EXCLUSIVE: All About “Tabitha” — The 1977 “Bewitched” TV Spin-Off

Everything You Need To Know About The Lisa Hartman “Witch-Com”

It was 1977.

Bewitched, starring Elizabeth Montgomery as Samantha Stephens, the house-witch-with-a-twitch, had ended its original network run on ABC merely five years before.

Miraculously, Tabitha, the half-sorceress/half-human daughter of Samantha and Darrin (first played by Dick York, then Dick Sargent) was now 22-years-old and starring in a witch-com of her own.

Erin and Diane Murphy, the twin-actresses who had originally portrayed the young diviner, were only 13-years-old.

Lisa Hartman, who would later find fame on the CBS even soap, Knotts Landing, was cast as Sam and Darrin’s grown-up immortal off-spring.

Apparently, one Samantha and two Darrins added up to three Tabithas — actually four, if you count the failed initial Tabitha pilot tabbed as a Bewitched sequel.

This initial title for the sequel was Tabatha, with an “a,” with Liberty Williams in the lead. Bruce Kimmel played Adam, Tabatha’s brother, and Archie Kahn was her love interest, Cliff. This early version was not greenlit by ABC, while the second pilot starring Lisa Hartman was made and sold to the network.

Hartman’s Tabitha (back with an “i”), lasted 12 segments in all (including the pilot). She was a lovely, high-spirited witch, who could twitch her nose just like her mom, though the finger-to-nose method Tabs used as a kid had been put to rest.

Tabitha worked as a production assistant on a late-night Los Angeles TV interview program, entitled, The Paul Thurston Show.

Robert Urich, later of Spenser For Hire and The New Love Boat, was cast as Thurston, who was unaware of Tabitha’s enchanting ways, though he was spell-cast as her romantic interest. As the producer, as well as star, of his own show, Paul was Tabitha’s boss.

Frequently confronted with a barrage of ratings and deadlines pressures from the top brass and Paul’s bullying, Tabitha somehow manages to juggle everything successfully and get the show-within-a-show on the air every week.