Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina muted Salem the cat, making him far too distracting (and cute) in the process.
Confession: I never really watched Sabrina the Teenage Witch. I was aware of its existence, I occasionally caught reruns, and for an embarrassingly long time I thought that Sabrina and The Nanny was in fact the same show.
(Like, she was Sabrina’s nanny? Was she one of the aunts? I wasn’t sure. All American sitcoms looked the same to me. I’m pretty sure they all took place in the same house, anyway.)
One thing I did not like about the original Sabrina was the animatronic talking cat. I adored cats, and had several of my own, and my tiny self absolutely did not appreciate imagining a grown man’s voice coming out of a puppet that frankly looked like reanimated roadkill.
It should be noted that I was maybe five years old at the time, so a puppet cat with dead eyes and a gruff man-voice lounging in the bedroom of a teenage girl was a fairly frightening concept. Especially because, the cat speaking English and all, I had no idea what it was saying. In my imagination, it was all sorts of dreadful things.
(And, as it turned out, I was right: as I later found out, Salem was in fact an evil warlock who tried to take over the world, so, VINDICATION.)
Sabrina the Teenage Witch may not have been as ~chilling~ as its Netflix successor but, to me, Salem the cat made even the sitcom pretty damn terrifying. An unintentional effect, perhaps, but it did set my expectations high for the Adventures of Sabrina reboot on Netflix!
It was supposed to be scary, right? Edgy, dark, gritty, and all those other words we like to use nowadays to sell a new version of an old idea.
So imagine my disappointment when I — now an adult with a low-to-medium tolerance for scary things — found TCAOS to not only be not that scary, but Salem the cat was now… adorable. And just kinda there.
In the new adaptation of the Sabrina comics, creator and Sabrina comics writer Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa opted to keep Salem silent (as indeed he was in the original Archie Comics), for several perfectly understandable reasons.
As Bustle writes, TCAOS is using real cats, and the animation work to make them look talkative — as well as do anything else of substance — would have been expensive.
On top of that, lead Kiernan Shipka turned out to be allergic to cats, which obviously and understandably limited what they were able to do with Sabrina and her familiar. In fact, the more of a physically distant and/or off-screen presence Salem could be, the easier for production.
(Sidenote: if you ask me, an animatronic talking cat would literally solve all of these problems, and it would be suitably creepy for the chilling tone, but nobody did ask, sooo.)
The only bit of talking Salem does is when he is still in his goblin form, answering Sabrina’s summons. He’s not got a dark backstory, or latent evil intentions (beyond those of the witches themselves). He’s just one of many familiars that bulk up the busy scenery.
In The Chilling Adventures, Salem has gone from being a character with agency, backstory and personality who influences the plot in major ways to just being a standard variety pet who doesn’t seem like he thinks much beyond basic cat-thoughts. He’s described as Sabrina’s ‘equal,’ but we never really get a sense of what that means.
As Sabrina’s familiar, Salem’s primary responsibilities appear to be meowing, purring, and hissing as he is awkwardly inserted into scenes to appease the fans that couldn’t abide his presence having been cut completely.
Since there is no context given for his actions, or inactions — no snappy wisecracks or inappropriate comments — he is literally just a cat, inhabiting the same space as Sabrina and occasionally fighting an enemy in the periphery. Sitcom Salem would be rolling in his grave.
Aside from the general weirdness of this — what’s so familiar about this animal Sabrina rarely interacts with and has no seeming personal connection to? — the lack of not only talking but also just basic interaction its surroundings makes Salem a far more distracting element than he should be, considering how little his presence matters.
Because it’s not so much that Salem has been downgraded from a main character to a moving prop (ironic, since he’s actually real this time). It’s that he still takes up a lot of space in the series, not only on screen but in promotion — the cat serves as the Twitter icon, he is a prominent poster motif, he’s gonna have his own Funko and walked the damn red carpet. We’re meant to notice Salem. But why? Just cause he’s a cute cat?
(Him being so cute is honestly part of the problem. I don’t know about you, but I find it a real challenge to pay attention to anything else happening in a scene when Salem is adorably meowing in the background and the camera occasionally cuts to him with his little tail in the air.)
Salem is distracting exactly because he isn’t meant to be. He’s clearly only there because he has to be; he’s a prominent figure that helps audiences connect this show to the original, and he has nostalgic value. But it just feels like they’re exploiting the symbol of what Salem should be without ever actually committing to his character (such as it is) in the new story.
He only matters because he mattered once, in another version of this story, for another Sabrina. But in the context of this adaptation, he matters very little, both to the world and to Sabrina herself. He really is just part of the scenery, a black Halloweeny cat to meow among the pumpkins.
And don’t get me wrong, the scenery as a whole is spectacular, and (with the possible exception of Tati Gabrielle’s Prudence) the best thing about The Chilling Adventures. There’s nothing wrong with deciding to focus on other factors than Salem and his bond with Sabrina.
And yet here I am, here we all are, talking about him rather than all the other things the show presumably wants us to be talking about. The silence of Salem is much louder than his speaking would have been.
Maybe it’s because he, for better or worse, was such a scene-stealer in the original Sabrina adaptation that it’s hard to accept a version in which he’s not. Maybe it’s just me, still obsessed with a puppet that terrified me as a child and disappointed with the fact that clearly, the creatives behind the Netflix adaptation aren’t cat people.
Or maybe Salem occupies so much of the conversation around Chilling Adventures because we’re not sure what to make of him. It’s like the show can’t really decide whether he’s a character or not; the camera lingers on him for too long, breaking pace, as though waiting for a voice-over that never comes. They aren’t willing to commit to Salem being a real character, but they’re also not willing to let go of his symbolic value.
We’re never allowed to forget that Salem is there, but we’re never allowed to feel any personal connection to him, either — much like, it seems, Sabrina herself, who could honestly benefit from having someone to interact with during the extensive sequences in which she mumble-monologues to herself.
Just imagine if they did this to Pantalaimon in The BBC’s His Dark Materials trilogy, or Mr Fox or Mr Beaver in the Narnia movies. It would just be so… weird.
There’s a lot of good to be said about the new Sabrina reboot — did I mention Prudence? — and Salem the cat really doesn’t warrant a fraction of the think-pieces he’s getting (including this one), exactly because he’s such a non-entity.
But maybe Salem is such a jarring element to viewers exactly because he sticks out like a sore thumb in an otherwise fairly good show, unnecessarily distracting from the elements we’re ‘meant’ to focus on. Does Salem matter? Does he not? Will he ever act in a way that suggests he’s a thinking, independent creature? Or is he just a purring prop? If only he would tell us!
Let’s hope they figure out how to get Salem talking (or just shelve the ‘character’ altogether) in season 2.
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