Fun for Actors

Every time I rewatch the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch, I'm struck by how much *fun* this show must have been to work on. Because while all of the things that happen make sense in context, and the *characters* either forget what happened (the mortals) or are just used to a world that runs on silliness (the witches), for every one of the wacky "magic runs on storybook logic" scenes, the *actors* are still playing all that out-- so in the Thanksgiving episode, Harvey doesn't notice/remember either the drawing board sequence or getting turned into a Fonzie parody, but Nate Richert got to cycle through a whole bunch of different versions of his character. Thanks to the nature of magic in this show, every few weeks they're doing a different genre for some or all of the episode-- there's the one where the episode becomes a soap opera and suddenly they all have to do everything REALLY DRAMATICALLY, there's the one where it's suddenly a spy-thriller parody and they're going "today we are dressing up in black catsuits and doing silly stunts", in the final season there's a musical number complete with Broadway-style dance routines (which, thanks to the nature of magic, is occurring in-universe) well before having a Musical Episode was a thing most shows did... they even have an episode that's a silent movie, complete with period costumes.

It must have been so much fun, and so challenging to one's range, to come in each week never knowing what genre the show was going to be (well, always comedy, but is it a fairy tale comedy? Are we suddenly in The Crucible?), and knowing that whatever genre it was, you were probably going to get to do some ridiculous overacting-for-the-comedy-of-it at least once.

(And of course the show itself takes on a certain tenor when you stop to think about the fact that while it does make sense in context, someone was actually standing there melodramatically exclaiming "These fishsticks are simply divine!" while wearing a ridiculous scarf.)