50 best television shows set across the United States
By Sundi Rose
Massachusetts: Sabrina the Teenage Witch
The premise: Sabrina Spellman discovers on her 16th birthday that she is a witch and she begins to realize she has magical powers. She lives with her two 500-year-old aunts who try to teach her how to control and use her new gifts. Sabrina has to juggle her new powers with all the troubles of high school and adolescence, and she often bumbles her spells, causing herself and her aunts a whole lot of trouble.
The setting: Sabrina, her two aunts, and their talking black cat, live in the fictional town of Westbridge, Massachusetts, a supposed suburb of Boston. Even though Sabrina is a character in the Archie comics universe and was originally from Riverdale (and sometimes Greendale), the television series relocated Sabrina and her people to Massachusetts as a nod to the state’s infamous history of witchcraft.
The most Massachusetts thing about it: Aside from the area’s witchy past, the Spellmans’ cat is named Salem, a direct allusion to horrific witch hunts in the city hundreds of years ago. The lore of the American witch comes up quite a bit in the show, and the aunts often reference history that has to do with witches.