THE CHARMED ONE: THOUGHTS ON THE DEATH OF SHANNEN DOHERTY

Have you ever felt like a phone call that's been disconnected?

I never met Shannen Doherty. I never worked, to my knowledge or remembrance, on any project in which she was even tangentially involved. A great deal of what I remember about her is from gossip magazines and entertinment news shows of the 90s, who frequently crafted hit pieces based on secondhand information and spiteful rumor. In recent years -- the last ten, it seems -- she was on my personal radar because of her fight with cancer, and her ongoing and seemingly never-dying feud with Alyssa Milano. And now she is gone, a victim of the cancer she battled relentlessly up until the day it killed her. That is not a great deal to go on by itself, but there is, of course, more. There is always more.

I arrived at college in 1990, which coincidentally was the same year BEVERLY HILLS, 90210 debuted on Fox. I had "encountered" Shannen before, as a child actress on various programs I'd seen, but I doubt I had even a faint remembrance of her. Playing Brenda Walsh, the tempestuous other half of the Walsh twins, Doherty made immediate waves with the show's fast-growing audience, but she was a polarizing figure on the show. Was she hot or just weird-looking? Was she a likeable fish out of water or a mere social climber? Was she sympathetic or something of an antagonist? This was the sort of thing fans, and people like myself, who pretended not to be a fan but watched it anyway, would argue about, sometimes almost seriously. In regards to Shannen the human being, however, Shannen the actress, there was little debate: she was the quintessential Hollywood Bad Girl, the spoiled child actress semi-grown up to be a full-blown set siva, bitch, and monster. When she finally left 90210 after four seasons, it seemed to be one of those situations which walked the line between "I quit!" and "you're fired!" Shannen was the girl everyone loved to hate -- in part, I think, because of the complicated, paraodoxical relationship Americans in particular have with celebrity. We seem to both want and need celebrities, and were are often as entertained by their off-screen doings as whatever they bring to the television or theater or stage, but at the same time we love to hate them, and to pass judgment on their lifestyles. There is a good deal of envy at the core of this, but that is not important, anymore than it is important whether everything that was said about Shannen was true or none of it. What I myself know after almost thirteen years grinding in Tinseltown is that nobody, and I mean nobody, who isn't actually there on set will ever truly the know the story. TV shows, like films, are hermetically sealed communities in which very little escapes which is not intended to escape: the code of silence practiced by the ordinary crew member is far more rigidly observed than the Mafia's omerta: he will talk shop with fellow crew, or with relations with no connections whatever to the industry, but never to celebrity gossip rags whatever they choose to call themselves. Hell, when I was working there (2007 - 2020), it was taken as an article of faith that if you'd worked for TMZ, even as a 23 year-old production assistant, you were unhirable in any other field: nobody wanted a rat on set.

But at the time I believed all of it, every bad word. I believed it because I wanted to believe it, because I'm no different than anyone else -- rather, I wasn't then, before my own time in the industry -- and had fun mocking the bad behavior of the young starlet.

The next time Doherty came on my personal radar was when she was cast as Prue Halliwell on CHARMED, another Aaron Spelling show, and one which turned out to be one of the unexpected hits of 1998. Doherty had "reconciled" with Spelling sufficiently to head up this new series about three sisters who discover they have inherited magical powers, but this time her run was even shorter than on 90210 -- a mere three of CHARMED's eight seasons. Having directed the cliffhanger season finale herself, Doherty and her beau were on vacation -- in Canada I believe -- when they got the news she'd been unceremoniously fired for "bad behavior." Although I didn't watch CHARMED at the time it was on the air, I had to laugh at history repeating itself. I believed every word of the gossip rolling out of the online magazines, and simply accepted that it was her jealousy of the popularity of her co-star, Alyssa Milano, which had short-circuited this precious second career chance. Divas gonna diva, after all.

It was quite a few years later that friends of mine from the industry let me in on the fact that Doherty's departure from CHARMED was in many ways a raw deal, a sort of cold-blooded assassination carried out by the producers to appease Milano, "who wanted to move up one place on the call sheet" and thus disposed of the series' titular star rather than face a lawsuit. As I said above, nobody who wasn't there will ever know the whole story, but I've heard enough from "knowledgeable sources" to believe that as guilty as Doherty had been on 90210, which was largely but not entirely, was how innocent she'd been here. The fact the entirety of the cast ultimately and publicly sided with her over Milano is sufficient proof for me to believe this is substantially true, and that she was a wronged woman.

Why does any of this matter? As the cliche goes, it's complicated. Doherty was a staple of the 90s. Between 90210, MALLRATS, HEATHERS and CHARMED it seemed you couldn't escape her for good or ill, and then -- bang. It was over. A lot of actors get fired off shows and return after a period of career purgatory, or what my friend Mark calls "film jail," but almost nobody gets a third bite at the apple. Doherty's career never recovered. She became more famous for her feuds than she was for her work. And this is why it matters.

