With "Bewitched," the ideal American family is struck by flashes of modernity.

A French television comfort series, rebroadcast ad nauseam in the dead of afternoon, Bewitched was for many French people their first contact with the American sitcom and its canned laughter. Developed for ABC by screenwriter Sol Saks, the project was loosely inspired by the film My Wife Is a Witch, directed in Hollywood by the Frenchman René Clair (1942), and initially aroused suspicion. At the time, witchcraft remained a serious matter in rural America.

But it was precisely the middle class that the series was aimed at. To expand beyond the big cities, television had to offer more and more mainstream programming, and broke very clearly with the television progressivism of the 1950s, a legacy of pre-war radio. Bewitched and its ideal family, the Stevens, were put on the air in 1964 and the animated opening sequence, produced by the Hanna-Barbera studio, immediately became legendary. The first ratings were excellent – 30 million viewers on average for each episode – and the series quickly spread: it was broadcast in France for the first time in 1966.

For anyone who has watched I Love Lucy (1951), Bewitched is indeed a throwback. The witch in question, Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery) is a housewife. When she reveals her magical powers to her young husband, Jean-Pierre (Darrin in the original version, played by Dick York), on their wedding night, he makes her swear to renounce them now that she is married. For eight seasons, the series will play on the discrepancy between a woman with superpowers and a " Muggles” often overwhelmed by the situation.

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