Meanwhile, Tabitha's father Darrin Stephens (Dick Sargent), who works at an advertising agency, fails to land a million-dollar account with toy company owner Mr. Brockway (Parley Baer) because Mr. Brockway is racist and incorrectly believes Darrin to be married to Lisa's mother Dorothy (Janee Michelle).

Sargent said that the students, "who might have been stuck in the ghetto for the rest of their lives, loved Bewitched, and with just a little approval and motivation, came alive on the set.

"[1] Montgomery considered "Sisters at Heart" her favorite episode of the series, and said that it "was created in the true spirit of Christmas ... conceived in the image of innocence and filled with truth.

Montgomery's biographer Herbie Pilato wrote that "no episode of the series more clearly represented [the] cry against prejudice" than "Sisters at Heart".

[3] Critic Walter Metz praised Asher's choice of camera angles, but denounced the episode's liberalism as excessively sentimental and simplistic.

The Wilsons are African-American, and all of the other characters are white, including the Stephens family: Darrin (Dick Sargent), his wife Samantha (Elizabeth Montgomery), their daughter Tabitha (Erin Murphy), and their son Adam (David Lawrence).

Samantha takes the children to the park, where another child tells Lisa and Tabitha that they cannot be sisters because they have different skin colors.

On Christmas Day, while the Wilsons are visiting the Stephens, Mr. Brockway arrives, apologizes for his previous actions, and repents his racism.

In 1969,[4] Marcella Saunders, a 23-year-old teacher at Jefferson High School in Los Angeles,[5] found that her ninth-grade students were unable to read the short stories and poetry in the class textbook.

[5][a] Because many of these teenagers, now in the tenth grade,[8] did not have the financial means to make their way to Hollywood, Montgomery and Asher paid for the class to be transported there and back by chartered bus.

"[10] Avedon expressed amazement over the script the students produced[10] and helped them revise it and expand its length so it would sustain a full half-hour episode.

[12] The final script credited the teleplay to Avedon and Asher, and the story to all 26 students, who were listed on screen in alphabetical order.

The government of California gave Jefferson High School a grant to support a program to allow the students to be part of the filming and post-production of the episode.

"[6] Asher also expressed pleasure with the program's success, and recommended that other white businesspeople invite minority groups into their lives.

These kids, who might have been stuck in the ghetto for the rest of their lives, loved Bewitched, and with just a little approval and motivation, came alive on the set.

[15] Samantha's statement at the end of the episode, "We're having integrated turkey: white meat and dark", was repeated in Spike Lee's 1986 film She's Gotta Have It.

"[3] Sony Pictures Home Entertainment eventually released the episode on a VHS collection called A Bewitched Christmas 2.

'"[3] A reviewer from the Australian newspaper the Daily Liberal wrote that "Sisters at Heart" is "very thoughtful" and argued that it is the sole episode of the series that is not simply a "lightweight offering" reflective of "the United States' post-war society of new consumerism and advertising.

"[26] In his book about Bewitched, critic Walter Metz writes that "Sisters at Heart" exemplifies the liberalism endorsed by the series, which he argues is excessively sentimental and simplistic.

[28] Metz criticizes Mr. Brockway's "magically found soft-heartedness" as a "paternalistic approach to liberal racial tolerance [that] implies that only white patriarchs have the cultural authority to declare that racism is wrong.