Charmed (2018)

The Reboot That Earned Its Place TV Show Reviews

By C.J. Barembruch | I Am Is and Was ™

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Namaste. 👋

Let me be honest with you before I say another word.

The original Charmed is my all time favorite show ever made.

Full stop.

No competition.

No close second.

So when they announced a reboot in 2018 I had feelings about it.

Big ones.

The kind of feelings that come with twenty years of loving something deeply enough that the idea of someone remaking it feels almost personal. Like someone is about to redecorate the house you grew up in.

I went in with expectations the size of the Power of Three itself.

And for the first little while — I struggled.

Not because the show was bad. But because I kept making the wrong comparison. I kept holding the 2018 version up against 1998 and finding the gaps. Different sisters. Different dynamic. Different aesthetic. Different everything

I had decided was sacred about the original.

And then somewhere in those first seasons something shifted.

I put down the comparison.

And the moment I did — I fell completely in love.

A Similar Story. A Completely New World.

Here is what the writers of the reboot understood that I did not give them credit for at first.

They were not trying to remake the original. They were telling the same kind of story for a completely different decade. The bones were familiar — three sisters, the Power of Three, witchcraft, demons, destiny. But the flesh on those bones was entirely new. Relevant. Current. Alive in a way that belonged to the world the show was actually being made in.

The sisters were different. The threats were different. The conversations they were having — about identity, about power, about who gets to be protected and who gets to be forgotten — were conversations that 1998 was not ready to have the way 2018 was.

I loved that. Once I finally let myself see it.

The first three seasons pulled me in and held me there. Each one building on the last. Each one deepening the world and the characters and the stakes until I genuinely could not imagine the story ending.

The Sisters

Macy Vaughn — The Eldest.

The protector.

The scientist who walked into a world that defied every equation she had ever trusted — and found a way to trust it anyway.

Where Prue carried the weight of protection through sheer force of will,

Macy carried it through intellect.

Through the need to understand before she could believe. Through the particular courage it takes to let magic be real when your entire life has been built on proof. Telekinesis in her hands was not just power. It was precision. The mind of a geneticist learning that some things cannot be mapped — only felt.

Mel Vera — The Middle Sister.

The heart. The fighter.

The one who brought her convictions into every room she entered and refused to leave them at the door because the stakes had changed.

Piper wanted a normal life and chose the extraordinary one anyway.

Mel never wanted normal — she wanted justice.

And the magical world handed her a battlefield that matched every fire already burning inside her. The power to freeze time in the hands of a woman who refused to let the world move faster than her conscience could keep up with. That is Mel.

Maggie Vera — The Youngest.

The empath. Again.

As if the universe knew exactly what it was doing the second time around.

Where Phoebe received the emotions of others through touch and premonition, Maggie heard them.

Thoughts. Raw and unfiltered and arriving whether she invited them or not.

The same lesson delivered in a new voice — that feeling everything is not a flaw to be managed. It is a frequency to be mastered. That the most powerful thing in any room is sometimes the person who can hear what nobody else is willing to say out loud.

Kaela Danso - The Fourth.

She arrived the way Paige arrived.

Carrying the impossible.

A new presence asked to complete something sacred without erasing what came before her.

Asked to be entirely herself while stepping into a space that grief had made sacred.

She earned it. Completely.

And the Power of Three was whole again.

The Season Three to Four Transition

Every Charmed fan knows the history of the original. The cast change. The seismic shift between what the show was and what it became. A moment that divided fans for years.

The reboot repeated that history.

But here is the difference — and it is the difference that matters.

In the 2018 version they did not just swap a character and hope the audience would follow. They wove it into the story itself. The transition was earned. It was part of the narrative. It made sense within the world they had built rather than arriving as a disruption from outside it.

By Season 4 I was not just watching anymore. I was invested the way you only get invested in a show that has taken the time to make you care about every single person on the screen.

The Ending That Should Not Have Been the Ending

And then it was over.

Not wrapped up. Not given a finale worthy of everything it had built. Just — over. Cancelled. Door left wide open. Story mid-breath.

I was furious.

I am still a little furious.

Because the 2018 Charmed earned its ending. It earned more seasons. It earned the chance to walk through the doors it had spent four seasons building toward. The world was there. The characters were there. The stories were waiting.

And someone decided that was enough.

It was not enough.

The Verdict

If you loved the original — and especially if you loved it the way I loved it — I am asking you to do what I eventually had to do.

Put down the comparison. Give the reboot its own shelf. Let it be what it is rather than what you expected it to be.

Because what it is — is genuinely great television. A show that took a beloved story and made it new without making it lesser. A show that gave us characters worth caring about and a world worth living in for four seasons.

A show that deserved more.

Watch it. All four seasons. Let it earn your love the way it earned mine.

And then join me in being quietly furious that we will probably never get the fifth.

Charmed (2018) - Available on Amazon here.

This review is part of the TV Show Reviews hub at I Am Is and Was ™. If you loved the original as much as I did — you can find that review there too.

Namaste. 👋

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