TV Review- Charmed (2018)

Charmed 2018
TV-MA

Imagine the original Charmed minus the hot women and exposed midriffs and voila: you have Charmed, a reboot so uninspired it doesn’t even have a colon followed by a description like Charmed: We’re Out of Ideas or Charmed: That Show Your Ex-Girlfriend Used to Make You Watch.

They made one of the witches a lesbian activist this time because nowadays, everyone is a lesbian. Thanos is a lesbian, Chewbacca is a lesbian, even Rocky Balboa is somehow a lesbian (Ivan Drago was always a lesbian). If you don’t have bare midriffs or Alyssa Milano, you have to have lesbians so they can make out with each other. And in 2018, forcing young girls to make out on camera is considered to be empoweringly titillating, rather than exploitative.

Watching Charmed, I became nostalgic for the blind Stygian witches in Clash of the Titans and the three batty witches in Macbeth. I even reminisced fondly upon the original Charmed witches. It’s amazing what Alyssa Milano’s midriff can do for a show.

If we’ve learned anything from Sabrina the Teenage Witch and its reboot (which doesn’t bother with a colon or a description either), it’s that if you aren’t willing to expose midriffs, lesbians just aren’t enough. You need a talking cat puppet or a cauldron or at least a glass eye or something. If all I wanted was to watch lesbians make out for half an hour, I’d hang out in high school parking lots after softball games. This isn’t 1998. Viewers have choices nowadays.  

Charmed has no idea what it wants to be. One second it’s lesbian horror, the next it’s a crime procedural, then an ironic comedy, then a lesbian romcom. And it does all of these things extremely poorly.   

⅖ stars   

H. Seitz
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