7 Fantasy Shows With Witches That Are 10/10 Masterpieces

Kathryn Hahn as Agatha Harkness throwing purple light out from her hands in Agatha All Along

Published Oct 20, 2026, 5:44 PM EDT

Jessica is a journalist, editor, TCA critic, and multimedia storyteller with a decade of experience covering pop culture, film, TV, women's sports, lifestyle, and more. She earned her degree in journalism from the University of North Carolina-Wilmington with a focus in creative writing before moving to N.Y.C. and getting her start at The Huffington Post. (She still misses those nap pods.) She's covered multiple film festivals, recapped some of your favorite series, worked too many red carpets to count, and even yapped on a podcast or two. When she’s not interviewing your favorite showrunner or ranking Ryan Gosling's best roles for places like UPROXX, Teen Vogue, Marie Claire, The Daily Beast, and Cosmopolitan, she’s busy being a full-time hype woman to her cat, Finn. You can find her on Bluesky and, sadly, Twitter.

TV fans hear "witches" and automatically picture teen melodramas and sketchy special effects. The word might even conjure broomsticks and hats and hooked noses craning over steaming cauldrons. And, to be fair, the genre has earned some of that skepticism over the years. But it's also produced some of the most ambitious fantasy television of the last three decades, and writing the whole category off means missing a lot of good TV.

These fantasy shows sit on the right side of the gap. They come from different decades and land in very different places tonally, but they all take their witchcraft seriously. The magic matters to the story and the characters, and that's what makes them worth watching front to back.

'American Horror Story: Coven' (2013–2014)

Jessica Lange as Fiona Goode in American Horror Story Coven holding a cigarette while seated

Jessica Lange, Kathy Bates, Angela Bassett, Sarah Paulson, and Emma Roberts all in a show about warring witches in New Orleans is exactly as good as it sounds. Though, it's made weirder and even more camp thanks to Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk's involvement. The third American Horror Story season aired 13 episodes on FX in 2013, and it remains the franchise's high-water mark because every member of the ensemble is fully (and loudly) committed to the bit at this point. Lange plays Fiona Goode, the reigning Supreme of a dwindling coven headquartered at Miss Robichaux's Academy, and her power struggle with Bassett's Marie Laveau, the voodoo queen of New Orleans, gives the season its central conflict.

The show piles on necromancy, immortality potions, Salem flashbacks, and a brutal succession crisis, with Murphy's signature excess fitting the material (for once). Bates plays Delphine LaLaurie, a real historical figure whose racism the show refuses to soften or sideline, and the way the season folds that ugliness into its supernatural plotting gives Coven more weight than you'd expect from a show that also features a Minotaur and a guest spot from Stevie Nicks.

'Charmed' (1998–2006)

Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, and Rose McGowan in 'Charmed'

Charmed premiered on The WB in 1998 with a simple setup: Three sisters find out they're witches and have to fight demons. The Halliwell sisters — played by Shannen Doherty, Holly Marie Combs, and Alyssa Milano — made it work for eight seasons because the show understood something other fantasy series get wrong. The demon-of-the-week plots were fun, but the family dynamics are what kept people coming back. When Doherty left after Season 3, Rose McGowan joined as long-lost half-sister Paige, and the series managed to survive a cast change that would have killed most shows.

The visual effects look dated now, and the writing wasn't aiming for prestige television. But Charmed earned its 178-episode run on the warmth between its leads and a willingness to be silly when the moment called for it. Piper (Combs) freezing a demon mid-monologue so she could get back to making dinner pretty much summed up the whole show: Magic was part of domestic life, mixed in with bad dates and sisters who wouldn't stop borrowing each other's clothes.

'The Magicians' (2015–2020)

Quentin, Alice, and Penny reading a book in 'The Magicians.'

