Totally Charmed

Paige came late to the magic game, a pinch hitter for the lost Prue. Leigh Adams Wright makes the case for the newest Halliwell sister by arguing that her appearance in the fourth season revitalized the show by reinventing it, and that the character of Paige was integral to the success of the following seasons.

I CAME TO CHARMED LATE. My mother had been watching for years, but my mother, I regret to say, while in possession of many good qualities, does not always have the best taste in television. But I was home visiting one Sunday and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I settled in to give it a shot. It was that or risk not getting any popcorn; a girl’s got to have priorities.

Mom gave me a rundown, but I was still starting my Charmed experience at a disadvantage. It was the beginning of the fourth season, and I hadn’t seen the first three. I’d gotten the gist—they’re witches—from the media buzz surrounding the show, but I didn’t know how their magic worked, or where it came from. Everybody was pretty upset about Prue being dead, but I didn’t really know who Prue was—though I felt for Piper and Phoebe and sympathized with their grief. These characters were as much a mystery to me as their magic was, and so it was a little hard to keep up. The one thing I remember having a handle on, though, was Paige.

It’s difficult to be a first-time viewer. You can’t tell the characters apart, you’ve got no idea what’s going on in their lives and, in the case of a supernatural show like Charmed, there are rules they have to follow that you don’t know about. The show isn’t doing a thing to help you, either—you have to catch on yourself, and on the fly. With a show like Charmed, one that has a rich family history and men who have a tendency to go a little evil on short notice, it’s even harder.

It was lucky that I came in on that first episode of season four. Because Prue had just died. Because the show was in a period of upheaval, still trying to determine what it was going to become, and so my newbie status was less of a handicap. But most of all, because that was the episode where we met Paige.

There seems to be a pretty fundamental split among Charmed fans: those who like Paige’s addition to the show, and those who don’t. Paige is a breath of fresh air, a big improvement on the uptight Prue, and lets the show and its characters develop in ways Prue’s presence never would have allowed, or she’s obnoxious, and whiny, and really badly dressed, and needs to get over herself already. But love her or hate her, her character might have been the smartest thing Charmed has ever done. Her introduction not only served to unequivocally usher in a new, Prue-less era, one with a lot fewer practical concerns and a lot campier style, but also created a golden opportunity for the show to successfully attract and keep new viewers.

For the Charmed neophyte, Paige was like a guide, but better—Paige was a sister in bewilderment. She was new to Charmed, too. She knew no more about these people and the world they lived in than I did, and that made her easy to identify with. She acted out my confusion for me: freaked out at the appropriate times, asked the questions I wanted to ask. Plus, everything I was supposed to know about her, I did. Where Paige was concerned, I could be totally confident that I knew exactly as much about what was going on as anyone else in the viewing audience.

More importantly, though, the other characters explained things to, and through, Paige—things I needed explained. Look at season four, episode three—”Hell Hath No Fury”—Paige’s first episode as a fully vested Charmed One. After a negligible opener in which we saw Piper, Phoebe and Cole careening about town, demon-hunting in dearly departed Prue’s SUV, we cut to Paige, at work . . . reading about witches. It’s a quick scene, a throwaway moment, but her single read-aloud line—“Throughout history, witches have been misunderstood, persecuted and destroyed; the public hanging, drowning and burning of women suspected of witchcraft is a far more recent chapter of our history than most people realize”—established an air of vague menace as well as the Halliwells’ need for secrecy.

This episode, too, briefed both Paige and the new viewer on the dangers of using magic for personal gain: comic though her sudden increase in cup size may have been, it was also effective. For Piper or Phoebe to “forget” that hard-learned lesson in order to educate me would have lost the show’s integrity; for Paige to do so made sense.

As a device, she worked beautifully. Her presence was a way to rationalize clueing new viewers in to things they needed to know without alienating Charmed first adopters: anvil-free (or at least anvil-light) exposition. Information could be imparted to the new viewer without having to sacrifice the integrity of the characters. Instead of explanatory monologues existing solely for the purpose of transmitting information, expository dialogue could also illuminate the interpersonal dynamics developing between the members of the newly formed trio. The scene in “Hell Hath No Fury” where Paige was first introduced to the Book of Shadows not only told us newbies that “It is a book of spells, right?” but that Piper really wasn’t handling Prue’s death well and that Phoebe was embracing her new role as Paige’s big sister. Compare this to shows whose networks have decided they need to be more friendly to new viewers, and therefore the characters spend a few minutes at the beginning of each episode reestablishing their situations and relationships by telling each other things all of them already know.

But overall, the most important thing Paige’s presence did for me as a new viewer was keep me from feeling like an outsider. There’s a reason excluding people is the emotional fighting tactic of choice in middle-school cafeterias everywhere: it works. And where I could have felt excluded by the references to events in previous episodes, by the intensity and the details of Piper and Phoebe’s mourning for Prue—excluded enough to stop watching the show—Paige’s presence, and her own sense of exclusion, kept me involved. She might have felt out of place, unworthy of filling Prue’s shoes and not yet comfortable with the family dynamics, but we as viewers (new and old) knew she belonged—that she was a Charmed One, and that even if she couldn’t see it now, her destiny was with them. That knowledge promised me a place as a viewer too: as Paige would be integrated into the show, so would I.

