The Charmed reboot brings intersectionality to white feminism
By: Preeya Phadnis
Tags: Charmed, Social Justice, Television

Content note: This comparison references aspects of workplace abuse, including constant surveillance of employees, withdrawing access to necessary medical care, and a somewhat abusive mentor/mentee relationship. Also, there are spoilers for old Charmed and early episodes of new Charmed.

“A hollow celebration of sisterhood.” “Even worse than I anticipated.” “Wants to stand for something, but ends up feeling cheap.” These were the reviews that greeted the pilot of the CW’s Charmed reboot last fall. Fans of the original felt the reboot was too “SJW”, fans of social justice were incensed that the CW cast two non-Latina actresses as Latina in the show, and fans of good television felt the pilot was poorly written and lacked the original’s watchability.

The first I heard of the new Charmed was its casting controversy, which remains one of the biggest problems with the series. Although the three lead roles are all meant to be Latina, only one of the lead actresses (Melonie Diaz, who plays middle sister Mel) actually is. Madeleine Mantock, who portrays oldest sister Macy, is half Jamaican and half white English, while Sarah Jeffery, who plays youngest sister Maggie, is of Black and indigenous Canadian descent. I’m not necessarily against cross-ethnic casting — it happens for white actors and characters all the time — and both Mantock and Jeffery are aware of the controversy and have responded with respect towards the Latinx community. But in today’s world, with a clear lack of Latina characters and Latina actors struggling to be cast in any role, this was a huge misstep by the CW.

Sadly, it’s easy to see how it happened: everyone in charge of the show, from the developers to the showrunners to the executive producers, is white. They’ve hired plenty of writers of color, but all-white leadership with mostly people of color employees is a terrible look that verges on exploitation. (Hiring more white writers is obviously not a fix—only adding Latinas to the show’s leadership will do.) I don’t blame anyone who refuses to watch the show on principle.

That being said, all the episodes after the pilot involved these writers:

And they have done an amazing job. Those bad headlines? They’re based only on the pilot, which is the only episode the above people didn’t contribute to, and which is not coincidentally the worst episode of the season. (A better entry point to the show is episode three, “Sweet Tooth.”)

If you’re able to get past the leadership problems — and, again, no argument if you don’t want to — new Charmed is low-key one of the smartest, funniest, most compulsively watchable shows on television. If not for the casting and leadership problems, it would also be the most woke. The post-pilot writing is thoughtful enough to merit comparison to Pose, FX’s hit about queer and trans people of color in NYC’s ballroom scene. But Pose is fundamentally prestige television, and like anything prestigious, it’s most concerned with the past. Specifically, Pose is the emotional answer to all those people who wonder where “their” country “went” — it’s the emotional, beat-by-beat explanation of what the oppressed have gone through to form today’s society. New Charmed isn’t trying for prestige, which frees it to ask the only better question: Where do we go from here?

It’s impossible to understand how well new Charmed answers that without first referencing the many problems in the original series. To be blunt, original Charmed was the epitome of what we now term white feminism. Yes, it was feminist — the sisters consistently stood up for themselves and for the many (white) women they encountered — but its whiteness cannot be overstated. And not just because the whole cast was white, or because notorious white feminists Alyssa Milano and Rose McGowan were both leads. Whiteness was baked into the philosophy of the show. Prue, Piper, and Phoebe’s goals, both implicit and explicit, were to live static, only mildly varying — what they called “normal” — lives. For them, that version of normality was not only achievable but also the only imaginable ideal. The Elders, the mostly-white-guy magical governing council, were always depicted as fundamentally trustworthy, even though their actions were anything but. Perhaps the best summary is that both old and new Charmed have bar sets, but in new Charmed it’s because Mel gets a job as a bartender, while in old Charmed it’s because Piper buys a nightclub, a purchase which is never explained in-universe.

Or take one of the major plots of old Charmed, the romance between Piper and Leo. This romance was, to put it mildly, creepy as shit. Leo was a Whitelighter, a “guardian angel for good witches,” who had been watching over Piper and her sisters since they were children. (In both old and new Charmed, Whitelighters are former humans who demonstrate enough integrity in their lifetimes that the Elders feel able to trust them with the power needed to mentor witches, including teleportation and magical healing.) Whitelighters weren’t supposed to reveal themselves to their charges in original Charmed, but Leo disguised himself as a handyman and visited the sisters anyway. He then began a relationship with Piper, without mentioning the whole “immortal magical being whose job is to observe her” part.

