The Ghost of Sitcoms Past: Free Spirit
By Michael Jones | April 28, 2021
It’s 1989 and you’re nervous about embarrassing yourself at a neighborhood kid’s bowling tournament.
You somehow don’t know how to bowl, it’s before the internet and you can’t just type “how to bowl?” in Google, and your recently divorced dad and older siblings are too busy to teach you. You’re so stressed you throw a temper tantrum in your bedroom and cry out for the universe to help you learn how to throw a ball at a bunch of pins.
And all of a sudden, a witch descends from the heavens and crashes into your bedroom with the sole focus of making you a championship neighborhood bowler.
If that sounds insane, welcome to the 1989 pilot episode of the ABC sitcom Free Spirit, a 13 (or 14?) episode sitcom that came and went at the end of the 1980s. Part Bewitched, part Mary Poppins, part The Nanny, with a small dab of Who’s the Boss (if Tony Danza were a witch), Free Spirit chronicles the adventures of Winnie, a 100-year-old witch who’s conjured from the afterlife and tornadoes into the lives of the Harper family to cast a few chaotic spells, heal a few broken family wounds, and create a few shenanigans.
Are you out of eggs? Winnie can conjure egg-laying chickens to appear in the kitchen cupboards. Do you have an annoying older brother? Winnie can glue a chair to his butt or split him into two people. Got dirty dishes? With a few swishes of her hands Winnie will have the dishes just do themselves.
All of which begs the question: of all the things you could ask a witch to do, the show gets its start by asking a witch to help a kid bowl?
Free Spirit might have three claims to fame. The first? It was more or less the television launching pad for Alyson Hannigan. Long before she was tag-teaming with Buffy The Vampire Slayer or part of the How I Met Your Mother or American Pie crews, she was Jessie Harper on Free Spirit, the teenage daughter who needs Winnie the witch to help her navigate the ups and downs of adolescence. (The Halloween episode, with the puntastic title “Hallowinnie,” sees Winnie assisting Jessie with throwing a Halloween party to help get Jessie into a popular clique of girls called “The Debs.”)
The second claim to fame is that Free Spirit joins the list of TV shows gobbled up as competition by other blockbuster pop culture megahits. In fact, the show that helped kill Free Spirit’s ratings is still on today, heading into its 640th episode! Free Spirit aired Sunday nights on ABC, right after the Patti LuPone/Kellie Martin drama Life Goes On. But in December 1989, a little animated series called The Simpsons premiered on FOX opposite Free Spirit. And suffice it to say, there wasn’t just a ratings war; there was a ratings bloodbath not even a witch could stop. Free Spirit lasted just a few weeks longer after The Simpsons premiered, canceled before January 1990 would come to a close.
And Free Spirit’s third claim to fame has to deal with its cancellation. Yes, not only was Free Spirit up against a TV show that’s still on the air today with The Simpsons, but it was also replaced by a TV show that is still on the air today. And that would be the venerable America’s Funniest Home Videos, which originally premiered as a one-off TV special in November 1989 but was so popular, ABC rushed it into production for a season order. Before you could say “Abracadabra,” (or whatever else a witch might say), ABC was booting Free Spirit from the schedule. Caught between two pop culture juggernauts, the sitcom was doomed.
While the show more or less lives in obscurity today, there are a few cool things worth calling out about it. You’d be remiss not to take a beat and actually give some love to the actress who played Winnie the Witch, Corinne Bohrer. Asked to inhabit a role that was part supernatural, part ditz, part ingenue, and part mom-like figure, she’s actually a joy to watch on screen. (Here’s a scene where the two boys in the Harper family try to trick Winnie into taking them to the movie theaters to see an X-rated movie, and the innocent effervescence just bursts from the screen.)
If you think you’ve never heard of Corinne Bohrer before, think again: she was not only Veronica Mars’ mom, but also the therapist from those beloved “Mac vs. PC” commercials in the early 2000s. Or for Police Academy junkies, she’s the person who feeds Captain Harris helium in Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol. And she also stars in one of the campiest of camp flicks from the 1980s, Surf II, where an insane mad scientist invents a new soft drink that turns people into zombie punks, all in a plan to rid a local beach of annoying surfers. (Seriously, watch the trailer and be instantaneously teleported back to 1984.)
And then if you love a 1980s TV theme song, Free Spirit offers one of the best. And that’s perhaps not surprising, since it’s done by the same duo (Steve Dorff and John Bettis) who brought the world “As Long As We Got Each Other” from Growing Pains, one of the most iconic theme songs in TV history.
You can still find a few episodes of the show floating around online. In the U.S., only 13 episodes were released. A 14th episode was slated to air on January 21, 1990 but ABC axed the series and placed a rerun of Full House in the time slot before it could air. Rumors abound that the 14th episode aired internationally and exists on some old school VHS tapes.
By 1989 standards, the show was voted the worst show on television. But history has a way of bolstering reputations, and the show holds up much better than you’d expect today. Good? Not really. But more interesting than most sitcoms on ABC at the time? Well, you don’t need an ancient witch from the afterlife to help you with that answer: absolutely.
An unabashed 80s & 90s pop culture junkie, Michael Jones is a Brooklyn-based writer and co-host of the Pop Trash Podcast.