James L. Conway

Obvs, this is not a documentary or anything like that, as expected. I did like it better than Doctor Dallek, (Who? Doctor Who?), who came off to me as a carping Uber-Mann, you know. So that’s the ‘adventure TV’ I’ve watched recently; as far as more vague categories like feminine TV, I guess it’s marginally better than “Friends”, which I didn’t like, because it’s clinically normal, you know—not that there aren’t good stories about straight non-mystic romance, right. (“Charmed” is NOWHERE near as good as “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”: for real.) But I don’t have a lot of experience watching non-conformist/experimental TV, which I guess that this is right on the cusp of, you know. I watched a lot of conformist TV when I was trying to conform, but…. I mean, it’s very logical; I know that might sound weird, but so far I can look at every plot point and say, “Obviously this plot point serves the theme of….”—but I don’t know how ~inspired~ it is, you know. I didn’t feel much. (shrugs) But as far as TV goes, this was definitely a three-point shot, and most three-point shots miss.

…. It’s certainly television; it’s kinda to being a witch what “Star Wars” is to being a fighter pilot…. Kinda an impressionistic, vaguely similarly gendered, sorta thing, you know. At least it’s cutesy feminist; aside from the relatively monochromatic nature of the thing, that at least is something we could benefit from having more of.

…. It’s campy. It’s the “Star Trek” of witchy TV. Actually, sometimes ST is clever, lol….

Anyway, I probs won’t be writing something for each episode like I mostly did for Doctor Who and am doing for Gossip Girl, because I didn’t really enjoy it/find it to be Good TV like Gossip Girl, and it didn’t infuriate me like Doctor Who.

I mean, I don’t really like a lot of masculine-style TV, although I guess “Mad Men” is as good at least, although that’s starting to skew more towards the Very Good Indeed (My good man) award-y shit, right. “Monk” is as good—actually, I like the whole Encyclopedia-Brown-Teams-Up-With-The-Hardy-Boys better than Nancy-Drew-Teams-Up-With-The-Charmed-Ones, at least as far as Monk vs Charmed goes.

But anyway, although there is a steady stream of white male villains—the bad date chorus: not that that’s good or bad, although it is a little cliche—but it is borderline racist that there is this constant thing with the Black males always being the bad guy and never the good guy; there’s always like this Black male authority figure who’s the big baddie, and the white guy always comes off at least a little bit better. Not a good choice when you’re going to totally black box Black women and African magic, you know.

“Monk” is also ethnocentric, of course. And the sorta TV feminism is okay—female friendship, bad dates, violence against women, girl power, the whole nine yards…. But the episodes all seem like they have the same basic plot repeated over again like the first episode never happened, you know, and I’m only on the second one—this could get boring! That’s what makes a lot of TV so bad; the writers don’t trust the audience to buy (or even borrow) an entire season and watch it, they usually expect you to dip in and out while doing your laundry, so they just make the same superficial things happen over and over again, right….

…. I want to say something good about it, but it would come off like I was the guy from Office Space: I’m gonna have to ask you to come in and do that spell on a Saturday….

🥱

…. The next episode sounds unusually terrible; “Asian gang thugs” sounds more Trump-y than Clintonian, you know….

“Thank You For Not Morphing” was pretty good for an episode of “Charmed”, though. Basic family trauma, a little sitcom magic, a little cartoon violence…. It had potential, and wasn’t a complete ripoff.

…. Ok, it’s not quite as racist as they make it sound, although they did TV cartoon-villain an Asian god, you know…. It is pretty bad about gender, though. I’m not going to sit and count the ways that the writers drag Phoebe through the mud in this episode, but it’s bad, and she’s the only one who’s even vaguely like a witch, really…. Freezing time and being a living poltergeist are cartoon powers, you know. It’s like female Garfield stuff, you know. Let’s see: they’re girls; they can’t eat until they get fat—say, maybe one of them can freeze time!

…. It’s too bad there’s no actual plot to “Charmed”: like they’re not trying to fight the Cult of the Dark Nazarene or something (work with me, right), or promote peace and intercultural tolerance, or upgrade their mansion and/or buy an island in Hawaii, right; so because there’s no plot, they have no real goals, so they can’t ally with anyone or even fight like an important battle or progress in a war…. It’s always just like, some random doofus is like, I think I’m gonna kill me a sweet broad while listening to The Eagles (I hate the Eagles, lol), and then the charmed ones are like, offended like, Then WE will kill, YOU!! (In Soviet Russia, girls kill YOU!!!)

…. There has to be some priest trying to knife the bitchy bride to foist a girl with a bad hair day on us, right. Why don’t girls just believe that they can be prosperous and pretty—they can read the ‘Believe It!’ girl, right. Of course, the land is a sad realm for Femmie. Still, the only thing a girl hates more than her boyfriend is a bride, right.

