Darrin

Elizabeth Montgomery played Samantha Stevens, a young and beautiful woman who also happened to be a witch.

She is married to a man named Darren Stevens, a mortal, meaning a plain old non-magical human.

But she doesn't tell him until after they are married that she is a witch.

Being a show from the 60s, the misogyny is baked right in.

The idea is that he wants to be a nice normal household, where his success is due to his hard work, not her magical interference.

Noble, but often taken to the extremes.

The cast is often joined by Samantha's mother, Endora, who despises Darren, always calling him the wrong name.

Then there are the nosy neighbors, Abner and Gladys Kravitz.

And back in WandaVision, Bettany got to lean into his comic chops.

You know, he's playing Vision as this... stiff sitcom husband you know the Darren Stevens basically hapless dad hapless dad exactly and here he gets back and forth and he gets back and forth with a bunch of different characters so he's getting to play comedy again and that's good but I mean to your point man if this show was just Vision and Ultron verbally sparring in that attic I'd be happy It isn't, though.

There are lots of other plot lines and other characters.

There's Tommy, there's Paladin, there's Jocasta.

So I grew up watching a program called Bewitched, which I guess people our age are going to know what that was.

And I thought that I was going to be like Darren Stevens.

And it wasn't like that at all.

But, you know, the reality is, is so many things that I learned, even in that.

And it's a witches are a subspecies setting.

They are immortal subspecies of humans, but they can breed with humans, so they're not... inhuman monsters but you have to be born a witch to do witch things so uh we've already talked about the there was two previous things that highly influenced this show the movie i married a witch and the play and movie bell book and candle so now we finally come to bewitched after having talked about those two things A witch named Samantha meets and marries a mortal named Darren and then tries to fit in and not use magic and just be a normal housewife.

But eight years later, she's still doing magic.

Yeah, that lasted like two episodes.

She's at least a stereotypical mother-in-law.

Yes.

Our cast is Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stevens, Dick York from 1964 to 69, and then Dick Sargent from 69 to 72 as Darren Stevens, her mortal husband.

Apparently York started not feeling well.

This is

like Bewitched when they replaced Darren.

I'm glad that I could.

Oh, with Dick Sargent? Yeah, you're the new Darren.

What?

That's an unfortunate name.

You devil.

Richard Stanford Cox, known professionally as Dick Sargent.

And Bewitched was about a witch who could twinkle her nose and make stuff happen.

And her husband was just this old school business guy named Darren Stevens.

And Darren, he would always go in a room with people and pull back the cover on a big idea and show them ideas.

He actually worked for an ad agency called the Tate Agency.

And I would see that and I just thought, that's cool.

And so I go in the next day to my English professor and I said, you ever watch TV? You watch Bewitch? Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I said, what is that called? Darren Stevens does.