets its coming-of-age tale against the backdrop of witches living the kind of violent, debauched lives that most humans would run from screaming, which makes Sabrina (Mad Men's Kiernan Shipka) — the daughter of a warlock father and a human mother — an anomaly in both worlds. Sabrina’s choice of whether to live her life as a witch or as a mortal is the central conflict of the first season, and that particular conflict falls flat from the beginning.

The problem with this setup is that the show makes a rather poor case for Sabrina’s choice feeling like much of a choice at all. On one hand there is her witch life, which promises a delicious, sexy alternative to reality. The scattered glimpses of Sabrina’s coven in the first half of the show are by far its most interesting parts, so there’s little in her human life that can compare to the audience’s desire to see more of that black magic.

However, somewhere in the middle of the season, just as Sabrina’s waffling over whether to go bowling with her boyfriend Harvey or acquire outstanding magical powers for free beings to grate, something clicks. Sabrina’s worlds collide and the show begins to ask more interesting questions about its own conflict. What if magic wasn’t contained to the witches of Greendale? What if the witches’ satanic church could be corrupted by human influence? What if Sabrina’s choice wasn’t ever hers to make?

And that’s when things start to really get spooky.

To say more about what happens would of course be spoiling the show’s twists and turns, but it’s worth it to say that the conflict makes the characters on both sides of the witch/human divide significantly more interesting. Only one — Sabrina’s housebound cousin Ambrose played by the luminous Chance Perdomo — has the luck and writing to be captivating from his first appearance to his last, but others like the nasty teen witch Prudence, Aunt Hilda, and Sabrina’s friends Ros and Susie grow marvelously over the course of the season.

The drama of the season’s second half is reflected in the town of Greendale itself, a place that is just across the river from the CW’s Riverdale but, if possible, even more messed up. The Chilling Adventures does a good job in making the town feel and look like a place where darkness takes permanent residence, with its incongruous reliance on coal mining (in this economy?) to the generations-long conflicts between its families. As the season goes on, Greendale reveals its secrets to the viewer in surprising and horrible ways, and it makes for some of the series’ best twists.

Readers of this review are now presented with a choice. Do you continue with your mortal life, ignorant of the witchy world awaiting you in Greendale?? Or do you choose to live deliciously and sign your soul over to The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. That choice, at least, is yours.