YMMV / Just Add Magic

• Adaptation Displacement: You'd be hard pressed to find anyone who remembers the book it was based on.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: The "in-betweeners". While it's clear that the three of them weren't exactly the best protectors, and occasionally used the cookbook's magic for self-gain, were they really completely selfish, or did they have hidden hearts of gold that the audience just doesn't know about? One factor that supports the latter theory is that, the flashbacks with the three protectors where told from Arthur Morris' perspective, and from his side of the story. Keep in mind that Arthur wasn't an official protector, rather, he was close companion of theirs, and if the protectors had a mystery to solve outside of school, Arthur more than likely wouldn't have been involved, or even known about it. On top of that, considering the three protectors were worthy of the magic spice garden — which requires all three protectors to pass a Secret Test of Character — this means the in-betweeners had to have had some goodness in them.
• Awesome Music: "Magic" by Pilot used to intro the girls' trip to 1975 in "Just Add Time Travel." A bit on the nose, maybe, but still awesome.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Terri and Scott Quinn for being Good Parents to Kelly and Buddy, and avoiding common stereotypes with parents typically seen on kids shows. They actually have personalities, are portrayed realistically, and have their own storylines. Scott in particular is shown to be a fan of vinyl records and oldies music, and Terri gets a subplot in Season 2 (both parts) that involved her running for mayor.
  • Buddy Quinn gets this for being a Jerk with a Heart of Gold, plus ever since Kelly found the cookbook, she hasn't been spending as much time with Buddy as she used to.
  • Charlotte has a reasonable despite being a minor character, mainly because she's shown to break several Alpha Bitch stereotypes, and can actually be a decent ally/companion to the girls once they get to know her.
  • Trudith Winters is a fan favorite for essentially being a J. K. Rowling or a Suzanne Collins {Expy}}.
• Evil Is Cool:
  • Mama P has a lot of fans for being a wise, experienced mage, who's got access to nearly every kind of magic spice over her many years of study. Plus she's very charismatic with how she can charm nearly anyone on a whim. Even when she semi-reforms herself and becomes an Anti-Hero, she's still beloved for being very complex for maintaining her manipulation.
  • Chuck Hankins is a huge fan favorite for his sheer determination, tragic backstory, vast magic knowledge, resourcefulness, and his ability to come up with backup plans on the spot. He has the Magnificent Bastard label for a reason. Fans were ecstatic when they found out he would return in Season 3. Being portrayed by Zach "Steven Universe" Callison definitely helps.
• Growing the Beard: Season 1 won the crowd with its unique plot and relatable characters, especially with the sixth to eighth episodes. But season 2 became more popular when the OCs, most notably Becky, get notably larger roles with the three of them becoming fan favorites (especially Ida and Silvers), and the mystery genre got more serious with its antagonists, and more dramatic scenes.
• Harsher in Hindsight: During the first episode where the girl trio first discover the cookbook deal with the effects of an Unexpectedly Real Magic recipe from the book, Hannah wanted to burn the cookbook to prevent any more trouble from occurring with the magic. Come the season 1 finale, and it's revealed that Kelly's grandmother had gotten herself cursed because she had similar feelings about the cookbook and tried destroying it, but only got so far before the book fought back. If Kelly had listened to Hannah's suggestion and tried to burn the book, the girls likely would have gotten themselves cursed as well. It's a very good thing they didn't go for that route.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • Gina Silvers is no doubt a creepy old woman who's unpleasant demeanor and jerkish tendencies give her a bad reputation among the town, but at the same time, she's also a Misunderstood Loner with a Heart of Gold, who's unfairly viewed as a witch to the point where kids either fear or dislike her. Then, near the end of Season 1, it's revealed that she was actually cured to be unable to play piano outside of her house, at that she basically had to abandon her life-long dream. Even after her curse gets broken, she's still unable to easily adjust back into society
  • Mama P may be shady and untrusting, but you can't blame her for trying to get the cookbook back to get rid of her curse. You try being stuck in your town for over 40 years. Plus, season 2 reveals that Chuck stole money from her father getting him fired from his job, and Chuck got off scot-free, without getting caught. Not to mention her family slowly got torn apart after to the fallout and to this very day, she sees Jake as the closest she has to a family.
