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Although I myself was a Dungeons-and-Dragons-playing tween in 1984, I'm not sure if that means I'm the target audience for this, or if the kind of nostalgia it offers is aimed more at people who just know the '80s from movies. That part of it isn't super interesting to me; it's a candy-colored suburban version of the era that might be accurate for some people but it wasn't the world I grew up in, and I never had a gang of best friends or a middle-school crush, so stories about those things are abstract for me unless the character writing and dialogue are great... which I don't think they are here. But I'm a sucker for monsters and mad scientists and ESP, and this show manages to rehash a lot of familiar takes on those things in a way that may not exactly be fresh and new, but does feel like what a lot of '80s movies and paperback thrillers might have aspired to be if they'd had better special effects and permission to really take their time. The tone is odd: not always light (a lot of dark gruesome stuff does happen), just always sort of friendly—which is different from my usual taste in SF/horror, but they do it with great conviction and it usually works.
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I wanted to see this show because Kiernan Shipka is in it; more about that later. The basic setup comes from the recent Archie Comics thing, which was a scarier version of the long-running Sabrina the Teenage Witch and its many spin-offs (I haven't read or seen any of them), so this isn't exactly a case of trying to come up with a new take on a supernatural youth series.

Still, there are a few things that set it apart from Buffy, Charmed, etc. ( Read more... )