Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Last year was without question the year of the vampire, what with Twilight and True Blood and the return of ruffly shirts. Some recent reports of a Sex and the City-style show about female werewolves called Bitches might have you thinking prematurely that the next supernatural trend on the horizon is our lupine friend, the he-wolf. But with today’s news that ABC has greenlighted a series called Eastwick based on the 1987 Jack Nicholson film The Witches of Eastwick (to which I say hells yeah), I’m of the impression that we’re cycling back to that reliable TV trope, the witch. Like bushy eyebrows or tapered jeans, the TV witch is a phenomenon that comes into and out of favor intermittently and is wholly at the mercy of fickle, mercurial home audiences. You can try to extrapolate a correlation between the economy and the incidence of small-screen sorceresses if you so choose. Or talk about how it’s a sublimation of Hollywood’s misogynistic leanings. I’m too lazy, so I’m just gonna list off my favorite harpies of all time. Pretend it’s magic.

1) Endora, Bewitched
Samantha, with her twitchy little nose tick, was supposedly at the crux of this show, but her delightfully mean-spirited mom Endora, with her saucy red bob and meddlesome ways, was the real draw. Who the hell wants to use their magical powers to get the laundry folded faster? Wouldn’t you rather, say, turn your ex-boyfriend into a donkey?

2) Magica DeSpell, Duck Tales
You don’t have to rock a red-headed bob a la Endora, but it helps to have one or the other of these follicular features if you want to be taken seriously as a witch. Magica had the sleek ’do down, and she gets points for that. She made a habit of antagonizing Scrooge McDuck and his nephews on my favorite childhood cartoon Duck Tales by having a funny accent and threatening to steal Scrooge’s lucky dime. If that doesn’t sound terrifying to you, then clearly you are underestimating the powers of a cartoon duck.

3) Prue Halliwell, Charmed
There were three main bitches witches on Charmed, but for reasons totally unrelated to her fictional character, Shannen Doherty was the most believable. She was the original hot mess pretty much since she came on the scene (I bet you Wilford Brimley has some stories!), and knowing about her reputation off-camera merely added to her potency on this otherwise, let’s be honest, pretty goddamned cheesy show.

4) Sabrina, Sabrina the Teen Witch
Clarissa from Clarissa Explains It All plus an animatronic talking cat? How can that not be amazing? The production values alone make this show a camp favorite, even if Sabrina lacked the bite (and the hairstyle) we typically like in a TV wizardess. Melissa Joan Hart hasn’t done anything worthwhile since.

5) Willow, Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Watching Willow Rosenberg blossom from shy nerd to hardcore (magical) power lesbian on Buffy was one of the most satisfying character evolutions ever. And who knew there were Jewish witches? Score one for the Chosen People!