The New Charmed

The New Charmed Review

I love charmed. I grew up on that show, my friends and I watched it constantly, it introduced us to the world of supernatural stories and it kicked off our interest in Wicca. Which we explored for almost our whole childhood. We all had our favorite sister and would run around the neighborhood pretending to be them, chanting the power of three.

When they announced that they were rebooted charmed i was not happy about it. I thought that it was too soon for a reboot. The original isn’t even old yet, all of the original actors are still working, I would have preferred for them to make a sequel series about wyatt or maybe on of their granddaughters were the charmed ones, or even a prequel about their mom or grandmother.

However i'm not in control of anything at all. At first i was adamant that i was going to boycott it and never watch it and for a long while I didn't. Until it hit netflix, then i finally caved and watched the first two episodes with my best friends that i watched the original with.

It wasn’t horrible, i'll admit that, however I still have a hard time seeing it as being charmed. Yes, it has three sisters and the power of three but it's so different that it's almost unrecognizable as charmed. I found that I was able to watch it better if I separated it in my mind as a completely different show. If im looking at it that way, its an enjoyable show, a tad overdone and a little too political and the graphics can be a little ridiculous. Otherwise i enjoyed it.

Now to talk about why/how its so different from the original. Firstly, the mom, she dies in the first episode instead of having died years before and the sisters being raised by their grandmother. Secondly, the sisters aren't raised together at first. Two of them are and then the third joins them and she's actually the oldest. Which is the complete opposite to the original. On top of that they never really showed them bonding as sisters.

Thirdly, it gets very serious, very fast. Five minutes into the second episode and they were already talking about the source and the apocalypse and the end of the world. In the original they had more time to get used to being witches and leaving magic before all this came up. Fourthly, they introduced and killed off the the elders way to soon. They were introduced in the fourth episode and by the ned of the season they were all dead. It was so off putting because in the original the elders were physically introduced for seasons and did not start dying till nearing the end of the series.

Fifthly, the sisters blood relationship is weird as well. The oldest (Macy) is the one that grew up separately from the others, instead of it being an original three sisters and one of them dying. This new incantation starts with only two sisters Mel and Maggie and then macy discovers them. That is so different from the original that it really made it seem like a different show.

Sixthly, Macy is not half whitelighter. She is half mortale, they all are half mortals but macy died as a baby and was brought back by a necromancer that brought her back to life with demon blood which starts to bleed into her powers and personality. Seventhly, they introduced the source very very early. There was almost no time between leaning their witches and then dealing with the source. Then macy took over the source and went a little evil which is very close to the original but in the original it didn;t happen until the later seasons.

Eighthly, so far there isn’t any romance between their whitlighter and any of the other sisters. If they never start any romance then we loose the great romance in Charmed. It really feel like the show was lacking something without it. Overall, i have a lot of problems with it but i can watch it for fun.