CW Developing The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch

The CW today announced that they are developing The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, a horror series based on Archie characters that re-envisions the origins of Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

The series comes from executive producers Greg Berlanti and Sarah Schecter, the team behind Riverdale, but there is no specific indication whether this is a stand-alone project or a spinoff at this point. It may (like the comic of the same name) coexist with but not be directly tied to the “main” show.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina reimagines the origin and adventures of Sabrina the Teenage Witch as a dark coming-of-age story that traffics in horror, the occult and, of course, witchcraft. Tonally in the vein of Rosemary’s Baby and The Exorcist, this adaptation finds Sabrina wrestling to reconcile her dual nature — half-witch, half-mortal — while standing against the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit.

Sabrina the Teenage Witch was a family-friendly sitcom for seven seasons in the late ’90s and early 2000s. That series’ star, Melissa Joan Hart, said in 2016 that she had heard a reboot of the property was being mulled.

Riverdale showrunner and Archie Chief Creative Officer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa will write and executive produce. Lee Toland Krieger is named as a producer and director, so will likely helm the pilot. Archie CEO Jon Goldwater is also listed as an executive producer.

Aguirre-Sacasa has been fielding Sabrina questions for a year now, with increased intensity following a season finale that had a Sabrina Easter egg but not, as many fans had hoped, an appearance by the character in the flesh.

“The truth is, we did talk a lot about introducing Sabrina, but she’s such an important character and it’s such a big idea to introduce the supernatural into a natural world that honestly when we got to the finale, we kind of realized that there was so much stuff to play that if we introduced Sabrina, it would kind of overshadow everything that we had planned,” Aguirre-Sacasa, who writes the comic book Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, told ComicBook.com. “We are going to continue exploring the idea of the supernatural being on the fringes of Riverdale, and that might be to lead up to Sabrina’s arrival or that might just be to make it more like Twin Peaks and the way they dealt with the supernatural.”

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is being eyed for the 2018–19 television season as a companion to Riverdale.

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