…. It would be nice, I guess, if a Catholic priest could be a hero in a story about witches, but if that means that the three witches have to knife Hecate, the Queen of the witches to stop demons from being born into the world of men…. I realize that Christians think that movies are all about dating not Jesus, (and that dating is usually witchcraft and getting demons in the belly)—but do they have to have everything? Not one pagan god is being treated fairly in this show; they’re all get demonized and knifed, and you know that the Church-of-the-Terrible-Savior Christians will knife the actresses if they see them on the street anyway, or at least online, so what Exactly are we accomplishing here, you know?

…. Prue and Allison was the two-woman conversation where the women are weak. You can talk about a man and not be weak, but this is not it. The non-bride is like, I am defeated!, and the witch is like I’m SUCH a good witch that I’ll knife the other witches for the Christians AND not tell the blushing Christians that I’m a witch! It’s like…. Wow. Just wow, right.

…. That was stupid, even by the standards of “Charmed”.

…. Let’s see, we whitewash Kali (whose ~name~ means, “black”, right? She’s Dravidian, isn’t she? South Indian….), and then demonize her ~anyway~, because she’s a female with agency, and not a delightful little dilettante who bakes cookies or something, who Prue etc. always have to punish as an apology, even though Prue in that one scene of “The Wedding from Hell” all but said, “I know that I am objectionable”, you know….

It’s as bad as Doctor Who, basically. The only way to make it worse would be to have a screaming male browbeating them every step of the way, although I suppose they’ve internalized that….

…. And it got excellent reviews! The normies think that they’re being good!…. I don’t know where to start with that, right…. “There’s something wrong with trying to convince witchcraft-hunters that witches are on their side by having the witches hunt witches every week, and not even take a break to go to the park or something, and to sweeten the deal by making it all whitewashing, white-centric, and POC-othering…. I mean, most Wiccans are white, but you could have had them talk about the marginalizing of women or Native peoples or something…. I feel like in some scenes, we walk in just after they’ve got done grousing that King Arthur wasn’t Christian enough or something! It’s like the Gwenhwyfar witches show, you know…. Witchcraft as conformity; witchcraft as British Victorian tradition…. Granted the craft isn’t like computer programming, but you’d have to be a very deluded witch to think it’s Victorian tradition. No Christians think that, not even NPR older computer nerd ones. And if you had a head on your shoulders, you might put two and two together and figure out that if people in your group usually don’t know anyone personally with similar beliefs, you’re not being a conformist….

Granted that the once-born like to tell stories about the craft that have nothing to do with what magic is really like—Harry Potter, etc.—and that some of these stories are okay, even entertaining. But to have this pretense that it IS about Wicca and witchcraft, and then to make it about witches fighting each other, like gladiatorial-combat-meets-a-day-at-the-zoo, and it’s like…. Yeah, yeah: fuck you, maybe. Just a suggestion. Considering fucking off, like, as an experiment, you know.

…. The odd thing is, in our divided world, if the sisters had a friend out there in San Francisco—say an Indian from Brazil that they bought crystals from—that might even have really started the ball rolling with figuring out that it’s a racist show, ironically. “Don’t ask me to be part of your little monstrosity, white girl. You go along and play.” I mean, racism in terms of colorism, the “exotic”, treating your POC friends like shit because you can and you don’t know any better—and, holy shit, would they EVER have, right!—but you don’t catch as much shit from just creating a nauseatingly white-centric POC-phobic environment, because the Black people stay away and don’t say anything—there is SO MUCH out there like it, and how can you fight it all? It’s how the world is: “and at least those white girls stayed in their side of the train tracks”, you know. I know it must sound like I’m mocking the words in quotes, and I do think they’re flawed, but I do kinda get them, to the extent possible. White people are exhausting. Why shouldn’t they stay away, if they’re going to be racist?…. And then, you create a white-centric environment with nominal liberalism, the white intellectuals gush: you’ve given them a way to be loyal to whiteness; you’ve made it safe, you know. You’ve made exclusion safe…. And the precious white liberals usually react very poorly when someone points out that their white-centric exclusions to find a way to be loyal to the white race within nominal liberalism is racist, you know…. Gosh, and they have a pet cat or something, and they fight ex-dates and cute women. I think that makes them feminists, right?

…. It’s basically just so anti-witchcraft/paranoid majoritarian, and ~such bad fiction, you know. It’s like the news, or something. You don’t have to watch making-Shakespeare-woke shows, or anything, specifically, but this is like tainted bottom feeder meat, you know. It’s bad. It’s kinda, mentally/emotionally unhealthy, really. It’s the news.

…. I wrote way too much about (or around) “Fourth Sister”, but yeah; it’s pretty bad. Black lipstick = criminal. Get it? She’s not white; she’s a witch! She’s a criminal! (Battlestar Galactica prison ship chant) Terrorist! Terrorist! Terrorist!…. (‘In old times, the woman was the terrorist…’)

“We knew you were white on the inside, bitch. Here you go. Your first copy of Dickens.”

…. Aliens, or whatever, is a fun topic. So, good, we’re back to general normie TV, and not special anti-freak TV, you know. Gosh, after two episodes in a row of anti-Wiccan stories—and the second especially was a full-on Fox News update—I was starting to wonder if I was going to be able to make it through the whole season, you know.

