let me tell you about hallmark’s ‘good witch.’
I'm not saying it's the best TV show ever, but I'm also not *not* saying that.
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If you had asked me 10 years ago what my favorite TV show was, I almost certainly wouldn’t have said it was anything that aired on the Hallmark Channel. But life changes. You get a little older, you move out of the city and all of a sudden you find yourself feeling deeply and spiritually connected to the fictional residents of a little town called Middleton.
Middleton, for the uninitiated, is the setting of Good Witch, a wildly(?) popular Hallmark television series that spun out of a series of the network’s made-for-TV movies. To date, the Good Witch empire encompasses a set of seven movies dating back to 2008, five TV specials, and the show just premiered its seventh season.
The show’s protagonist, Cassie Nightingale, is played by Catherine Bell (of JAG and Army Wives fame). When we first meet Cassie in the first movie, she is surrounded by an air of suspicion as an out-of-towner who is taking over the rumored-to-be-haunted historic Grey House mansion. Before long, Cassie hooks up with the hot police chief, gains a level of trust from the townsfolk and opens a gift shop called Bell, Book and Candle (because running a bed-and-breakfast alone clearly isn’t enough work).
The Good Witch universe first came to my attention shortly after my partner and I left Chicago and moved to Batavia. The parallels felt a little creepily uncanny. At the time, my partner was working at a just-opened gift shop in town. As a queer, young-ish, child-less couple moving into a town known for its aging population and kid-friendliness, we felt a bit like witches ourselves when we arrived in B-Town.
The more I watched, the more I was pulled in. As it turned out, fictional Middleton is set in a suburb a couple hours west of Chicago. One episode actually placed Middleton north of Aurora and south of Elgin, a.k.a. in the heart of the Tri-Cities of St. Charles, Geneva and Batavia.
The way that the conservative channel portrays Cassie’s “magic” has also been mystifying over the years. The most common display of Cassie’s powers is that she is extremely intuitive in the most mundane of ways — she’ll often predict when a text message is going to come through, and from whom. She’ll also seem to know when someone is about to enter a room, or what is on someone’s mind. One time, no joke, she actually made it snow. Over the course of 13 years, the powers that be at Hallmark have, simply put, never felt the need to spell out any parameters for Cassie’s powers and I love that for them.
Timelines, seasons and casting choices blur, contributing to a sense of surrealism, as well. We watch before our very eyes as Grace, Cassie’s child with Jake the hot police chief, goes from a young child in the 2004 film The Good Witch’s Wonder to a teenager played by Bailee Madison in the first season of the spun-off TV series a year later. Brothers, wives, children, etc. all have a way of disappearing with no explanation.
The demographics of Middleton are also questionable. A recent citywide movie night screening of Grease featured seemingly no children in attendance, the show rarely features people of color and an openly queer character has yet to be portrayed across the entire franchise (though a few queer-coded villains like a sassy celebrity baker called “The Chocolate King” have sprung up from time to time, its closest queer icon is probably the character of the blustery busybody mayor Martha Tinsdale).
And while we’re talking queerness, I have to take a moment to dip into Bell’s personal life. Adding intrigue to the franchise is the fact that its star, Bell, is a longtime member of the Church of Scientology. Further, reporter Tony Ortega has identified Bell as being in a long-term relationship with Brooke Daniells, her business partner in a jewelry line.
The show, like Bell’s backstory, is both wholesome and patently bizarre and overdramatic always. In Middleton, seemingly nothing happens and no one is a villain, but also main characters are suddenly widowed with no closure or discussion around the topic whatsoever. The writing is bizarre, the continuity is practically nonexistent, Cassie is constantly baking for no reason (despite having three full-time jobs). But none of that matters: it seems to be a big hit. In a 2017 The New York Times story shadily titled “Have Your Grandparents Told You About ‘Good Witch’?”, it is noted that the show consistently draws higher overall ratings than buzzy prestige shows like Fargo, Veep and The Americans — though it sinks with the 18-to-49 crowd.
To be honest, this essay is a bit of a mess but my holiday-weekend mind is consumed with fan theories on who will be revealed as the killer on HBO’s (excellent, holy cow, watch it now) Mare of Easttown tonight. So, while I sit here waiting for Good Witch to finally pursue a queer storyline and incorporate more diversity in its casting, I’m just here to tell you that if you want something both mindless and baffling, at once pure and vaguely occult, you should absolutely watch this show.
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On the local queer front, I wanted to give a quick plug to a few more Pride-related things going on in the area in the weeks ahead:
On Saturday, June 5, Naperville-based 360 Youth Services is hosting a virtual drag queen bingo “fun” raiser with Muffy Fishbasket. Proceeds will benefit the organization’s LGBTQ+ programming.
The Geneva Pride organization is also hosting two upcoming events. On Sunday, June 6, Fox Valley Family Pride at the Park will be taking place at the Island Park Pavilion in Geneva from 9:30-11:30 a.m. The same group will also be hosting a panel discussion titled Being LGBTQIA+ in Geneva at the Geneva High School commons on Sunday, June 13, from 6:30-8:30 p.m.
On Sunday, June 13, the Aurora Pride Drive will be taking place with a kickoff at 11 a.m. Be sure to check out the Saint Astro concert and mini-murals at Wesley United Methodist Church.
Now, bring on the links!
The Guardian offers 20 questions that the Mare finale needs to answer tonight. It’s a good primer for the episode (but don’t read it if you’re looking to avoid spoilers, obviously).
Lindsay Lohan is returning to acting to star in a holiday-themed romcom for Netflix. Of course, I’m delighted. Remember when she “saved” that lobster on her MTV reality show?
There’s been a great deal of #discourse around whether there should be cops at Pride, or whether there should be kinksters at Pride. Roxane Gay just published an essay in the Times touching on both of these debates.
Speaking of Pride, we are on the cusp of June and the brands are at it again with Pride collections of varying degrees of quality. I can’t get this Twitter meme out of my head. For what it’s worth, Converse has the best one I’ve seen yet (but I’m still not wearing any of it).
This weekend marks the 100th anniversary of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre. NBC News has a thorough exploration of the attack on “Black Wall Street” and the efforts to acknowledge the massacre’s three living survivors.
The arrival of summer means the arrival of summer reading season, and Vulture compiled a round-up of 35 much-anticipated summer reads. Some of my favorites from the list include releases from a pair of queer authors — JP Brammer’s Hola Papi and Brandon Taylor’s Filthy Animals.
Ziwe’s Showtime series is the gift that keeps giving. Enjoy her interview with Patti Harrison and Bowen Yang:
J. Lo was spotted in Miami with her ex-husband Marc Anthony and Twitter thinks she’s doing a High Fidelity.
A Florida concert promoter is charging $18 for tickets to an upcoming punk show if you’re vaccinated, or $1,000 if you’re not. This is the level of petty we should all be aiming for.
A Nashville hat shop is selling anti-vaccine “not vaccinated” yellow stars of David and that’s going over just as well as you’d expect.
A bee researcher hired a Dolly Parton impersonator to kick off their virtual PhD defense. Honestly, why haven’t we all been hiring Dolly Parton impersonators for various tasks this whole time?
I always leave you with a bop, and this week is no different. Atlanta hip-hop duo EarthGang just dropped the track “Aretha,” a timely tribute to the music icon. This sounds like summer. Pass me a White Claw.