Pop Culture Planet Podcast: Joey Falco Reveals ALL When It Comes To The Charmed Reboot
Potentia Trium!
On a brand new episode of the Pop Culture Planet podcast, Kristen Maldonado is joined by Charmed season 4 showrunner Joey Falco to talk all things Charmed. He talks about what it was like going from writer to showrunner over the course of four seasons, lost storylines, new directions, and answers your questions -- plus he gives details on where the show would've gone in a fifth season.
Episode Quotes
Joey Falco shares the original planned ending of Charmed season 1 before the season was wrapped up to soft relaunch with new showrunners in season 2: “Their original pitch the final scene of the first season was Alyssa Milano was going to show up as Phoebe and launch the multiverse back at the end of season one but that did not ever come to fruition when this network decided to make some serious like heavy creative changes at the end of the first season.”
Falco on the decision to move away from demon-centered storylines: “I didn't want to see a show where they just went out and killed someone every episode, even if that person was a demon. I just don't think that […] is the story Charmed should be telling, even if that's what Charmed was in 1998. We wanted to do something new and fresh and different. That's why you probably noticed like they didn't kill a demon every week this season. They had to deal with much more complex kind of gray situations because that's what real heroes have to do. You can't just blow people up and and say you've done your job. That's why we went into the magical world and creatures that were kind of split the difference between witches and demons so that we could play with that morality a little bit and make it harder for the Charmed ones to decide how to save the day.”
Falco on a potential musical episode: “There was conversation about whether we could do a whole musical episode. Thee problem always ended up being that it's hard and we didn't have time in our schedule. I don't know how Zoe's Extraordinary Playlist [did] it […], but we didn't have the music budget to pull it off properly unless we did original songs and to write and produce eight original songs would have killed us. [But] whenever I had a chance when writing an episode, I tried to force a song in there. I got Madeleine [Mantock] to do “Forget You” in season two and I somehow convinced Sarah [Jeffery] and Lucy [Barrett] to do “Lady Marmalade” in season four.”
Falco on why Mel and Maggie’s powers changed in season 2: “The time stopping time freezing was a really difficult power to write to in season one. The whole writer's room struggled with it because, in any battle, at any moment, Mel could just go like this and everyone would freeze and it was over. So either the scene's over and there's no tension and there's no stakes or you jimmy up an excuse every episode why this particular demon is immune to Mel’s time stopping. It just got old and even in season one we kind of got sick of it creatively. So in season two, [showrunners] Liz [Kruger] and Craig [Shapiro] decided to strip their powers as a way of giving them new powers that could be a little more dynamic.”
Falco on the original idea behind the trio of light and dark: “We originally had storylines planned related to Abby and two other sisters of hers and […] them trying to take the Power of Three. When we put in that little poem with the ghost witch lady, it was kind of an oblique reference to that potential storyline. When the world shut down and the production shut down [due to Covid] a lot of the potential storylines for how this season was going to wrap up […] changed. Part of it was like fan response to Abby. People had a lot of issues with Abby and how she related to Macy.”
Falco confirms Jordan is “definitely not” a Whitelighter: “He's not a Whitelight. There's a reason he didn't get the orbing that goes along with being a Whitelighter, he only got the healing because [of] the way powers connect to personality and soul in this show. He's always been that medic. He had a first aid kit in the first scene we ever saw [him in in] season two. That's how it manifested in him. The way the reboot is crafted Whitelighters [are] a very problematic thing […] plus he has both halves of his soul. He wasn't split the way other Whitelighters were so […] if I were Jordan, I'd want to set out [to] craft a new identity for myself outside of that construct."
Falco confirms they did have plans to go out to the original stars of Charmed: “We knew it had to be a flexible plan because [we] were going to talk to the studio and put phone calls to Shannen [Doherty] and Alyssa [Milano] and Holly [Marie Combs] and Rose [McGowan] and see who's available and who's interested. We can't force them to do this show so we couldn't write out a storyline in advance that said we needed Prue, we needed Piper because we didn't know who we could get.”
Falco shares that season 5 would’ve opened up a Triquetra-verse: “The plan was to basically introduce three universes. What if the Triquetra and its origins, those three overlapping shapes, are actually three universes that overlap? There's the Vera universe, there's the Halliwell universe, and then there's a third universe that we were also gonna go to in season five. [We would] introduce a threat that transcends the three universes. A demon. We talked about someone from the original show that we were going to try to incorporate or possibly one of their children, like Wyatt, gone bad. They were going to solve a problem in the Halliwell world […] but that problem was going to follow them and the answer was going to take them to this third world. So most of the season was actually going to be spent in that third universe. This might be super controversial, but we were going to introduce a trio of male Charmed Ones in that universe. These these were not going to be great dudes. They're kind of bros and you would learn through this that there's a reason that women have this power in these other universes and why there's a better balance in that way. [They’d all come together to] not just save the world, but save the Tri-verse of Charmed. That was gonna be the plan for season five.”
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Hosted by TV and film critic Kristen Maldonado, Pop Culture Planet is a video podcast featuring analytical pop culture discussions and interviews with diverse voices in the entertainment space. Watch episodes on youtube.com/kaymaldo or listen on your favorite podcast platforms, from Spotify to Apple Podcasts and beyond.