Lev Grossman's novels asked what would happen if a depressed grad student found out that magic was real and the fantasy world of his favorite books wasn't as idyllic as he believed, and the Syfy adaptation ran with that premise for five seasons and 65 episodes. Jason Ralph plays Quentin Coldwater, who gets accepted to Brakebills University, a secret graduate school for magic, and discovers that Fillory, the enchanted land from his childhood stories, is a real place with real problems. His friend Julia (Stella Maeve) gets rejected by Brakebills and starts learning magic through underground channels that lead somewhere much darker.

Created by Sera Gamble and John McNamara, The Magicians treats depression and trauma as real forces in these characters' lives rather than backstory waiting to be fixed. Magic in this world is dangerous, and practiced mostly by people who are barely keeping it together. Hale Appleman and Summer Bishil became fan favorites as Eliot and Margo, two characters whose humor and loyalty to each other are the best thing about the later seasons. It's weird and heartbreaking, and it deserved better than what it got during its initial run.

'A Discovery of Witches' (2018–2022)

Matthew Goode and Teresa Palmer in A Discovery of Witches

Teresa Palmer and Matthew Goode make a surprisingly strong fantasy pairing in A Discovery of Witches. Palmer plays Diana Bishop, a historian and reluctant witch who stumbles onto a bewitched alchemical manuscript at Oxford's Bodleian Library. Goode is Matthew Clairmont, a centuries-old vampire biochemist with his own reasons for wanting to understand what she's found. Based on Deborah Harkness' All Souls Trilogy, the show ran for three seasons and 25 episodes on Sky One in the UK and streamed on Sundance Now and AMC+ in the U.S.

It wraps its mythology around one of the better on-screen romances in recent genre television, and the chemistry between the leads carries the show through its slower stretches. The series builds out a world where witches, vampires, and daemons coexist under a fragile political arrangement, and the tension between Diana and Matthew goes deeper than attraction, pulling on centuries of interspecies distrust. Season 2 sends them back to Elizabethan London, and the show pulls that off, mainly thanks to its gorgeous sets and sharply-edited storytelling.

Collider Exclusive · 8 Questions · 2 Minutes What Fantasy World Do You Belong To? Middle-earth · Grand Line · The Continent · Camp Half-Blood

Pick your magic, your crew, where you want to wake up and who you would rather be fighting, and we will tell you which world you actually belong in. Four are open to you: an ancient kingdom living through its last good age, an endless sea full of pirates, a continent that pays people to kill monsters, and a summer camp where the Greek gods are extremely real and mostly a nuisance.

💍Middle-earth(Rings of Power)

👒Grand Line(One Piece)

🐺The Continent(The Witcher)

🔱Camp Half-Blood(Percy Jackson)

FIND YOUR WORLD →

What kind of power do you want? Every one of these worlds runs on a completely different sort of magic.

ASomething ancient and half forgotten that came down through my family. BSomething completely ridiculous that works in a fight and gets a laugh. CNo magic at all, just training, potions and a very sharp sword. DSomething I inherited from a parent I have barely met.

NEXT QUESTION →

Who is travelling with you? Nobody gets through any of these stories entirely on their own.

AA fellowship drawn from every corner of the world who barely trust each other. BA crew I picked up one at a time, all of whom would die for me. CTwo or three people I would never describe out loud as friends. DTwo mates from school who are exactly as out of their depth as I am.

NEXT QUESTION →

Where do you want to wake up tomorrow? The best fantasy is usually just somewhere you would genuinely like to live.

AA high city of white stone with the sea somewhere far below. BA ship under sail, with an island ahead that nobody has mapped. CA rented room over a tavern, in a town I am leaving in the morning. DA cabin at a summer camp with everybody else already awake outside.

NEXT QUESTION →

How are you making a living out there? Even in fantasy somebody has to pay for the horse.

AI am not, because somebody far older than me decided this was my duty. BTreasure, and I am not always careful about whose it used to be. CI take contracts, since people will pay well for what they will not touch. DI am fifteen and this is all technically a school trip.

NEXT QUESTION →

There is something in the woods. What do you do about it? All four of these worlds keep something unpleasant out there in the dark.

