In the pilot episode Prue remarks, "This house is perfectly safe." Piper responds, "Don't say that! In horror movies, the one who says that ends up dying." Poor Prue. May also double as Hilarious in Hindsight, as the exchange seems to be a reference to Scream (1996) which co-starred Rose McGowan.
Near the end of season 5 Penny refused to bless Wyatt saying that men should not be trusted with magic powers because they can't use them responsibly. At the end of the episode she learned that not all men are bad after all and gave her blessing. The very next season revolved around Wyatt becoming evil in the future. Only the successful prevention of said outcome thanks to the intervention of his time-traveling brother keeps this from becoming a Broken Aesop as well.
Everyone's shock that Future!Phoebe is imprisoned for using her powers for evil and to kill a man in "Morality Bites". Given her increasinglyselfish behaviour in later seasons, she ends up doing a lot worse and actually has a much higher bodycount, having either directly or indirectly killed people out of spite or sheer neglect. This gets addressed in a meta sense in the season 9 comics, through "Morality Bites Back" revisiting the Cal Greene plotline and revealing that the close friend Greene murdered was her boss Elise Rothman. This time the crisis is averted, and thankfully the comics don't seem to be marred by many of the problems the show had—including the tendency to forget that the good guys are supposed to be good.
In "A Knight To Remember" the Evil Enchantress nearly kills Paige by blasting her onto the windshield of her car. Rose McGowan would later be involved in a nearly fatal car accident and suffer damage to her eye.
"Spin City" has Leo finding out that Chris hates him in the future. When demon Chris is attacking him, Leo mockingly says "Did I miss a school play? Take away your favorite toy? Play favorites with Wyatt?" when it's already known that he wasn't around much in Chris's future. However later on, it's revealed that Piper died when Chris was fourteen. This turns Chris's angst from When You Coming Home, Dad? to a huge Tear Jerker. It's kind of understandable why Chris keeps punching him even after he's been turned back.
A Season 6 episode has a subplot where Paige needs to help a co-worker expose a sexually harassing boss. Years later, Rose McGowan revealed that she had been sexually abused on The Doom Generation and raped at one point. And then Alyssa Milano would end up popularizing the 'Me Too' movement.
Any scene where Phoebe and Paige are getting along may be somewhat difficult to watch now that Rose McGowan has turned against Alyssa Milano in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein sexual misconduct scandal.note This refers to the fact that Milano continues to associate with Creative Artists Agency (CAA), whom McGowan accuses of covering up Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct and his rape of her in particular. They also got into an extremely nasty Twitter row in 2020 that ended with Alyssa blocking Rose.
It's a minor gag in Season 1 that Phoebe got the Slut-Shaming nickname "Freebie" in high school - which is then expanded in Season 6 when she goes to her high school reunion. This rather eerily parallels the Slut-Shaming attitude she and Alyssa Milano would get from particularly zealous fans.
There's an episode in Season 5 where Paige tries to impersonate someone else and get married pretending to be her. Rose McGowan described an odd feeling in her autobiography, where she had her first wedding in Charmed but also got married three times in her roles before it happened for real.
"I don't necessarily agree that your wedding day should be the single greatest event in your life, but having it happen on-screen for the first time robbed something from me. All told I was fake married three times on film before my "real" marriage. By then, I was repeating an emotional scene I'd already played. Your entertainment comes at a cost to us performers."
The Season 8 plot of journalists constantly invading the Halliwells' lives, and Paige's attempts to fend them off ended up paralleling Rose's own negative experience with the paparazzi. She detailed some extremely disturbing encounters in her autobiography after finishing on the show - including getting chased through the Vatican by a mob of people with phones.
"Everybody was reporting on anyone well known and you didn't know where the enemy was because it was no longer just the paparazzi or the gossip columnist. It was everybody. I was forced to live a life where I didn't say anything, I didn't do anything, lest I be branded a bad girl. Most were so freaked out by people reporting false items, they just stayed hidden. At least that's what I did."
The entire plotline for the second half of Season 4, where Paige tries in vain to warn her sisters that Cole has turned evil again, but everybody dismisses her, calls her delusional and abandons her. This finds a near carbon copy parallel in what Rose went through after publicly accusing Weinstein and receiving the backlash. The episode The Fifth Halliwheel is especially harsh: Paige witnesses first-hand Cole using magic again, so he has her infected with paranoia-inducing magic and proceeds to alternate between terrorising her with his powers and gaslighting her into believing it's all a hallucination, only for her sisters to believe her initial statement was caused by the infective magic too. The parallels with the smear campaign by Weinstein's media team is heartwrecking.
The plot of the first season has Prue and Phoebe being estranged and rebuilding their friendship, ultimately becoming close sisters again. It was the opposite way in real life, where the actresses initially got on very well - Shannen Doherty and Holly Marie Combs were bridesmaids at Alyssa Milano's 1999 wedding - but they ended up at complete odds by the third season. The two actresses did end up putting the past behind them in The New '10s however.
The twist in "We're Off to See the Wizard" is that said wizard is actually evil. Quite uncomfortable to watch since Armin Shimmerman voiced how much he hated his time on the show, and called the three lead actresses the most difficult performers he'd ever worked with.
In Marry-Go-Round Paige says "Is this a wedding or a coronation?" as a joke. About six episodes later, Phoebe does have a coronation as she becomes Queen of the Underworld.
Also Piper jokingly telling Prue 'you've lived a full life' in "Animal Pragmatism".
