Movies based on TV shows are legion. Just off the top of my head, there’ve been movies based on Leave it to Beaver, Dragnet, Gilligan’s Island, Star Trek (at least two generations), The Dukes of Hazzard, Get Smart, The Beverly Hillbillies, The X Files, The Twilight Zone, The Addams Family, and no doubt numerous others. Well, it appears no one’s made a movie of My Mother the Car yet, but it’s probably only a matter of time…
But going the other way seems to be a much rarer occurance. I can only come up with a half dozen examples:
The Odd Couple
MAS*H
Mister Roberts
In the Heat of the Night
Friday Night Lights
Buffy the Vampire Layer[sup]1[/sup]
Are there any others?
[sup]1[/sup] Spelling may vary slightly in your consciousness.
Stargate SG-1
Clone Wars
Blade: the Series ('course, that could arguably be based on the comic book moreso than the movie, which was itself based on the comic)
IIRC, there have been a TON of TV series based on movies over the years, but very few have been successful. I’ll bet someone with a better memory than mine can come up with quite a list.
Also, it seems that this kind of spin-off was more common in earlier decades. Maybe they don’t do it so much any more because it didn’t tend to work very well.
I know that there are a bunch of animated series based on kids’ movies, but I can’t think of any off the top of my head. These animated series are based on both animated and live-action movies.
Naked City (1958-1963)
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1968-1970)
The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969-1972)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (1982-1983)
Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1964-1968)
Peyton Place (1964-1969)
Planet of the Apes (1974)
The Real Ghost Busters (1986-1991)
Beetlejuice (1989-1991)
Fame (1982-1987)
Beethoven (1994-1995)
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1962-1963)
Going My Way (1962-1963)
Topper (1953-1955)
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1973)
The Thin Man (1957-1959)
Strictly speaking, some of these series may have been based on the same literary proroperty that the movie was based on, and not the movie itself.
There was a TV series called 9 to 5 from 1982-1983 based on the popular movie, and then in 1986 they tried again for some mysterious reason. (Interesting trivium: Both projects starred Rachel Dennison as Doralee, the character played by Dolly Parton in the movie. Dennison is Parton’s real-life sister; this was apparently her only attempt at acting.)
And now that I poke around a little more, here is an IMDb list of projects with “based on film” in their genres. It doesn’t appear that you can narrow it to just TV shows though, so it’s got a lot of video games and such in there as well.
Were you tacitly discounting animated series? If not, TV series based on movies is far from being a much rarer occurance than the other way around. For example, almost every animated Disney movie since The Little Mermaid has had a spin-off series.
The Addams Family films also spawned a revival of the TV series, I believe in both live-action and animated form.
“Working Girl” spawned a series starring Sandra Bullock.
“Kiss Me, Guido” came to the small screen as “Some of my Best Friends” and starred Jason Batemen.
Other than the names, there was no relationship between the films and the TV series. There was supposedly talk that in the FT13 series one of the cursed items was going to be Jason’s hockey mask but nothing ever came of the idea. One horror franchise that did spin off a series was Nightmare on Elm Street, which spawned “Freddy’s Nightmares” for syndication.
The original War of the Worlds gave rise to a syndicated series decades after the fact, which initially built upon the mythos of the film but in the second season kind of drifted away from it.
Dirty Dancing got a series on CBS that lasted about three episodes.
There was also a Fame: LA for a short time and a Fame reality series which, while not strictly based on the film was part of the franchise.
Clerks the Animated Series (cancelled after two episodes)
Casablanca (1983, with David Soul and Hector Elizando)
Freebie and the Bean (1980-81 with Hector Elizando)
Down and Out in Beverly Hills (1987 with Hector Elizando again)
Ferris Bueller (1990, with Charlie Schlatter and Jennifer Aniston)
Serpico (1976-77, with David Birney)
The Thin Man (syndicated, 1960-62) with Lost in Space’s Jonathan Harris playing Harry Lime, who was transformed from the movie’s amoral swindler into an amateur sleuth
Shane (1966, with David Carradine)
Uncle Buck (1990-91) with Kevin Meaney; notable mainly for the historical footnote of being the first broadcast sitcom to use the phrase “You suck”
The Bad News Bears (1979-80)
Stir Crazy (1985-86)
Fast Times (1986) based on Fast Times at Ridgemont High. With Ray “Mr Hand” Walston and Courtney Thorne-Smith
A League of Their Own (1993)
Shaft (1973-74) with the film’s Richard Roundtree
