Apparently CW decided to reboot Charmed, and given that I’ve watched the original series more than once, I kinda had to check out the first episode. My reaction was…mixed.<\/p>\n
Positives: Negatives: Overall, I do plan to keep watching, although I truly hope the acting and dialog improve! I forgave it in the original, but I’ve come to expect more out of modern television.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Apparently CW decided to reboot Charmed, and given that I’ve watched the original series more than once, I kinda had to check out the first episode. My reaction was…mixed. Positives: 1. This new show is unabashedly political, taking on\u00a0#metoo\u00a0with almost brutal head-on force. 2. It also ups the ante on the original show’s feminist themes […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[498],"tags":[727,722,69,551,725,98,726,724,723,37,97,721,216],"class_list":["post-5066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-blacklivesmatter","tag-charmed","tag-christine-amsden","tag-cw","tag-feminism","tag-magic","tag-metoo","tag-powers","tag-reboot","tag-reviews","tag-sorcerers","tag-tv-reviews","tag-witches"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5066"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5066\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5067,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5066\/revisions\/5067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christineamsden.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\n1. This new show is unabashedly political, taking on\u00a0#<\/span>metoo<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0with almost brutal head-on force.
\n2. It also ups the ante on the original show’s feminist themes by having one of the sisters be a lesbian.\u00a0
\n3.. The sisters are all half-sisters this go around, which created an opportunity for one of them to be half black, something I hope they will use to great advantage to be more inclusive and also to take on topics like\u00a0#<\/span>blacklivesmatter<\/span><\/span><\/a>\u00a0in future episodes.
\n4. The youngest sister’s power is telepathy rather than prescience, a better choice IMO for a variety of reasons, not the least is that being able to see the future breaks the plot if you’re at all consistent about it. (The original show was not.)
\n5. The oldest sister is a scientist (a chemist, if I’m understanding it right), which adds a fun angle. Already, they used both science and magic to beat antagonists and I hope they take this to new levels.
\n6. The girls are all attached to the local university….one is an undergrad, one a grad student, and one doctoral or post-grad (not clear yet). This gives them something in common besides sisterhood, and I like that the ages have downshifted just a few years to start with. Offers some great opportunities for growth and maturity if the show takes off and they get nine seasons like the original.
\n7. Using dead languages for spells is definitely better than bad rhymes.<\/span><\/p>\n
\n1. Neither the acting nor the writing was great. And no, they weren’t great in the original either, but the overall effect in the reboot was more “after school special” than I would like.
\n2. I’ve got some vague unsettled feelings about half a dozen minor things the show did — both things they left the same and things they chose to change. This may smooth out over time, but overall I felt myself wishing they’d either kept more the same or gone after more intentional differences. This is probably just my overfamiliarity with the original show talking.<\/p>\n