Eva Marie

Ughh, Brad Kern's always been an open chauvinist. He said on an old Charmed interview that it was time for JM to leave the show and "have his own career instead of being known for a chick show"... Julian's made Brad real proud since. He went on to star in a long-running hyper-misogynist porny dung-heap, which got turned down for being too sexist by the original actor his part was written for. It was also instrumental in intensifying the sexual degradation of women on cable TV to the currently mad level where GOT and True Detective are mainstream fare and touted as oh so brilliant. Yippip- hurray! Isn't everybody just overjoyed here?? Never mind that actresses have no choice but build their whole careers on being on mens' shows cause it's the default. Thankfully that's been improving in leaps and bounds lately in large part thanks to Netflix being female-friendly and pushing everyone else to bring up their game.

I never minded the blankness of Cole as a character because I don't care for an abuser being interesting. Theirs was a textbook abusive relationship.

Yeah, the camera adores Julian. The double-edged sword of being so charismatic onscreen is that your every acting mistake is magnified because everyone is watching you intensely. The reason I was so impressed with Oded is that he could do it all: be smartly sexy, villainous AND act well. I feel like he and Billy Zane retroactively upstaged JM as attractive demons. Julian as Leo might only have worked as a prop for Holly to spar against - like they did brilliantly in 7-Year Witch. When it came to dramatic chops however - she would've wiped the floor with him in the same way that she did with Brian. The mind-blowing sex was telegraphed like a giant billboard. I reckon Phoebe's true sexual orientation was towards demons: Cole, Drake and Kyra according to some people! lol As for the acting standard on WB/CW - Jane the Virgin set a new standard for them: the entire cast (save for Baldoni) is top notch, with amazing ensemble chemistry and several wins/noms for acting. So I'm retroactively judging Charmed on a higher level than I would've at the time of airing.

See, that's the thing with JM: he's never wooden. In fact, he's so dynamic that it takes you a while to realize how little he's actually expressing. When I think 'wooden' - I think of Duchovny on the X-files. You could've replaced the guy with a line-reading robot and it wouldn't have made any difference!

I would've cast Oded as Cole, found a way to keep Billy Zane around for longer, and then JM could've been Darryl. He could've been the flirty, funny, loyal detective with limited screen-time, and that wouldn't have pushed him outside of his acting range and overloaded the viewers with smarminess. Young JM was what movie stars used to be like: entertaining eye candy with out sized screen presence and erotic energy. If they were still like that - I'd still be watching movies. He was what Brad Pitt and all the current listless "heartthrobs" really should be like. Quality TV has sucked not just all the talent out of cinema, but all the hotties too (speaking for the men). My suspicion is that's the reason why the Charmed fans are so loyal to his casting: we're so bloody starved of this kind of old-fashioned, truly sexy stars because they're nowhere to be found on the big screen anymore. It makes for a lot of leeway with the acting standard. I understand why Krause was cast as Leo: he has a sweet, light energy that's perfect for simmering in the background. Which would've been fine if Holly wasn't such a strong actress or if they were never involved in a love plot. She really needed someone actually talented to bounce off. The 1st Cupid might've worked as Leo. Overall the casting director on this show was like Leo as a whitelighter: sleeping on the job much of the time!;-)

I've looked around the fandom and I'm honestly stumped as to why Julian's acting is so highly regarded. He is not even remotely a dramatic actor - he can't emote AT ALL (with the exception of anger which he always overplays without). There were several moments on the show where I wanted to yell at the screen: "Emote, dammnit!". The most notable of those was the siren ep - he should've looked horrified when he realizes he almost killed Phoebe. Nope - he's just blank. At other times he mugs like crazy. In S3 both he and Alyssa were just plain soapy in 2 scenes. He's overwhelmingly charismatic however, which I've seen confused with good dramatic acting before. If I had to pick the best male actor on the show, that honour would go to Oded Fehr. I'd even put "Kyle" above Julian on the drama front. There's a gulf of difference between charismatic performances and skilled performances. (Just disclosing now that I'm VERY picky about acting...)

On Kyra and Phoebe: We're so starved of seeing female friendship outside the sisters on this show, that it can feel sexual when it isn't. There's also the fact that Alyssa, just like Julian, had so much sex in her general presence that she could project it onto anyone around her. If anyone gave off a gay vibe - it was Paige. I saw her interact with her whitelighter charge in S7 and my 1st thought was: is she on a date with this lady? As for the Cole/Pru match-up - it wouldn't have worked despite the chemistry because they're a different kind of actors. Shannen is a straight dramatic actress, while AM and JM are both the same kind of sexy/funny/soapy/charismatic kind of performers. In fact, they BOTH give off an old-fashioned MGM sort of vibe in their talents - that's why I enjoyed the ep where they're possessed by 50s ghosts!:-) Shannen and Rose remind you how much voice matters to actors. Shannen had this soothing, husky timber, while Rose's performance was always undermined by her whiny nasal tone (which she couldn't help).

