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Again, I disagree. Samantha waits until her wedding night to inform Darrin that she's a witch with magical powers. After their marriage, she does her level best to stop using them solely to please Darin, and she raises her two children to believe that their magical abilities are deviant and they need to be punished for using them. Samantha constantly bows and scrapes before Darrin's almighty boss, Larry Tate. From what I've seen of the show, the only time she ever criticizes him is late in the series when she tells him he has a heart "the size of a pea."
Jeannie, by contrast, insists that Tony love her for what she is: a powerful magical woman, who freely uses her magical talents whether he approves or not. She even does this in the episode where he has the chance to send her back to Hadji. After Tony relents from his initial decision to send Jeannie back, she responds by blinking him into her bottle when he says he's going back to the date he deserted to stop Jeannie from leaving.
And Jeannie is much brighter than Bewitched fans often give her credit for. For instance, she writes a best seller on child rearing that enjoys universal and critical popular success, and brings the two "problem" kids the NASA brass impose on Tony together without magic. She can think on her feet, as well. She not only rids Tony of his pushy, materialistic fiancee, she prevents him from ending his astronaut career when he's offered a desk job by the NASA brass, sets the poor widow who was denied a loan by the Cocoa Beach Bank up in her own dress shop, turns a small town in Alabama she accidentally flooded into a fisherman's paradise, making the residents far wealthier than they had been as struggling farmers before the flood, etc., etc.
And if Samantha "understood the mortal world," she didn't think much of it. Several times throughout the series she readily agrees with Endora that mortals are greedy, selfish, covetous, bigoted, silly, with Darrin being the only exception.
I respectfully disagree. I've been watching episodes of BEWITCHED and JEANNIE during the pandemic, and whatever one may think of the latter, love it or hate it, "Jeannie" was a much more proactive and independent character in many ways, than Samantha.
Jeannie also chose to do what she wanted to do. In the first episode, after she rescues Tony from the desert island, he sets her free, and she chooses to go back with him to Cocoa Beach, sneaking her bottle into his gear while no one is looking. Once there, when Tony orders her to "vanish" she refuses and reminds him that he set her free and that means that she is "free to please" him and she chooses to do so.
In the same episode, after Tony tricks Jeannie into her bottle and it almost gets carried off by the garbagemen, when he releases her she's furious and threatens to "turn him into a serpent...WITH 2 HEADS!" This is just the first of many instances in which Jeannie goes against her alleged "master's" wishes and threatens him with real harm if he crosses her.
In one episode, she decides to make Tony a general because "it makes me look bad to have a master who's only a major." In another, when Tony is suffering from exhaustion due to overwork, Jeannie makes every day Sunday to force him to rest and refuses to reverse the spell until he does. She blinks Tony into a sword fight with Captain Kidd to prove her point that he would defeat the pirate in a confrontation. She turns him into a parrot to keep him from preventing her from killing a princess, she's sworn an oath to kill, etc., etc.
Barbara Eden has often said of Jeannie: "She may have been saying 'Yes, Master," but she did what she wanted to do." and based on what I've seen of the series, Eden may have a point. As the narration in the show's first opening credits stated, "There in this house, the girl in the bottle played spin the astronaut."
By contrast, Samantha openly accepts Darrin as "master of the house," and the worst thing I've ever seen her do is zap Darrin from their bedroom to the couch when they have an argument.
I respectfully disagree. I've been watching episodes of BEWITCHED and JEANNIE during the pandemic, and whatever one may think of the latter, love it or hate it, "Jeannie" was a much more proactive and independent character in many ways, than Samantha.
Jeannie also chose to do what she wanted to do. In the first episode, after she rescues Tony from the desert island, he sets her free, and she chooses to go back with him to Cocoa Beach, sneaking her bottle into his gear while no one is looking. Once there, when Tony orders her to "vanish" she refuses and reminds him that he set her free and that means that she is "free to please" him and she chooses to do so.
In the same episode, after Tony tricks Jeannie into her bottle and it almost gets carried off by the garbagemen, when he releases her she's furious and threatens to "turn him into a serpent...WITH 2 HEADS!" This is just the first of many instances in which Jeannie goes against her alleged "master's" wishes and threatens him with real harm if he crosses her.
In one episode, she decides to make Tony a general because "it makes me look bad to have a master who's only a major." In another, when Tony is suffering from exhaustion due to overwork, Jeannie makes every day Sunday to force him to rest and refuses to reverse the spell until he does. She blinks Tony into a sword fight with Captain Kidd to prove her point that he would defeat the pirate in a confrontation. She turns him into a parrot to keep him from preventing her from killing a princess, she's sworn an oath to kill, etc., etc.
Barbara Eden has often said of Jeannie: "She may have been saying 'Yes, Master," but she did what she wanted to do." and based on what I've seen of the series, Eden may have a point. As the narration in the show's first opening credits stated, "There in this house, the girl in the bottle played spin the astronaut."
By contrast, Samantha openly accepts Darrin as "master of the house," and the worst thing I've ever seen her do to him, is zap him out of the marital bed and onto the living room couch when they have a spat.
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