Witches of East End casts entertaining spell
Witches of East End is a romp, a lighthearted soap about high-society debutantes behaving badly and resorting to magic spells when things don’t break their way. Think of it as the anti-Walking Dead, an estrogen-driven supernatural fantasy (very) loosely based on Melissa de la Cruz’s brisk-selling novel of female empowerment and metaphysical hijinks.
Witches scared up solid if not spectacular ratings when it bowed earlier this month on the Lifetime specialty channel, in Canada and the U.S. It performed well enough that it’s here to stay for a while.
Julia Ormond plays Joanna Beauchamp, a practitioner of the dark arts. She has two daughters, Ingrid, played by Rachel Boston, and Freya, played by Jenna DewanTatum. In a departure from the book, Ingrid and Freya are unaware of their powers, even though Freya is given to bad dreams and convinced she can read auras. Freya is engaged to the local rich boy; unknown to her, he comes from a long line of she-devils and brooding losers.
Joanna is immortal, but her daughters are not. This will prove most inconvenient.
Freya and Ingrid’s Aunt Wendy, played by Mädchen Amick — Twin Peaks devotees will recognize Amick in a heartbeat — is a shape-shifter who spends much of her waking hours as a black cat.
The repartee is tart and brisk throughout. The dialogue has an irreverent, sassy vibe to it — “Well I died this morning, so I’m sorry if my hair isn’t perfect” — and the worse the women in Witches behave, the more fun the show gets. (Sunday, 10 p.m., Lifetime)
When Doctor Who first appeared out of a foggy London night in November 1963, no one knew what to make of the low-budget, serialized science-fiction drama about a citizen of the universe “and a gentleman to boot,” who travels through time, solving existential problems.
As David Tennant explained in last week’s première episode of the 50th anniversary commemoration series Doctor Who Revisited, the original Doctor was played by then-59-year-old stage actor William Hartnell as “prickly, crusty, grumpy.” Hartnell’s Doctor was not at all the playful, carefree Doctor of later incarnations like Tom Baker, Christopher Eccleston and Tennant himself.
When Scottish actor-director Peter Capaldi takes over the role in 2014, he will be the 12th Doctor. Capaldi will be in the hands of Doctor Who’s present-day showrunner Steven Moffat, who’s playful by nature. Moffat wrote some of Doctor Who’s liveliest scripts during the Tennant years, from 2005-10, and ran Doctor Who during Matt Smith’s tenure. Smith is still the Doctor of record, but will officially step down in the as-yet-untitled 2013 Christmas special.
Doctor Who Revisited will air for the next several weeks. Each three-hour episode focuses on a specific Doctor — Saturday’s second episode focuses on Patrick Troughton, with anecdotes from Tennant, Moffat and many of the surviving performers who acted with the Doctor in question, followed by an uncut, fulllength repeat of what Moffat and the others consider to be that Doctor’s most representative episode. (Saturday, 9 p.m., Space)