ASend word to somebody who has seen this before, then hold the line. BWalk straight in, because it is interesting and possibly edible. CAsk what it has been eating and what the village is willing to pay. DWork out which myth it escaped from, then improvise very badly.

NEXT QUESTION →

Who is the villain of your story? The enemy tells you far more about a world than the hero ever does.

AAn ancient evil that has been patient for several thousand years. BA government that has spent a long time calling itself the good guys. CA man who turns out to be far worse than anything I hunt for money. DA god, or possibly my own family, and quite likely both at once.

NEXT QUESTION →

What do you actually believe in out there? Every world hands its heroes one rule and asks them to hold onto it.

ASome things are worth defending even when the odds are hopeless. BNobody gets to tell me where I can go or what I am allowed to want. CPick the lesser evil, and never pretend afterwards that it was not evil. DMy friends come before anything a prophecy has to say about it.

NEXT QUESTION →

A thousand years from now, how are you remembered? Eight questions in, this is the one that decides your world.

AIn a song, in a language hardly anybody still speaks. BAs the one who got there first and proved the whole thing was possible. CBarely, and mostly wrongly, in ballads I would absolutely hate. DOn a plaque at a camp, read by kids about to do the same thing.

REVEAL MY WORLD →

The Map Is Drawn Your World Is…

Four worlds and four completely different ideas of what a good life looks like. This is where you belong, what it would ask of you, and what you would get back in return.

Middle-earth

You belong somewhere old enough that the mountains have names and somebody can still tell you who gave them. Middle-earth is for people who think the right thing is worth doing even when it will not be finished in their lifetime.

This is the only world on the list where doing good is understood as a very long defeat, fought anyway, by people who will never see how it ends.
You are drawn to grandeur, to white cities and deep forges and the sense that almost everything you touch is older than your entire family line.
The Rings of Power is set in the last good age before it all goes wrong, which gives every quiet scene in it a slightly unbearable weight.
You would take the hard road, and you would take it on foot.

The Grand Line

You want the sea, a crew, and absolutely nobody telling you where you are allowed to go. The Grand Line is the world for people whose main ambition in life is finding out what is over there.

One Piece has run for decades on one very simple engine, which is a group of people who each want something impossible and have decided to go and get it together.
You collect people. Your ideal crew is a set of misfits who were each written off somewhere else before you turned up and offered them a better idea.
The world is enormous and deliberately ridiculous, and the emotional gut punches land harder because of that rather than in spite of it.
You would set sail knowing the map runs out, which is more or less the entire point of it.

The Continent

You would rather be feared and useful than liked and useless. The Continent is a world where the monsters are the straightforward part of the job and the people are where it all gets complicated.

Witchers get paid to do what nobody else will and resented for existing at all, which is a trade most people would refuse and you would probably accept.
You have no real illusions about which side is the good one, largely because on the Continent that question tends to have a disappointing answer.
The best of these stories are not about the fighting. They are about somebody with a rigid code being repeatedly cornered into caring about people.
You would take the coin, finish the job properly, and be out of town before the story got told wrong.

Camp Half-Blood

You want the myths to be real and loose in the actual world, and you want to find out at about thirteen that you were never anywhere near as ordinary as everybody kept telling you.

Percy Jackson takes the oldest stories we have and drops them into car parks and diners, which makes the gods considerably funnier and a great deal worse.
You would be the kid every school gave up on, who turns out to have been built for something nobody thought to test for.
The series is genuinely about friendship rather than destiny, and it says so out loud every time a prophecy tries to get in the way.
Camp Half-Blood is the real fantasy here: a place where the thing that made you difficult everywhere else is the thing that makes you belong.

↻ RETAKE THE QUIZ

'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina' (2018–2020)

Sabrina and the Weird Sisters in 'Chilling Adventures of Sabrina'

If you grew up watching Melissa Joan Hart navigate high school with a talking cat, then Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is going to be a bit of a shock. This Netflix creation is a completely different show, and it means to be. Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa's adaptation, based on the Archie Comics horror series, recast Sabrina Spellman as a half-witch, half-mortal teenager caught between two worlds that are both trying to claim her. Kiernan Shipka plays her with a stubbornness that often causes chaos for her family and friends. Her Sabrina is furious about the impossible position she's in, and she makes choices the show refuses to let her take back easily.

