It appears that before Kenya Barris, the creative mind behind Black-ish, left ABC for a lucrative $100 million deal with Netflix, he sold them on one last high-profile idea: Bewitched, a single camera, interracial blended family comedy based on the popular 1960s sitcom of the same name.
It took a bit of time for the deals to close but ABC has given a pilot production commitment to the new take on the classic supernatural sitcom. In Bewitched, written by Barris and Yamara Taylor, Samantha, a hardworking black single mom who happens to be a witch, marries Darren, a white mortal who happens to be a bit of a slacker. They struggle to navigate their differences as she discovers that even when a black girl is literally magic, she’s still not as powerful as a decently tall white man with a full head of hair in America.
ABC aired the original Bewitched from 1964-1972 and has been interested in rebooting the series for quite some time. In 2014, ABC heavily pursued a Bewitched sequel, one of two previous attempts by Sony Pictures TV to revive the comedy series over the past decade. Besides the 2014 project, which in a bidding situation landed a pilot production commitment at NBC but did not go to series, another reboot was in development at CBS during the 2011-2012 season.
Barris sold Bewitched to ABC shortly before his overall deal at ABC Studios officially terminated August 15, a little over a year into its original four-year term.
