The character of Munch from L&O: SVU first appeared in Homicide. Does that make L&O a spinoff from homicide, or is Munch a different category altogether?
*Hill Street Blues * begat Beverly Hills Buntz.
If you follow the chains, a rather large percentage of TV turns out to be inside the head of the autistic kid from the St. Elsewhere finale…
Much also appeared in the orignal L&O before joining SVU.
Knots Landing was actually created first but the creators couldn’t get it on the air. Dallas went on the air and became a monster hit, so KL got the green light.
SOAP began Benson which was nowhere near as good as its parent but lasted much longer (and even semi-wrapped up a plot thread when SOAP ended with a cliffhanger).
Some Spin-Offs that Never Were:
Who’s the Boss? was going to spin Katherine Helmond into her own series and had the set-up episode (Mona and her brother buy a run-down hotel [how the hell many times has that been done= this, Whoopi, Golden Palace, etc.- and it’s never worked]) and replace her in the series with James Coco as Tony’s ex-con father-in-law. Unfortunately James Coco died and Helmond couldn’t be spared (probably for the best as far as her career is concerned).
One Day at a Time at one point planned to spin off Mackenzie Phillips’s character and her on-screen-husband (Michael Lembeck) into a sitcom about the difficulties of a young married couple. Unfortunately Mack couldn’t stay sober, so it was scrapped, then dusted off again when she cleaned up and came back onto the show, and permanently scrapped when she relapsed.
Facts of Life planned a spin-off centered around Blair’s CP affected cousin Jeri and shot a pilot, but it never got the greenlight. (Source: Jeri on an interview show many years later.) They also centered an episode around Tootie’s aunt, a newlywed with a white husband, who were to be TV’s first mixed-marriage main-characters (the Willis’s were supporting characters), but it was deemed too controversial. (Tootie did later refer to her aunt and uncle’s break up, but the characters were only seen in that one episode.) There was also a plan to star Jo in a posthumous series when Facts wrapped, but Nancy McKeon decided she wanted to make a break with the character (and didn’t even do the much later TV reunion movie).
A couple of obscure but interesting failures:
W.A.L.T.E.R. was a spin-off of MASH featuring Radar O’Reilly as a cop in St. Louis in the 1950s. It vanished pretty quickly.
Hello, Larry, spinoff of Diffr’nt Strokes, is often brought up as a truly terrible TV show. I don’t understand this. I mean, it was drek and I thought it was bad, but it wasn’t much worse than a lot of the other crap that’s appeared on TV. It lasted for two episodes, I think.
Tabitha was a short-lived spinoff of Bewitched. I remember seeing one episode of this on Halloween night when I was maybe eight or nine; soon after, it disappeared into thin air. It was about Samantha’s daughter all grown up, of course. I think there was a horrid mother-in-law involved in this one, too, but I really don’t remember.
Of course, Daria was a successful spinoff of Beavis & Butt-Head. That’s the only animated spinoff that I know of, though. (But wasn’t there a show featuring Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm?) In the comics pages, Popeye was sort of a spin-off of Thimble Theater, though it had more to do with his having taken over the strip. Snuffy Smith is a spinoff of Barney Google (and I wonder if the holders of the copyright of that strip have ever considered a lawsuit against the search engine?) Funky Winkerbean has begotten John Darling, Crankshaft, and… it seems there was another one, wasn’t there?
Not as quickly as you forgot WALTE*R, apparently 
And not half as quickly as I forgot to check Chance’s post, Blake. D’oh! is me.:smack:
Slightly off topic: Did anyone catch the Carol Burnett Show episode that aired around the time that the “Death of Lt. Blake” ep did? It had a short sketch that featured MacLean Stevenson on the ocean in a liferaft shouting “I’m still alive!”
Actually, AFAIK, I Love Lucy featured the first mixed-race marriage. I guess it didn’t stand out so much because the marriage wasn’t a black-white mix. In fact, until they mentioned it on some biographical program, I’d never thought about it at all!
Not trying to be nitpicky–just thought it was interesting! 
Eh. I don’t know that I’d even consider that so. By today’s standards, with “hispanic” encompassing pretty much anyone with a Spanish surname, sure. But light-skinned Cubans were, at the time, pretty much considered (and considered themselves) European in ethnicity. If Desi Arnaz spoke with a French accent and looked exactly the same, he wouldn’t even be considered of another race.
“Hello, Larry” ran for 33 episodes.
No one remembers that The Simpsons was a spinoff of The Tracey Ullman Show?
Nope. You’re the only one who remembers. Thank god you were here to serve as the repository of this knowledge.
No need to be such an ass about it, Otto. I’m just surprised to see one of the most popular shows on this board, if not the most popular, not mentioned within the first 50 posts.
Don’t be so thin-skinned. Pretend there’s a smilie or something if it makes you feel better.
How about Fernwood 2-Night (later America 2-Night )–spun off from Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ?
A previous thread on the subject.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=256109&highlight=spinoff+spin-off
Gah! Really? I’m probably just counting the ones that I actually watched. That’s just the tunnel vision of time, I guess. For a while I was under the impression that The Dukes of Hazzard ran for only a couple of years because I only watched that show for a couple of years. It started much sooner than I first saw it and was canceled much later than I lost interest. 33 episodes? Yoy…
Well kiss my grits.