But I can watch aliens drill holes in people’s foreheads. It has a lot more to do with ‘Stargate SG-1’ or ‘Doctor Who’ than Wicca, but maybe that’s what they do best. If their sense of respect/responsibility to minority groups is low, the least they can do is make general whitey TV and not pretend, you know. It would be like making a Black neighborhood show where the Malcolm X guy rants at Mr Beloved Whitey and commits a crime: although of course, Hollywood probably has made an episode or two like that of some show, along the way, right.

It’s almost makes it worse that it’s from a wounded-female-mother POV, you know, or at least no better, at all. (crying mother of the tribe of females) “All I’m saying is that I don’t want black-censoreds to commit crimes against my white family in the name of witchcraft…. (struggling to breathe, breaks down).” (Fox News studio audience) “All that we’re sayin’ is…. ‘Throw them in jail!’”

…. Of course, if they hadn’t spent on their energy on the cartoon aliens and the ballad of the three little mice, they might have made a decent episode about prejudice towards and acceptance of witchcraft, you know. But then, it wouldn’t have been “Charmed”. Those things were important strategic elements in making a bad episode.

…. It’s middle-bad, though, of course. I’m not really an alien person as much as I am a witch, but I feel like aliens translate into bad TV better. Sometimes aliens guide you into the light, or have complicated existential crises, but they are more often depicted more as less as scary spooky people, you know.

…. Sometimes I wonder whether having a plot that makes a minimum of sense is something that the “Charmed” writers aren’t good at, or whether it’s just not an objective, you know. “They’re witches! This is American TV! (cartoon villain laughing, laughing, eventually starts to choke laughing) Woh, woh. Ok. Well, anyway.”

…. Hollywood villains are so funny. “This is my favorite line in the whole episode! Every time we run through the script, it’s the highlight of my whole day!”

…. I like “Wicca envy”; it’s almost a good episode. By the standards of “Charmed”; it’s a great episode…. I really like the cheesy villain Rex; he’s almost a good character. By the standards of “Charmed” he’s a real stand-out guy, you know. I feel like in some non-8-year-old black-and-white budget morality play, he’d either be flat-out cool, the writers saying something thematic, or both. Or maybe it’s just cheese, I don’t know. Mostly the show isn’t cheese, it’s meat bologna on white bread, so everything stands out, I guess.

…. It’s very campy—it’s the girls’ night out version of ‘Star Trek’, basically—and it claims to be about Wicca and it’s so, so, ~not: but as a show by an about women, (ordinary women, basically), it’s not totally without worth. Sometimes.

…. They probably should have called it, “Powers Envy”, though. “Powers” isn’t actually a bad synonym for Magic, although of course, “Charmed” being “Charmed”, it can be a little euphemistic. (I can imagine Piper saying, I hate my boyfriends, but I’m also ashamed to be a woman.”) But yeah; they were just so charmed by their domestic-exotic word, “Wicca”, that they just kinda had to throw it in there….

…. I’ll never watch another season, but I am starting to almost enjoy the show’s Femme-Trek qualities, you know. There is a sort of inferior satisfaction to the campy, stereotypical lines, you know. ~Aww, an adventure for normies….

…. “What can I do to get my sister not to do due diligence and risk going to jail and wrecking her career—I’ll cook her dinner!”

But it’s funny, after a while.

…. And the ubiquitous “don’t act like that” characters….

…. They are unlike unmarried moms without kids, though. It’s very weird. 😸

…. So many mixed messages about sex: if lame guys turn confident, they’ll become the playah monstah, who doesn’t know that relationships can never end even when they grow toxic, lol…. And the other guy: if you don’t respect her boundaries, well…. Hollywood! I don’t know; you don’t have to write off in 100% of cases respectful persistence because the lawyers/PR legal team is all 🤓; but at the same time you don’t have to be all 😘👹….

And when does even respectful persistence turn into, “relationships can never end, even when our values secretly clash”

And you’re not responsible for other people, but the typical wounded-female, “You’re a bum! You’ll never change! You’ll remember me in therapy sessions!”—you know; it’s not a sign of strength.

Such bogus drama, though: just tell the cops what happened; you don’t need a date first, you know.

…. Cautiously feminist opening abruptly ended after two minutes by helpless woman scenario, and rescue by a mysterious male stranger with a gun…. In California, where people don’t carry guns wherever they go, right.

I mean, come on. Where to begin?

…. I somehow can’t believe that they demonize the female cop while still getting the out to lunch critics to call the show feminist, you know.

If this is feminism, what’s anti-feminism? “She has short hair; kill her!” 😹

…. This show did have some potential: the funny names for villains, the old, expensive crap. It’s just too bad about being campy and self-hating, you know. “Oh no—I’m a woman! Just like women not in my own family! (shudders)!”

…. I’m glad for the tokenism; personally I think it’s better than nothing: but she could have dropped the patronizing white woman crap and said, “Is this your daughter”, you know.

…. Fight the demon, Piper! Stay weak! 🏂

…. The astrophysicists who hate Star Trek have NOTHING to complain about, lol. 😑….

