# most generations of spin-offs? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [June 9, 2016, 2:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919 "2016-06-09T14:48:57Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 9\ **Page:** 5
**Author:** ![Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/bosda_di_chi_of_tricor/32/16845_2.png) [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 12:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/81 "2016-06-13T00:49:06Z")
> [@Mr\_Shine](#): > > An obvious triple is Love American Style\>Happy Days\>(Mork and Mindy, Laverne and Shirley) I don’t know if any M&M or L&S characters got their own show though. Lennie & Squiggy had a (brief) spin-off, didn’t they? ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/82 "2016-06-13T01:48:41Z")
> [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > Um, yeah. I laid it all out 20 minutes before you posted. Right above your post. Take a look through this thread. Scan a few posts. Oh look, [here’s one](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19392157#post19392157). It’s got a number. Hmm. _ **#4** _. ---
**Author:** ![GuanoLad](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/guanolad/32/42_2.png) [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 1:49am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/83 "2016-06-13T01:49:55Z")
> [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > Well, since _Three’s Company_, a single man living with two single women, was an American version of the British series _Man About The House_, a single man living with two single women, that when in England, they decided to spinoff from _Man About The House_ with the series _Robin’s Nest_, where the male character from the original opens up his own bistro, it’s not surprising that the spin off from the American version, _Three’s Company_ was the series _Three’s A Crowd_, where the male character from the original opens up his own bistro. See also _“The Ropers”_ vs _“George and Mildred”_. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_John\_Marcej](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_John_Marcej)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/84 "2016-06-13T04:56:23Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > Take a look through this thread. Scan a few posts. Oh look, [here’s one](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=19392157#post19392157). It’s got a number. Hmm. _ **#4** _. I **DID** read that post. In fact I read EVERY post. I was listing the two series of the 1970’s with the MOST spin offs and pointed out series that spun off from _Happy Days_ that WASN’T mentioned in Hmmmmmm Post #4. ---
**Author:** ![Richard\_John\_Marcej](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Richard_John_Marcej)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 4:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/85 "2016-06-13T04:57:27Z")
> [@GuanoLad](#): > > See also _“The Ropers”_ vs _“George and Mildred”_. Good one. Forgot about that. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 8:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/86 "2016-06-13T08:45:26Z")
> [@Richard\_John\_Marcej](#): > > After reading through these posts it looks as if the 1970’s could be called the decade of the spin off since so many seemed to be born then and the two series with the most from that decade: > > All In The Family - which begat: _Maude_ (which in turn, begat _Good Times)_, _The Jeffersons_ (which in turn begat _Checking In_), _Gloria_ and then finally _ **Archie Bunkers Place** _ (and I guess to a lesser extent) _704 Houser_. > [@Annie-Xmas](#): > > Three’s Company also spun off **Three’s a Crowd** , one of the worse spin offs ever. > [@TriPolar](#): > > Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman was renamed to Forever Fernwood after the Louise Lasser left the show, and then spun off from there was Fernwood Tonight with Martin Mull, a local talk show which spun itself off as national talkshow **America 2Night**. America 2Night was really a sequel though. IMHO none of those bolded above are spin-offs, they were all ‘ **retoolings** ’ of the original series (and retoolings, unless done immediately after the first few episodes of a series air, fail even more often than spin-offs do). And if it started as a Brit-com and was redone in America, well, that’s a **remake** , not a spin-off. Steve Carell did not star in a spin-off of the Ricky Gervais show. ---
**Author:** ![zweisamkeit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/zweisamkeit/32/4360_2.png) [@zweisamkeit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zweisamkeit)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 1:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/87 "2016-06-13T13:20:51Z")
> [@Hail\_Ants](#): > > The term ‘spin-off’ itself has sort of fallen out of favor as being too simplistic. And as being something of a ‘jinx’ because far, far more spin-offs have failed than have ever succeeded. I’m sure that when _Law & Order: SVU_ premiered back in '99 it was routinely referred to as a ‘spin-off’, but nowadays shows like it and _CSI_ and _NCIS_ etc. are all referred to as ‘franchises’ instead. Good point. An interesting development of the franchise idea recently has been from Dick Wolf (to everyone’s surprise! :p): The Chicago franchise has three (soon to be four) interconnected series and were imagined that way (in a general sense) from the start. Chicago Fire started in 2012, Chicago P.D. in 2014 and Chicago Med 2015 (Chicago Justice will begin this fall, I believe). Characters from the shows will show up in the others frequently but … organically, if that makes sense. Like, the Fire EMTs might show up for 10 seconds bringing a patient to the hospital in Med and that’s it. There are some multi-show story arcs, but they’re pretty rare, considering. But most interesting to me is that there have been multi-show arcs between this franchise and Wolf’s L&O:SVU. For example, child porn was found in a house after a fire on CF which was relevant to some unsolved child porn cases on SVU, which then connected to CPD. The story and characters flowed between the shows but each show still remained distinct. It’s a cool experiment, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![Telemark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/telemark/32/372_2.png) [@Telemark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Telemark)\ **Post date:** [June 13, 2016, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/88 "2016-06-13T15:07:04Z")
> [@zweisamkeit](#): > > But most interesting to me is that there have been multi-show arcs between this franchise and Wolf’s L&O:SVU. For example, child porn was found in a house after a fire on CF which was relevant to some unsolved child porn cases on SVU, which then connected to CPD. The story and characters flowed between the shows but each show still remained distinct. It’s a cool experiment, IMO. In 1994 NBC had “Blackout Thursday” where 3 of the 4 shows on Must See TV had episodes involving a blackout caused on Mad About You that carried over to Friends and Madman of the People. The fourth show, Seinfeld, didn’t use the plot device. It had already been established that MAY, Friends, and Seinfeld existed in the same universe, not sure if the short-lived MofP was ever included. ---
**Author:** ![Hail\_Ants](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/dc4da7/32.png) [@Hail\_Ants](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hail_Ants)\ **Post date:** [June 16, 2016, 3:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919/89 "2016-06-16T15:31:04Z")
> [@zweisamkeit](#): > > But most interesting to me is that there have been multi-show arcs between this franchise and Wolf’s L&O:SVU. For example, child porn was found in a house after a fire on CF which was relevant to some unsolved child porn cases on SVU, which then connected to CPD. The story and characters flowed between the shows but each show still remained distinct. It’s a cool experiment, IMO. > [@Telemark](#): > > In 1994 NBC had “Blackout Thursday” where 3 of the 4 shows on Must See TV had episodes involving a blackout caused on Mad About You that carried over to Friends and Madman of the People. The fourth show, Seinfeld, didn’t use the plot device. It had already been established that MAY, Friends, and Seinfeld existed in the same universe, not sure if the short-lived MofP was ever included. The reasons for these is that production companies have more control and ownership of TV series nowadays than in the past. Before, even if the networks didn’t own the shows outright they liked to have cozy relationships with their most successful ones’ producers, and they’d go to great lengths (i.e. money) to keep them from developing shows for any other networks. Television simply became too fragmented for the big three networks (and Fox) to maintain this anymore. It used to be that there was a lot of potential content but only a small number of outlets (i.e. channels) to air it on. Now the situation has reversed, there’s hundreds of channels and a shortage of (good) content. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/most-generations-of-spin-offs/756919.md?page=4)