Our guilty pleasure series: Nineties kitsch and witches from Charmed

You know the internet memes that start with “If I grew up in the 90s” ? If so, the supernatural adventures of Prue, Phoebe and Piper must be familiar to you! Launched in 1998 in the United States on The WB channel, Charmed landed on the French small screen through the iconic “Saturday Night Trilogy” on M6. Produced by Aaron Spelling (Beverly Hills) and created by Constance M. Burge, the series follows the adventures of three adult sisters, who live in a mansion inherited from their family, the Halliwells, in San Francisco (the cutscenes on the famous red bridge remind us of this in every episode!). In the pilot, they discover that they are part of a powerful and long line of witches. A magical grimoire, the “Book of Shadows”, awaits them in the attic. Through a spell, they activate their power and become the “Enchanted”the most powerful witches in the world, destined to work on the side of Good.

This is the moment of the article where I insert the absolutely cult credits (better than the series itself in fact) and where the fabulous title “How Soon Is Now?” resonates. of the Smiths. A piece of advice: if you launch a rewatch on Disney+, keep this link carefully, because for obscure rights reasons, the end credits no longer have the same music and therefore lose all their flavour. Heresy!

The first three seasons star Shannen Doherty as Prue, the responsible and killjoy older sister (you need one), Holly Marie Combs as Piper, the calm and maternal younger sister, who will have a long-lasting story. final love with Leo (Brian Krause), a being of light charged with watching over the sisterhood; and Phoebe (Alyssa Milano), the youngest. She’s funny and always ready to kick someone’s evil ass, until she falls in love with Cole Turner (Julian McMahon), aka the demon Balthazar, aka The Source, aka the older, toxic boyfriend that ’90s fiction loved to make us believe was true love! If this profile tells you anything it’s that at the same time, another brunette, half demon and half human, was giving a hard time to a heroine who had other things to do, like saving the world: I speak well of Buffy and Angelo .

Looking closer, Buffy the Vampire Slayer AND Charmed have more than one point in common : broadcast simultaneously, on the same channel (The WB asked Aaron Spelling to work on a new supernatural show, after the success of Buffylaunched in 1997), the two series for teenagers present powerful heroines, who fight against the Forces of Evil and transmit their power in a matrilineal way. But Charmed never achieved the writing quality and depth of Buffy, which is why it falls into the “guilty pleasure” category for me. You just have to embark on a revisit of the two series (something your servant did) today to realize this.

If you find the special effects and monsters of Buffy kitsch, wait until you see those of Charmed ! I sympathize with the poor performances of the cast, especially the demons. Do you find me hard? David Carradine’s guest appearance in the season 1 finale will show you that I’m “harsh but fair.” Several familiar faces appeared Charmed : we mention Charisma Carpenter, Elizabeth Hurley, Coolio, Amy Adams, Eric Dane and Kaley Cuoco. Recognizing an actor early in his career is one of the small pleasures of rewatching the series.

Faced with these interchangeable evil figures, often guys in suits with goatees (a beautiful illustration of hell on earth!), Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano, and Holly Marie Combs do what they can with often bland dialogue and screenplay inconsistencies bigger than Book of Shadows. Rose McGowan brings her naïve charm to the role of Paige (seasons 4 to 8), the Halliwells’ hidden half-sister who is very handy at recreating the Power of Three. Prue’s death at the end of season three is extremely poorly staged (I thought I missed an episode), probably because the writers didn’t know whether or not Shannen Doherty would stay when they wrote the script.

Behind the scenes, more rivalry than sisterhood

A series that rehabilitates the long-demonized figure of the witch and is also hosted by a woman? What more could you ask for in the early 2000s! Unfortunately we know that behind the scenes of the filming there was anything but feminist. The rivalry between Shannen Doherty and Alyssa Milano was common knowledge. The media have long been on the side of the latter. Years later, Rose McGowan harshly denounced Alyssa Milano’s behavior on the set of Charmed, calling it “toxic”. It’s not easy to create female solidarity in the ultra-sexist and competitive world of Hollywood in the late ’90s…

The behind-the-scenes drama was ironically reignited as Paige and Phoebe’s artists found themselves at the forefront of the Me Too movement. Rose McGowan was one of the first actresses to publicly testify to the rape she suffered by Harvey Weinstein. In October 2017, Alyssa Milano proposed on Twitter to resume the hashtag “Me Too”, created by Tarana Burke in 2007 to combat sexual violence against women. We know the rest. But much to the dismay of fans, the two stars-turned-feminist activists have not reconciled. In March 2023, a convention brought together “The Charmed One,” (Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs and Rose McGowan), without Alyssa Milano.

A series that is half embarrassing and half funny

From a feminist point of view, the series is ambivalent. It certainly presents figures of strong women who learn to master their power and try to find a balance between their professional and personal lives. But the three sisters also spend a lot of time jealous of each other and vying for male attention. The characters of Phoebe and Paige are hypersexualized, while Piper is constantly brought back to motherhood and her hormones. For a series set in San Francisco, the queerest city in the United States, Charmed it’s comically heteronormative. No LGBTQ+ characters (aside from a few queer-coded demons, like Disney villains) interrupt the incessant heterosexual love stories of our three heroines, who end the series married, with a beautiful colony of children ready to take over. On the other hand, the series has a recurring black character (Who Does Not Die) from the first season, with Darryl Morris (Dorian Gregory), while many mainstream and progressive fiction of the time (Dawson, Friends, Buffy…) I didn’t have any.

Charmed it definitely suffers from lazy writing, but it also has its very funny moments : its returns to the past, its benevolent female ghosts (who doesn’t dream of being able to evoke the ghost of their beloved grandmother when things aren’t going well?), its historical-mythological episodes (the Salem trial, Phoebe transformed into a mermaid, the three sisters as Greek goddesses or Valkyries)… And let’s not underestimate the joy of a series in which a trio of women sends a cast of demons, often male and macho, to burn in hell! Other narrative arcs, such as this episode in which a man is transformed into an owl, take a frankly comic turn, not originally foreseen, which give all the kitsch flavor of a rewatch of Charmed.

If there’s one area our witches excel in, it’s appearance! The series is an ode to low-waisted pants, spaghetti-strap dresses and frilly pastel tops. Enough to give you lots of ideas for your next 2000s costume party! And honestly, who wouldn’t want to live in San Francisco with the girls, in a beautiful mansion, practicing spells in the attic with pretty crystals? Ah, this mansion, its stained glass windows, its furniture destroyed in each episode and miraculously new in the next…

It’s hard to turn a blind eye to its flaws when you see it again Charmed in 2023. Yet, the Halliwell sisters probably cast a spell on us (which we’ll call nostalgia!) because as soon as the credits roll, we want to crawl under the covers with a bowl of hot chocolateand memorize the Power of Three spells.

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