It would be like if there were a show with astronomers in the 1600s and every week they were trying to get Galileo to recant to prove that they were “good scientists” or something, you know. It’s like…. Bad.

It’s fucking apologetic. Trek plots are campy and random and have nothing to do with real math, but they don’t apologize for science or democracy or whatever, you know.

…. The fucking things normies believe, right! 🏂😹

…. And just once I want Phoebe’s “vision” to be because she picked up the package of Mike’s Might Extra-Meaty Meat Burgers and saw a turkey getting pushed, bloodied but still alive, into a meat processor, right—that would be a lot more real than picking up some generic piece of jewelry and seeing that a little girl needs to go see the Charles Dickens adaption of the Secret Garden or some fucking thing: whatever this show is about, lol. 😝

…. Of COURSE, Prue being Prue, she’s like, the witch lecturing other witches that witchcraft doesn’t work. She’s the self-hating witch. If Moon County, California declared itself a safe haven for the world’s witches, Prue would lead the Lutherans and the Inquisition underneath the ancient castle to destroy it: because she’s a self-hating witch.

…. “(Your door’s) not (closed) to me, witch.”
~TV villain who goes through doors like Jesus, only he’s…. Bad.

(bursts out laughing) Come on: you KNOW you wanted him to say, “not to me, bitch”. You KNOW that’s what you want.

Your bitchcraft cannot hold back my male power.

Right? 😹🏂

…. He looks like a half-Native American Jesus, you know. Everyone says Jesus isn’t white…. And that he came to fulfill the Law, which says to burn witches! 🏂

And he can go through closed doors! Only Jesus can do that! 😏

…. It’s funny how Prue is a rationalist, Piper is a folk Christian, and Phoebe is a groupie. They’re like the Normal American Family. None of them are witches. It’s like if they were scientist sisters, and one was a Buddhist who took a vow of silence, one was a folk Christian, and one was a groupie. It’s like…. 😕

The show is constantly trying to warn you away from occultism, you know. “You could get murdered…. (kiddie Halloween voice), By Jesus!!!”

…. A parody of “Charmed” would have so much potential. I need that dick to come back and say “witches” again. Bitch was comedic GOLD.

…. Man, I hate paperwork. (opens tablet)

Ok, first, they’re gonna repeat the awesome/crap B-drama humor where the villain says ‘witch’ but means ‘bitch’; it’s gonna be great. Then I’m gonna go:

(Leonardo DiCaprio or whoever sitting in chair pointing at television meme) TALENT!

Ok, I’m ready…. But then, it doesn’t happen. Instead, there are pompous anti-feminism scenes where the professional woman who outshines her husband cheats on him, and he responds with beauty and grace, like the Mythological Southern Baptist we all used to be. And Piper, (I’m Piper! I can’t get a date! I must be ugly! I hate myself!) does a Wiccan ritual in a crowded kitchen because lol, Wiccans are ghetto, and gets rejected by the Perfect/Utterly Sympathetic Rationalist Man Who Has Been Wounded By Psycho-Superstitious Bitches He’s Too Grand to Hate, right.

I know it’s not REALLY surprising anymore, but seriously: and it wraps up with the whole trope of, “I may be an anti-feminist salt-of-the-earth woman, and an anti-witch pretending to be a witch, but I love my mother and my sisters. After all, I can literally form the literal legal words, I love you: even though, that was so hard for me.”

(physical pain) Aaahhhh…. FUCK! Fucking losers, man! Fucking self-defeating, LOSERS! (doubled over in pain, possibly dying) You could have just repeated that fucking stupid B-drama gold you stumbled upon, instead of letting your anti feminism harden and calcify into pompousness.

(Prue) I would never let that happen. I like letting my anti-feminism calcify and harden. (dispels my energies and I die or whatever)

…. S1E14 (the title is retro or something; they should have called it ‘White Light’ or something; go for the whole ‘trying to have respect’ angle, you know) isn’t really an example of good TV in the general sense, but it comes a lot closer to a good episode than most of “Charmed”, you know. The various parts of the episode aren’t polished and don’t come together well, but usually they just gunning with nothing, you know.

It’s still funny, though.

(Leo) I can’t date your sister. Good people and your kind can’t mix.
(Phoebe) We are good people; I don’t get it.
(Leo) No: you’re good women. I’m a good ~person~, right. Like the kid, the little Black kid; he’s a good kid. The heroic victim of white-on-Black crime, a real good egg. He’s a good kid. And you girls are good women; you’re not all bad. But I’m a Good Person. (smiles) I’m a white man who can’t assert himself.
(Phoebe) What’s so great about that!
(Leo) (smiles) I have to go. Remember: the fact that I don’t consider you evil incarnate ~~has to be kept a secret~~.
(Phoebe) (rolls eyes)
(Leo stands up and leaves)

And yet, and yet, it’s ALMOST a real story, you know. They didn’t win the game…. But they found the stadium. 🏟️ 😹

…. Although—and I don’t want this to be a speech—but the whole “problem” in the Leo & Phoebe conversation where they (especially Phoebe) are saying, “women are difficult”, is that Leo doesn’t respect women/this woman, not really, (and won’t tell the truth), but wants her respect (or at least her sister’s)…. (and what she Really Thinks, etc).

