Melissa Joan Hart Looks Back on "Sabrina" Finale

[JamesG]

Melissa Joan Hart Answers our Burning Questions about "Sabrina the Teenage Witch's" Series Finale, 20 Years Later
by Andy Swift
April 24, 2023


Monday marks exactly two decades since Melissa Joan Hart wrapped her seven-season run as "Sabrina the Teenage Witch", and we still have big feelings about how it all went down.

(Not to mention a No Doubt earworm we’ll never get out of our heads.)





Did you film this knowing it was your last episode?

“We didn’t know it was our last last episode, but we knew it was our last one of the season, and we didn’t know if we were coming back,” Hart says.

When "Sabrina" was renewed for its second season on ABC, it was also renewed for a third and fourth, but that wasn’t the case during the show’s final three seasons on The WB, all of which came down to the wire.

“We though it could be the last, plus we had to shoot on location because of the church — which we didn’t do very often — so I got an In-N-Out Burger truck to come and feed the crew,” Hart says.





Did Aaron ever stand a chance against Harvey?

Aaron may have been disappointed when Sabrina jilted him at the altar, but the fans certainly weren’t.

“I feel like it always had to go back to Harvey,” Hart says. “And I think the way the writers handled it was really beautiful, that Sabrina made the decision on her own. When you watch Friends, you want Ross and Rachel together. When you watch How I Met Your Mother, you want Robin and Ted together. I think it was important to wrap it up that way.”



Of course, this is merely speculation, as Hart admits that she “wasn’t always privy to what the writers were thinking,” despite being an executive producer on the show.

“I wasn’t really looking down the pike at what was coming next, so I was never part of [shaping] the arcs of the seasons,” she says. “Nowadays, I’d be like, ‘Tell me everything!'”



And Hart has no mixed feelings about the series’ final shot — Sabrina and Harvey riding into their future atop his motorcycle, as their soul stones come together like magnets.

“That send-off was pretty amazing,” Hart says. “That’s actually one of the reasons I never thought we should do a reboot of the show, because it wrapped it up so nicely.”





What would we have seen in Season 8?

The possibilities for an eighth season of "Sabrina" were endless, but Hart isn’t convinced that the Powers That Be actually ever actually put a plan together.

“I don’t think they even entertained it, because we were just trying to survive that season,” she says. “I also know that the writers liked to take breaks, refresh their brains and come back with something new, so I don’t know that they had thought ahead at all. We were also sort of aware [that it was ending].”



Despite the absence of an actual plan, Hart has her own theories about what the future might have held for the no-longer-teenage witch:

“I don’t think there was a real plan, but Sabrina was done with her college years, so I imagine she would move on to family life. What does it look like to be a young, married witch? That’s probably where they would have gone with the next season.”





A modern day "Bewitched"? I'd watch the heck out of that. I know you just said you were against a revival, but if you were legitimately asked, would you consider?

“I think it would be so much fun to be back with those people,” Hart says. “I would want to assemble the same crew and cast. I see the appeal of it, for sure. And I would like to see what kind of storylines they’d come up with, but it would have to be done right.”



Hart knows that devoted "Sabrina" fans would love to see what she’s up to today, but she also has very real concerns about what that might look like.

“Everybody has created what it might look like in their heads, but we’re all a lot older now, and I don’t think it always works,” she says. “It’s really dangerous territory to tread. You can ruin a beautiful thing if you don’t do it right. It would have to be something that was worth it, that felt like we were moving forward and not just taking a step back for nostalgia’s sake.”

Final answer: “I would say, ‘Never say never.’”





Any fun memories from your final days as Sabrina?

“Our last day of shooting was on the actual sound stage,” Hart recalls.

In fact, there’s very little she doesn’t remember from that day, down to the gray zip-up fleece sweatshirt she was wearing. More specifically, the sweatshirt featured the image of The Bear in the Big Blue House — a gift from the show’s creator Mitchell Kriegman, who previously launched Hart’s career on "Clarissa Explains It All".



Therefore, it should come as no surprise that the sweatshirt was affectionately known as “Bear.”

“I wore that sweatshirt every day, because it was always freezing on set,” Hart says. “When we wrapped, the crew painted a big ‘No. 1’ on the back of the shirt and hoisted it up into the rafters of the sound stage. They put a spotlight on it, as if I was retiring from a hockey team or something. So my jersey was hanging in the corner of the sound stage for a little bit before they took it down.”





Why was Aunt Zelda MIA from Sabrina's wedding?

Now to address a magical elephant in the room. Like most weddings, Sabrina’s doubled as a family reunion, bringing back her mom (Alley Mills), dad (Doug Sheehan), cousin Amanda and aunt Hilda (Caroline Rhea) for the big day.

Unfortunately, former series regular Beth Broderick, who departed with Rhea ahead of the final season, did not return as Aunt Zelda. It was explained that the Witch’s Council temporarily turned Zelda into a candle in exchange for allowing Sabrina’s mom to attend her daughter’s wedding — exactly the kind of magical twist that fans accepted without blinking an eye, even if they’ve always wondered the real reason we didn’t get to see Zelda one last time.



“We’re all really, really close now, but I think there might have been … I don’t wanna say drama, because it wasn’t drama, but I think there might have been some hurt feelings about things that went on in previous seasons,” Hart explains. “We’re all super close, we’re like family.”

She continues: “When a lot of characters change in a show, it’s either because the network has asked for new blood to reinvigorate it, or because a new showrunner takes over. In our case, we had a lot of different showrunners over the years. New showrunners come in and they want to create new characters because they get paid by the characters that they create. So if they introduce new characters that live on for seasons and seasons, they keep getting paid for those characters.”

“It’s unfortunate that Beth wasn’t in that last episode, but I can tell you that she’s like a big sister to me,” Hart says. “We have wonderful discussions, and we talk often. The cast couldn’t be tighter.”





Did you take anything from set?

“So much!” she admits. “I took everything. Clothing, set pieces, things I don’t even know how I got home.”



One of Hart’s key acquisitions was “a mirror in the kitchen that Sabrina always looked at — it’s like a mirror, coat hook and umbrella stand all in one.” It made the journey from set to Hart’s home in L.A., then to her next home in Connecticut. “I think my husband got rid of it after that,” she says. “My husband doesn’t like to keep nostalgic things around. I’m a hoarder.”



And Hart technically has Salem — or at least the cat who played him — to thank for helping her haul so much loot.

“We were all screaming and yelling on the night we wrapped, so the cat freaked out and escaped,” she recalls. “We had to lock down the set to find the cat. It just freaked out, scratched the trainer to pieces and disappeared. Our sound stage was something like 22,000 square feet, and we had to search the whole thing for that cat. While we walked around the set, we just stole so much stuff. Maybe I’ll post some of it on Instagram and be like, ‘Anyone recognize this?’”

https://tvline.com/lists/sabrina-ser...sabrina-props/

[irehtman]

About that Beth's absence incident info, first of all, her financial relationship to Melissa was getting weak, her Zelda role is supposed to be both eldest and head witchcraft manager, but was unfortunately turned by financial public and even if Beth was a comedian, she was denied a raise for being a serious type of comedian than humourous.