Valerie Taylor is a mom and writer whose novels include The Mommy School and How to Marry the World’s Best Dad. Jane Finocharo is a fifth-grader and budding pop culture maven. They live in Cincinnati with their family and their TiVo.
THE CHARM OF CHARMED
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LAURA RESNICK
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To get an analytical viewpoint on Charmed, I corralled a levelheaded, some might even say cynical, friend of mine, Laura Resnick, and made her watch the first season on DVD. “So what is it that makes this show so watchable?” I asked her when she was finished. “The sisterhood? The magic? The hot guys?” “Nope,” she said. Read on.
I‘M NOT ORGANIZED ENOUGH to be a fan of many TV shows.
A fan is someone who knows who the show’s characters are, what their relationships are and how those relationships change over time. A fan is able to follow the ongoing storylines and the shifting parameters of a show’s premise. A fan knows that the reason the actress playing a major character is no longer in the opening credits is because last season her character died or left town (perhaps to start a spin-off series).
A fan, in other words, is someone who watches a show regularly. Some fans watch religiously, others are more casual in their habits; but, by and large, a fan is a person who catches quite a few episodes of a show.
This requires a tremendous amount of organization.
For one thing, you have to know what day of the week a show is aired. As a direct corollary to this, you also need to know what day today is on any given day of the week.
Right there, I start running into problems.
Like Phoebe early on, my lifestyle allows me to be at home all day. And it’s remarkable how hard it is to keep track of the days of the week when you don’t spend several days of each week going to a place where everyone keeps reminding you what day of the week it is. (You know: “It’s Monday, so we have a staff meeting today”; “It’s Wednesday, so we’re halfway to the weekend”; “It’s Friday, so we get paid today!”) Without these little reminders that people who regularly go to work take for granted, I have to consult my computer to find out what day of the week it is—if, for some reason, I’m suddenly seized by a burning desire to know.
The next organizational burden to befall anyone who wants to be a fan of a TV show is that you have to find out what time a show airs. Having done so, you then have to keep an eye on the clock that day; and you have to do this on that same day every week.
You see how complicated this is getting?
Like Prue, the “strong” one, I work full-time. (I just happen to work at home.) So you might reasonably suppose I keep track of the hours each day, as most working people do. But you’d be mistaken! I’m a writer. In fact, I’m a fantasy writer. This means that I spend most of each working day lost in other realms, struggling with mysterious forces, confronting towering evil and saving the world. I don’t freeze time the way Piper does, but time does frequently seem to freeze while I’m working. Only much later, as I emerge from another day of battling the blank page, do I discover that rather than standing still, time actually progressed in its usual manner, it’s now much later than I thought and I owe apologies to various people who may have been expecting me at dinner, at yoga class or at an appointment of some kind.
Consequently, even if I’ve managed to find out what day and time a show is on, and figured out that it’s on today at a certain time . . . I usually miss it anyhow.
This, in a nutshell, is why I’ve never become a fan of Charmed. I’m just not organized enough.
I have not been unaware of the show’s existence. I sometimes see ads for it. I occasionally stumble across the middle of an episode of Charmed while flipping channels. Friends of mine (some of them contributors to this anthology) mention the show to me now and then, suggesting I’d like it if I could get organized enough to watch a few episodes of it.
So I know what you’re thinking: Why don’t I just get TiVo to save Charmed for me?
Hah! I don’t have TiVo.
And I know what you’re thinking now: Okay, no TiVo, but good grief, is this chick so inept she can’t even program her VCR to record a few episodes of Charmed?
In fact, I do have that capability. When armed with a large cup of strong coffee, some chocolate and the VCR owner’s Manual, I can preset the machine’s timer to record a program for me.
However, in order to pre-set the VCR to record Charmed, I’d have to find out what day of the week Charmed airs, what time it airs and what channel airs it. And this is a big challenge.
If you could see my cable channel guide, you’d understand the problem immediately. There are twenty-four hours per day of television programs listed in this thing, all day every day for an entire month, and the listings appear to be for well over one hundred channels. In other words, there are tens of thousands of entries here. For goodness sake, not only can I not find Charmed in this guide—I also can’t find the State of the Union address, the Superbowl game or a nightly news broadcast in it!
Additionally, there are several kinds of cable-viewing packages available in my city. Each kind seems to come with its own unique numbering system. Consequently, even when I do find a program listed in my cable guide, I can’t tell which of the channels listed for it is the one I should watch.
My God, man! When burdened with a system this confusing, how it is possible that many Americans are reputedly watching up to eight hours of television per day? Amazing! I can only attribute those statistics to the staunch determination and strength of character that distinguish us as a nation.
Thus it was that when Jenny invited me to contribute to this book, I was forced to explain that I couldn’t participate, because I had never seen an episode of Charmed. It wasn’t that I’d never felt any interest in a female-centered fantasy show that several of my friends had assured me I would enjoy; in fact, it sounded like just my sort of thing. But my organizational skills had never been up to the task of tracking down Charmed, let alone tracking it down enough times to become a fan—or to become capable of writing about it.