Miranda Otto and Lucy Davis are wonderful as Sabrina's aunts Zelda and Hilda, and the gap between Zelda's fundamentalist devotion to the Dark Lord and Hilda's softer approach to family gives the household scenes their tension. But the show goes much darker than you'd expect from something with "Sabrina" in the title. There are demonic pacts, witch tribunals, and, of course, Satan gets some screen time.

'Agatha All Along' (2024)

Kathryn Hahn stole WandaVision in 2021 as the nosy neighbor who turned out to be a centuries-old witch, and Agatha All Along gave her an entire show for her trouble. The nine-episode Disney+ miniseries picks up three years after Westview, with Agatha Harkness stripped of her powers and stuck in a life she can't quite see through. Joe Locke plays a mysterious teenager who helps her snap out of it, and together they assemble a coven to walk the Witches' Road, a mythical gauntlet that promises to return whatever each witch has lost.

Showrunner Jac Schaeffer built something that feels nothing like the rest of the MCU's television output, and that turned out to be the right call. The coven here is the best part. Aubrey Plaza and Patti LuPone alone would be enough to carry a series, but the full ensemble, including Sasheer Zamata as a potions expert and Debra Jo Rupp as a civilian neighbor pulled into the chaos, gives every trial on the Road its own energy. The show borrows from horror and musical theater without apologizing for any swings, and the tonal shifts between episodes feel deliberate rather than sloppy.

'The Wheel of Time' (2021–2025)

Rosamund Pike as Moiraine Damodred in The Wheel of Time Season 3.

Prime Video invested heavily in adapting Robert Jordan's 14-book fantasy series, and for three seasons, showrunner Rafe Judkins delivered a version of The Wheel of Time that made good on the author's ambition. Rosamund Pike stars as Moiraine, a magic-wielding warrior diplomat with a complicated political agenda, who arrives in a remote village searching for the Dragon Reborn, a prophesied figure who will either save the world or destroy it. She leaves with five young villagers, any one of whom could be the one she's looking for, and the first season builds its plot around the question of which one fate has chosen.

Amazon ended the show after three seasons on Prime Video in May 2025, which is frustrating for a series with this much scale. But what exists is worth the time. The world-building is thorough without being exhausting, and Pike gives Moiraine a gravity that keeps the show grounded when the mythology starts to sprawl. The magic system, built around gendered access to a cosmic energy source called the One Power, feeds directly into the show's questions about institutional authority and what happens when the people holding power stop answering to anyone.

'The Witcher' (2019–Present)

Geralt (Henry Cavill), Ciri (Freya Allan), and Yennefer (Anya Chalotra) in The Witcher Season 3 Episode 6

Henry Cavill lobbied hard for the role of Geralt of Rivia, and that dedication shows up on screen in Netflix's The Witcher. The series, based on Andrzej Sapkowski's novels and showrun by Lauren Schmidt Hissrich, follows Geralt, a mutant monster-hunter navigating a continent where the humans are worse than the creatures he's paid to kill. Anya Chalotra plays Yennefer of Vengerberg, a sorceress whose arc across the first three seasons is one of the show's strongest threads, and Freya Allan's Ciri, a princess on the run with a destiny she didn't ask for, rounds out the central trio.

Cavill departed after Season 3 and Liam Hemsworth stepped into the role for Season 4, which premiered in October 2025, with a fifth and final season on the way. The transition was always going to be noticeable, and it is, but the show's world and supporting cast hold up. The series works best when it leans into the political scheming and moral murkiness that made Sapkowski's source material popular. It's a grimier, more cynical strain of fantasy than most of what's streaming right now, and if you've been putting it off, here's your sign to finally jump on board.