Nerding Day: BratTV Charmers Sponsored by Starburst 🌭

Now that we’re all aware of Chicken Girls The College Years: Sponsored By Takis, I think it’s time to wade you into Brat TV’s less chicken flavored offerings. Three years ago, an executive at BratTV, who was probably a fourteen-year-old former Vine star now far past his prime, saw the show Charmed, a vehicle for witches to be horny, and thought this would make a great show for kids! They barely even needed to change the name. They just called it Charmers because legal said Li’l Charmed, like Li’l Archie, was absolutely off the table. It’s not Charmed, it’s just another entry into the four women holding glowing orbs genre. It’s Orbcore!

Even though Charmers debuted twenty-three years after Charmed, its special effects are about what you’d expect from a ’90s show. This show seems very affordable. It takes place at a summer camp, so the costume budget went to a box of t-shirts, each teen getting their own color like Power Rangers, only by personality instead of race.

Charmers also saved on set design because they shot the child actors at an actual abandoned murder shed.

The rusty shack budget for season one of Charmers was paid for by Starbursts and they should have been swimming in nightmare shacks with the way these children pushed Starbursts. Every heartwarming moment of the show was mumbled through an enormous wad of original flavor or limited time all-pink Starburst brand fruit chews. It’s basically the only food the children on this show consume. This summer camp is exclusively feeding these kids Starburts. It’s possible they’re not really fighting demons; they are all going mad from malnutrition and diabetes.

The plot of Charmers is that these sugared up children are witches, sometimes. They only have the budget for occasional witchery, so a lot of the show is about explaining why they don’t have magic right now, or why their magic isn’t working for some reason. The four main characters are the inhabitants of Bunk 15 at the not-at-all-ominously named Camp Whispering Sky: Senna, the powerful one, Colver, the nerd one; Flori, the hippy one; and Zaria, the goth one. Senna arrives at camp with telepathy, and the other girls say that she is a “natural witch,” but after episode one, this telepathy disappears, and Senna’s power is revealed to be a magic shield in season two when the girls all get their individual powers. Telepathy would be very helpful to these kids multiple times, but sadly, the sugar amnesia wiped it away. Damn, you, Starbursts.

Instead of battling an expensive new demon every episode, they battle one demon per season, starting with an evil witch/demon who crawls out of a wardrobe set up in the nightmare shack. This demon is the reason for the show’s best line: “Wait, the demon, it’s heading straight for the talent show!” The girls dashed to rescue the demon from half hearted teenage dance routines, but they were too late.

The girls manage to vanquish the demon because, for that episode, they have demon-vanquishing powers, which are later forgotten about. The banishing only sends the demon back to the nightmare shed, though; it’s a light banishing. She can send a new demon through the wardrobe that possesses the campers, and the campers it possesses still love Starbursts! Sorry I haven’t mentioned Starburst in a while. You should know that they are still very present in the story and even demons love them!

I don’t think Starburst considered how demon-possessed children would meld with this product. In fact, the whole tone of the show is pretty all over the place. They couldn’t decide how high the stakes should be for the teen witches, so sometimes it was, “Wait, the demon, it’s heading straight for the talent show!” and sometimes it was, “The demons are trying to open a portal to Hell and destroy the earth.” They never officially say Hell, though. The demons are trying to open a portal to…wherever the demons come from. It could be a Pottery Barn.

You could tell in season one there was a complaint, probably from Starburst corporate, that it’s a little weird and extra scary to have children fighting full-grown adult women. So, in season 2, they made the main villain a child with a permanently bloody mouth who unhinges her jaw and vomits bats. Sooooo much more comforting than dub step Daenerys Targaryen.

They also have one of the children get physically injured for the first time in season two during a tragic capture-the-flag explosion. It’s so artistically done. The camera lingers on his bruised hand, still clutching the flag, as if it’s a commentary on man’s incessant need to conquer. If only he hadn’t captured that flag, he might still be alive!

To further lighten up season two, Charmers also added two older camp counselors to the cast, John and Jean. I thought Jean had the fakest French accent I’ve ever heard, but I looked him up, and it turns out he’s actually a famous French TikToker with 13.8 million followers who, at the time of filming, was married to the actor who played John in real life. They announced their divorce shortly after Charmers season two premiered, blaming the pressure of social media stardom for ending their relationship. You guys, I think Charmers ended that marriage.

The addition of the older camp counselors made the children’s demon-slaying seem more supervised. Maybe there wasn’t someone they could go to and say, “Help, there’s a portal to some unspecified place that’s spitting out demons everywhere!” but they could at least say, “Jean, this 29-year-old woman has wandered into camp,” and there would be some help available.

Like The Chicken Girls The College Years, Charmers is presented in ten-minute increments, but they fit a lot more plot into those ten minutes and the cast is more expansive. Each of the four main girls is given an issue to deal with over the two seasons, but once again, the tone of the issues is weird. Colver wants to be more confident, and Filori feels guilty for distracting her mother and causing a car accident that killed her brother. Some don’t have enough Starburst fruit chews. So there’s just a little bit of disparity between the issues they face.

The reason for the camp being filled to the brim with demons, Unseelie fairies, and ancient half-dragon kids making friendship bracelets along with the other campers is that Sinna’s natural witch magic is a magnet for darkness. Don’t worry, though; the girls can handle it. Remember that wardrobe in the shack in the middle of the woods that was a demon portal? They closed that right up with some loose lumber, nailed randomly in any which way. Problem solved. Demons are no match for witchcraft and Home Depot.

You would think that one of the camp’s two staff members would have some questions about the satanic wardrobe but they unequivocally do not. When the girls vanquished the talent show demon in front of everyone, they won the talent show. The general consensus was that their talent was “cool special effects,” which is also what I would say if I set a woman on fire on stage in front of an entire summer camp. The kid who got exploded during capture the flag was written off as a freak lightning strike. The sudden appearance of tons of bats from the girl’s mouth was probably sold to parents as animal husbandry and karaoke.

Charmers seems to have slowly lost its audience over the course of the series, beginning season one with 1.8 million views and ending it with 625K. It turns out that when you take away the weird horny plots and cute outfits, Charmed kind of sucks. Staring into the dark nexus brought to you by Starbursts just wasn’t the dark tone for a cool teen show the Brat TV audience was looking for. So I’ll leave you with one of the most touching quotes from the show. “You don’t need to use magic to be something you’re not. You are a pink Starburst, amazing, exactly the way you are.”

This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Timmy Leahy, who was in turn sponsored by new Wow! Only Timmy Skittles: Unlock The Tangy Chew of Timmy Leahy!