You’d think the Elders would break this up, since they had all witches and Whitelighters under 24/7 magical surveillance, but when they realized that Leo was engaging in a mentor/mentee relationship, they simply reassigned him — without assigning the Charmed Ones, the most important and powerful witches on Earth, a new Whitelighter. This was a huge problem, because the Charmed Ones’ job in both series is to vanquish evil, and the Whitelighters are their magical medics. In other words, the Elders punished the sisters for Leo’s actions by taking away their access to magical medical care.

When this eventually put Piper’s life in serious danger, Leo defied the Elders’ orders and healed her. His reward was having his wings clipped, i.e. being temporarily suspended as a Whitelighter, a much harsher punishment than the one he received for getting involved with Piper in the first place. It was only when Piper began to realize she might be better off without Leo that the Elders abruptly blessed the relationship.

As bad as all of that was, the worst part was that old Charmed didn’t seem to think any of that was wrong. It never wondered whether a government that denied life-saving medical care to its best soldiers was perhaps making less than optimal decisions in other ways. Prue, Piper, and Phoebe objected to (some of) the Elders’ decisions on an individual basis, but they never made the jump to indicting the whole system. Leo even eventually became an Elder, in a twist eerily prescient of some of today’s worst politics.

None of this would ever fly in the new Charmed, which could not be less interested in making excuses for the system. Old Charmed felt that while the system had flaws, its specific characters would be fine once they found their place. New Charmed recognizes that a system that does so badly by its people must be replaced. It’s this revolutionary tone, even more than the casting or references to texting, that makes new Charmed too “SJW” for fans of the original.

This change in tone reverberates throughout the series. In old Charmed, the sisters were well-off white women who owned their own house in San Francisco and experienced magic as a distraction from their ideal lives, similar to how some white women regard their gender as the one annoying impediment to having white-guy power. New Charmed doesn’t have time for that, because when you’re subject to multiple intersecting oppressions, it becomes very clear that a satisfying normal is only achievable by redefining the system itself. This infuses the show with incredible, intoxicating ambition. Macy, Mel, and Maggie aren’t just trying to keep their heads above water. They’re in it to win it.

This tone-first approach can occasionally be confusing. For example, many viewers have noted that, although the sisters speak Spanish and occasionally consult a Yoruba priestess, new Charmed doesn’t feel the need to deeply identify them with any one culture. They’re also widely spread in age and interests — Macy is 29 and has a Ph.D. in biology, while Maggie is 18 and a sorority hopeful. (Middle Mel is a women’s studies grad student.) Hence the early reviews denouncing the sisters’ lack of chemistry. But new Charmed knew what it was doing. The sisters growing closer is the season-long emotional plot that allows them to stand in for a unified and invigorated social justice movement.

Nor does new Charmed feel the need to hide from that metaphor. Instead it proudly spells it out in the pilot’s most cited scene, where the sisters’ Whitelighter Harry (Rupert Evans) introduces himself by giving them a lecture on why their witchcraft matters.

This immediately establishes the show’s cultural ambitions. Macy, Mel, and Maggie are essentially the TV versions of the Squad (recently elected Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Ayanna Pressley, and Rashida Tlaib), and the season’s showdown of good vs evil is a reification of the stakes of our current political moment. Mel even gets involved with a witch antifa group called the Sisters of the Arcana, who employ a refreshingly direct approach to both the magical and mundane world. And yes, there is a Nancy Pelosi analogue, Elder Charity, who…well, let’s hope that plot isn’t one of those eerily prescient twists.

The perspective of women of color is as baked into this show as whiteness was in the previous one. Take the magic system. In original Charmed, once the sisters could control their individual powers, most magic was a straightforward if not necessarily simple matter of paging through the Book of Shadows to find or put together the right spell. In new Charmed, nothing is straightforward, controlling one’s powers is only the first step on the way to mastery, and there’s always more to learn.

To balance this, the show quickly establishes that once the research is done, magic is a question of individual practitioners’ underlying power. No spell is guaranteed to work if a more powerful magic user wants to counteract it. This is an excellent extended metaphor for the simultaneous simplicity and complexity of being a woman of color. Every time someone who looks like Macy, Mel or Maggie looks in the mirror, they’re reminded that they cannot take the world at face value, because the surface of the Western world doesn’t admit their existence. Below that surface lies complexity upon complexity, all of which must be understood and embraced to achieve any semblance of power. Yet none of that work matters if someone with more immediate surface power decides to stand in their way.

