NCIS (17 seasons so far) has outlasted JAG (10 seasons)
NCIS (17 seasons so far) has outlasted JAG (10 seasons)
It hasn't happened yet, but Vince Gilligan intends for a 6th and final season of Better Call Saul consisting of 13 episodes rather than the usual 10 or so. This would push it to just one episode more than Breaking Bad.
Considering how much critics, audiences, and AMC loves the show, there's no reason for now to doubt that it'll happen.
Frasier was an even bigger hit, and critical darhling than Cheers.
"We are Shakespeare. We are Michelangelo. We are Tchaikovsky. We are Turing. We are Mercury. We are Wilde. We are Lincoln, Lorca, Leonardo da Vinci. We are Alexander the Great. We are Fredrick the Great. We are Rustin. We are Addams. We are Marsha! Marsha Marsha Marsha! We so generous, we DeGeneres. We are Ziggy Stardust hooked to the silver screen. Controversially we are Malcolm X. We are Plato. We are Aristotle. We are RuPaul, god dammit! And yes, we are Woolf."
While THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW (8 seasons) didn’t outlast it, I only just found out the series was a spin-off of THE DANNY THOMAS SHOW (11 seasons).
I’d always thought Andy was an original!
Fonz and the gang are still lost in time.
That gets tricky. Sheriff Andy Taylor and Mayberry did appear in an episode of the Danny Thomas show. But Andy was a crooked sheriff who used speed traps and so on. For the series, he was rewritten into a very different character at Andy Griffith's insistence. The show was a production of Danny Thomas Enterprises and filmed at Desilu.
But I say it's tricky because, when you rewrite the nature of the character and of the town so that the Danny Thomas episode would be an alternate reality that those events never really happened as far as the Andy Griffith show goes, is it really a spinoff?
This also brings up the point: do characters have to be regulars in a show for another show to be a spinoff?
The Andy Taylor character appeared in one episode of the then very popular Danny Thomas show and it was done specifically to give a boost to this Mayberry idea before it became it's own show that Danny Thomas was producing.
"Mork and Mindy" was the same. Mork was not a regular on Happy Days. They put him into one episode to give him a boost, free advertising before his own show started so people would associate it with the already popular Happy Days.
Last edited by Powerboy; 05-12-2020 at 08:11 PM.
Power with Girl is better.
Technically Mork just proved so popular in his appearance they decided to spin him off, and added a scene at the end of that admittedly very off the wall ep. (after Robin Williams appeared as a regular guy at Richie’s door, making the whole ep. a “just a dream” scenario) to show it was actually Mork after all, or so I’ve always heard.
As to the rest of your point, characters getting changed from pilot (or backdoor pilot) to regular series is pretty standard. I mean, Frasier always said his dad was dead and never even mentioned a brother on CHEERS, but it was hand waved for his series. If that can be done for a character w. years of appearances, doing it for a character w. just one seems like no big deal.
EDIT
Well I was right -and- wrong.
The sheer power of Robin Williams turned an ep. no one was excited about into a backdoor pilot!
I posted a link, but this site’s profanity filter broke it.
It was a story about how Gary Marshall suggested the idea and everyone thought it was awful, and how Robin Williams came in and just blew everyone away. Man that guy was great.
Last edited by Riv86672; 05-13-2020 at 02:11 AM.
NCIS is indeed a spin-off of JAG, and they still occasionally pull in actors that were from JAG to reprise their rolls. One of the female Lawyers from JAG just had a cameo on NCIS: LA
As for Law and Order, there have been several spin-offs, and all but one had pretty good runs, though nowhere near as long as SVU or the original. There was Law and Order: Criminal Intent (10 seasons), Law and Order: UK (8 seasons), and Law and Order: LA (ONE season. Ouch).
Right on the first two, but Dukes of Hazzard started as a show, and has since had a couple of movies. I see no evidence of a film on IMDB that precedes the show.
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There was an episode of Frasier where Ted Danson guest-starred as Sam Malone and they addressed the issue. When Sam meets Martin, he says to Frasier, "You told me your father was dead," and Martin says, "You told Sam Malone that I was dead?" Then I think Frasier said something about how he and his father weren't getting along at the time and he was "Dead to me!"
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