Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale

What would you get if Desperate Housewives took a supernatural slant and decided to be about #MeToo? You might get a new spin on The Witches of Eastwick, but you'd definitely get Sanctuary: A Witch's Tale, a tryhard show that never states the obvious conclusions from it's own narrative, that witchcraft really is the problem. Sanctuary wants to be relevant so badly it's painful. Here's a political buzzword as a plot device, here's #MeToo, here's quarantine, here's this, here's that, and at the end of the day this many-headed hydra doesn't work together to vanquish it's foes, it fights itself until it's dead, or until it's lost its audience. And if I'm the typical viewer, that's very fast. And I wanted to love it! It's adapted by Debbie Horsfield, she of Poldark fame, how could she go wrong? I wanted Broadchurch with witches! I wanted it hard. But that isn't what this show is. It wants to be, but it isn't. This show is a politically correct nightmare that I can't get my head around, and what's worse, I don't want to. So I'm now going to spoil it all for you, so if for some reason you actually want to watch it, turn away now. Golden Boy Dan Whithall dies at a party. But Dan has a lot of secrets. The biggest being that when he was younger he died and the local witch, Sarah Fenn, did what she shouldn't have done and brought him back to life. Dan grows up to be a horrible human being, having raped and molested all the young girls in town, though somehow none of the adults know this. His mother, who is a member of Sarah Fenn's coven, decides that if Sarah can't bring him back, again, then she'll blame it all on her and thus ensues a good old fashioned witch-hunt. It escalates as one would expect, but what just gets me is that, well, the witch-hunt was kind of justified. Sarah is supposed to be a white witch, yet she's doing spells on her friends husbands to "help" them out, and then there's the aforementioned bringing someone back from the dead. If she had just left well enough alone none of this would have happened. I mean, yes, you could say that having the power to bring a beloved child back from the dead shouldn't be wasted, but maybe she should have investigated his death a little closer. Because he died the first time when Sarah's own daughter's magic manifested to protect her friend who Dan was trying to sexually assault. Sarah's own daughter who grows up to date Dan and then when they break up he drugs and rapes her. Why did she date him in the first place? I mean, so much of this show was just why!?! I literally don't get any of the characters' motivations. Yes, they are trying to protect themselves and their families, but this isn't the way to go about it. They are just all so self-centered and oblivious I just can't with them. Keep all of Sanctuary in quarantine forever. Burn it to the ground and let's speak no more of it. But before the cordone goes up please send out your interior decorator, because they are fabulous and if it wasn't in Sanctuary I'd move into Sarah Fenn's house in a heartbeat.