It's been more than 15 years since Charmed, The WB's long-running series about the Halliwell sister witches, first debuted in October 1998. In its initial incarnation — which starred Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, and Shannen Doherty, who left the series after Season 3 — Charmed was a dreamy combination of Charlie's Angels and Buffy The Vampire Slayer with Prue (Doherty), Piper (Combs), and Phoebe (Milano) grappling with moral ambiguity while fending off the forces of evil and looking fabulous. (Well, at the time. The years have not been kind to the awful late '90s/early '00s lingerie tops, pastel-colored camisoles, and other trends they wore.)

After Doherty's exit, Charmed veered into slightly-absurd-yet-no-less-entertaining territory as Rose McGowan joined the show, playing the Halliwell's long-lost sister Paige — a necessary leap of logic required in order to reconstitute The Power of Three. The addition ushered in a wave of increasingly campy episodes; hours that saw Paige and Phoebe sport a series of progressively revealing and ridiculous costumes in the name of vanquishing.

Thankfully, the show's emotional core remained intact with the Halliwells' sisterly bond never waning in importance. In fact, the ties that bind actually became more prevalent in later seasons as Piper gave birth to two sons, and Phoebe struggled to figure out how "Happily Ever After" could fit into their magical lives.

In the eight years since Charmed came to an end, a few networks have attempted to recapture the show's magic — including a long-rumored, recently-aborted reboot — but no subsequent series have been able to replicate Charmed's success. (At 178 episodes, it's one of the longest-running, hour-long television series featuring all female leads, surpassed only by Desperate Housewives.)

So when Lifetime premiered Witches of East End in 2013, Charmed fans were understandably skeptical, especially since ABC's seemingly similar Eastwick had been such a massive misfire in 2009.

And while the show has a few fundamental similarities — Witches of East End revolves around the bewitched Beauchamp women: Joanna (Julia Ormond), Wendy (Mädchen Amick), Freya (Jenna Dewan Tatum), and Ingrid (Rachel Boston) — the show's aims are entirely different. Where Charmed was essentially a procedural with the Halliwells squaring off against a different supernatural creature every week, Witches of East End is much more serialized, with decidedly darker stories that span the entire season, and no "creature of the week" to be vanquished.

But the fundamental qualities that made Charmed so beloved are also front and center on Witches of East End, and the reasons outlined below are exactly why you should be watching!