And Phoebe’s thing there; that used to be my thing: “my gender is so difficult”, right: but when a man does it, the whole fucking world can see it as bullshitting, whereas when a woman does it, there’s a serious nod and a, You’re right. Let’s pass a law, that will say that….

…. That line of alienation dividing adults who have kids from adults who don’t have kids (and are therefore children) is funny, you know. It’s like—I think they called it the parish house, after Mass; I just remembered it almost as the Episcopalian fellowship hall—this guy was trying to talk to me, all friendly but depressed, and I was repeating the things about family you’re supposed to believe from television or Dickens or whatever, and he’s like, all polite like, “you can’t understand my hell hole”, but what he said was more like, the polite version of telling me “you don’t have kids so whatever”, right. Ah, church….

But it is nice to see a Black guy saying it. (American asleep under the oak outside Thor’s church, watching TV, eating popcorn) Fascinating. (popcorn) You forget that Black people have families, just like us! (experiences consciousness, like, ~wow~)

😸🤯

…. It’s funny how everyone treats Piper like a child. That’s what you get for being a good girl….

…. Only in Hollywood: “Please Mr. Criminal: let my son go; in exchange, I’ll feel good about myself, I’ll—I’ll—I’ll sing, “Please Mr. Postman”!”

That’s all you have to do to be a sympathetic Black man in Hollywood, lol. That, and…. (spoiler)

…. (laughs) The little Black kid, the little Black boy, wanted to call the cops, and the grown white woman: she had to tell him no…. Jesus; this is American TV…. Holy shit….

…. “Raise the boy well.”

Well thanks, white lady: you know, I was thinking of sodomizing him, because I’m a black nikro, black as the night…. But now, I’ve seen the white; I mean, the light….

…. I think it was being told that adults without children are children who sinned by throwing away their childhood toys that finally made her promise to be a good woman/child’s mother, right. 🏂

…. S1E15: Basically, going into this, I already know that fourteen episodes would have been fine, lol.

The campiness is kinda amusing, hopefully they can kinda ride on that, this time…. At least they do have a nice title theme music, although visually the title theme sequence leaves something to be desired.

…. It would be nice to live in a special house, although I would like to rent rather than buy. There are things I can imagine investing thirty years in, but agreeing to buy a house and live in the same place—at least theoretically: I realize that people buy houses anticipating selling them, but…. Risk can be good, but risking theoretically staying in the same place for thirty years…. I don’t know, I don’t travel much, out of habit, but to have as a project staying in one place…. I’d rather rent.

…. It’s a terrible episode, though. They don’t do fun-campy well. They do nothing well.

…. And yeah: maybe the supporting character cop who shot Trayvon Martin and all those people just caught up in a spiritual vortex that can go either way—it’s not his fault; at least he’s not bisexual—and he probs just should have gotten a two week vacation, right. But that joke didn’t come to me for a long time: I’m a bad liberal, right. 👌

But yeah: I give them some credit for trying to integrate some borderline-incorrect TV-style witchy details into the plot, for a change. And yeah: San Francisco could almost be China: closer to China than Europe…. And at this point, can the show’s vaguely anti-Wiccan weirdness still bother us? Isn’t the important thing, that we still love those of us, that conform? 🦹‍♂️😸

…. And I can totally see Piper now: Well, we know he can go both ways—but we also know, that he’s not bisexual. (small popping sound with mouth) (the other two automatically accept this comment as normal and continue on with their day)

I mean: she’d almost quote the Bible, right: the Bible as quoted in some 19th-century novel…. Maybe I should channel Malcolm X with “normies” substituted for “white people”, right; I’m just waiting for the showrunner to break the fourth wall and anachronism/time travel or whatever and say, I voted for Obama: but I also love Fox News! I’m lovin’ it! (jumps into air and hurts himself)

And just once: I want a Fox News report to end with—But they know their doom approaches. ~Just once; I don’t care if it’s on April Fool’s Day. But don’t let the guy with the line in on the joke: just put it up on the teleprompter, without any warning, so he reads like he’s reporting the weather when he’s skeptical of the weatherman right. But they know, (their doom approaches). (much louder voice) And now Kelly with sports!

Just once. Do this for me, mighty gods: just once. 😙

…. Oh, I had so much to write; I forgot: I did feel weird though, the actual moment that they drew the pentacle on the city map; it felt like they were both: (a) trying to get condemned by Jerry Falwell or whatever, and (b) weirdly echoing his beliefs. So yeah: voting for Obama; listening to Fox. And going to drink at the Fox and Wolf, right: with Mr. X, lol….

It was funny though; usually the episodes have NOTHING to do with real magic, just like Harry Potter, only Jo didn’t call Harry a Wiccan. For the record, ~honest~ once-born “magic” stories don’t have to be so bad: a lot of non-initiates did come to festivals in the good years and die as so-called witches in the bad; it’s their culture too, to some extent…. But yeah, for ONCE a tiny half-distorted detail of occultism got into a relatively ‘acceptable’ popular thing about random Americans, instead of it just being kept to ancient times or obscure non-fiction books (that most people dismiss as fiction!)…. And THEN, they had to turn it around and do the religion version of a dog whistle almost like, These people are coming for you. They want your city. The Protocols of the Wiccan Elders of San Francisco, right?

