Ever since The CW announced their revival of Charmed, the new series (which debuted last night) has been saddled with some extra baggage in the form of controversy.
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Original Charmed star Holly Marie Combs, who appeared in all eight seasons of the first series and served as a producer for five of them, has objected to the revival, saying that any version of Charmed that happens without input from herself, co-star/co-producer Alyssa Milano, and former showrunner Brad Kern is basically not Charmed at all.
Kern has since been fired by CBS amid sexual harassment allegations, some of which were apparently made during his time working on Charmed. Milano recently told The Hollywood Reporter that she had no idea about those allegations at the time and did not work closely enough with Kern to have a sense of his professional conduct in the writers’ room.
The new series, rather than recasting the Halliwell sisters (originally Combs, Milano, and Shannen Doherty, whose character was eventually killed and replaced by one played by Rose McGowan), created an entirely new trio of sisters — and it is through those sisters (played by Melonie Diaz, Sarah Jeffery, and Madeleine Mantock) and a plot point from the series premiere that we have an idea as to how The CW could still tie the new Charmed with the original — if that is what they wanted to do.
In the series’ pilot, we see that the girls’s Whitelighter, Harry (Rupert Evans), is apparently not what he seems, as they use a Ouija board to reach out to the spirit of their dead mother and she tells them “Don’t trust Harry.”
(A Whitelighter, for those who didn’t watch Charmed, is kind of like a guardian angel. There is more to it than that, but for the purposes of this conversation, you can use shorthand.)
So here goes:
It’s The Good Place — with witches.
Three sisters — Mel, Maggie and Macy — lose their mother and learn that they are witches. Check. In this case, though, the Halliwell sisters existed and they were the Charmed Ones. Following the events of the original series, they “retired” to raise their children and prepare the next generation of powerful witches because “adventure? Excitement? A Charmed One craves not these things.”
So who or what are our heroines? They are essentially the anti-Charmed Ones. Prophecied to be a dark and twisted analog to the Halliwells, our girls are supposed to bring “balance” to the battle between good and evil by serving as agents of The Source on Earth. Evil’s philosophy with the Charmed Ones has become that they clearly cannot beat them, so they might as well join them.
The complication? These girls are not evil. Their mother, knowing their destiny, raised them to be good, strong women who could stand up against the temptation and torment coming their way. Macy would obviously be the wild card here, since she was not raised by their mother.
You would have, then, a story about fundamentally decent people who are struggling with a dark destiny. The forces of good want to kill them because they are the Cursed Ones or whatever we would end up calling it; the forces of evil are constantly tempting them to do terrible things for personal gain in the hopes of bringing their prophecy to life; and each of the three handles these challenges in a different way.
This is, of course, based on very little available evidence and mostly just a fun theory…but it could work.
Charmed airs on Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET/PT following new episodes of Supergirl on The CW.