  • Chuck Hankins himself is this, he and his sister Rose wanted to become immortal one day, they both became immortal, but Rose got stuck in the cookbook with no way out (technically speaking, she did become immortal just not in the way she expected.) Mischievous he may be, but he still became tragic. Chuck tried everything to get his sister out, and nobody wanted to help him because they thought he pulling another prank (including the OCs (Becky Quinn, Mama P, and Gina Silvers), the Traveler, Jake, and the current girl cook trio). All the trouble Chuck caused in the series were attempts to get his sister back.
  • RJ White, who despite being a prankster and a manchild who misused the Cookbook for personal gain, is ironically the least evil member of his trio, as he doesn't show pleasure in harming or endangering innocents like his partners did, and is too ineffective and childish to be a genuine threat. Plus when he realizes someone was after the magic, the first thing is does is try to warn the main girl trio that they were all in danger, rather than try going after the cookbook. Thus, him being the first person to lose his memories of magic is treated sympathetically to the point where the heroes actually fell bad for him.
• Les Yay: The main girl trio have shown signs of this occasionally, since there's hardly a time when they're ever not together. Darbie and Hannah especially, since they seem to be the closest and Darbie gets really sad when she finds out Hannah's transferring because it means she can't hang out as much anymore.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Ida Perez, better known as "Mama P" is the owner and founder of her self-titled restaurant as well as an ex-protector. After having her life ruined when Chuck got her father fired from his job, she became a pessimist with magic and got into various magic-related arguments with her partners Becky Quinn and Gina Silvers. Eventually cursed by Gina into being stuck in Saffron Falls, Perez spent the next 40 years trying to break said curse even after her protector era had ended, whether by collecting magic spices and hiding them in her secret pantry within her restaurant, or sabotaging her competition via magic and never getting caught. When she finds out Kelly, Hannah and Darbie were the new protectors, she offers to help Kelly cure her grandmother Becky's curse while deceiving them into helping her with breaking her own. Though she successfully escapes and callously freezes most of the town, she ends up returning to Saffron Falls as a manipulative but well-meaning ally helping the girls to fend off other rogue protectors, spending the remainder of the series hoping to make up for her past actions, while still having a deceptive side to her.
  • Charles Peizer, aka Chuck Hankins, is a former protector of the Cookbook from the 1860s. Losing his sister Rose in an attempt to make them the permanent owners, Chuck dedicates his life to finding a way to her back. Meeting Becky Quinn, Ida Perez, and Gina Silvers during their protector era in the 1960s, Chuck becomes friends with Gina, ruins Ida's life, and indirectly causes the trio to break up and end their protectorship. Disappearing in 1965 and returning 50 years later, Chuck continues trying to bring Rose back by tricking the 1960s trio Becky, Ida and Gina, along with the current protector trio of Kelly, Hannah and Darbie. He creates his own cookbook to steal pages from the main book, traps both trios in a Morton's Fork with a sleeping spell, takes over Jake's body and pose as him to deceive the heroes, and spell Hannah into nearly being trapped in the book in Rose's place, before reforming when his sister is finally freed from her prison.
  • Season 2B: Caroline Palmer is a former protector from the 90s, and was once the fearless leader of a mischievous high school prankster trio. After one day altering a time travel recipe to go to the future and check on her audition for a ballet class, and finding out she was unable to go back and was stuck in the future, she then grew angry and bitter and started to see magic as a dangerous resource and vowed to destroy it. Using a spell to alter her appearance into a completely different looking woman named "Jill", she spends the next 20 years posing as a campaign manager and getting to know targets and single-handed places a trigger word on nearly all of the protectors to wipe out any magic-related memories. When she's exposed, she destroys nearly all the spices in sight so the girl trio can't cook to fight back. She holds back on erasing the girls' memories so they'd lead her to the spice garden and she can destroy it. She comes dangerously close to permanently destroying magic for good, right before she erases her own magic-related memories.
• Moment of Awesome:
  • Darbie out of all people gets one in Just Add Muscles when she draws a perfect model of Chuck's trailer with prefect measurement and not leaving out any details. Usually she's The Ditz in the group. Well done, Darbie!
