Towards the end of every season, show executives wait patiently to find out if their show has been picked up for another season. Executives for the WB's drama, Charmed, went in expecting the worse. They filmed the season finale as if it was the last episode of the series, and even had a wrap party not even knowing if they still had jobs.
Most fans watched the finale wondering what was happening. Charmed had been running for seven years; surely they deserved a better going away party than that? However, the WB's new fall season rolled around and Charmed was still on the lineup.
So the new question was: How do they continue with the show after they ended it the way they did?
Charmed is the story of three sisters, Piper (Holly Marie Combs), Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) and Paige (Rose McGowan), who happen to be good witches. They save innocents and "kick evil's ass everyday" as Paige so succinctly put it.
The show premiered back in 1998 and continued to enthrall audiences through the years despite major changes in the cast. After season three, the oldest sister Prue (Shannen Doherty), was killed off and replaced by an unknown younger half-sister, Paige (McGowan). Behind the scenes issues between Alyssa Milano and Shannen Doherty hit a breaking point and Doherty departed.
But even with the major changes, fans stuck with the show because it remained as good as it was in the beginning.
However, last season, Charmed lost a lot of its magic. The show fell into really silly plots.
I have been watching the show since it began, and even I found myself staring at the television asking, "Who thought up this crap?" However, I continued to watch. In the season finale the sisters, cornered by both demons and the government, fake their own highly publicized deaths and assumed new identities, thus enabling them to carry out their lives magic-free because the whole underworld thought them dead.
This presented a problem: everyone thinks they are dead, their jobs are gone, and the manor (their house and an important part of the story) is gone...
everything's gone. How do you come back from that? Well, somehow the writers found a way.
Now it's almost midway through the season and I have to admit: I am pleasantly surprised. The show has regained a little of what it lost last season. The storyline, so far, is better, the plots of the episodes are better and the humor is back.
There's a few new addition to the cast in the form of Kaley Cuoco (8 Simple Rules). She plays Billie, a young witch coming into her powers and Paige's new charge. When I heard about this new, younger addition, I already hated her.
Why would the producers bring in another witch? Who are they trying to replace? But I was happy to find that Billie's role has not been overshadowing.
She isn't replacing any of the sisters; she's just picking up slack and providing a lot of comedic fuel. And then there's Jason Lewis (Sex in the City) as the sexy Dex Lawson, Phoebe's new love interest.
In this season, the sisters have new identities and began to live out their lives as someone else.
They posed as their cousins (if that makes sense) and continued to live at the manor. Billie takes care of their light-weight demon/warlock problems; however, demons continue to make attempts on the manor, a great source of power, and on Piper's son, Wyatt, an extremely powerful magical tyke. After Phoebe has a premonition of she and Dex getting married, it becomes her all consuming passion to tie the knot.
The only problem is he was in love with Phoebe, not Julie (Phoebe's new alias). Both Piper and Paige struggle to deal with their new lives. Finally, the toll of keeping up the charade takes its toll and the sisters come out of hiding with the help of their new friend, Agent Murphy of Homeland Security.
Now they can resume their normal lives; however, their resumed identities as "The Charmed Ones" bears a lot of demon/warlock sized baggage and they are forced to resume their usual innocent-saving, "kick evil's ass" ways.
As of now, I like where the show is going. I'm not too sure if they will continue on this path.
In many cases, shows start up a good storyline and then completely blow them (anyone who watched the last season of the WB's Angel can agree with me). If this is the last season, the show's many devoted fans are looking for some of that old Charmed magic they had in the beginning. Hopefully, they will be able to live up to the amazing series finales of other WB shows like Buffy: The Vampire Slayer or Dawson's Creek.
Hopefully they won't end with a series finale like Angel, which was horrible and an awful way to repay fans for five years of support, but that's another story.
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