Keeping the Magic Alive on 'Charmed'
By Kate O'Hare
With "The Lord of the Rings" straddling the movie world with its wildly successful trilogy, and "Harry Potter" looking to do the same, there would seem to be no better time than now for fantasy on the big screen.
On the small screen though, fantasy generally has had a tougher time than its genre siblings -- horror and science fiction. It's fine to have mythical creatures and magic, as long as you toss in a few vampires or put everyone on an alien planet.
The exception to this is The WB's "Charmed," the supernatural drama about three sister witches battling evil in San Francisco. It survived the departure of one of its original stars, Shannen Doherty (successfully replaced with Rose McGowan), and has managed to keep its audience despite a variety of time slots and nights.
Now ensconced on Sunday, "Charmed" has been picked up through next year, which will be its seventh season. This makes it one of The WB's longest-running shows, outlasting "Dawson's Creek" and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" (which only ran five seasons on The Frog, before hopping to UPN).
After a couple of high-profile genre flops on The WB -- "Birds of Prey" and "Tarzan" -- one would think the network would be trumpeting the ongoing success of "Charmed." But the show remains The Frog's stealth bomber, flying under the promotional radar. Executive producer Brad Kern is philosophical.
"I'm humble and grateful," he says. "I can complain about not being mentioned with all the other shows, but seven years on the air ... they're still paying the bills and want us on the air."
The commitment goes both ways. If The WB wants to keep "Charmed" around, Kern will stay the course.
"The network said, 'We're not letting you develop until this show is over,' " Kern says. "I'm flattered by that, but at the same time, I'm frustrated by it. So I've decided to put my complete focus on this show. It's a difficult show to mount.
"I feel if they're paying me this money, and there are these many people who are working for us, paying mortgages, and there are five-and-a-half-million people who watch the show week in and week out, I have this weird ethic that it's my job to focus completely on that until that doesn't work anymore."
Explaining why a show failed is hard, but sometimes it's even harder to understand why one stays on the air. Kern, whose resume includes "The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.," "Nash Bridges," "Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" and "Remington Steele," thinks he has a fix on what keeps "Charmed" alive.
"It starts with the characters. The one common denominator is the characters. They're what the audience watches week in and week out. Why do they come back to a show? It's not the genre, it can't be. 'Lois & Clark' was about Lois and Clark and their relationship first. The icing on the cake is the genre.
"It's got to start with the characters, so there's an accessibility to the audience. That's the foothold that lets the audience then enjoy the genre. That is first and foremost.
"The second thing is knowing who your audience is and honoring them, not disrespecting them, paying attention to them, being aware of what they like about the show, being unafraid of making adjustments to make them happier, if you will."
To that length, Kern keeps a weather eye on Internet message boards, e-mails and fan mail, but it doesn't stop there. "I also talk to the studio executives, the network executives, the writers, the actors -- keeping it in your consciousness all the time.
"Especially on 'Charmed,' now more than ever, because I want to keep the show fresh and alive. But I can't be a slave to the boards, and I can't be a slave to the mail."
Kern believes that sometimes, you give an audience what it needs by not giving it what it wants. It's a lesson he learned at "Lois & Clark."
"In one season-finale episode," Kern says, "Lois found out Clark's secret, and he asked her to marry him. The fans wanted that, they got it. But suddenly they're married, she knows the secret and the fans went away. I think that cost us one whole season on 'Lois & Clark.' So I learned a lot from that, and have applied it to 'Charmed.'"
At the end of last season, Kern chose to split up the married duo of witch Piper (Holly Marie Combs) and the angelic Whitelighter Leo (Brian Krause) -- a conflict that has yet to be fully resolved.
"I keep an eye on what the fans want," Kern says. "They want Piper and Leo back together again. Whether I get them back together again or not, I'm aware that's what the audience wants -- but I'm in no hurry.
"At the same time, I don't want to just piss off the audience so much and say, 'I just don't care that you guys want that, you're not getting it.' If and when they do get back together, I want to honor how they get back together and earn it."
Other vital elements, Kern says, are keeping the stories grounded in the reality of the sisters' lives, and making sure that the show's internal logic and reality are not violated.
"If you break your own laws, you've shattered the fourth wall, and you've lost the audience," he says.
While Kern doesn't quite understand why there haven't been any "Charmed" spin-offs, DVDS or merchandising, there's no place he'd rather be.
"I love this world. We've circumnavigated the globe and scoured the map of the world, know the depths of the Atlantic Ocean. There's no place left to play, no canvas for the imagination other than fantasy and these genres. We're able to play with morality, fables, issues and emotions in this imaginary world."
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www.charmed.org.
