Salem - tune in for the TV fantasy

Shane West, as John Alden, is embroiled in the witch-hunt frenzy.

Just as you were about to give up on witches, in come some scheming, dark, violent types to restore their good name, writes Rebecca Barry Hill.

After the horrid Charmed and the hammy Coven series of American Horror Story, I'd all but given up on TV witches. But Salem (Wednesdays, The Zone, 9.30pm) brings new meaning to the phrase "toil and trouble". It's dark, creepy and violent. Wildly fantastical yet strangely wise. There are hogs and frogs, sexy Sabbaths and priests with prostitutes. There are merciless Puritans, god-fearing innocents and a poor possessed girl who gets walked down the street like a crazed dog.

Best of all, these witches have a decent motivation for their scheming and cauldron bubbling beyond the simple notion of power: revenge.

Brannon Braga (24, the Star Trek remakes) and Adam Simon have taken the traditional story of the Salem witch trials and turned it on its head, asking: What if there really were witches in 17th-century Massachusetts and what if they had a reason to inflict evil on the world?

In the busy pilot episode we meet Mary, (British actor Janet Montgomery) who discovers she is pregnant to her lover John Alden (Shane West) and must do the unthinkable to avoid capital punishment. When John returns from war seven years later, Mary is married to the richest man in Salem. She's also, unbeknown to him, dabbling with black magic. Her marriage is all part of a grand scheme to pay back those dastardly Puritans with the help of witchypoo friend Tituba.

The world in which this occurs is beautiful but menacing, and the devil is in the details. It's hard to shake some of the more creative images: Mary's "feeding time", whereby she basically uses her hubby to make her own foie gras, the strange oil slick masses writhing in the flames, a go-go-gadget fingernail piercing a white dove, exploding into a bloody mess. Worst of all, that poor girl Mercy, who shows the extent of her suffering by chowing down on her own finger.

Salem pushes the boundaries but never at the expense of narrative. The characters are just as intriguing, calling to mind the more devious minds of Game of Thrones. And although the acting is often more outrageous than the plot, (West may look a lot like Justified's Timothy Olyphant but that's where the similarities end), Salem has successfully clawed witches back, fingernail by fingernail, from the cartoonish cliche.

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