Crazy. ☹️

…. Wow, Phoebe in pigtails and a boxing outfit actually looked kinda hot: normally they kinda go for the church outing with Grandma Elijah or whatever outfit, right…. Which is of course, you know: well, it’s television: the other, television stereotype, right….

…. God, Prue is such a bitch, even to her sisters: I can’t tell if they’re trying to impale the professional woman or remind the trad mother type to be a ruthless tyrant, right….

…. They really should have said, “I checked the internet”, instead of “I checked the book of shadows”: it’s a lot more realistic to have ‘all information ever’ on the internet, rather than one single volume book, even if it’s six hundred large pages or whatever….

…. I need like, a synonym for ‘campy’: a more intensive synonym, right…. Like, makes campy look like HBO, right….

…. And it’s really, really boring basically having only three characters every episode, time after time: they need like, a real male character, you know: and not like the generic straight agenda, shy-romance character, all like: “You know, when ~straight people~ do romance, it’s always So Shy, So Good….” (Piper) (peeved) (turns page of magazine) Not like those damn gays…. ~Right?

They need like a shopkeeper or bookseller, a brainiac, someone who’s not a love interest, but someone who puts them on their A-game intellectually, right…. (Piper) (offended) Our A-game intellectually? Haven’t you ever read Charles Dickens—AKA “the great, great man”? Women are not ~intellectuals~; they’re ~relatives~….!!

lol. Just…. Yeah. So much. So much.

…. “Once you separate Gabriel from his sword” lol—were they going for that, or are they just oblivious?

I wonder if they paid the Prue actress extra for the episode where she had to play multiple Prue’s, lol….

…. “Where’s her soul? Where’s her magic?”
“I’ve been tricked!!!”

lol.

I can’t even come up with a good joke, anymore.

…. But yeah: most people would be really mad saying this, but, yeah: and also, if oppression is a game, Black people totes, win, right—and that’s not really a game I’m trying to win; it’s really not, right—but as part of my “history of music” exploration, I watched this minstrel/black face show for a few minutes, and yeah, they’ll be some white guy who believes Blacks are inferior, “proving” blacks are inferior, (or else, that he’s a racist, one or the other), and then the white guy pretending to be God or whatever songs his song, like, The Bombastic Sentimental Song, right. (Although sometimes Stephen Foster Era songs/the song “Dixie” are okay; usually subtly racist, and pretty stupid, too: but all songs are stupid. “It’s not a bug, bro: it’s a feature! I’m telling ya! Bro: it’s gnarly!” ~maybe I’m not using that slang right but I don’t care.)

But yeah: “Charmed” is basically like, Wiccans are fake and gay—go straight people, though!—and magic is nonsense and not real: Exhibit A, People Who Obviously Aren’t Wiccans Who Are Pretending To Be Wiccan To “Prove” Wicca Is Bogus (or else, it proves that….?)

And, I mean, I like pop, but if if they’re going to be constantly reaching for that ‘say-witches-mean-bitches’ joke, they should probs include a pop rap number, right. (shrugs)

…. (Maia) Hermes, in this life, we all participate in the ‘bright’ and the ‘dark’, but witches are essentially good, because they have healthful gender ideas and desire a connection to the Earth.
(Little Baby Hermes) They’re good because they’re white and straight—but they’re bad because they’re bitches! (bangs spoon against high chair) They’re bad because they’re bitches! (laughs!)
(Maia) (long sigh….)

…. It’s funny how they always try to make Phoebe sound like a prostitute, even though she doesn’t even show cleavage, or even have a nice bust, or even go on Dates!, lol. It’s like:

(Prue) And WHY did you stop reading “David Copperfield”, again?
(Phoebe) Because it was Long, and Boring.
(Prue) Yeah, well I’m taking you to the country club whether you like it or not, little lady; a lot of people there pretend to have read it. (gets up in a little something of a mood)

…. It’s basically if Mrs. Charles Dickens wrote a sci-fi story, right.

…. It’s funny how at the end of S1E16, the hostility against/fear of/resentment towards men finally came up—like it really came up in a credible way, bubbled up from the bottom, slipped into semi un-repressed mode…. And then just dropped the whole thing. They didn’t develop it, resolve anything. It’s always popping up and then getting re-repressed, basically; nothing ever gets resolved.

And Piper is “stupid”; everything the writers do wrong is her fault….

But at least nothing that white women can ever do can be creepy, right—not REALLY, right; I mean, c’mon; they’re white women: they’re really, really, women…. They can break and enter, but the children will intuitively understand that, you know—…. What are we trying to communicate, again?