This, of course, is what DVDs are for.
As of this writing, the complete set of season one DVDs for Charmed has recently been released. So, after delivering an overdue book, sleeping for twelve hours and then performing some much-needed acts of personal hygiene, I borrowed the Charmed DVDs and watched all of season one over the course of the next ten evenings, with a view to, er, organizing my thoughts well enough to write about my reaction to the show’s first year.
I’ve still never managed to find Charmed during a regular broadcast. So I currently know the story of the Charmed Ones only up through the final episode of season one, “Déjà Vu All Over Again,” in which Detective Andy Trudeau died to save the three sisters from a time-looping demon who was trying to kill them.
But speaking as a newcomer, I’d say the show has two obvious strengths: first, the relationship among the three sisters, and second, the humor.
Without these two factors, the show wouldn’t work. That undoubtedly seems a self-evident statement in terms of the sisters; Charmed is built entirely on their relationship. The comfort and conflict of their familial bond is the primary emotional component of the show, and the triumvirate of power that the sisters share—the Power of Three—is the central fantasy premise, the unique feature that makes them the Charmed Ones, the witches whose delicately balanced combination of supernatural abilities is sought, feared, envied and challenged by their various fantastical nemeses. So I wouldn’t argue with any premise that the single most important factor in Charmed is the relationship among the sisters.
However, I think the show’s humor is so important that, while it may run second to the sibling rapport, Charmed wouldn’t work without it. This is because, at least in season one, the humor, in a necessary and effective way, props up or fills in for aspects of the series that are weak.
It’s an enjoyable show—a Charming one, if I may say so without getting whapp
ed by the smelly wet salmon of pun-punishment—and I look forward to watching the season two DVDs as soon as they’re released. But most of the show’s charm resides in the same two elements I’ve cited as its strengths. And it does have many weaknesses, ones which would prevent it from working effectively as a more “straight-faced” show.
I can’t address the series’ accuracy (or inaccuracy?) in terms of witches, witchcraft or Wicca, as these are areas in which I’ve done relatively little reading and can claim zero expertise. However, my overall reaction to season one is that the fantasy basis of Charmed, its portrayal of a supernatural world, while often fun, is not particularly strong or well crafted.
For example, sure, I’d love to find a thick, mysterious, ancient tome in my attic that contains the solution to every supernatural problem I’ll ever encounter. But in addition to being a heavily contrived story device, the Book of Shadows is such a handy, all-encompassing problem-solver that it makes the outcome of almost every episode seem predictable and anti-climactic. We realize fairly early in the series that most Charmed installments follow a similar pattern: The sisters encounter a supernatural problem, and they page through the Book of Shadows until they find an explanation for it and a handy spell or set of instructions for solving it. By the end of season one, this particular fantasy-based plot path already feels too well worn. Even allowing for the fact that we know when watching any weekly TV show that things have to turn out well enough for most of our main characters to return for a new adventure in the next episode, we can nonetheless too easily foresee the likely Charmed solution to a wide variety of supernatural problems the moment they’re introduced each week: Look in the book.
Additionally, the script material that comes from the book consists mostly of simplistic singsong rhymes and generic-sounding spells. Having just sat through twenty-two episodes, I don’t recall any spine-tingling, frightening, provocative or emotionally moving text emerging from the Book of Shadows, despite its prominent place in the series.
The show also stumbles over weak links in its fantasy premises in episodes that do not rely on the Book of Shadows to solve the plot problem. For example, in “From Fear To Eternity,” Prue was able to vanquish the evil Barbas upon overcoming her greatest fear (drowning) by relying on the power of love (for her sisters). While drowning, she was led to this revelation by her deceased mother, who came to her in the form of a vision or spirit visitation. Which was fine, since we willingly suspend our disbelief and embrace such possibilities when watching a fantasy show. But such premises need internal logic within the structure of the show’s fantasy world. And there wasn’t any for this incident. There was no previous episode where Prue experienced such a visitation, meaning there was no established premise for the incident. There was also no episode-based premise for her experiencing such a visitation on this occasion. And there was no explanation of (or inquiry into) why she didn’t keep experiencing such visitations after this episode.
The villains weren’t a particularly powerful aspect of the show, either. Except for the delightfully oily Rex Buckland and Hannah Webster, colleagues of Prue’s at the auction house who were gradually exposed as supernatural villains over the course of several episodes before being vanquished in “Wicca Envy,” the villains were mostly single-episode characters.
Some of them were quite memorable, usually because they played on common fears or well-established tropes, such as the Dream Sorcerer, the Wendigo and the sewer-dwelling, child-stealing grimlocks. In most cases, though, the villains weren’t around long enough—or were not distinctive enough—to make a very strong impression. They were more like sketches of characters than characters. And a rather large number of them had seemingly interchangeable motives: they wanted to kill the sisters for being powerful or they wanted to acquire the sisters’ power—as in “Something Wicca This Way Comes,” “Thank You For Not Morphing,” “The Fourth Sister,” “The Witch Is Back,” “Wicca Envy,” “Which Prue Is It, Anyway?” “That ’70s Episode,” and “Déjà Vu All Over Again.”