In fact, I'd cast the girl portraying young Rita as 1 of of the witches - she's just so captivating. They could explain away her accent with her having grown up with their dad in Scandinavia for example. Eghh, a fan can dream... And they did cast a Mexican and an Israeli in the main cast of Jane the Virgin.

BTW, Rita is available on Netflix (it got picked up as a Netflix Original). I'm really confused as to how that works actually. There seem to be 3 types of those Originals: 1) Netflix's own productions like House of Card; 2) Foreign productions financed (or just distributed?) by Netflix like Rita 3)The ones produced by American channels that Netflix just has a instant streaming deal with, like Riverdale Am I getting it right? Kinda disingenuous of them to call the last kind Originals...

TM: Trademark - as in TV archetype. Eg. Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Cool Girl.

I'll give you an example of what I consider a truly feminist portrayal of women in the Danish show Rita: It's about 2 very different, but thoroughly unconventional women in a conventional feminine profession (teachers). 1's middle-aged, rebellious, model-gorgeous naturally but never primped (Rita). The other is what Hollywood would portray as a hopeless loser: overweight, Awkward TM and very geeky (Hjordis). Here, however, we're never asked to judge Hjordis that way because no one on the show does. She's portrayed as competent, warm-hearted, loveable and works as comic relief in the sense that we laugh WITH her, not AT her. She steals the show in fact. She also gets happily married to en equally geeky and lovable man and has a child. The show asserts twice and very loudly that her differences are actually her strengths and there's no need for her to become Normal TM, because that would crush her and her family's spirit. Rita's a borderline sex addict, but we never ever see that exploited for porny purposes. She's never behaves or dresses like a Sexy Woman TM. In fact, she turns down an overconfident Cole-type character because she has no use for Bad Boys TM. Many traits make her a truly amazing female character (and revolutionary by Hollywood standards). The show is centered around the friendship and work of these 2 women. Men are always around, but they never come to the forefront and swallow the womens' lives. The last season also has Rita reconnect to her best friend from her teens, and that story (including flashbacks from their teens) is truly the best and the most real portrayal of female friendship I've ever seen. I'm so impressed by it that I propose creating a Rita test to replace the Bechdel test ;-). Seriously - this and Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries are my gold standard for female-friendly TV. Now, I'm not naive to expect anything even in this stratosphere from any Hollywood production. I can only hope for something in the league of Jane the Virgin at best. But the point is, it CAN be done and it's actually very simple: just portray women as actual full humans on screen with no trade-offs such as catering to the male gaze, empty platitudes or 'male as default' casting.

Funny story on the cast in other roles: Here I was, watching a new Aussie movie Swinging Safari, and I could not for the life of me figure out why one of the husband characters looked so terribly familiar (something about the eyes and brows). It was just out of my grasp and I spent the whole movie puzzling it out with no luck. So I look at the credits and...nothing. The names don't ring any bells aside from the ones I knew already. I'm even more puzzled because I know the actor has to be Aussie - no foreigner can ever get the accent right. This is weird, because practically all the familiar Aussie faces that work domestically are easily recognisable: it's a small pool because most are off in Tinseltown. Then the word Charmed pops into my head - a show I've only seen a few eps of in the original run as a teen, but have fond nostalgic memories of. I also remember that there was this cute guy with sinister-looking eyebrows in it, and he had an unusual name. I finally crack it and turns out that: A) the culprit's name is Julian McMahon; B) that he's Australian; and C) that he still has the crazy eyebrows despite looking nothing like his Charmed self due to having done something unspeakable to his face... Now here things get stranger: this is yet another instance of my Charmed connections. Within the past few months I've stumbled on The Craft in a bargain bin and heard the Charmed song in it; saw Holly on Pretty Little Liars, heard of Rose's feminist efforts and discovered that Charmed is the 2nd longest running show with all female leads after Desperate Housewives. The kicker is that I'd seen absolutely no reminders of Charmed in 13-15 years. So I look it up and guess what: there's a reboot in the works! I feel like everything is converging to steer me to watch Charmed all of a sudden:-) That's not the end of it: I put it on my To Do list. Then I browse Netflix, stumble on Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (very much my kind of show). Guess who I see on it.......Julian again, on another supernatural show, which is... wait for it...all about how seemingly unrelated coincidences all connect holistically due to The Universe!!! And I'm mentally yelling: all right, all right, universe; I'm going to start on Charmed ASAP! Since I've done that - no other reminders have popped up. Not a peep. True story.