…. The time traveling episode is especially bad. Cops are bad because they’re men with agency—bring down the system! Bring down the man!—but it’s also better to be a safe homemaker or whatever than a warrior who might die in the battle, right. “Oh, support the system, my daughters; we are only women.” It’s the feminine mystique, basically…. It’s an unusually shitty episode, even for this show. There’s some potential in childhood pre-suppressed magic and parental stuff, but there’s nothing real about it, you know…. It’s just like, Witches of Patriarchy Place, basically.

…. And just such a dragging, painfully-executed plot, you know…. Such fucking sci-fi technobabble…. dragged out to fill up an episode that probably would have been fifteen minutes shorter had it not been for episode length formulas, you know….

Such combining of lying about childhood and making up things about time-space physics to tape together a bad plot must not come easily, you know. One of those writers must have really lost his soul to do it, right. lol.

…. I realize that Christians feel like they’ve lost the TV wars, but it does kinda bum me out, how it’s a show about ~witches~ and the only way to be serious/moral is to go talk to a Christian cleric, right. And although I’m not expecting “Charmed” to get past the old folklore/popular trope (Harry Potter, etc.) that “witches are female”, but it’s like, every time that they need a good male character, a powerful/consequential male: he’s automatically Christian, basically. He’s never magical, he’s not a Druid; he’s not secular; he’s not a Buddhist or a Taoist…. It’s like, I’m supposed to believe that Christianity is the Great Morality Way, right, even though we’re basically communicating that the church is here to save the males, basically.

Anyway, I kinda hate, in the bored sense of the word, Piper’s character, but her toying with becoming a nun is very in line with her character. Once I was a Christian considering becoming a monk, and my line of reasoning was very similar: avoid pain, avoid sex…. Avoid pain…. I mean, now it strikes me as very selfish; and while I suppose you can have “selfish” goals if you damn well please, I chose that word because avoiding pain IS selfish, and yet the church often equates it with selflessness…. And when the rest of the world doesn’t, they feel oppressed for not controlling the rest of the world, you know.

…. And I realize that it’s a bullshit TV show, but it’s such bullshit that not even ONCE does Phoebe have her premonition when she’s not in snippety/sister sniping mode, you know. Just ONCE they could pay some homage to the reality of the work that goes into divination/intuition, whatever, right.

…. The title credits song is pretty good: it’s pretty unlike the show. The show is like, country, basically. Like if Stephen Foster wrote a song about his wife, or something…. “She’s a magical, motherly, wise young runt/She fights demons and rubs her—“

Such a problematic depiction of women, you know.

…. It’s kinda amazing how they can make women seem like disposable, semi-evil cunts, but also…. Kinda de-sexed, you know….

…. It’s funny how the trad view is that women have to be coerced both into being with men, and into not being with men, you know.

Some of the actors are handsome; the ‘have to be coerced into being with men’ part especially doesn’t make sense, right.

…. It’s like he’s a trad evangelical gay man or something; Jesus saves—I’m gay. Don’t save me Jesus! Add to your glory!…. You know, I don’t believe in “coming out of the broom closet”, you know; I don’t know much about gays and society, but coming out of the closet of gayness probably isn’t always the choice recommended by insurance companies, either…. Christian normality is so psycho, though, either way. “Please: I hate myself! There’s no such thing as a good me! No Good Hoomies! That makes me…. That makes me…. I mean, I’m good, but I’m not…. I’m so confused!” (runs off to read Aquinas)

…. And it’s like there’s no priest in “Charmed” except he ends up dead: I’m waiting for a priest to get struck down while wishing someone a Merry Christmas, you know…. Folk insanity, you know…. “It’s so hard to celebrate Christmas: such an ~obscure~ holiday; it’s getting to be like Hanukkah!….

…. Pretty standard issue, you know: they have the cop hate Wicca because it’s portrayed as being criminal, and then the Christians, basically, come in and save the day, with their love and tolerance, right: on anything other than TV they would have been getting hysterical and cursing and threatening, you know—hell the cop practically, you know, it’s like—“they drew the Jewish symbol on the Christian virgin’s neck”—you know….

But that’s kinda what I expect, at this point. I’m literally just watching this because I have bigger problems today. I wish I was more experienced with money, you know…. Man, I went in to see the mechanic before my car was off the road, but, he was like, We told you about the (gobbley gook) last time, ~and it’s like, But I let you do so much work last time; you did most of it…. And it’s like, Yeah, but you just have to pay (moolah) and you’ll be set for years…. And it’s like, I guess I shouldn’t have assumed it was only going to be a few hundred dollars when I decided to spend down to below SSI benefit limits before seeing the mechanic, right…. Yeah, I read a lot about money: but a lot of learning is experience, too….

(sighs) Ah, the Christians. “Only do not kill the innocent…. (😇)…. Rather, kill the terrorists! (👹)….” Yes, if only that were all of life, just killing and not killing, and not all that living….

…. God, the lines just sound so fake, though, whether we’re suppressing rage or anything else, right: I’ve decided to (cliche) and (conform)….

