No Fantasy Show Does Magic Systems Like The 3-Season Witch Series With A Near-Perfect RT Score

Published Aug 18, 2026, 12:30 PM EDT

Arielle Port started as a TV producer, developing content for Netflix (Firefly Lane, Brazen) and Hallmark (The Santa Stakeout, A Christmas Treasure) before transitioning into entertainment journalism. Her love of story went from interest to lifelong passion while at The University of Pennsylvania, where she fell in with a student-run web series, Classless TV, and it was a gateway drug. Arielle Port has been a Writer for Screen Rant since August 2024. She lives in Los Angeles with her boyfriend and more importantly, her cat, Boseman.

The biggest fantasy TV shows tend to get so much of the spotlight in the genre that smaller, more inventive series can easily get lost in their shadow. TV giants like Stranger Things or Game of Thrones become cultural phenomena that define fantasy television for years at a time.

However, smaller, original, underrated fantasy TV shows can be just as immersive and magical. Despite its distinctive visual style, Pushing Daisies remains an underseen fantasy series that never found an audience large enough to match its creativity or quality. Galavant was an equally inventive, underappreciated fantasy show, turning a traditional medieval adventure into a wildly self-aware musical comedy.

From Disney's Freeform, Motherland: Fort Salem belongs in the same conversation, with one of the most original fantasy premises and richly imagined worlds of the past decade. It’s an incredible alternate history show based on the hook that magic is real, and the Salem witches became America’s army, based in Fort Salem.

Motherland: Fort Salem’s magic is unlike any other depiction, rooting witchcraft in an inherited female lineage and the human voice, with witches using precise sounds together to perform increasingly powerful Work. Fort Salem feels like a more mature, female-only Hogwarts, where young witches train together to master their abilities for combat.

Motherland: Fort Salem Makes Magic About Sound & Sisterhood

Image via MovieStillsDB

There are no wands or traditional wandwork in Motherland: Fort Salem, unlike many of the best magic systems in fantasy TV shows, because witches' bodies are effectively their magical instruments. Magic in Motherland: Fort Salem is rooted in the human voice. Witches manipulate the world using specific vocal frequencies called Seeds, combining them in different ways to perform Work.

Their voices produce Work directly, although they sometimes use specialized tools alongside their abilities, from objects used for scrying and detecting magical residue to the whip-like Scourges they wield in physical combat. Witches can also combine their voices, allowing a group working together to accomplish things that would be impossible alone.

However, witches have special gifts, as the three girls of the Bellweather unit demonstrate. Raelle is an unusually skilled healer, or Fixer, who can take another person's injury or illness into her own body, while Tally is a powerful Knower whose heightened perception allows her to see and sense things that others cannot. Abigail is a Blaster, gifted at Weatherwork.

Motherland: Fort Salem Characters & Magical Abilities
Character	Actor	Specialty
Raelle Collar Image via MovieStillsDB	Taylor Hickson	Fixer (healing)
Tally Craven Image via MovieStillsDB	Jessica Sutton	Knowner (heightened perception and ability to perceive Work)
Abigail Bellweather Image via MovieStillsDB	Ashley Nicole Williams	Blaster (Weatherwork)
Scylla Ramshorn Image via MovieStillsDB	Amalia Holm	Necro (death-work)

Magic is also inherited, making ancestry an important part of both witch culture and the military. Witch bloodlines are traced through women, and Abigail Bellweather comes from one of the country's most prestigious military families, with a history stretching back to the American Revolution.

Male witches exist and can perform Work, but women possess most of the military and institutional power, creating a fascinating reversal of traditional gender dynamics. This makes witchcraft inseparable from the characters' voices, bodies, ancestry, and relationships.

Even the emphasis on witches working together reinforces the show's larger ideas about sisterhood. The show's magic becomes more powerful when voices join together, making collaboration between women a literal source of strength, putting Motherland: Fort Salem up there with TV's best female friendships.

Motherland: Fort Salem Season 1 Is A Perfect Binge

Image via MovieStillsDB.com

Motherland: Fort Salem season 1 is a perfect binge, with just 10 addictive episodes that throw viewers into its complicated alternate history without getting bogged down in exposition. The world unfolds through Raelle, Tally, and Abigail as they arrive at Fort Salem and learn how to use magic in combat while gradually questioning the military system they have entered.

The academy gives the season a strong structure, with each stage of the Bellweather Unit's training introducing another aspect of witch culture, history, and magic. At the same time, Raelle, Tally, and Abigail are coming of age, forming complicated relationships, and figuring out what kind of witches and soldiers they want to become.

Motherland: Fort Salem is also visually distinctive, finding beautiful and sometimes surreal ways to depict magic. Raelle's first kiss literally sends them floating off the ground, turning the familiar feeling of being swept away by a first romance into an ethereal magical image.

Moments like this make magic feel woven into the characters' emotional lives rather than limited to training and battle. Each new piece of mythology is therefore connected to the characters rather than introduced simply to expand the world, although larger lore is hinted at even from the beginning.

Seasons 2 and 3 greatly expand Motherland: Fort Salem's mythology, exploring more of its alternate America, the history of witchkind, and increasingly ambitious forms of magic, making Motherland more Agatha All Along and less Harry Potter. However, that larger scope sometimes sacrifices season 1's tighter structure and character focus.

Though once available on Disney+, Motherland: Fort Salem is not currently streaming anywhere. However, episodes or seasons are available to buy on YouTube, Apple TV, or Prime Video.

Fort Salem itself gives the first season a natural framework for discovering this strange world alongside its three protagonists, making those initial 10 episodes remarkably easy to fall into and difficult to stop watching. Motherland: Fort Salem is truly an underrated gem for fans of fantasy television.