Working the NIGHT SHIFT: What Charmed Taught Me About Witches (10/6)

October 7, 1998 was the premiere of Charmed on The WB. Just seven months after the premiere of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show would be most often compared to. By this point, I had been writing about witches for a decade, but hadn't published anything yet (one more year). But I want to talk about what Charmed taught me about witches, specifically, what Charmed taught me about witches in NIGHT SHIFT.Charmed (1998 - 2006, 2018-2022)Charmed was about witches. But this was a different take than other witches on TV. We had Samantha in Bewitched and Sabrina in her own show, which showed that a witch can work well, if comedically, in modern times. Charmed had more to do with the 1996 movie The Craft, including using Love Spit Love's cover of The Smiths' "How Soon Is Now?"The witches of Charmed were not old hags or evil sorceresses. Nor were they suburban housewives dealing with the magical and mundane worlds. They were three estranged sisters who discovered they were not just witches, but…