  • Chuck gets a villainous one in Just Add Meddling. Mama P said that it took her 40 years with the help of three protectors to break her curse. Meanwhile, Chuck managed to break his curse in one day, by himself! He does this by tricking Jake into going to an address for a delivery, then when he meets Jake, he uses a recipe to get in Jake's body, so he'd be able to leave Lavender Heights, and no one would suspect Chuck, and it worked for a few episodes. The boy seriously knows his magic.
  • Meta example: The sole fact that the pilot example had actually managed to attract a large fanbase of adult viewers, and allow the series to be picked up to be a full-on regular series. Yeah, really says something about how smart the show was compared to a majority of other family shows at the time.
  • This Song Parody from the stars of the show that cleverly recaps all of the major events of Season 1 and the first half of Season 2, in the style of Hamilton's "Alexander Hamilton".
• Nightmare Fuel: Most scenes involving The Traveler can be pretty scary for young audiences, even if she is the Big Good of the franchise.
  • Just Add Beginnings: The girls nearly forget about the friendship, when they try to remember magic.
• Paranoia Fuel: What if the food you're currently eating isn't regular food, and it's actually enchanted food from the cookbook that'll cause unusual things to happen to you, and around you?
• Periphery Demographic: On the outside, it looks like a slow-paced friendship show that's not worth your time... and you'd be wrong. The series is mostly aimed for kids, but with the mystery/fantasy genre and suspense levels from the antagonists in some episodes, the show's a fan-favorite for teenagers and adults as well.
• Retroactive Recognition: Steven Universe used to be a Protector of the cookbook back in the 1860s.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: Most viewers and fans of the show will agree that the pilot episode (and maybe the first few episodes of season 1) isn't really the best way to begin a show with this level of intelligence, and has pretty low stakes compared to the rest of the series.
• Spiritual Successor: A number of people have called this series a kid-friendly version of Charmed (1998) due to both shows focusing on a trio of females who find a magic book in an attic and find out they were linked to magic.
• They Really Can Act: All of the characters really know their stuff on the show. Special mention goes to the main trio of the show, who really know how to act like best friends, and help each other out. Bonus points for the girls being BFFs in real life. Well done girls!
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • A family's worth of characters. Except for Kelly and her grandma, the Quinn family doesn't get any involvement in the magic, although they do still get their share of development. Some people think that Kelly's parents — or at least her younger brother — should discover the cookbook's magic recipes, become Secret Keepers and help Kelly and the girls cook the recipes, and protect the city from the evil-doers. It would ease the family's nerves and in turn bring the Quinn family closer together.
    • Buddy gets hits with this treatment the worst. While Kelly's parents at least get their own subplots (Scott trying to find the source of his mother's "illness", and Terri running for mayor), Buddy's mostly just a background character who barely gets anything to do. As one of the episodes show, Buddy's a decent kid deep down, and the main reason he's a jerk is that Kelly's so busy spending time with friends and cooking, that she spends almost no with him. Maybe if he became an ally to the protectors as well, he'll reveal his nicer side.
    • Also an episode in Season 2's first half had Scott Quinn talking with a man who claimed to know how Becky lost her ability to communicate, with said man actually being an ex-protector and saying Becky was under a magic spell — which was technically true, but Scott brushed him off as crazy. It would be quite interesting to see what his reaction would be finding out magic was real.
  • All of the false suspects from Season 2, Part 2 (RJ White, Noelle Jasper, Mr. (Arthur) Morris and Amy). Once they get crossed off the list of not being the season's Big Bad, they're pretty much shoved into the background and never play an important role in the series ever again. Which is really too bad, considering RJ and Noelle's side stories of magic and being ex-protectors, Arthur's life as a protector companion and the Only Sane Man among the In-betweeners group, and Amy's side plot as Darbie's stepmother all could have made great stories to expand on. But nope, they're all just Red Herrings and all of the time spent when them feels pretty much pointless.
