The Disney Corporation made its fortune on the backs of witches. Disney has produced a movie about witchcraft (or invoking witchcraft) almost every decade, including: 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, 1959’s Sleeping Beauty, 1975’s Escape to Witch Mountain, 1989’s The Little Mermaid, 1993’s Hocus Pocus, 2007’s Enchanted, and many remakes like 2014’s Maleficent, and 2022’s Hocus Pocus 2 and Disenchanted.
In doing so Disney has provided a lot of roles where actresses could star as a witch—Pat Carroll, Susan Sarandon, Angelina Jolie, Sarah Jessica Parker, Bette Midler, and soon Gal Gadot (in the forthcoming 2025 Sleeping Beauty). After acquiring the Star Wars and Marvel franchises, Disney now offers a series that might match the best of its past enchantments, Agatha All Along, with Patti LuPone, Aubrey Plaza and Kathryn Hahn.
Agatha is a spin-off from the Disney/Marvel 2021 mini-series WandaVision, itself a continuation of Marvel’s Avenger’s movies, in which the Red Witch (Wanda Maximoff) has lost her lover Vision, an android, in the battle with the villainous alien Thanatos. In that series a grieving Wanda returns to a golden age, copied from 1960s/70s television (think Bewitched, not a Disney product but constantly referenced in both series), glamouring the small town of Westview, and its inhabitants into a delusional reality in which Vision lives. They’re married, have two boys, and the residents are forced into fabricated lives that support the delusion. Among those caught in the spell are Kathryn Hahn, an old nemesis, and Debra Jo Rupp, a somewhat klutzy “earth witch” who’s reduced to a neighbor lady with a green thumb.
In the current series, Wanda’s gone but Westview is still trapped in the glamour, with a few changes. Hahn—who Wanda stripped of her powers—is no longer a nosy neighbor lady akin to those of Bewitched or The Dick Van Dyke show, but now a local homicide detective. Debra Jo Rupp isn’t Vision’s boss’s wife but a gardening neighbor. Emma Caulfield (who played a witch on Buffy the Vampire Slayer) isn’t the mean girl queen of charity committees but a haggard librarian.
Agatha (Hahn), a powerful witch before Wanda trapped her in a fabricated story in Westview, had many magical enemies, and they want her restored with all her memories and full consciousness so they can make her suffer and know that they did it. Before they kill her. Two people appear who have just enough witchcraft to end her amnesia: a 13-year-old boy who wants to be a witch, and Aubrey Plaza, who first plays along with the Westview glamour and appears as an FBI agent, but ultimately reveals herself to be one of Agatha’s past enemies.
Disney’s previous witchy series this year, The Acolyte, was cancelled. It was far less entertaining than Agatha, which features Patti LuPone et al singing and dancing. Critics of The Acolyte disapproved of how the series eliminated virtually all white men, especially straight white men, and how so many characters seemed like lesbians. Agatha has one scene in which Plaza plays cat-and-mouse with a still amnesiac Hahn, with a lot of B&D/S&M innuendo. Other than that scene, and the 13-year-old who has sought Agatha out, having a teen boyfriend, this show isn’t as gay, though the cast is largely female. Its governing allusion is to The Wizard of Oz. Agatha assembles a coven: herself, the teen, and four former or down-on-their-luck witches who represent earth, air, fire, and water. By conjuring up and then easing on down something called The Witches’ Road (which has its own ballad), they’ll go through trials that may kill them, or if they survive, restore them to power.
A fourth episode is out this week. The trial in episode three was the first stop on the Road, a house where the coven had to drink some magical merlot, and then the potions (water) witch among them had to brew an antidote from whatever the coven could scrounge from inside the house.
Agatha hints at a reversal of Disney’s “progressive” ideology. We learn that Agatha originally became so powerful because of a Faustian bargain where she traded away her infant for a “darkhold,” a book of black magic. (Before her magical amnesia is dispelled, FBI agent Aubrey Plaza arrives at Agatha’s home with a pizza and says something about how everyone knows a successful lady cop can’t have a successful family life.) The witches in Agatha describe themselves as evil of almost Randi Weingarten proportions. The “Witches’ Road” ballad’s lyrics are about good and evil being transposed. When recruiting Patti LuPone’s divination witch character LuPone says she wants nothing to do with covens because she’s tired of having people think she poisons wells and eats babies, and Hahn’s Agatha replies, “Well, babies are delicious.”
There are hints that the teen (Joe Locke) is this castaway child. If he is, what we don’t know yet is, whose side is he on? Does he want reunion with his mother, or is he an ally of Plaza?