After seven seasons, Sabrina is fresh out of magic.
The sitcom about the now-twentysomething "teenage" witch has been zapped by the WB.
The network made it official in a press release, billing Thursday's hourlong broadcast, featuring the nuptials of its bewitched heroine (Melissa Joan Hart) to newbie Aaron Jacobs (Dylan Neal), as the show's "series finale."
No reaction yet on the cancellation from Hart, who also produces the series, along with executive-producing mom Paula Hart.
One guess is that neither is terribly surprised.
The relationship between Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and the WB chilled last spring when the Frog renewed the show but ordered only 13 new episodes, instead of the usual 22. It wasn't until November that the WB finally gave the go-ahead for a full season.
By that time, Hart was plenty peeved.
"It's a pretty crappy way to treat a show as old as we are," Hart told TV Guide Online, "but it happens."
Hart accused the WB of not caring about the series because: (a) as a veteran series, Sabrina cost too much; and (b), as a show originally developed by ABC, it didn't have anything invested in it--emotionally.
"Because nobody there backs our show, nobody there is fully supporting it or putting their neck out for it," Hart said.
The WB said it did, too, support Sabrina. Then, last month, it moved the show out of its longtime Friday-night home to sacrificial-lamb Thursday nights, opposite CBS' Survivor: Amazon and NBC's Friends, to make room for Grounded for Life, another show salvaged from another network (in Life's case, Fox).
Last week, a rerun of Sabrina was the week's least-watched show on the six major broadcast networks, placing in 121st place, with 1.6 million viewers, not a good thing, even by the WB's standards.
For the season to date, the show ranks 156th among total viewers, averaging a little more than 3 million sets of eyeballs. Before its relocation to Thursdays, Sabrina was conjuring 3.4 million viewers, up from the 3.1 million it averaged during the 2001-02 season.
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch began its prime-time life on September 27, 1996, on ABC, with Hart, then 20, casting her first spell as Sabrina Spellman, a high-schooler who learns of her magical powers on her 16th birthday. (Hart previously played Sabrina, then known as Sabrina Sawyer, in a 1996 TV-movie for Showtime.)
The series was based on the Archie Comics character (the character itself created by cartoonist Dan DeCarlo in 1962). Legal and contractual issues meant that Sabrina would remain "the teenage witch" no matter how long the show ran or how old Hart got. (She turned 27 last Friday, having run afoul of the Archie police in 1999, at age 23, when she showed much cleavage in Maxim and dished about her sex life in Movieline.)
The series went through two major overhauls--the first, in the fall of 2000, when it jumped from ABC, where it was averaging 10.6 million viewers, to the WB, where it was coveted for its appeal to teen girls.
The second major revamp came last year. Longtime costars Beth Broderick and Caroline Rhea (as Sabrina's aunts) departed, as did David Lascher (Sabrina's love interest, Josh).
When the seventh season started, "the teenage witch" was a college grad who scored a writing gig at a music magazine. (Like, the best a kid with the ability to time travel could do was go into journalism?)
"It was time for her to grow up, it was time to get her on her own two feet, and, yes, it was time to reinvent the show," Paula Hart told the Hollywood Reporter last August.
Sabrina grew up all the way into bridal material. Thursday's finale finds the witchy one and her girlfriends enjoying a bachelorette party in the Bermuda Triangle before getting down to the business of the "I dos." Rhea, of late of her own talk show, returns as Aunt Hilda for the ceremony.
Hart will get down to the business of her own "I dos" shortly. She confirmed her engagement to rocker Mark Wilkerson in January. Footage of the ceremony (no date yet) likely will be included in a six-episode reality series based on Hart's prewedding life (dress shopping, bridal shower, etc.), set to debut on the ABC Family Channel in July.
Hart has lived much of her life on camera. Her prime-time career dates back to the mid-1980s. As a teen, she starred on her first series, Nickelodeon's Clarissa Explains It All, from 1991-94.
Sabrina's run on ABC and the WB produced 163 episodes and two TV-movies. About the only cast member to last the long broom ride, save for Hart, was Nick Bakay, as the voice of Salem, the talking cat.
As the show's end neared, Hart sounded wistful--and hopeful.
"A wedding is either a good place to start a story--or end a story," she told Zap2it.com during the shoot for the final WB episode, "or I might be starting a new story."