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So, I ended up watching the pilot of the rebooted Charmed, after having initially given it a pass because the original was not a show I enjoyed that much. What drew me in was a Twitter thread by Lord Stabbington of subtitled screenshots (although the captions themselves were not reproduced in the text of the tweet) that suggested the reboot was ready to engage the 2018 audience and their concerns about women, empowerment, and feminism.
The original, in my somewhat scattered watching, seemed to fall fairly swiftly into being a story ostensibly about witches and vanquishing but that spent quite the amount of screen time focused on the romantic entanglements of the main cast, which wasn't the show I was looking for and doesn't ping my feminism radar, but it's also true that a lot of what I watched of it was in syndication, and therefore I might have missed the actual parts that were.
I'm not sure I can even give cautious optimism about feminism to the show based on the single episode, but not because it isn't trying. It's that what I saw seemed to be caricature drawn from the headlines of 2018.
Here be spoilers, if you also want to watch it without my opinions interfering. I'll even pad your decision time by mentioning that the effect for the disappearance and reappearance of the known supernatural character is going to be very familiar to fans of the Harry Potter movies, as it is essentially the Apparition twist. (The CW, the network producing and airing the new Charmed, is owned, at least in part, by Warner Brothers, so I imagine clearances for that effect were a lot easier to obtain than they might have been.)
Also, the reboot has been situated in a fictitious Michigan location, Hilltowne, with a college that has enough student population to support a Greek system, and that means I will be extra on my guard about location references and what the weather is supposed to be like if people make date references. (I suspect Hilltowne is supposed to be an Ann Arbor expy, making the fictitious unnamed college a University of Michigan expy, so if I continue watching, I might be extra-shirty about getting the university wrong, if this hunch turns out to be supported.)
( Spoilers! )
The original, in my somewhat scattered watching, seemed to fall fairly swiftly into being a story ostensibly about witches and vanquishing but that spent quite the amount of screen time focused on the romantic entanglements of the main cast, which wasn't the show I was looking for and doesn't ping my feminism radar, but it's also true that a lot of what I watched of it was in syndication, and therefore I might have missed the actual parts that were.
I'm not sure I can even give cautious optimism about feminism to the show based on the single episode, but not because it isn't trying. It's that what I saw seemed to be caricature drawn from the headlines of 2018.
Here be spoilers, if you also want to watch it without my opinions interfering. I'll even pad your decision time by mentioning that the effect for the disappearance and reappearance of the known supernatural character is going to be very familiar to fans of the Harry Potter movies, as it is essentially the Apparition twist. (The CW, the network producing and airing the new Charmed, is owned, at least in part, by Warner Brothers, so I imagine clearances for that effect were a lot easier to obtain than they might have been.)
Also, the reboot has been situated in a fictitious Michigan location, Hilltowne, with a college that has enough student population to support a Greek system, and that means I will be extra on my guard about location references and what the weather is supposed to be like if people make date references. (I suspect Hilltowne is supposed to be an Ann Arbor expy, making the fictitious unnamed college a University of Michigan expy, so if I continue watching, I might be extra-shirty about getting the university wrong, if this hunch turns out to be supported.)
( Spoilers! )
