Six TV spinoffs that are even better than the original

When media corporations repeatedly favour “proven” intellectual property over something fresh and riskier, it’s easy to be cynical about new iterations on old stories or characters. “Why don’t they tell a new story?” people groan in online comment sections. “Don’t they have any original ideas?”

But just because something is “existing IP”, doesn’t mean it’s creatively bankrupt. We’ve all reached the end of a book and wished desperately that there was more of it to devour, or wanted extra helpings of a single-serving character. Sometimes, just sometimes, the suits and the audience share the same desire: more of that, please.

For as long as it’s been around, TV has done this to mixed results. For every Mork (an unknown Robin Williams crushing a Happy Days appearance so hard the network gave him his own show and created a superstar) there’s a Joey (NBC’s infamously unfunny attempt at keeping the Friends gravy train running). For every Watchmen, there’s a And Just Like That... (Sex and the City sequel series, which this week goes from existing IP back to RIP).

But thoughtful or fun takes on existing material, or charismatic expansions on already developed characters, can sometimes work even better than their parent material. Here are some of the best.

Wednesday

Is this latest instalment in the Addams Family universe a spin-off, a reboot or a revival? The Addams canon is such a hodgepodge of on-the-fly lore that it feels pointless to try and make a ruling. But this Netflix supernatural teen drama benefits from a long-awaited lick of Tim Burton’s twee-goth magic. The idiosyncratic director executive produces and is at the helm of around half the episodes, and a gorgeous little stop-motion sequence in the second-season premiere nods to the shelved stop-motion Addams film he was once slated to make.

More than anything, Wednesday is a showcase for Jenna Ortega and her masterful micro-expressions. Her Wednesday Addams is a bookish, steely loner whose dark sensibilities are at odds with the rah-rah boarding school vibes of supernatural Nevermore Academy – an outcast among outcasts. With a phenomenal cast that includes familiar faces from the ’90s films and just-gory-enough violence, it’s a fun family watch that the over-13s won’t turn their noses up at.

Frasier

Watching Frasier Crane’s early run on Cheers as the pitiable but sweet egghead who served to turn Sam and Diane’s legendary flirtation into a love triangle, you would never have picked him as the anchor for one of the most successful TV spinoffs of all time. But the creators of Frasier knew exactly how to turn this character from a narrative lever into a fixture.

Crane – whom Kelsey Grammer has been playing since he was in his late 20s – is a pompous, verbose snob, which makes him a great foil for easygoing Boston barflies, but he’s also kind at his core and as hard on himself as he can be on those around him, which gives him a path to connect with others despite himself. At the beginning of his eponymous show, his original 1985 sweetness and vulnerability calcified believably into a ’90s cynicism, all the better for bickering with his pernickety brother, cranky father and shrewd radio producer.

Frasier is not all about Grammer’s career-defining performance – the abject failure of the ensemble-free 2023 reboot proved that – but at its best, it’s just as joke-dense and classically structured as its parent sitcom, with way more acerbic jokes about opera.

The Good Fight

At its best, The Good Wife was a stellar politico-legal drama that served up ripped-from-the-headlines cases with wit and style. The Good Fight – its 2017 spin-off starring the lethally fabulous senior partner Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski) as she takes up a new position at a previously all-Black Chicago law firm – takes a few of Wife’s characters and dials everything up to, well, post-2016.

Possibly the defining dramedy of the first Trump administration, it’s a deeply silly show for smart people that managed to stay painfully relevant even as it tried to out-absurd every political development months ahead.

Daria

Famously a side character in the snickering, sketchy ensemble of Beavis & Butthead, Daria’s own spinoff as she deadpans her way through a new school proved to have more cultural staying power than the dynamic duo. Just ask my then-13-year-old stepdaughter, who dressed as Daria for Halloween 2023, and had never heard of the other duo.

An essential alt teenage girl text of its era – like Ghost World and Welcome to the Dollhouse – Daria showcased a character whose potential could only be realised outside the context of her origins.

Xena: Warrior Princess

Originally written for a handful of episodes on the schlocky Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Lucy Lawless’ leather-clad warrior was such a fan favourite that she was spun off into six seasons of her own. Lawless became a convention staple, working solidly in TV over the coming decades. And Xena is undeniably the stronger of the two series 30 years later.

Hercules star Kevin Sorbo was a Temu Schwarzenegger with a tendency to read stage directions aloud, whereas Lawless had the steady, reassuring aura of a construction site forewoman. The chemistry (and the increasingly sapphic overtones) of Xena’s relationship with sidekick Gabrielle (Renee O’Connor) gave the series real heart no matter how silly the god or monster of the week.

The Colbert Report

Comedy Central’s stalwart The Daily Show has always occupied a middle ground between news commentary and comedy, but it did give us one iconic fictional character: Stephen Colbert. Before he was the long-tenured late-night host in the Trump White House’s sight lines, Colbert created a persona for himself as the token conservative correspondent balancing out host Jon Stewart’s ever-replenishing store of jokes about George W. Bush.

Brash, underinformed and completely confident even as he undermined and conflated his own talking points, Colbert the character became even more finely honed and indispensable as the host of his own spinoff show. Between 2005 and 2014, through Obama’s election win, the Tea Party era, and Fox News’ daily splintering of the news media Overton window, “Stephen Colbert” stayed in character during appearances at congressional committee hearings and infamously mocked Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

Colbert’s comic commitment and fearlessness haven’t had a better showcase since – but it’s an era worth revisiting as he sees out his Trump-focused final season at The Late Show with little to lose.

Do you agree with these picks? Please tell us your thoughts in the comments below.

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