Television writer Sol Saks died 23 April 2011. Born in New York City on 13 December 1910, he grew up in Chicago and studied journalism at Northwestern University.
He may be best remembered for penning the pilot episode of Bewitched, “I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha,” which marries the couple off, only to have Darrin discover on their wedding night that his bride is a witch (in the original script, her name was Cassandra). The series ran from 1964 to 1972, and although Saks was only involved with the pilot, he maintained a credit as creator throughout the run.
His wife, Sandra Wagner, said he preferred writing pilots to the grind of a weekly series.
He also wrote the 1968 pilot Out of the Blue (which was not picked up for a series).
In response to criticism that Bewitched was derivative (critics noted earlier movies such as I Married a Witch [1942] and Bell Book and Candle [1958]), Saks (quoted in the Hollywood Reporter in 2004) would reply “Go back to the Greeks, who had stories of gods coming down to Earth to live with mortals. There are stories in other cultures of angels doing the same. The only thing is, before Bewitched, this basic tale had not been used as a TV series.”