This message could easily feel heavy-handed in the show, but new Charmed smartly avoids that by keeping overt racism and sexism to a minimum. This is far more realistic than the opposite approach, since so much of oppression is subtext. A great example of the writers’ precision with these dynamics is when Alistair, the Big Bad of season 1, makes fun of empath Maggie for having a “passive” power that (he thinks) can’t be used in battle. Yes, there’s absolutely some intended subtext there about feminine vs masculine types of power. But it also makes sense in context: they’re in a battle and he’s throwing fireballs at them. There’s no need to take it further into overt sexism, so the show doesn’t.

Now, a show this identified with cultural context could easily slide into shallow plot maneuvering without resonant character beats. New Charmed deals with this too, by identifying movement in-fighting with the sisters’ interpersonal dynamics. When Mel is initially suspicious of Macy, it’s both tonally sensible and true to her “angry” character— a trait that’s an asset in her witch antifa work, but a liability when it comes to suddenly meeting new family members. When Mel argues with Maggie about rushing a sorority, it’s not just true to their relationship, but to the oft-argued question of whether women of color are best served by resistance or assimilation. (For the record, Charmed gives the right answer, which is that women of color are best served by supporting each other in doing whatever they want to.)

Over the course of the season, this grows into a quietly revolutionary depiction of powerful women of color as ordinary people who are doing their best. As the magic plot ramps up, the sisters experience uncontrollable emotions, take silly risks, and often fail. This is a bracing contrast to what I’ll call the Olivia Pope woman-of-color archetype: ultra-competent, perhaps emotionally tortured, but always in control of herself and her surroundings. If an Olivia Pope-like character fails at something with no opposition, it’s usually because she was innately misguided, not because she needed help she didn’t get or because she had a good reason for taking an extreme risk. New Charmed brings the stimulating new perspective that women of color are, in fact, just…people.

Best of all, new Charmed is just a lot of fun. It’s clear that every writer is more than familiar with the tropes of the episodic-urban-fantasy-TV genre. There’s a body swapping episode, several time travel episodes, winking pop culture references (my favorite is the episode about a manic pixie dream girl who is an actual pixie), a favorite-TV-characters-become-real episode, at least one use of a selfie cam as a magically necessary mirror, and so on. And the quick-paced, organic writing is a joy no matter what. In fact, the writers’ ability to balance complex issues, characters, and plot, while still keeping all accessible to the audience, is strongly reminiscent of Back to the Future II.

One aspect of new Charmed that never quite gels is the sisters’ romantic relationships. A heavy emphasis on romance made sense in the old Charmed. Since it was pre-Internet and pre-binging, most of the show elements had to stay the same week after week. The romance served as the through-line that kept things moving forward for dedicated viewers. Since new Charmed is free to draw plot momentum from anywhere, the romantic relationships function differently. Maggie’s boyfriend Parker (Nick Hargrove), like Cole in the original series, is a half-demon who (initially) seduces Maggie in order to influence the Charmed Ones, while Mel’s girlfriend Niko (Ellen Tamaki) is a police officer whose work often intersects with the case of the week, and Macy’s love interest Galvin (Ser’Darius Blain) turns out to have some magic of his own. But the emphasis on plot swamps the romantic chemistry. Maggie and Parker have a bit of a spark, but most of these pairings fall completely flat.

Or maybe the problem is that Rupert Evans as Harry throws off the curve. I don’t know if it’s his accent or his smoldering bedroom eyes, but he has off-the-charts chemistry with every single person he interacts with, particularly Macy. (After extensive research, I can confirm that the vast majority of new Charmed fanfiction on AO3 involves Harry/Macy shipping.) What’s pleasantly surprising is that this is even imaginable in-universe. You’d think this pairing would uncomfortably reference the terribleness of Leo/Piper, but new Charmed is so good about fixing all the situational problems in the original that it actually feels inspired rather than creepy.

Or as Tumblr put it:

This goes a long way towards reconciling Harry with the show’s social awareness. It’s common for extended female-focus stories, whether on TV or in books, to end up tacitly centering whichever man is closest to the main characters. A good contemporary science fiction example is His Dark Materials, which builds up Lyra as a bold and fearless girl only to immediately lose all interest in her inner life once she meets Will. It would take only a slight reduction in acting or writing quality for new Charmed to fall into that trap. But so far, Harry is redeemed by his selflessness and empathy. This turns him from an awkward social justice fit into a role model for allies. As long as that characterization is maintained, there’s no danger of Harry taking over the show.

Overall, new Charmed is well worth the time it takes to watch it. It puts a welcome new spin on an outdated property while simultaneously achieving a new level of cultural relevance for the CW. It’s also a sparkling, highly memeable joyride that will doubtless impact fanfiction and Internet culture for years to come. You can catch up with season 1 on Netflix. Or don’t — but don’t say you weren’t warned when these ladies find you anyway.