Charmed/Trivia

• Actor Allusion: Charisma Carpenter appeared in several episodes as a demon who had visions.
• Directed by Cast Member: Shannen Doherty directed three episodes: The season two finale "Be Careful What You Witch For", the season three episode "The Good, The Bad, and the Cursed", and that season's finale, "All Hell Breaks Loose", where she gets Killed Off for Real.
• Did Not Do the Research: Bizarre mix of aversion and straight examples; someone clearly did a broad survey of modern Neopaganism and Wicca while developing the series, resulting in a show that at least initially got a lot of the flavor and a few of the details right. But it seems that after that first burst of research, the writers and production staff never went back to the books.
  • This can probably be explained by the fact that the show's creator, Constance M. Burge, left the show after Season 3. Considering the lighter direction of the show after she left, she was probably the someone in the paragraph above.
  • Many bad guys use athames to kill their victims. This is something of an odd choice considering that athames usually aren't even sharpened.
  • Even from the beginning of the series, the cosmology in Charmed is much closer to Christianity than Wicca. Wicca does not have a dualistic view of good and evil. Piper also refers to God a lot, but the Goddess is never mentioned.
  • There's no rule against using magic for personal gain in Wicca, but thanks to the show a lot of newbie witches think there is.
  • No one was burned at the stake in Salem. Most victims were hanged, and in one case crushed to death under rocks.
  • In the episode "I Dream of Phoebe", Leo reads the Arabic inscription on the bottle. Fair enough, he's an Omniglot. But Brian Krause visually rotates the bottle to read the Arabic text from left to right. Arabic reads from right to left.
• Executive Meddling: One of the stipulations for an eighth season was an inclusion of a younger character who could potentially star in a spinoff.
• Hey, It's That Guy!: Sometimes paired with Retroactive Recognition.
  • Badger sighting!
  • Simon Templeman as the Angel of Death.
  • The priest Prue fell for in one episode went on to play Tony DiNozzo.
  • Sylar plays a warlock who tries to kill the Charmed Ones' familiar in an episode. Ma Petrelli was Prue's boss.
  • John Cho, the pioneer of the term "MILF" from American Pie appeared as a ghost in another episode.
  • Within show example: Those watching Season 1 again after watching later seasons might notice that Aunt Jackie (The Fourth Sister) looks a lot like Phoebe's newspaper boss Elise.
  • Q, Commander Shelby, and Uncle Phil are elders.
  • Castiel discovered how to translate the Akashic Records.
  • The season 3 episode in which Prue obtained empathic powers via a scheme of Cole's (and nearly went mad from the influx of emotion) also starred Mayor Wilkins as a Talkative Loon who was also a good priest.
  • Teyla ran a coven and was a friend of the sisters.
  • And Imhotep was a darklighter who tried to drive first Giselle, then Prue, suicidal.
  • Antoine manages to get her client's house back from the sisters towards the end of the season 7.
  • Marshall infects people with sins.
  • Joy appeared in the season five premiere.
  • Duncan McLeod once tried to use Paige's body to resurrect his lost love.
  • Dr. Nigel Townsend was a warlock who stole powers in Blinded by the Whitelighter.
  • Before we were disappointed by Billie, the original reaction was "Hey, it's Bridget!"
  • Hey, it's Cordy! And she even has the same powers!
  • Don Draper is Agent Brody's father in 7x11 ("Ordinary Witches").
  • FREDDY FREAKIN' KRUEGER was shrinking young women (or womyn) to six inches tall and turning then into figurines in "Size Matters", Season 4 Episode 5.
  • Ron Perlman playing a demon? No way!
  • Murphy is a rather terrible boyfriend isn't he? Also Connor is apparently competition to Christian over who gets Phoebe.
  • In his former life, Dwigth Schrute was an alchemist.
  • Oh, Look Who's Barking, it's Sharpay Evans.
  • The episode "Wrestling With Demons" features real wrestlers Scott Steiner, Booker T, and Buff Bagwell. The former two get to do what they do best.
    • So…Prue and Phoebe have whooped the Main Event Mafia? Well, then, you might want to sign 'em up, TNA.
• Hey, It's That Voice!: Commander Shepard is a friendly neighbor to the Charmed Ones in Morality Bites. This is one of Jennifer Hale's very rare live appearances, as opposed to her prolific voice overs.
• Shout-Out: To Buffy the Vampire Slayer in the episode "The Power of Two". Prue and Phoebe are in a mausoleum and have this conversation:

Prue: Ohh, I hate cemeteries at night.
Phoebe: I hate cemeteries at day. What was that?
Prue: Uh... huh. Probably a zombie or vampire.
Phoebe: Great. Where's Buffy when you need her?

• • They also do a shout to Psycho, when in a season 2 episode Piper is pursued by a serial killer from a movie.

Piper: I am being stalked by psycho killers, and I hide in the shower?!

• • The girls' one-shot "superhero" costumes in Season 5 are reminiscent of the Legion of Super-Heroes, with a dose of some more recent X-Men outfits for flavor. Piper's in particular seems like an updated version of the original Dazzler costume. This may or may not be intentional.
  • In the season five finale, Paige gets turned into a goddess of war - more a genderswapped version of Ares rather than Athena, but with Poseidon's trident. Phoebe asks her whether she was done being a Warrior Princess.
  • One demon actually says the line "I find your lack of faith... disturbing."
  • Another shout out happens in several episodes with Leo (Brian Krause) & Piper (Holly Marie Combs) about their real life dating when Leo quotes he always fancied a stronger woman like a 'Bethany' he refered to his then wife Beth Bruce (who he later divorced) and Piper spat back with 'Well to bad your not a Don or David' which refers to her eventual real life husband David Donoho (also later divorced), who she was just casually seeing at the time.
  • In Season 8, The Jung and the Restless there is a shout out to Quintin Terintno, by Rose McGowan who at that time had done the movies Death Proof and Planet Terror with him.
  • In early seasons, Prue works at the Buckland Auction House. The name comes from Raymond Buckland, who introduced the religion of Wicca to the United States.
• You Fail Biology Forever: Two characters performing an autopsy in the coroner's office both appear to believe that a woman with "high levels of testosterone" in her bloodstream is a biological anomaly, rather than a statistical outlier. "Testosterone? How's that even possible?" It's as if the writers believed that women normally have no testosterone in their bodies at all (in actuality, they do, and some have more of it than others).
• You Look Familiar: Rebecca Balding, who plays Phoebe's newspaper boss Elise, was the aunt of a young witch in the Season 1 episode "The Fourth Sister".