'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' Part 4: Did Netflix reboot do Harvey Kinkle justice?
Spoilers for 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' Part 4
When the reboot for 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' was announced, one of the first things we were excited about was to see how Sabrina Spellman and Harvey Kinkle of the reboot, known as 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina', would look like. When the casting was announced, we were not disappointed: Kiernan Shipka and Ross Lynch seemed perfect for the role and during Part 1, we certainly liked their chemistry.
However, as the episodes went on, it became clearer that 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' was going to be nothing like 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch', including in terms of what the characters were like and viewers realized that the one true pairing from the beloved '90s series would not be repeated in the 21st century "upgrade."
Harvey and Sabrina soon broke up and Sabrina began to veer toward warlock bad boy, Nicholas "Nick" Scratch (Gavin Leatherwood). Even so, Sabrina never seemed to be able to let go of Harvey completely and rather than this make any creative sense, it just seemed like the writers were doing so to keep the 'Habrina' shippers around. This especially feels like the case when Sabrina Morningstar is transported to an alternate universe where she is a television character and she is dating Harvey, whose alternate version even says, "We're #Habrina, we're always dating. It's canon."
And that's why we have an issue with the new Harvey Kinkle -- though no hate to Ross Lynch. The new Harvey may have been written to be less vanilla than the original Harvey (Nate Richert), but ended up becoming more one-dimensional and so, less interesting. Yes, Harvey was given an interesting background -- his abusive father, his brother dying in a mining accident, his aversion to magic because Sabrina used it on him without his consent and so on. Yet, while all these characteristics shaped him up to be a compelling character in the first two parts of the show, any further character development was shelved in order to make him a prop to further Sabrina's story, although this is true of any other character.
That's all Harvey was in the Netflix reboot and it continued to be so in the final season. Harvey continued to date Rosalind Walker (Jaz Sinclair) and when it turned out that Ros is a witch, the latter was nervous about Harvey starting to hate her because she is magic -- not that anything has particularly changed, she can see the future as she always had. And yes, Harvey is a bit of a jerk at first, but he soon apologizes and they continue dating. That is pretty much the only plot that Harvey was given in the final season.
Compared to this, Harvey from 'Sabrina the Teenage Witch' never revolved around Sabrina (Melissa Joan Hart). Sure, he will always be known as Sabrina's boyfriend, but the '90s show made sure that Harvey was a rounded character, with things to do when he was not pining for Sabrina. Another key thing is that Harvey and Sabrina almost always treated each other as equals in the original show. That was not the case for 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' where Sabrina always had an air of superiority thanks to her being Satan's daughter -- something that is clear when she becomes upset as her friends are occupied in their own personal lives.
All seasons of 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' are now streaming on Netflix.