Elsewhere I’ve mentioned the small (I hope) group of zealots who tried to have L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz removed from library shelves because it depicts Glinda, the Witch of the South, as a good witch — and, as we all know, there ain’t no such animal as a good witch. Doubters (and doubtrices) should check out Exodus 22:18 for the truth of the matter.

Well, this hasn’t been such a good year for these folks. Glinda ⁽¹⁾ and Samantha Stevens (Elizabeth Montgomery) ⁽²⁾ were fairly isolated phenomena, in their times, but then last year Sabrina popped up on national TV and has become fairly popular in some circles. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer you had, for a while, Ms. Callander (I think I got the name right), the teacher who doubled as a techno-pagan and helped the main characters defeat e.g. a demon released into the net from an ancient manuscript during electronic scanning. Not too many weeks go I sent out a review of Kiki’s Delivery Service. And now, within the space of nine days, we have been introduced to Charmed and Practical Magic.

Charmed (WB network, Wednesday evenings in our area) is an ongoing series about three sisters in San Francisco. The elder sister, Prudence (Shannen Doherty), and middle sister Piper (Holly Marie Combs) live together in an ancient San Francisco Victorian, apparently with a good view of the Golden Gate Bridge, that they have inherited from their grandmother; third sister Phoebe (Alyssa Milano) is just returning from New York early in the first episode. The three find that they are, in fact, hereditary witches (ultimate fam-trads, for those who know the jargon), and that the mansion is not the only thing they have inherited from grandmother: each of them has a power. Prudence can move objects, Piper can stop time, and Phoebe gets flashes of the near future.

The series so far (two episodes) largely concentrates on where their lives are going (their careers — Prudence is an evaluator of ancient objects, Piper is a chef, Phoebe is … well … Phoebe — whom and how intensely they are dating, what they are going to do with their powers, how they are going to handle their effects on their own lives. There are some pretty good subplots here, including Prudence’s tiff with her now ex-boss in the first episode, and Piper’s fear that she will be struck by lightning if she tries to enter a church in the second (the priest, who otherwise seems to be not a bad egg, contributes rather heavily to this fear). This is probably good, but — given the time constraint of one hour a week on this show — it makes the main conflicts, with a malicious warlock in the first episode and a malicious demon that turns lively young women into senile old women in the second, into short sidebars.

The series is not about the Craft and the neo-pagan movement per se, though some of the trappings are dragged in (grandma’s Book of Shadows, the Wiccan lady lighting a bunch of candles with her fingertip early in the first episode, the quote of the Wiccan Rede), but those who are familiar with these things — e.g. through reading — may recognize the ambience.

It will be interesting to see where the series goes. There is the occult-knowledgeable policeman whom Prue is dating, there’s her new potential romantic involvement with the owner of the auction house where she’s about to start work, there’s estranged dad waiting somewhere out in the wings to appear and take a role in some future episode…

Not too bad, given that it’s a product of Aaron Spelling’s kitsch factory. I would keep an eye on this one.

⁽²⁾ There also seems to be an on-again-off-again project to do a movie version of Bewitched — Penny Marshall was involved in this a couple of years ago, as was Nicole Kidman of Practical Magic. At the moment, the whole project appears to be on hiatus.