“Sabrina the Teenage Witch” premiered on ABC on September 27, 1996, to more than 17 million viewers, and thirty years later the cast is still hearing from fans who say the show got them through hard times or taught them English.

Key Points

• The series premiered as the anchor of ABC’s “T.G.I.F.” Friday-night lineup, drawing over 17 million viewers for its debut, according to Wikipedia’s account of the show’s production history.
• It starred Melissa Joan Hart as Sabrina Spellman, a teenager who discovers her witch powers on her 16th birthday — a deliberate change from the original Archie Comics character, who had powers from childhood.
• The cast, including Hart, Beth Broderick, Caroline Rhea, Soleil Moon Frye, Nate Richert, Michelle Beaudoin, Jenna Leigh Green, Elisa Donovan and David Lascher, reunited in Chicago on June 13 to mark the 30th anniversary, per TVInsider.
• Hart told TVInsider the show’s reach still surprises her: “It’s still so loved. It’s so international. So many people come to me and say it got them through a hard time, or they learned English from the show.”
• Broderick, who played Sabrina’s aunt Zelda, said the cast knew they had something special during filming but never expected the show to still be airing internationally three decades later, per TVInsider.

The show ran for seven seasons and became one of the defining sitcoms of TGIF’s mid-90s heyday, sitting alongside “Boy Meets World” and “Family Matters” as reliable Friday-night comfort viewing. Its central gimmick — Sabrina’s talking black cat Salem, voiced with deadpan sarcasm, secretly a warlock trapped in feline form as punishment for trying to take over the world — became one of the most quotable running jokes of 90s network TV, alongside a supporting cast of magical relatives who treated actual sorcery like an ordinary household inconvenience.

Unlike a lot of decade-plus-old sitcoms that quietly vanish from circulation, “Sabrina” never really left. TVInsider reports the series still streams on Hulu and continues to air internationally, which explains why the anniversary reunion drew such a wide, multigenerational reaction rather than a narrow burst of 90s-kid nostalgia.

Thirty years on, a show built around a girl juggling homework and spellcasting still holds up as a tidy piece of appointment TV — proof that a good talking-cat joke, like a good record, doesn’t really go out of style.

Part of that longevity traces back to the character’s own history: Sabrina Spellman first appeared in Archie Comics in 1962, decades before Hart’s version, and has since been reinterpreted again in Netflix’s darker “Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.” Having three separate generations of the same witch in circulation, each with its own fan base, is a big part of why a 30th-anniversary reunion still pulls a crowd instead of playing to an empty room.