Hmm, so why didn't The Seer just get it on with Cole herself to conceive the spawn? Wouldn't that rid of the pesky human portion of the fetus? Surely if she had the 'plumbing' to gestate it, she was capable of conceiving it too? Yeah, I know I shouldn't get into that kind of logic with this show lol

And it's more than costumes. Look at Cole's blonde assistant demon in The Source storyline. Why have her flirt so outrageously with him? Nobody can resist Cole apparently...But it did give us that droll line: "I'm a 1-woman demon":-))

The budget was cut in S8, which I haven't seen yet. They were quite good in S7. Piper was the only relatively sensibly dressed one throughout. Phoebe was actually OK in S2. Later on that mermaid costume alone should be grounds for suing for pain + suffering for Alyssa and the female viewers. Most of the men were dressed head to toe actually, even the obvious sex objects (Cole + Dan were only seen shirtless a couple of times max).

There were LOTS more men than the love interests: something like 95% of the demons, Darryl, most of the Elders and Avatars. The vast majority were a waste of screen-space as actors. There were a few solid actresses in small parts that should've had much bigger roles instead.

Yeah, Fifth Halliwell felt like a different genre to the rest of Charmed. It was a combo of Sex and the City and a horror film. That's where Charmed could've gone if it was a little braver, but I'm actually glad that it didn't. The reason being is that there are plenty of overly graphic shows sadistic towards women these days, but so few successful dramedies have ever been made. Charmed is at its best when it remembers that it's an Aaron Spelling show at heart: about a bunch of pretty people saying witty things and doing mildly entertaining stunts, all in a warm fluffy tone.

There should be a poll for best villain. My pick is Zankou: the actor just killed it.

Esmeralda, feel free to spoil away! Plot isn't really an issue on this show. You're right - I think that the chocolate only worked as an aphrodisiac for Piper because that was the side effect. The main effect was to make a demon baby which was not genetically Phoebe's or Cole's (this is what The Seer said when she transferred the fetus to her own body).

Just watched Fifth Halliwell and I'm left stunned by it: so many thoughts. 1) The whole thing feels a 42 min. long Nip/Tuck audition tape for JM (even a posh car is there!) 2) Shocked by the Paige & Cole torture scene. It feels like something too sadistic to belong on this show. 3)I finally saw what Esmeralda said about AM and JM enjoying themselves far too much in all their sexy scenes, and my - did this ep milk that. Again, it feels like it belongs to a different show. 4) Piper getting orally serviced!!! Yay! :-))) How did they smuggle this past the censors back in the day??? A horny Piper seems like the best Piper :-) 5) Great metaphor for reproductive coercion and birth control sabotage. They didn't even try cushioning it in any way.

From my experience, even the most female friendly Hollywood shows have no clue how to do feminism organically simply because they can't do women organically. Several international shows have done it though: British Bletchley Circle Aussie Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries Danish Rita Canadian Orphan Black Australia also has a female prison show which makes Orange is the New Black look like Touched by an Angel. It's called Wentworth. I guess CW got cocky because they got feminist praise for Jane the Virgin and Crazy Ex-GF...and they proceeded to shoot themselves in the foot with it.

There were also 2 Twin Peaks faces in S2: "Leland" & "Bobby".

My bad about Rose - that's a perfectly legitimate reason. Julian has no such excuse that I'm aware of...and he played a plastic surgeon for 7 years!! Oh the irony....And it's not like he needs the work with his family inheritance. Nothing but narcissism in his case. Drake was such a joy that I wish he's been a regular on the show (Charisma Carpenter too. In fact, they'd make a perfect couple with their shared enthusiasm for the small joys of being human). Anne Dudek was similarly everywhere in the mid-00s as well. I'm quite fond of her: she's a memorable character actress.

Crikey, he was in Back to the Future as well!!

I'm watching it all out of order: S2, then 4, then 7, now into 5. I already know all the plot-lines for other seasons though, because this isn't a show where spoilers matter all that much. Billy Zane was a hoot and his arc was so emotionally satisfying. He's truly the most successful C-list actor of all time, because somewhere among all his "Zombie World 5" type of credits he managed to get himself onto Titanic, Twin Peaks, this AND the Nicole Kidman break-out Dead Calm.