The Netflix series starring Kiernan Shipka in the title role "struggles to figure out exactly what its tone is, and how to balance its darkness and its campiness," says Constance Grady. She adds: "Even Sabrina herself is left to fall a little flat. Shipka has a radiantly likeble screen presence, but throughout the first season she has little to do besides be determinedly plucky and also sometimes sad. While the show seems interested in Sabrina as an intellectual construct who can act out an allegorical dilemma between power and freedom, it doesn’t seem to be fully invested in her as a character, and never bothers to give her the psychological complexities it grants to her aunts, to her cousin Ambrose (a smoothly charming Chance Perdomo), or even to mean girl Prudence...Still, for as messy and as inconsistent as Sabrina can be, the moments that work are more fun and more stylish than anything else on television. And when it takes the time to really delve into the complexities of the witch power fantasy, to think about what it means when the fantasy gives women power from a male source, and that source has its own agenda, when it begins to play out its ideas about power and autonomy and obligation and gender — well, then, just like the title promises, it’s downright chilling."
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TOPICS: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, Netflix, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Kiernan Shipka, Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa