Witness The Rebirth of Charmed
The CW finally released the trailer for their Charmed reboot this morning. All throughout the Upfronts I’ve been drumming my fingers on the table, waiting for the Charmed trailer to show up. I don’t know if it speaks to the lack of quality in the lineup that this was my most anticipated trailer of the season, but here it finally is, nearly four minutes of the Charmed Ones’ return to television.
https://youtu.be/loWpbevW9xg
Um….hmm. Gotta be honest, I’m not sure how to feel about this.
All they had to do to please me was make it better than the original, and unfortunately I still can’t determine if it is, because they threw me a curve I wasn’t expecting. The original sisters looked to be in their thirties when they started out, late twenties at the earliest. These girls are in college, and INCREDIBLY green…which in the right hands could be more interesting, but I’m not convinced these are the right actors to pull it off. They’re TOO young….or maybe I’m just too old. The one on the right was pretty darn annoying in the trailer.
The good news is that none of the mythology has been monkeyed with, which is what DID work about the show. Their individual powers are the same. The Power of Three and the Book of Shadows and the sisters’ lineage and everything…it’s all there; there are no unnecessary changes to the formula. They even live in a house that looks almost exactly like Halliwell Manor.
https://youtu.be/OsKXUXrMRRQ
It’s in the familiar attic of this familiar house that they meet….a character that didn’t exist in the original show; a middle-aged man in a suit who reveals their destiny in a British accent. I guess that guy is their answer to Leo? Leo sucked on toast, but here they combined him with Giles from Buffy, which also means he’s too old for any of them to date him, so….I like him already.
These are different girls, though. Their roles are the same, but they hail from a different town and their names begin with “M” instead of “P”. I’m somehow amused by the fact that one of the sisters was unknown to the other two and showed up midway through the pilot — a twist THIS series is doing voluntarily, instead of making the tactical mistake of hiring Shannen Doherty.
Just like we predicted (because we’re magic too), the new Charmed is debuting on The CW’s reclaimed Sunday, the night where it thrived originally. It’ll run at 9, preceded by Supergirl.