Charmed, I’m sure.
I can’t watch the news anymore. I can’t stare longingly into my Facebook feed for hours at a time without getting upset. I quit Twitter all together. I find myself with a considerable amount of free space in my head that before November 8 used to be filled with, what I now realize was, nonsense. And even with all of that parsing down, news from the deplorables still manages to find it’s way into my head. Enter the bygone television series Charmed.
Many fans of Charmed will tell you that they didn’t find the series in a post-Trump world, the series found them. It found me around the hour of 7am on the elliptical machine at the downtown YMCA. Where I used to fill that half hour with Morning Joe on MSNBC (barf) or CNN (gross) or Fox News (kill me ), I now had an opening in my brain schedule. Sure, I could have listened to music or books on tape. I could have stared out the beautiful windows into downtown Houston and pondered the future of our city. But why do that when there are literally tens of channels waiting to be watched on my elliptical cable.
Charmed, as I am sure you already know, is the story of the three Halliwell sisters who live in beautiful, liberal San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. They discover one day that together they make the “Power of Three” and their job is to fight crime and solve mysteries and vanquish demons…or something. Who cares? Anyway, they live in this house that they obviously inherited because real estate in San Francisco, even by late 1990’s standards, was still crazy! Each of them has a power and all of their names start with the letter “P”. I can’t remember their character names but it doesn’t matter because it’s Shannen Doherty, Alyssa Milano and that other chick from that other show Picket Fences or White Fences or something….and it had Tom Skerritt in it. Anyway, she’s the third sister. And their powers are, respectively: telekinesis, psychic, and freezing things or freezing time — I never really could figure out what the third one did.
Now the real story of Charmed was behind the scenes because although the character sisters loved each other the actors portraying them apparently did not. More specifically everyone hated Shannen and Shannen gave zero fucks about that. Personally, I am #TeamShannen all day long and if that puts me in the minority then I am totally cool with that. Shannen likes her trailer at 70 degrees and she wants her latte scalding. If you can’t deal with that then go talk to Picket Fences in trailer 3 on the back lot. You and her and Jennie Garth can write a whole blog about it.
The real life drama eventually made it’s way onto the set, per usual with Shannen. Alyssa and the other one were having none of Shannen. Perhaps because Shannen spells her name with and “e” where an “o” should be. However, the big problem was that this show was originally a Shannen Doherty vehicle and the whole premise centered on three sister witches fighting mysteries and solving spells together…or something. You can tell by around season four that things were going off the rails behind the camera. Apparently the actors hated each other so much that they couldn’t even do scenes together so for one whole episode they turned Shannen into a fucking dog. Like no joke, Shannen was played by a dog the whole episode and the episode was about Alyssa being jilted by her ex-demon boyfriend and so rather than just dealing with that she turns into a banshee. In the Charmed-iverse, unlike the Gaelic mythology, banshee’s are demon lady spirits who fly around scream-crying because a man was mean to them and they kill other jilted human ladies who are also sad. The catch is that dogs can track banshees and so dog-Shannen plays a integral role in this episode meanwhile real-Shannen is like kickboxing or side-gigging with the Pussycat Dolls or whatever people did at the turn of the century.
This show is fucked up. Am i right? No wonder Hillary lost.
Eventually Shannen gets for real killed off the show (don’t worry she eventually works again on a show about a hotel in Hawaii that failed and then the 90210 reboot for a few episodes). She is replaced by this half-sister played by Tatum from Scream. You know, the one that was crushed in the garage door? And Tatum can “orb” places which is their way of saying “teleport” without sounding too sciency, I guess. Then eventually Kaylee Cuoco shows up and the whole show, which was already a total garbage show anyway, goes straight to hell. And I don’t mean that was a plot point. I mean the show was just bad to worse. Kaylee is like a cousin or something. Who cares?
At any rate, I am apparently not the only one who is sitting at the elliptical at a loss for what to watch because the American political system is somehow way worse. Charmed reruns have apparently been enjoying a renaissance of sorts because now the CW is going to do a retro reboot of the series that is set in 1976. If only it could take us all back to 1976 with it. Imagine all of the things we could prevent and fix. Imagine all of the lessons we could learn from. Just kidding, no one learns lessons and history is as irrelevant as truth. Anyway, back to Charmed Again! or maybe it will be called Re-Charmed or Classic Charmed or Charmed: First Class. My main question is how are they going to get Kaylee, Alyssa, Shannen, Tatum and that other one back to 1976 in their forty year-old bodies?
In any case, I feel like by watching reruns of Charmed I somehow emboldened the creators of this terrible show to reboot it and bring it back from the dead; sort of like how swastikas are all the rage again. In a small way I made the world a worse place by supporting a show I know is a terrible because I am in willful denial about how terrible Donald Trump is. Charmed was supposed to be my safe space and now it’s just ruined. It has reinfected us as a country and soon it will be back. For that I owe you all an apology.
Holly Marie Combs! That’s the third one’s name!
