Why Charmed Deserves to be Celebrated
The premise for Charmed must have sounded simple – a female-centric show about three witches living in San Francisco that would cash in on the success of Buffy The Vampire Slayer on the still-new WB network. They wouldn’t just be witches, but also sisters, relatable across demographics with Prue (Shannen Doherty) – the late-20s sensible one, Piper (Holly Marie Combs) – the neurotic middle sister, and Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) – the wayward college dropout.
The late-90s was an era of US network television that fostered a whole bunch of series focusing on ‘kick-ass’ female leads – Buffy, Xena, Dark Angel etc. – but what Charmed wanted to do was slightly different. From the start, the show focused as much on the ordinary lives of Prue, Piper and Phoebe as it did on their extracurricular magical activities, living by the famous mantra of “not witches who happen to be sisters, but sisters who happen to be witches.”
It was clear after the pilot episode broke ratings records that The WB had a fresh hit on their hands and, after running for a total of 178 episodes, it later became the longest-running show featuring all female leads in history (surpassed later by Desperate Housewives at 180-episodes). It was lightning in a bottle, tapping into an audience that wasn’t really being served at the time.
The sisters cared as much about their outfits and their love lives (or other stereotypically ‘feminine things’) as they did about saving the world and, as easy as it is to dismiss that distinction in 2017, in 1998 it was still a fairly new thing to see on television. It was sex-positive in a way a lot of shows aren’t even today, and the chemistry between the three leads was palpable.
Overall, season one was shaky, and a lot changed between its finale and the following premiere (like giving Holly Marie Combs, the most endearing actress of the bunch, more material), but the first two years can be more or less lumped together and characterized as a fun fantasy procedural with a monster-of-the-week format and an equal focus on the soapy elements of the sisters’ lives. But then seasons three and four – the show’s best – stepped up their game in every conceivable way.
Suddenly there were long-running story arcs, and the show leaned into its genre roots in new and interesting ways. Instead of the girls’ dating lives running parallel to their witch duties (and invariably keeping the boys in the dark about their powers as default) Piper married their whitelighter (or, guardian angel) Leo and Phoebe entered an illicit romance with maybe-evil-half-demon Cole.
The tug-of-war for Cole’s soul lasted even beyond the fourth season finale as a long-game metaphor for abusive or toxic relationships, while Piper and Leo’s relationship became a solid emotional anchor for the remainder of the show’s run.
Now the weekly threat was rooted in character-building for one or more of the sisters, and those revelations carried over from week to week. Victor, the girls’ father, became a recurring figure in their lives, and introductions for The Elders (good) and The Source (bad) allowed for the world of the show to become a little more defined beyond the parade of faceless warlocks. The series still had plenty of camp and fun to offer, but overall things just seemed more accomplished, more deliberate, and more mature.
Season four carried forward this momentum, but with one major change. For reasons that have never been entirely clear (though there are plenty of theories), Shannen Doherty decided to leave the show after season three, leaving a very large hole right in the middle of the Power of Three. Her final episode, All Hell Breaks Loose – which Doherty herself directed – is ironically the finest the series ever produced.
Ending on a cliffhanger after which any of the leads could conceivably have been written out, the chaos behind the scenes could be seen almost bleeding through the screen. When the show returned for its fourth season, Rose McGowan had joined the cast as long-lost sister Paige Matthews – the product of an affair between Patty Halliwell and her whitelighter Sam. In season two this had been revealed in order to provide a mirror to Piper and Leo’s forbidden love, but it doubled here as an easy solution for the writers.
All of this was handled remarkably well given the circumstances. Early season four benefitted from a heartfelt exploration of Piper’s (and to a lesser extent, Phoebe’s) grief over losing her older sister, and the subsequent resistance she would feel towards accepting Paige as her replacement. As jilted as the audience felt, and as much as they warmed up to her in the end, the show made sure to reflect that.
Join our mailing list
Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox!
But with a new character, so came a new tone, partially caused by executi
0 Comments