Justin Shronk

I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately, which in turn makes me search for something on TV that is almost as good or better while on MUTE than it is with the volume on. I have found it. This show is 'Charmed'. You can follow 90% of the storyline with the dialogue on mute but with the aesthetic shapes of the likes of Alyssa Milano, Rose McGowan, and the drastically underrated Holly Marie Combs still stimulating the ocular senses. The bad guys are easily identifiable by the frequency at which they spontaneously show up unexpectedly and almost invariably can heave some kind of fire object. They also always have a cave in which they formulate a plan with a black woman who is higher in power than they are (I think it's either Oprah or Star Jones).

Here is an issue I've come up with lately with the show though. The conclusion of the show is almost always reached when the three sisters (who together have more power than any witches in history ... I think they're a 'coven' but I'm not entirely sure what that means) come together and formulate a "vanquishing spell." The spell usually does not need to be recited by all three sisters, but they always make it out to be that the spell was very difficult to formulate. Like they meet the beat at the 4 minute mark in the show, find out who it is by minute 22 and then it takes them 22 minutes to write a rhyming couplet that my sister could have done when she was five (I would have obv. been able to do it at age four). The spell is usually something like "Being of wolfness, being of night, banish from our lives, go out of sight." - in other words, it's not fucking Keats.

My question is this - shouldn't the Charmed witches just learn how to be really good at freestyling and save themselves the chance of dying and save us 44 minutes (not that I necessarily want to look at Alyssa Milano for any fewer minutes). Also, whoever the powers that be that named these three girls, whose only huge weapon against the highest evil beings is a duo of rhyming couplets - wouldn't they have been better off going with some people who didn't take 44 minutes to write two rhyming sentences?? Like maybe Jay-Z, Nas, and ... well, I'm biased but I think Alyssa Milano has to be in there somewhere, but that's just for us guys that watch it on MUTE while listening to the Mike & Mike podcast.