Stefanie Preissner

Sabrina the Teenage Witch was my mentor

Is it just me, or are other people’s versions of ‘normal’ based almost solely on what they saw on TV as a kid? My entire reality, growing up, was based on fiction. Sabrina The Teenage Witch was as crucial to my upbringing as tamagotchis or penny sweets. I took each episode as gospel, to the extent that now, during times of trouble, I often hear the voice of Beth Broderick (Aunt Zelda) before my own mother’s, or any of my teachers’. I watched the 24-minute episodes like student surgeons watching their first appendectomy — in awe, but also taking notes.

I built a fortress around myself made from the rules I learned from Sabrina. In hindsight, it was fortuitous that I chose such an exemplary show with which to align my moral compass.

I learned what mitosis is, and the equation for finding the slope of a line. More importantly though, I learned that Sabrina was acceptable and loveable, even thought she was raised by her aunts and not her absent parents. Each episode gave me a window into an alternative type of normal that I wasn’t seeing in my life, or the lives of my friends. Sabrina’s dad wasn’t there, and neither was mine, and because it was OK for her, it was OK for me.

As most of us do, I accepted what I saw. It means that TV creators have a lot of responsibility — I’m not sure they’re aware of it. I’ve taken as fact many things I’ve seen on TV, and later been shocked when real life was different.

Autumn is a great example. Every year, I look forward to the crisp, rusty-coloured leaves and bucolic elegance of the season. It’s purely based on films and TV shows I’ve seen, with people frolicking in gorgeous scarves. The reality is always browner. Autumn is brown, and everyone smells and looks like wet dogs, and the pavements have ‘broken hip’ written all over them.

I also have a skewed idea about the medical profession and how delicate and time-consuming surgeries are. I turned up for a procedure recently at 2pm and asked if I would be out before 5pm, ‘for traffic’. It wasn’t a huge surgery, so I assumed I’d be in and out, because TV led me to believe that if you can take a person’s spleen out and chat to them again in a 30-minute episode, the gown I was handed was hardly necessary — not to mind the one-hour recovery from mild sedation.

I’ve had to recalibrate my beliefs around lots of things, from relationships to death. People survive such brutal attacks on TV, it makes us, the public, seem weak and brittle. On screen, people just put a cork in a wound and carry on shooting, or pull out the bullet and pop a bandage on it, and then hunt more dinosaurs. On screen, no one gets cold, ever. People stand in the rain, on doorsteps, for entire scenes, without anyone saying, ‘Would you mind if I stood in a minute there, it’s baltic?”

My biggest gripe is how showering is represented on screen. Who faces the wall when they shower? No woman I know, anyway. And no one turns the water on after they get in. I used to try to emulate this mad way of showering, thinking I was the only one who couldn’t do it ‘the right way’. It wasn’t until showering in a friend’s house that I noticed her shampoos were on the wall opposite the shower-head, that I realised she, too, must shower with her back to the water. I felt so validated and normal when she confirmed that she never, ever faces the water because: ‘What if a killer came in?’.

Time is also so warped in movies — I know it’s functional to the plot, but it seems ridiculous that some sex scenes go on longer than entire lawsuits. (Also, in my experience neither have the neat resolutions I’ve seen on screen, either.)

Novelty misconceptions about ways to have sex or kill people aside, what we see is important. Now, more than ever. As reading books gives way to watching TV, it is now almost certain that young people will experience most things on screen before they happen in their real lives or before they read about it in literature. As a screenwriter, I feel a responsibility to accurately depict life as I experience it. Using vague stereotypes or unrealistic narratives is not OK when specific ones exist.

We need templates and scripts for how to navigate our lives. If we have seen a woman stand up for herself in a toxic friendship, then it’s easier to negotiate the situation when we find ourselves there. Ditto with dealing with a death, or asking for the morning-after pill. When I was eight, my friend Barry told me he was going to be the president of Ireland. I laughed at him and told him it was a woman’s job, because, for the first 24 years of my life, it was. I have US friends who still believe it’s not possible for a woman to be president. When we see something, we know it’s possible and that is a powerful thing.