Charmed To Meet You

It happens to us all eventually. Our parents or grandparents or guardians pass away, leaving us all of their worldly goods. Sometimes they leave a company. Sometimes they leave some money. Sometimes they leave a house. Sometimes they leave debts. Whatever they leave, the process is a natural part of life.

In the case of the Halliwell sisters, their grandmother left them a house and an unexpected surprise - magical powers. Prudence (Shannen Doherty), Piper (Holly Marie Combs), and Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) are witches, their powers suppressed until they reach adulthood and come into their inheritance.

Prudence, usually called Pru, is the oldest. She can move objects with the wave of her hands. Piper is the middle sister, able to briefly stop time. Phoebe is the youngest, gifted with visions of the future triggered by related objects. Together they live in a house in San Francisco destined to be the ultimate battleground of good versus evil. Aided by the Book of Shadows, a book of spells and information compiled by generations of ancestors, the sisters take on evil warlocks and demons while trying to navigate through the same daily grind as other twentysomethings.

The first season of Charmed begins as the sisters discover their powers. Phoebe moves home from New York City without much in the way of job skills, Pru's screwed over by an ex-boyfriend who wants the promotion she's earned, and Piper's working in a local restaurant. Much of the show deals with their evolving relationships with each other and learning how to integrate their witchcraft and need to protect the innocent with actual life and the need to hide their activities. This is complicated by a series of romantic entanglements, some short term and some a bit more serious. Pru gets involved with ex-boyfriend Andy (T.W. King), a police detective. Piper has a series of flirtations and eventually falls for Leo (Brian Krause), a handyman who isn't quite what he seems. Phoebe spends less time actually dating than the others but makes up for it by constantly flirting with everything in pants that comes her way.

Pru and Andy's relationship is the most central, one that adds tension to the show. The sister's fights against demonic bad guys often puts them in the middle of mysterious unsolved crimes and Andy's almost always the man on the case. This puts a lot of stress on their relationship, particularly as Andy knows Pru's hiding something but can't figure out what. Toward the beginning of the season, this seemed a bit forced and formulaic, but as the season progressed it was integrated better and felt much more natural.

The early episodes are fairly similar and fairly self-contained. Some nasty supernatural bad guy comes to town and the three girls have to defeat it to save some innocent from death or another undesirable fate. Elements of sibling rivalry, dealing with death and loss, and coping with work and dating filter in around the central fight, but it's clear that killing the bad guy is the point and the rest is just interesting filler and background information.

This changes about a third of the way through the season. The storyline becomes less strictly episodic and several plot arcs span multiple shows. There isn't always a specific fight against bad guys, but rather incidents that add up to nefarious doings over the course of time. These episodes also allow the characters to really develop, to focus the show on personality and details rather than action. There are some fights and we do see magic, but it's much more complex and compelling story telling.

The end of the season meshes the two approaches. We're back to fairly self-contained main storylines with a specific bad guy that needs to be defeated but also have recurring characters and plot points that span several episodes. It's not uncommon for these episodes to reach back to earlier episodes and highlight a detail that didn't seem very important at the time and several of the relationships deepen or take unexpected turns during this series of episodes.

Charmed was one of the first shows of the late 90s I went out of my way to watch. I haven't kept that up and hadn't seen most of the early episodes since their original airing in the late 90s, but watching the complete season one on DVD has really reminded me of its quality. Like Smallville with which it shares many qualities, Charmed mixes the supernatural with themes of fitting in with the expected norm, helping the innocent and maintaining friendships while keeping major secrets. It provides an ongoing morality play that doesn't require anyone to be perfect but does demand that you do your best and consider the consequences of your actions. Charmed is compelling storytelling and you should watch it.