Perfect stranger Bronson Pinchot will menace Sabrina for Netflix

Last Updated on August 2, 2021

Growing up during the late '80s – early '90s, I caught a lot of episodes of the sitcom Perfect Strangers, which ran for eight seasons and starred Bronson Pinchot as a goofball character named Balki Bartokomous. In the decades since, I have spent more time watching Pinchot play Serge in BEVERLY HILLS COP and Elliot Blitzer in TRUE ROMANCE (especially that one, pictured above) than I ever spent watching him play Balki, but regardless, the man is always going to be "Balki from Perfect Strangers" to me. That's just the way it goes. He has 88 credits to his name, and Balki overshadows all 87 of the others.

Pinchot is currently earning the 88th credit on Netflix's dark reboot of the Sabrina the Teenage Witch property, a show announced under the title Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

Said to be tonally in the vein of ROSEMARY'S BABY and THE EXORCIST, this series finds Archie Comics' teenage witch 

wrestling to reconcile her dual nature as a half-witch, half-mortal, while fighting the evil forces that threaten her, her family and the daylight world humans inhabit. 

Sabrina Spellman is described as an empowered young woman — half-human, half-witch — who is just beginning her dark education as a sorceress, even as she tries to maintain a normal life as a sophomore at Baxter High. Intelligent, compassionate and brave to the point of recklessness, Sabrina is all that stands between us and the forces of darkness that threaten our world.

Kiernan Shipka plays Sabrina, with Miranda Otto as her disciplinarian aunt Zelda, Lucy Davis as her nurturing aunt Hilda, Jaz Sinclair as her best friend Rosalind Walker, Chance Perdomo as her warlock cousin Ambrose, Michelle Gomez as her favorite teacher Mary Wardell, who becomes possessed by the devil's handmaiden Madam Satan, and Richard Coyle as Father Blackwood, High Priest of the Church of Night and Dean of the Academy of the Unseen Arts, a man with a "terrifying dark agenda".

Pinchot will have a key recurring role on the show, playing George Hawthorne, the villainous, puritanical principal of Baxter High. "He is a constant thorn in Sabrina's side and is always trying to thwart her escapades."

It sounds like Wardell, Blackwood, and Hawthorne are all villains Sabrina will have to contend with over the course of the series. With so many people established as troublemakers, it's no wonder Netflix saw enough potential in the show to give it an immediate order of 2 seasons, each consisting of 10 episodes.

The Hollywood Reporter's article on Pinchot's casting begins with the line "Yes, Balki from Perfect Strangers."