Of course, any new lead character could have done most of those things: provided a point of identification through his or her newness, kept the explanations for new viewers less heavy-handed. What exactly is it about Paige herself, youngest half-sister and daughter of a Whitelighter, that made her such an effective and necessary addition?

Part of it was Paige’s role as newly discovered sister—as an outsider who was expected to, in time, become an insider, her situation was an easy and satisfying parallel to my own. But the ways her newness, her difference from her sisters, was defined made the difference between Paige simply being a useful tool for acclimating new viewers and being an asset to the show itself.

Paige was introduced at a point where many veteran shows start to lag. These days in particular, a show is lucky to get past its first four episodes, let alone a whole first season; after three of those seasons, whatever initial situation the show’s creator set up has pretty much run its course. The interpersonal relationships have been played out, any secrets have been revealed and the show’s premise is starting to feel a little tight across the shoulders. To survive, a show has to move beyond its original incarnation and become something new. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a perfect example of this: the central metaphor it employed for its first three seasons, “high school is hell,” could only be considered new and inventive for so long, but even more crucially, the relationships between the characters would have become stagnant. The show survived by reinventing itself, notably by sending its core characters to college and into new, separate relationships in the fourth season, and again by forcing Buffy’s “rebirth” into hellish adulthood from the idyllic, “heavenly” existence of her youth at the beginning of the sixth. Each time the metaphor shifted subtly—”high school is hell” eventually became “adulthood is hell”—and the characters grew, largely thanks to their relationships with the supporting cast, but the characters themselves and the rules of the world remained familiar and satisfying to (most) loyal viewers.

The key word here when applying this concept to Charmed—really, when applying this concept, period—is reinvention. Shannen Doherty’s departure could not have come at a better time as far as the narrative was concerned. And the Charmed team could not have packed any more potential for reinvention into her replacement than they did into the character of Paige Matthews.

The first and most obvious benefit of Paige’s introduction was the emotional challenge it presented to Piper and Phoebe. All three of the original Charmed Ones were defined by their place in the birth order, but Paige’s integration into the family changed that—with Prue dead, Piper had to move from peacemaker to sister-in-charge, and irrepressibly irresponsible Phoebe had to learn to mediate between her surviving sisters. Prue’s absence made character growth necessary, but Paige’s presence, as youngest sister and witchcraft novice, solidified the direction of that growth.

More, Paige was different from her new sisters. The only child of adoptive parents, she had a different personal history and a different last name. Where the Charmed Ones were previously confined to their own family life, Paige provided a whole new set of stories for the writers to tell. She was connected to the other two, but she was fundamentally separate as well, in a way Prue was not. Her beliefs could credibly clash with those of the other two, creating conflict and providing perspective where the previous, more homogenous trio of Halliwell sisters could not have.

In addition, she wasn’t just a witch—she was half-Whitelighter, too. Though her powers filled the same niche Prue’s did in the Charmed Ones’ predestined bag of tricks, they were fundamentally different. They came from a different source and worked in different ways. Instead of using straight telekinesis, she orbed. With subtly different powers, too, come subtly different responsibilities—and subtly different stories. Recently, this has come to particular fruition as, late in the seventh season, Paige began to tentatively embrace her Whitelighter heritage and take on witch and future Whitelighter charges of her own.

Not only did her half-breed status generate storylines for her, but as the child of a witch and her Whitelighter, Paige’s very existence set the precedent for Piper’s pregnancies by Leo—a story move which let the show reinvent itself yet again, changing Charmed from a show about three barely grown sisters and their search for love to a show about three fully adult sisters and their quest to make the world a safer place for their families. On a less conceptual level, it also set the stage for the overarching plot for the show’s sixth season.

But the most radical, most brilliant part of Paige’s character is how her addition turned everything regular viewers thought they knew about the Halliwell family history on its head. Everything that seemed self-evident was suddenly open to re-evaluation; what previously seemed to be set in stone suddenly became suspect. Thought there were only three Halliwell sisters? Guess again. The Halliwell family regained a sense of mystery, of potential, that most shows only get during their first season. Even unused, that potential breathed new life into the show.

Sure, part of Paige’s effect on the show grew out of Rose McGowan’s energy, and the chemistry between the new trio playing the Charmed Ones. But there are also very particular attributes of Paige’s character that not only provided new viewers with a way into the show, but the show itself with a way out of the corner it had painted itself into. If Prue had remained, the show would have petered out seasons ago. Instead, it’s on its eighth season, with the promise of more—and we have Paige to thank.

Leigh Adams Wright, who would like to apologize to her mother for defaming her for narrative purposes, is a proud supporter of popular culture in all its many and varied forms. Her previous work includes essays in Finding Serenity: Anti-heroes, Lost Shepherds and Space Hookers in Joss Whedon’s Firefly and Alias Assumed: Sex, Lies and SD-6.