Just the Funny Parts by Nell Scovell

Author:Nell Scovell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780062473509
Publisher: HarperCollins

Teller, who originated the role of Skippy the witch, in a Magritte-style bowler hat with a fish wrapped in pearls behind him.

Courtesy of CBS Television Studios

The Council turns down the request. Sabrina has no choice but to go back to school and face Libby’s ridicule.

“Fine. I surrender,” Sabrina says as she heads off the next morning. “I guess every school needs a weird kid. Might as well be me.”

“I was the weird kid!” Hilda calls after her, cheerfully.

It made my heart beat faster to hear Caroline Rhea deliver this line in such a chipper voice. I was the weird kid, too. Sabrina was my attempt to create a show that my teenage self would have watched.

In the final scenes, Aunt Hilda confronts Drell and forces him to give her niece a do-over. Sabrina makes the most of her second chance. She catches the football, aces the pop quiz, and doesn’t turn the cheerleader into a pineapple. At the end of the school day, Sabrina races home, triumphant.

“Yay! I’m normal!” she declares. “Gotta go tell the cat!”

Viacom execs Steve Gordon and Chris Sanagustin were true partners and helped shape my early drafts. The biggest argument we had concerned a character who’s not even in the pilot: Sabrina’s mom. Jonathan’s script had Sabrina say, “I never knew my mom” implying Mom had died in childbirth. The studio thought this was a fine way to explain Mom’s absence, but I didn’t see any reason to kill her off. The tradition of matricide in “family” movies from Bambi to Finding Nemo has always rankled me. I presented my case to Steve and Chris.

“Why can’t we just give the mom a job that keeps her far away?”

“Like what?”

“What if she’s an archeologist on a long dig in Peru?” I said.

“And she just abandoned her kid?”

“Sabrina’s not abandoned,” I said. “She’s living in a nice home with her two loving aunts. I mean, her dad’s not with her and you’re okay with that. You’re not insisting we kill him off.”

“No.”

“So why is it different with a mom?”

Sabrina’s mom got a stay of execution. Still, Steve and Chris asked me to make it clear that Mom keeping her distance wasn’t a choice. I added a line of dialogue that explains if Sabrina sets eyes on her mortal mother in the first two years after becoming a witch, her mom will turn into a ball of wax. Sabrina’s dad adds this policy is how the Council discourages marriage between witches and mortals.

Back at the pilot table read, the ABC huddle broke. The group rejoined the Viacom folks and me. As president of the network, Jamie Tarses delivered the notes. She opened by saying she enjoyed all the performances. She liked the animatronic cat. She thought the story worked fine. She did, however, have one “fairly major note.” I tensed. Jamie felt there wasn’t enough conflict between the two aunts. She asked me to describe each one.

“Zelda’s the straight man: logical, restrained, and stable,” I said. “Hilda’s the wild card: emotional, blunt, and an incurable romantic.

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