On a drizzly morning in late September, Sarah Jeffery — one-third of the sisterhood at the centre of the CW’s mildly controversial Charmed reboot — is passing her phone around to her cast mates during a break in production of an upcoming episode.
There’s exciting news on the screen: a photo of New York’s bustling Times Square, where the area’s usual billboard razzle-dazzle now includes a jumbo promotional image of the show among its ranks.
“People have been sending me pictures of our billboards in every city,” says the 22-year-old Jeffery, whose credits include Wayward Pines and Shades of Blue. “It’s like, what is happening? I saw one from a distance recently and I squealed. But Times Square — are you kidding me?”
“Oh my God, this is such a moment,” says costar Melonie Diaz (Fruitvale Station), leaning in to stretch her fingers across the phone’s screen to zoom in.
It’s a welcome feel-good moment in what has otherwise been an unnerving lead-up to the launch of the show. When it was announced that the CW was putting Charmed, a young adult drama about sisters who discover they are witches, through television’s busy reboot machine, a spell wasn’t exactly cast.
Some fans of the original series — a cult favourite that starred Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, Shannen Doherty and later Rose McGowan, and ran from 1998 to 2006 on the WB — scoffed at the idea. And some members of the original cast were vocal with their dismay or reservations about a reboot.
“I’m not going to lie, it kind of bummed me out a little bit,” says Diaz, 34, who was jammed with her cast mates on a leather couch of an apartment rented for this day of filming. “You want people to be in support of what you do. But at the same time, there are people who are really, really, really excited about our show and it would be a disservice to them if we don’t lean into that.
“There’s always going to be negative noise,” adds Mantock, 28. “You just have to tune it out … it’s been a bit of a bonding experience for us.”
It’s yet another reboot of a fan-favourite TV series to test whether audiences still have an appetite for comfort food reheated — or, in this case, remade — years later. No stranger to bringing back popular titles (see: 90210 and Melrose Place), the CW has more riding on the success of Charmed.
The network, often the underdog in the broadcast hierarchy, is expanding its prime-time schedule by opening up shop on Sunday nights this fall for the first time in nearly a decade. And it’s counting on the name recognition of Charmed — whose cult following has grown since it went off the air thanks to a heavy rotation in syndication and its availability on Netflix — to help the network establish itself on the competitive night. (The CW’s returning series, Supergirl, has also been enlisted to assist.)
“We felt for the night, we needed a show that had some brand equity,” says CW President Mark Pedowitz by phone.
“Charmed has a lot of brand equity. That said, this [version] is different. There are elements of it that are very much the same, but it is a different storytelling.”
The new iteration from the writer-producer team of Jennie Snyder Urman, Jessica O’Toole and Amy Rardin (who have all worked together on Jane the Virgin) shares a similar conceit of three sisters who learn they’re witches and must protect the world from supernatural demons.
But here, the show’s original “Charmed Ones” are replaced with a multiracial trio: Jeffery and Diaz are the Vera sisters (named Maggie and Mel, respectively); while Mantock (The Tomorrow People) plays their eldest half-sister, Macy Vaughn.
“It felt like women of colour were going to be the women who had more interesting stories in our current climate, frankly,” O’Toole says. As the show unfolds, the goal is to incorporate the characters’ cultures into the storytelling in a way that’s “specific to who they are in an organic way.”
There are other differences too. There are no spells with rhyming couplets, not all the sisters’ powers are the same as in the original, and the show ditches its San Francisco surroundings for a fictional Michigan college town — to name a few.
Though the new series is leaning in to having a social conscience, its stars are careful to stress it won’t leave viewers rolling their eyes. “It should be cathartic,” says Mantock. “We’re not trying to bash you over the head with a handbook on how to be a good human in this day and age.”
They would, however, like to win over viewers of the original.
“I think it’s wonderful to be able to do a show that already has such a passionate fan base,” Jeffrey says. “It’s an addition to something that was already so wonderful. We’re not trying to take away from the original in any way.
“I just want to make them proud.”