  • Among the three main girls, Hannah's family and home life seems to have gotten explored the least, which may feel like wasted character potential to some. Kelly's parents and younger brother (despite partially being wasted themselves) are basically main characters, and Darbie got a subplot where her father gets a divorce and is getting remarried. But Hannah? Her older sister only gets a handful of appearances, and her father only appears once, and even then he appeared alongside the other girls' fathers, and didn't get any characterization outside of simply being Hannah's father.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The origins of the cookbook. The series had previously established that the cookbook was over 500 years old and had been around since at least the Middle Ages, and while the show does occasionally go into some deep lore with the book's history and some of its past owners over the ages, it still would have been nice to find out just when the cookbook came into existence in the first place. Having an Origins Episode for the cookbook — and possibly even The Traveler and her backstory — could have been a great concept. Who exactly is the Traveler? What were the first magic recipes in existence like? There's so much potential for some expanded concept.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: Mama P in Season 2B. Adam Lever blackmailed her into finding dirt in Terri Quinn (Kelly's mother), so she would lose the mayor election, but when the main girl trio found out that Mama P told Adam an embarrassing secret about Ms. Quinn, the girls and everyone else close to her, accused her of siding with Adam Lever, and didn't even take into consideration that Adam was forcing her to do it, yet the others are portrayed as in the right for jumping to conclusions about Ida. That definitely won't come back to bite them.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Hannah Parker-Kent, we all know you're trying to protect Kelly, so she wouldn't have to pay an enormous price to save her Grandma, but selling her out to her mother- and lying about some of the details-isn't the responsible thing to do at all! Only Mama P revealing herself to be self-centered saved their friendship. What were you thinking?
  • The main trio of girls in Season 2B. Not only are they quick accuse people of being the culprit without proof, they often accuse people being bad protectors for abusing the cookbook's magic... disregarding the fact that none of them have a sparkly clean record of using the book responsibly all the time either... especially Kelly. Also, when they heard Mama P was finding dirt on Terri and caused her to lose the election, they automatically accused her of being a traitor, and siding with Adam Lever, without even bothering to listen to her side of the story. Now that's just cold. Mama P was being blackmailed by Adam, and he threatened to call the Health Department and shut down Mama P's, and yet the girl trio is seen in the right for blaming Mama P for everything. Not cool, girls!
• Unpopular Popular Character: Gina Silvers isn't very well-liked in her world for being creepy-looking and having a short temper, but in the real world, people like her for being misunderstood and caring for the girls' safety.
• The Woobie:
  • Darbie O'Brien: On the surface, she seems like a cheerful, carefree girl who's little more than the jokester of the trio... but when you actually examine her character, she's actually more broken and complex than she lets on. She's insecure about her status, not always knowing what her purpose is in the trio, feels like Kelly and Hannah were the closest people she's ever had in her life, and even they tend to treat her as The Load occasionally. Her comical side is basically her way of hiding her insecurities. Then, Season 2 has her parents get divorced and she has to get adjusted to having a potential new stepmother, and Hannah going to a new school.
  • Becky Quinn (Kelly Quinn's grandmother) ended up being put under a curse under the cookbook, after she tried to stop Mama P, and Gina Silvers from fighting over the power, by getting rid of the book. It's not her fault the magic was causing trouble. Thankfully she went back to herself in the season 1 finale.
  • Jake also qualifies, since he always has to get the girls out of a jam, whenever the magic goes wrong, constantly has to do favors for Mama P (even if she does treat him well), and is often the victim of certain villains' spells (He once got possessed by Chuck and had to hope the girls would think of a plan.
  • Rose Peizer is hands down, one of the biggest woobies in the entire series considering she had to spend a full century in the book, while her brother at least got to live it up with his immortality. Plus her circumstances her completely out of her control. Who wouldn't want to just give this girl a hug?
  • Lexi Hamilton in the Mystery City spin-off series. She genuinely wants to be friends to Ish and others, but her family happen to be descendants of the Wesson Brothers, with her father and brother wanting to finish what their ancestors started. Lexi clearly doesn't enjoy aiding her family in their scheme or having to deceive and lie to Ish and her friends, but she's also too nervous to pull a High-Heel–Face Turn and betray her family, [[spoiler: and when she eventually does near the end of the season, Cody spells her into revealing what she did, and the others complete their plan anyway.