The death of the Halloween/crossover episode

Every year, each season feels less and less spirited than the last. Is that just a part of growing up, or is it because we're losing the ancient texts? On any given night in the past 30 years this week, you were bound to find some sort of spooky, 90-minute rendition of your favorite show on TV: Lizzy McGuire working a haunted house, Monica and Chandler from Friends hosting a Halloween party, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody in a haunted hotel room. Is Halloween less spooky, or is the media just not curating the season with the same effort anymore?

The crossover of the century

The true glory days of teen television was when we had the beloved crossover episodes. I'm thinking of the seasonal ones, like when Sabrina Spellman and Salem showed up in Boy Meets World for different Halloween episodes, but character crossovers between shows were iconic in general. Girl Meets World featuring Austin & Ally, K.C. Undercover featuring Emma and Zuri from Jessie, Liv and Maddie featuring Cyd and Shelby from Best Friends Whenever. 

This Boy Meets World Halloween episode was actually a part of a four-show crossover aired around Halloween that year. In the Sabrina the Teenage Witch episode, Salem travels back to the 60s, where he pops up in Boy Meets World and travels back to the 40s, where he then ends up in Wish and travels to the 50s, where he finds himself in Teen Angel, where Sabrina comes to get Salem and ends the saga. Sitcoms today couldn't even fathom such a convoluted series of events.

I think I'm imagining Roswell's Max showing up in a random Dawson's Creek episode and Felicity's Noel showing up in the Dawson's Creek Halloween episode as a crossover episode, but I overall just enjoyed seeing familiar faces in different shows from the same network. It's not the same as Zendaya being in every movie in the past two years: it's just a moment where you're like omg! I know her!

 A supernatural occurrence 

Forget about crossover episodes, whatever happened to Halloween episodes in general? Sitcoms today just don't do it like Sabrina the Teenage Witch (although every episode is a Halloween episode) or even Boy Meets World. 

 

I would say it's because there's no weekly release of shows how they used to be, at least not where I watch shows, but there's The Summer I Turned Pretty and Abbott Elementary: they just aren't the same sort of show though. There's no cozy show to look forward to every Thursday night at 9, and I think this is just something I completely skipped out on: one because I'm Gen Z, but two because I never had cable. I just want a good, coming-of-age show that's seven seasons long and each episode is 45 minutes. Is that too much to ask? I want a Christmas episode and I want a Halloween episode and I want it to span over four seasons and all of high school and college. 

If anyone knows of such a thing today, please let me know! Also, since Halloween is this weekend, I'm watching all my favorite Halloween features. My top choices are definitely "The Scare" from Dawson's Creek, "Good Will Haunting" and "The Halloween Scene" from Sabrina the Teenage Witch, and "And Then There Was Shawn" from Boy Meets World. 

Happy almost Halloween everyone!