90210 is something of a sentimental favorite for my generation, a teen soap opera which was somewhat ridiculous even when it was on the air, but possessed an undeniable charisma and the kind of strutting self-confidence you sometimes see if free spirits who don't give a damn, or a fuck for that matter, what you think of them because they know they're cool. (Hell, I freely admit I had Brandon Walsh hair and sideburns for several years.) But CHARMED, whatever you think of the series (and maybe you've only seen half of one episode because it was on the television in front of the only available treadmill at the gym), was something a hell of a lot more important to millions of girls and young women. Like BUFFY, it was not only an inspiration, providing not one but three role models, each of which appealed to a different sort of viewer, it also tackled a lot of the real-world issues that young women encountered in everyday life. CHARMED was about sometimes painful family dynamics; it was about work-life balance; it was about loneliness, lust, love and sex; it was about fashion; it was about music; it was about job hunts and aggravating co-workers and workplace dating and hangovers and rivalry and stealing your sister's clothing and makeup and how the hell do we pay the gas bill and are we going to die alone? It was, in short, about everything the twentysomething female was dealing with in the late 90s, the difference between that time and now being that the women of CHARMED were depicted as being liberated but also suffering the price of liberation, and trying to decide whether the strong-and-independent-girlboss or the traditional marriage w/kids life was the way to go, which is something you would never see on television now. In short, despite its fantastical premise, tongue-in-cheek delivery and often quite deliberate silliness, CHARMED actually had something to say about real life: it was relatable -- moreso on this in a moment. And if I had a penny for every woman I'd met who gushed over the memory of the series, I'd have as much money as Musk. But never mind Gen X and Millennials: there are young women I know who were barely alive if even born when the show debuted who binge-watch it regularly. And Shannen Doherty was at the center of that. She played the big sister Prue with a combination of bossiness, bitchiness, tenderness, and humor: she, the matriarch by default, had to be as much a mom as a sis and sometimes resented it, just as her sisters, played by Holly Marie Combs and Milano, sometimes resented her. The frictive nature of the relationship lent it a lot of credence.

But I mentioned relatability, and this is another thing CHARMED had in common with BUFFY and so many other superhero stories going back to Spider Man and before: the superpowers of the ladies in question did not make their personal and professional lives easier. It made them harder. It stress-tested and often destroyed their romantic relationships and cost them jobs and time and money and worry -- plenty of worry. It burdened them with the weight of a double life, and sometimes it threatened to end that life. And to circle back to Doherty directly, this paradox, this powerlessness by virtue of power, applied to Shannen herself. She was a child actor: you can find her on LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRARIE and T.J. HOOKER. She did not have what we call "a normal life." When she became a star she did not know how to cope with the superpower of celebrity and it played out in fights in makeup trailers, in nightclub brawls, in impulse marriages, in accusations and arguments and rumors and gossip, much of which was founded. She didn't even want to do CHARMED when the opportunity arose -- a TV show about witches? Come on. But it worked. Improbably perhaps, but that is the nature of magic.

Doherty struggled mightily in her post-CHARMED career. Her rhetorical remark, "Do you ever feel like a phone call that's been disconnected?" is probably the saddest and yet at the same time the most illuminating comment anyone has ever made about what it's like to be cut off in mid-career as if by an executioner's axe. Nor would she accept Milano's alleged attempts to gaslight what had occurred, replying to the charge that was merely set drama with the cry "what you call drama I call trauma." And I use the word "cry" specifically and not for dramatic effect: Doherty was obviously devastated by what had happened, by the consequences to her career and life, and being Doherty, wasn't inclined to be terribly quiet or polite about it. The extent to which she ultimately accepted her share of responsibility for her troubles, whatever that share might have been, is to some extent documented on her podcast, LET'S BE CLEAR, but the rest of it was known only to herself and her intimates. As I said above, at the core of all Hollywood feuds is a secret, and that secret is both open and remarkably well kept.

When I heard the news of Doherty's death, I was as they say "shocked but not surprised." I subscribed to her podcast, and she had released new material as recently as a week before her demise. Of course I knew she had supposedly incurable cancer, but nothing is incurable until it actually kills you, and she had lived with the disease so long that I regarded almost in the way I regard Magic Johnson's HIV+ status: a mere factor in a complicated life, and not one that required much commentary, or even thought. But now she's gone, and I find myself grieving almost as if I had worked with her or known her socially. Of course I know why, and so do you: pure selfishness. She was one of the pop-culture stars of the 1990s: in a way she encapsulated the decade. From her debut as Brenda in 1990 to her exit as Prue in 2001, her hair, her clothing, the way she carried herself on screen, the slang she dropped, all of it was the description of an arc: the twentysomethings. And like Doherty herself, the twentysomethings are now fiftysomethings, if only barely, and feeling dismay that they -- like the surviving cast of CHARMED -- no longer resemble their twentysomething selves. Hairlines have receded. Skin has wrinkled. Muscles have softened. The scars of living show plainly on faces and bodies. The styles, the fashions, the technology and the music of that time, as much as we all might still love it and cherish its collective memory, now feels definitely and unmistakably dated, part of another time, another era, the pre-9/11 world which everyone who was privileged to experience misses like all hell whether they admit it or no. To lose Shannen is to lose an icon, a piece of ourselves, our past, our collective history. It is to stare mortality in the face. It's a body blow, a gut shot, a kick to the balls. It hurts in a raw sort of way. A cruel way.

And yet the magic around her remains and perhaps strengthens in death. It casts a glow every time she shoots that look over a bare shoulder, or flashes that impossibly perfect smile, or deliberately evokes that smoky, flirty tone she was capable of summoning and dismissing at will. I honestly don't know how I'd rate Shannen as an actress, but as a presence, a charismatic force, a self-conscious icon of a time and a place and mood and a theme, she gets supernatural marks indeed. And is that not the nature of charm?