…. I am really not feeling it today, albeit for reasons not related to TV shows. It’s actually not such a bad episode, by the “Charmed” standard; it’s like a 74 really, out of 100, but on the curve that’s like 87, you know. I feel like it was written for “someone like me”, you know, a male with a wound, basically…. Although the bad is at least equal to the good, really. I still feel like they’ve got that subliminal association of witchcraft with the criminal—“let’s introduce an occult term and make it the villain’s gun”! 😀—and it’s not as heavy-handed antifeminist as many of the episodes, but it’s just not, you know…. It’s ambivalent. Very ambivalent, in quality…. Also a little literal—“I remember a tunnel. I got attacked in a tunnel”; “great! What gun works best in a tunnel, you think?”—even at its best, you know. Like some of it isn’t false at all, but, you know—although again, “some of it isn’t false at all”, is pretty good for an episode of “Charmed”, really.

…. (Andy) Well. And it’s almost like you moved the plot forward. (beat) Didn’t think you had it in you.
(Prue) Yeah: well. We’re one of the most famous shows about witches from the 1900s.

…. Maybe you know what I’m like, but I think I’m going to just leave the review here, because it’s like, even when they’re start like they’re gonna do something good: they like…. Yeah, they do what they do, which is not good. But I’m so close: with this last sitting I have two and a half episodes left; I’m almost through it….

…. It obviously wasn’t made for witches, and it wasn’t even made for people respectful of witches, and it wasn’t even made for “cool Christians” trying to make an interesting moral point about the forbidden, as dicey as even that is, you know, but I mean—it’s like for crazy normal people who have no idea what they think or what they want, or who exactly they’re prejudiced against or why, you know…. All they know is: it’s a lot, right.

…. “(a) Dark-lighters (b) aren’t capable of love.”

I can’t. 🙄

But whatever.

But yeah: it’s so Christian. They should probably have the Pope as a character, right. And like a torch-bearing peasant who has a Power of the True Cross he can use to detect evil witches, right….

…. Cute guest actress: plus I feel like the villain was a love interest in Battlestar Galactica, lol….

But yeah: “(I’m Spreading My) Dark Light” would be like a great Foster the People song, right….

You could literally make a more respectful episode about witches and real magic where they spent the whole episode chanting the names of angels…. But then the Christians wouldn’t like that as much as a Victorian bop, lol….

And they just won’t let go of that Hispanic-cop-says-that-cops-should-follow-the-rules; bah-humbug-cops-are-Indians-fighters-there-are-no-rules, right: like a dog with a bone: “Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” (Generic Song Title)….

And like the essence of Piper’s whole character is that the writer’s won’t let her do anything she really wants to do, right…. ~~unless she cries: unless she feels sorry, for herself~~…. God, that was worse than her failing: holy shit….

…. I’m not even sure how to begin with this show, lol….

Yeah: Hispanic cops are ~Satan~, and Jesus is a WHITE lighter, probably fought against Japs, right….

And every time the sisters bond over witchcraft: they’re really just bonding over drinks, lol…. You can’t go to hell for drinking at your friendly neighbor bar (ie your kitchen) the way that you can’t go to hell for going to bat for Hispanic cops, right….

…. God, the guest villain is actually does like good acting, albeit in the campy style, right…. Yeah, I could see him being a Kung Fu monk in the Old West…. But yeah, I get tired of the Regency Mornings second-half-of-the-pre-title-credits openings, you know…. It’s actually ~worse~ than Jane Austen, right, in terms of toeing the line, self-restricting…. And obvs we don’t need to contrast the amount of thinking that goes on, lol….

…. The segment producer is really cute, and would make a nice romance side character, you know, contrasted with like a, similar character with a slightly more natural affect, right: but in an adventure it’s like…. I don’t like that you have an unnatural affect but I wouldn’t care if you didn’t….

…. repetitive insults to pretty side character: the ultimate “benefit” to a time loop, lol….

I don’t want to spoiler away one of the stereotypes, right, but…. Yeah: one more witch/bitch joke for the road, right. (“Stupid witch!”)….

And yes: I BLOODY MADE IT TO THE END, FUCK YEAH! ALRIGHT, IT IS FINISHED!!!

~And we’re never going back, lol.… (more)

For a show from 1998, with a procedural, monster of the week formula, the first season of Charmed holds up surprisingly well. It respects its own continuity, characters and viewer enough to briefly acknowledge the events of earlier episodes whenever it would be strange not to (a simple feat a very sad amount of similar shows ever manage), and the sisters' relationship mostly avoids cliches and farce, becoming something rather genuine and likable to follow.

There are, of course, holes. Most episodes have at least two or three obvious logical issues that if questioned even briefly would make the whole narrative fall apart, and there are larger, structural conveniences that are difficult to swallow (like how the same two homicide detectives are always assigned every single case relevant to the protagonists -- even when the case in question is not a homicide). But that's kind of baked in to this kind of series, and it would be enormously surprising to me not to find such irritations. The fact remains, rewatching this for the first time in two decades, I found myself liking it still, finding fewer flaws and forgiving more of the ones I do see than I expected to. My vague memory of the later seasons (I think I kept up with it until season 4, maybe?) is that it grows weaker, but for now, as low-attention TV, this is watchable and occasionally outright enjoyable, even in 2023.… (more)