(Photo by Lucasfilm Ltd.)
The Best Witch TV Shows (And the Worst)
Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and caldron bubble.
– the Weird Sisters of Macbeth
Shakespeare’s Macbeth had a witch problem — or three. Four if you also count Hecate getting in his business. But tales of witches go back much earlier than Shakespeare’s famous tragedy from the early 1600s. Belief in witchcraft practitioners is even noted in the Old Testament and Homer’s Odyssey.
Whether they’re working for the Dark Side like the Great Mothers of Peridia from Star Wars: Ahsoka, are well-meaning witches like WandaVision’s Scarlet Witch, or are completely new to the whole incantation thing like Rowan in Mayfair Witches, witches and warlocks can add an intriguing dimension to a story. Anything seems possible with magic — or “magick” if you prefer — even the possible triumph of the minions of the dark, which is what makes witches so scary.
We’ve gathered TV and streaming series where conjuration, spells, and potions take center stage and ranked them by Tomatometer. The selection also includes a few teen witches, the Charmed sisters (twice over), and even nose-twitching suburban housewives.
Not every show on this list is specifically about witches, but they all contain major characters who would be suspect in 17th century Salem, Massachusetts. The list of supporting-character witches includes the powerful wife of time-traveling Ichabod Crane in Sleepy Hollow, Red Priestess Melisandre in Game of Thrones, and Nightcomer leader Evelyn Poole on Penny Dreadful. Nor is this list gender-specific, as it also includes the titular warlock in Constantine. And yeah, The Vampire Diaries was mainly about blood-sucking supernatural creatures, but witches played a major role on that series (and an even bigger one on spinoff, The Originals).
Before you curse us, note that this isn’t a ranking of the witches themselves, but rather a ranking of the series on which they appear by their series-level Tomatometer score. Below the scored series, shows without Tomatometer scores are listed by Audience Score (denoted by “A” and its rank; see Audience Scores on the series’ pages), then those without any scores are listed alphabetically.
100%
70%
100%
82%
100%
94%
99%
95%
93%
73%
94%
91%
92%
88%
91%
74%
91%
90%
89%
90%
89%
85%
85%
64%
87%
78%
87%
75%
87%
88%
86%
73%
85%
55%
85%
93%
85%
87%
85%
76%
83%
82%
88%
76%
84%
72%
82%
72%
82%
77%
75%
46%
79%
74%
78%
78%
76%
91%
76%
80%
74%
74%
80%
81%
73%
75%
68%
73%
65%
52%
65%
85%
61%
87%
50%
- -
50%
- -
48%
79%
47%
74%
45%
82%
59%
53%
43%
57%
38%
78%
34%
50%
29%
13%
29%
51%
- -
- -
- -
93%
- -
96%
- -
91%
- -
79%
- -
82%
- -
76%
- -
69%
- -
56%
- -
66%
- -
49%
- -
53%
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
- -
