No matter how long a show has been off the air, it seems like there’s always new drama to uncover from behind the scenes.
Charmed follows a trio of sisters and witches, known as The Charmed Ones, who use their combined “Power of Three” to protect innocent lives from evil beings such as demons and warlocks.
The show premiered on The WB on October 7, 1998 and immediately drew a cult following.
In its very first episode, “Something Wicca This Way Comes,” the show garnered a whopping 7.7 million viewers, breaking the record for the network’s highest-rated debut episode.
For its first three seasons in the Wednesday/Thursday 9:00 pm time slot, Charmed was the second-highest rated series on The WB, right behind 7th Heaven.
At 178 episodes, Charmed was the second-longest drama broadcast by The WB.
In 2006, it became the longest running hour-long television series featuring all female leads, only being surpassed by Desperate Housewives in 2012.
Now, more than a decade later, it has been revealed that there was some drama on set between those female leads.
In an interview on her Charmed co-star Shannen Doherty’s podcast Let’s Be Clear, Holly Marie Combs claimed that Alyssa Milano had Doherty fired from the series after its third season.
While revealing this bombshell about her former co-star, Combs recalled a conversation she had with producer Jonathan Levin.
“He said, you know, ‘We’re basically in a position where it’s one or the other,” the actress recalled. “We were told [by Alyssa] that it’s [Shannen] or me and Alyssa has threatened to sue us for a hostile workplace environment.”
“Which because she went to the therapist or the mediator or the corporate mediator, whatever the heck his title is, she built a case for herself where she was documenting every time she felt uncomfortable on set and for whatever reason, whereas you and I refused to speak to him,” she explained. “So that’s where the deck was stacked.”
Doherty said that this conversation was happening because she wanted to clarify the narrative around her exit from the show.
“I don’t think that there’s anybody in their right mind that would quit a hit show that’s paying them a good amount of money that they actually really enjoy working on, which was my deal,” Shannen said.
“Like I enjoyed it,” she said. “I remember [my representatives] looking at me at the time and said, ‘no, no, no, your career won’t survive another firing. So we’re just going to say that you chose to leave.’”
“And remember I started laughing, going, ‘Who is going to believe that I’m crazy enough to leave a hit show?’” Doherty recalled.
Even after discussing the fact that Milano allegedly got her fired, Doherty struggled to recall any source of tension that would have irritated her co-star.
“I lived a year after that, sort of replaying everything in my brain and really like trying to find those moments,” she explained.
“I couldn’t find them,” Shannen insisted. “We never had it out, not privately or publicly.”
On a previous episode of the same podcast, the former co-stars recalled how Milano and her mother attempted to split them up on the Charmed set.
“It was really interesting of [her] trying to pull you away from me,” Doherty said to Combs.
Their efforts to keep the pair away from one another allegedly went so far that they tried to prevent Doherty from seeing Combs in the hospital after she had surgery.
“Alyssa and her mom were blocking people from seeing you and at the time you didn’t know,” she explained.
“I remember you texted me, ‘Dude, are you going to come and see me?’” Shannen recalled of Holly.
As for Milano, she has said recently that she made amends with her former co-stars.
In an interview with Entertainment Tonight in 2021, Milano acknowledged how her competitive natured affected relationships with her castmates.
“You know, I could take responsibility for a lot of our tension that we had,” Alyssa admitted at the time.
“I think a lot of our struggle came from feeling that I was in competition rather than it being that sisterhood that the show was so much about,” she continued.
Milano also admitted that she has “some guilt about my part” in the on-set drama.