I was recently asked if I wished I’d seen queer characters on television when I was younger. I considered the question for a moment, but something about it felt wrong.

I had queer representation, I realised, because I had reruns of Bewitched.

Image credit: Bewitched, ABC, 1972

When I was in high school, Bewitched aired at the same time I arrived home. The show’s central character is Samantha, a witch who has married a mortal man and promises to be a typical housewife, eschewing magic, but finds it harder than she expects to keep the promise.

I watched formulaic episodes in which spells were cast, often by relatives, loosening Samantha’s control over her household, threatening her relationships with mortals. Each day I felt anxious as Samantha used her magic and found herself in further trouble. I wished that other witches, popping in to visit, would stop endangering her.

I don’t feel confident speaking on behalf of my teenage self. I don’t think I saw myself as bisexual, or knew what bisexuality was, and I can’t reduce everything to that.

I felt different though, and somehow wrong; I was terrified that I’d make mistakes and be rejected.

It makes sense, perhaps, that I was attached to Bewitched. It was a veiled, rather than realist, representation of difference. If I wanted anything at 17, it was to be normal, to meet expectations, to blend into suburbia.

On television, I watched Samantha talk to her neighbours, to her husband’s colleagues and their wives, concealing a core part of her identity. In each episode, she laughed and smiled, making jokes to disguise her own reality and deflect suspicion.

It felt so much like being a teenage girl, and I was worried, for 20 minutes, and then relieved at the end of each episode when everything worked out. I didn’t think deeply about the show or my relationship to it, but it was a salve, a source of comfort and consistency.

It is safest, sometimes, to figure out your identity at a fictional remove.

I encountered Bewitched again a few years later, at university, in a cinema studies class. It was, we learnt, a show that assuaged the anxieties of men threatened by women’s liberation. Bewitched showed powerful women, but reassured society that women would use their powers to serve their husbands.

“The capable housewife moves efficiently through her tasks,” we hear, in the second episode, as we watch Samantha struggling in the kitchen. “If she happens to be… a witch!” Samantha points her finger, conjuring Darrin’s breakfast, using magic to meet expectations.

This scene highlights unrealistic standards, but ultimately the outcome isn’t revolution: it’s dinner. It was easy to dismiss Bewitched in the same way that I dismissed my teenage self: embarrassingly naïve; accidentally conservative.

Ultimately, I realised later, the viewer is never asked to identify with Darrin. I wonder if, still naïve, I missed the complexity of the lesson.

Who is a better role model, Endora or Samantha? I was asked, as an undergraduate, in a tutorial.

Endora, Samantha’s mother, is a confident figure, outspoken and sure of herself.

“We live on the wind, on the sparkle of a star,” she says to Samantha, in the second episode. “And you want to trade it all for an acre of crabgrass?”

It’s easy to see, in Endora’s disdain for Darrin, and for mortal rules, delight in being wholly oneself.

In Bewitched, Samantha’s marriage isn’t only about love, but about adapting to norms, choosing comfort over glamour. It is about choosing family and domesticity over another kind of life, which remains unknown to the viewer and, perhaps, Samantha herself.

I didn’t realise, as a teenager, that Endora was a queer icon.

I never considered my sexuality in high school, watching Bewitched, though in retrospect my desire to hide seems very queer. As an undergraduate, I saw witchcraft as an allegory for women’s rights and didn’t think any further.

I was surprised, returning to Bewitched a decade later as a teacher, to find it so obviously queer. I taught Bewitched in relation to race, to gender, to psychiatric drugs, popular culture and Cold War politics, but it was my own relationship to bisexuality that changed the way I read the show.

I was surprised, watching Bewitched again, to realise that I wanted different things for Samantha. I agreed with Endora; I wanted Samantha to rebel. I didn’t like the pressure on her to hide things, to avoid magic.

“You’re just a wife!” Darrin yells, after Samantha turns a man harassing her into a dog. “You should have handled it. Any ordinary wife could have.”

I don’t think I realised, as a teenager, that Darrin was unreasonable.

She’s too good for him, I thought, as an adult.

When I taught Bewitched, I was in a relationship with a man; I was writing a novel about bisexuality, about ways in which we are read through our relationships. I felt, in this relationship, that domesticity was my responsibility; I could do it, but it didn’t always seem worth it. I wanted to live on the wind.

“All you have to do is be yourself,” says Darrin, when Samantha meets his parents. She smiles, relieved, and zaps away the dirty dishes.

“What?” Samantha retorts, seeing Darrin’s indignant face. “You said I should be myself.”

“I take it all back,” he says. “My folks aren’t ready for the real you.”

It often feels like love is conditional on performance, on presenting only some of oneself. Be yourself, we hear, but it’s generally an empty platitude. I thought, sometimes, that my boyfriend wanted a version of me that didn’t exist.

He didn’t mind that I was queer, he said, but did his parents need to know?

It was intentional, I learnt; I’m not inventing these parallels. Witchcraft, in Bewitched, was always an allegory, though not only for queerness.

“We talked about it on the set,” Elizabeth Montgomery, who played Samantha, said later. “Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration and trouble it can cause.”

I’ve now finished, and published, my novel about bisexual invisibility, identity and appearances. If I focus on these elements, watching Bewitched feels like lingering in my past preoccupations. We don’t stop changing, wanting different things from media we consume.

I don’t want Bewitched to be my mirror; I want to learn something new, instead, to consider experiences beyond my own.

I am curious, now, about Tabitha, Samantha’s daughter, who was always my favourite character. I think about the ways in which her upbringing highlights the broader ramifications of individual choice; while Samantha might choose to hide her own witchcraft, it’s a little less reasonable to impose this on her daughter.

I’m interested, too, in witches who aren’t allegories. I wonder how practicing witches, in the 1950s, felt about Bewitched. I wonder about their processes, their lives, and perhaps this is another chapter of engagement with the show.

I see, now, that the way we see the world and its media changes as we change, rendering one television show different every time. There are 242 episodes of Bewitched, and so many ways in which to watch them.