The last few weeks have been filled with background noise and visuals provided by Charmed, a TV show about three witch sisters saving the innocent, fighting evil and banishing demons. But the drama is entirely centred around a much larger, existential problem. Why is it so hard to date as a young, conventionally attractive, middle class, white women in the late nineties?! There’s an obvious answer to this that the show never confronts, the sisters are straight and live in San Francisco. Their cavalcade of bland hunks must keep getting better offers from the unfairer sex.

That said, for Charmed, San Fran is little more than a printed backdrop, and the show conspicuously lacks any LGBT content or characters. It’s the location, but it’s not really the setting. Charmed could take place in any US city, somewhat to its detriment. Echoing it’s pre-Lost monster of the week structure, where it doggedly resets the status quo within the last 10 mins of each episode. It’s also a massive fan of the mid season finale, this leaves you never further than 10 or so episodes from a massive reveal, an epic battle and fate of the entire world balancing on the edge of a broom stick. Then alas, the reset cometh and no consequences are left lasting. This can leave it feeling inconsequential and ungrounded. It’s hard to care for the people they can’t save, they don’t exist in a defined place and the shows odd theology insists it was their destiny anyway. A demon that will explode or destroy a city block doesn’t feel like a real threat to set-fran-cisco. The sisters run a club, which is a perfect choice for the city, but it’s presented in such a flat way. In a city full of pride, it’s a place with no decor or soul. Perhaps being the cities token straight club explains this.

TV shows often have this problem, sitting on top of their location, not inside it. I think it’s an attempt to make the story feel close to home, or a holdover from a pilot episode written with a flexible home base. But everyone lives somewhere, everyone interacts with their home cities and communities. So I often feel displaced by these alternative realities, ones sanitised by executives and production concerns. The best TV takes place somewhere, rather than pretending to. So many shows and movies embrace San Francisco too, characters in Monk and Tales of the City ride the cable cars, they interact with the city. Living and learning in it, not against it. Even Mythbusters made a character of its San Francisco location.

There is one sea change in Charmed, a finale with actual consequence. At the end of season 3, Prue, the sister who the show had really focused on, forced into the lead, dies. In this magical world where people joke about how many times they’ve faced the great beyond and come back. She just dies and is really gone and never comes back. The ‘power of three’ a nebulous all important magic that ties the sisters together is broken. Nothing can ever be the same again, yet we’re only 3 out of 8 seasons in.

Then season 4 begins and the writers go about completely undermining this in every way possible, remaking the status quo from whole cloth. Because it’s actual simple, there’s a secret 4th sister. There always has been and no one knew, a backup sibling in narrative cryo. This new sister, Paige, steps out of her life and tag teams into a magical one. She moves into the magical house with her new found sisters. The power of three is reborn, the status quo rebuilt and another midseason finale, another world ending crisis, is just 10 episodes away. Because it wasn’t a change the show wanted, an actor left to new pastures and the show must go on. So it healed around the wound. Nothing can ever change, even when it has too.