Even the most dedicated fans of long-running supernatural soap Charmed would be hard-pressed to argue that it was more than an indulgent guilty pleasure. While Buffy the Vampire Slayer was pushing the boundaries of genre television, Charmed was re-treading the path of countless soaps and witchy dramas before it and doing so inconsistently as it aged. It also somehow managed to continue to dress its leads in unidentifiable nineties fashion well into the twenty-first century. Fortunately for Charmed, almost everybody who guest-starred on the series was self-aware enough to ham it up enormously, particularly if theyd landed a role as a villain. Billy Drago, who played the recurring character Barbas, the Demon of Fear, was particularly committed to his role, but then an understated performance would have been lost on such gems as, Ill be back! Fear always comes back! Even Julian McMahon managed to get some mileage out of perpetually miserable half-demon Cole Turner, who attempted to thwart his immortality with the help of a guillotine. It turns out that Charmed could be kind of funny, and occasionally even when it wanted to be.
