At the time, the 1970 Christmas episode of Bewitched, “Sisters at Heart,” was considered a groundbreaking work of television. In fact, it received the Governor’s Award at the following year’s Emmys, reserved for the people and works the board just really liked that year. It’s centered on Darrin Stephens’ boss, who comes to believe for reasons of wacky hijinks that Darrin is married to a Black woman and subsequently passes him over for an important opportunity. At the same time, the Stephens’ daughter, Tabitha, casts a spell on herself and a Black friend, covering their skin in light and dark polka dots, after another kid tells them they could never be “sisters” because of their differing ethnicities. It ends with Samantha bewitching Darrin’s boss to see everyone, including himself, as Black, which convinces him of the error of his ways in a sort of Christmas Carol: Racism Edition. That part regrettably involves blackface, which is seen today as rather antithetical to the episode’s message, but if it doesn’t offend everyone across every point in time, did it really happen in the ‘70s?
To make matters even more complicated, the episode was actually written by a high school class of Black superfans. You might think the teens of 1969 South Central Los Angeles, where Thomas Jefferson High School is located, wouldn’t find a series about middle-class suburban white witches all that relatable, but when one ninth-grade teacher decided to use television as a teaching tool after finding that her students were unable to read the poetry and short stories in the assigned textbook, Bewitched emerged as a favorite.
As one student pointed out, the heart of the series was the marriage between a witch and a mortal, and its potential interpretation as a metaphor for interracial marriage wasn’t lost on them. That may very well be what inspired them to collaborate on a script after an overture from their teacher resulted in a visit to the Bewitched set, where the real (and fake) magic happened.
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According to Dick Sargeant, the students “came alive on the set,” and when they later presented their script to the crew, they were all too happy to invite the students back. “We’ve had bad scripts submitted by professional writers that weren’t as well written or creative,” Montgomery said.
The resulting episode not only won the Emmy but earned the praise of critics, who lauded it as “thoughtful” and “refreshingly free of the patronization which usually attended ‘racially sensitive’ TV episodes of the period.”
Most importantly, one line from the script (“We’re having integrated turkey: white meat and dark”) was repeated in She’s Gotta Have It, which means Spike Lee is also an unlikely Bewitched fan. He probably throws the best binge-watching parties.
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