Another aspect of the show that often lacked weight was the sisters’ relationships with men. Phoebe dated several stud muffins in season one who were all generically good-looking and not very interesting. Piper’s love life was such a busy revolving door (four “loves” in one season) that I couldn’t feel sad about Leo’s departure in “Love Hurts.” He’d already returned from two previous departures, after all, and Piper’s pattern so far suggested that she’d soon find someone else if Leo actually stayed away this time. However, there were a lot of strong elements to Prue’s love story with Andy, and this was one sister whose relationship with a man held my attention throughout season one.
In any case, if the strong, believable and often complicated relationship among the three sisters is the motor that drives Charmed forward, the humor could be likened to the wheels that roll right over the show’s various weaknesses and leave them behind like road dust.
I thought that far and away the least effective episodes of season one were those with the least humor. For example, “Secrets and Guys,” in which Prue helped a boy witch who’d been kidnapped, left me cold. Without enough humor to buoy the episode, not only did I get restless while watching it, but I was annoyed by the kind of inconsistencies in the fantasy elements that I shrugged off in funnier episodes—such as moments in “Secrets and Guys” where Prue could have solved a story problem by using her power and there was no explanation for why she didn’t do so. Another example was “When Bad Warlocks Go Good.” I found my mind wandering during what seemed like too many longish info-dumps in the dialogue of this mostly not-funny episode, and I thought it was a self-evidently bad decision to turn loose a being who’d come as close as aspiring-priest Brendan Rowe did to committing human sacrifice. After all, if news headlines in this country have taught us anything in recent years, it’s that being ordained doesn’t prevent a dangerous individual from harming the helpless.
Meanwhile, episodes which were much more humorous held my attention, made me eager to keep watching the show and effectively minimized or masked story weaknesses. “The Truth Is Out There . . . and It Hurts,” in which Prue cast a spell that forced everyone to speak truthfully for twenty-four hours, was funny enough to keep me from dwelling on the paradox problems of a time travel story. Phoebe’s ruthless use of the truth spell to interrogate a cop in this episode was particularly amusing and was a much more creative solution to that particular plot problem (the need for information) than leafing through the Book of Shadows. The subplot where Phoebe tried to use her power as a marketable job skill in “Dead Man Dating” led from one funny scene to another, culminating in her trying to save the life of an innocent who, quite understandably, thought she was either insane or a money-grubbing charlatan. Instead of Phoebe’s gift being once again just a handy plot device, the humor in this episode opened the door to understanding how bizarre life becomes when one possesses such a gift, and how simultaneously dramatic and absurd the results of exercising it may be.
Overall, the humor in Charmed usually took one of two forms: verbal or situational. These often overlapped or were combined, of course. The frequent sarcasm, ribbing and dry commentary which are such a central feature of the sisters’ communication with each other is part of what makes their relationship feel so real—and so durable. These are sisters who know each other extremely well, who can be annoyed with and critical of each other without it being a threat to their relationship, and who ultimately accept each other, warts and all. And although wit isn’t essential for me to become interested in a character, I am nonetheless typically much more drawn to a character with a strong sense of humor.
One of the most appealing and effective uses of situational humor in Charmed is the comedic consequences of the sisters having supernatural powers. After all, the very first time anyone drives a car with power steering and power brakes rarely goes smoothly, and the acquisition of a new computer is usually followed by a week or two of hair-tearing. So the dif
ficulty the sisters had in controlling their new powers was not only enjoyably funny, it was also very familiar to us, and this familiarity made their supernatural powers also seem more real to us, more believable. In “I’ve Got You Under My Skin,” the sisters flew into a panic, fearing discovery, when Piper accidentally froze Andy while he was in her restaurant. In “Something Wicca This Way Comes,” Prue’s attempts to appear calm were belied by the way her power wreaked havoc on nearby objects when she was angry. In “Dream Sorcerer,” Phoebe and Piper’s attempt to improve their love lives through magic backfired wildly, producing various single-woman’s worst-case scenarios with the opposite sex. A spell intended to increase Prue’s power instead produced Prue clones—who revealed aspects of her personality that she normally preferred to repress in “Which Prue Is It, Anyway?”
In short, without the humor which is used so often and so effectively throughout Charmed, the sisters’ relationship would be less interesting than it is, and the weakness of the show’s fantasy elements would be much more apparent. The humor doesn’t only serve to distract us from less well-crafted elements of Charmed; it also makes those elements more well rounded, more believable. And making the fantastical somehow more real to us, turning something supernatural into a metaphor we identify with personally, is one of the hardest and yet most essential tasks of fantasy. If season one is any indication, Charmed, through its use of humor, is very capable of doing just that.
Laura Resnick’s fantasy novels include Disappearing Nightly, The White Dragon and The Destroyer Goddess. The author of numerous short stories, essays and articles, she has also written more than a dozen romance novels under the pseudonym Laura Leone. She is currently waiting for the next season of Charmed to be released on DVD.
SEDUCING THE CHARMED VIRGIN
Totally Charmed Page 23