This may be a very short-lived thread.
What TV shows and movies started out as TV (or radio) commercials? All I can think of is:
Max Headroom
Earnest goes to XXXX
I assume that we shouldn’t count all the kid’s cartoons that double as a commercial, like G.I. Joe, The Transformers, He-Man, She-Ra, Jem, and so on?
Well, this is a bit indirect, but I think it counts.
Back in the 1970’s, a Midwestern advertising executive named Bill Fries made up a character named C.W. McCall for a series of bread commercials. I never saw any of these commercials, but I gather C.W. was supposed to be a good ol boy truck driver. The character proved so popular that, a few years later, when CB radios were becoming a popular fad, Fries made a novelty record called “Convoy,” using the character he’d created. That novelty record hit #1 on the Billboard charts.
A few years later, Sam Peckinpah made a movie version of “Convoy,” which starred Kris Kristofferson as the Rubber Duck.
So, indirectly, the movie “Convoy” was based on a character from a TV commercial.
The “Mean Joe Green” Coke commercial became a TV movie
I think that’s a seperate category, but as the examples I’m looking for will probably not constitute much of a thread, I think we can include those as well. So:
Type I: Commercials that became shows/movies
Type II: Products that became shows/movies as ads
A few more Type II would be Pokemon, Strawberry Shortcake, and My Little Pony
I forgot a Type I: Didn’t Joe Isuzu have a show?
No, but the actor who played him, David Leisure, had a role (wacky neighbor) on the '80s sitcom Empty Nest.
Yeah, I just looked that up and found the same thing. I guess it was wishful thinking that the Joe Isuzu character was continued on that series. Not so wishful that I ever bothered watching Empty Nest, however. And I loved Richard Mulligan!
I didn’t need to look it up – because I did watch it! 
Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer. The lyrics to the song were originally written for a coloring book advertising Montgomery Ward. Music was added, making it a hit song, and the TV animated special was done in 1964. A version was released as a theatrical film in 1998.
I may be fuzzy on the chronology or the geography but I’m pretty sure that Max Headroom had the show in England before becoming a pitchman. Er, pitchhead?
Type 1: Hey, Vern!
Johnny English?
Yeah, I mentioned that in the OP – the Earnest movies.
Who can forget… *The Raisinettes *?
I take it you mean The California Raisins?
The problem is that it’s hard to separate the two, short of making an arbitrary (and possibly inaccurate) guess. My understanding (from talks with toy designers at toy conventions) is that nowadays, development of new toy products and the associated cartoons/TV shows happen in parallel.
An actual good show, although it might a strech to say it started as a commercial, hasn’t even been mentioned yet! The Adventures of Pete and Pete started out as shorts promoting, IIRC, Nickelodon.
Didn’t Crocodile Dundee start out as a character to promote tourism to Down Under?
Baby Bob. Who went from commercial spokesbaby (for some Internet company) to sitcom back to commercial spokesbaby (for Quiznos).