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Unpopular Shows you Love

Drtooth

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I take offense to "Loan Gunmen" being on there. I could never get into X-files, but there was something special about Gunmen doing non-alien related conspiracies. Too bad no one cared about it. it was far better than most shows on that list.
 

CensoredAlso

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Getting back on the subject of crappy spinoffs, here's an interesting article and gallery of what are considered the top 25 unnecessary spinoffs ever made.
What's interesting is the two Three's Company spin offs were so disastrous, yet the equivalent British spin offs are still fondly remembered from what I've read. You just never know.
 

Drtooth

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Spinoffs are hard. Taking the most popular characters out of a show and giving them their own series doesn't work as well as it should. Look at any time Scooby and Shaggy are the main characters. that should be comedy gold, as they are the best characters and the ones everyone loves the most (you never hear anyone say "the heck with the dog and hippie, Fred is the man!"), but instead the antics are tiresome, they put into different, worse plot lines and have to make funnier back up characters that are just annoying and can't fill the void left by the other characters.

Personally, I think The Cleveland Show did the right thing by having the most ill-defined of the main characters as the star. I mean, a Quagmire series would suck. His antics are hit and miss already, and they keep having to push the boundaries of the character to make him worse. And, frankly, The Cleveland Show was actually pretty good (at least better than Family Guy became) up until the third seasons where you can tell the writers knew they were going to get cancelled and just threw together the laziest scripts possible. Not to mention the whole, "let's replace Seth MacFarline's voice for Tim the Bear, and barely use him or any of the other bar friends for anything more than a line an episode" didn't help matters much.

Getting back to that list, I see the first one listed is a yet to be produced "How I Met Your Father" series. That's the perfect metaphor. I'm a big fan of HIMYM, but the network screwed them by giving them another season. Now we have the entire wedding episode that could have been an hour finale or a 4 episode arc at most into a 20 something episode season. And they got desperate and did a Flashback episode barely 2 months in. Padding. Lots of padding. And a second series (be it about the same events from the mother's POV or another bunch of characters entirely) would be no more than a retread with characters that aren't as engaging as the originals. In short, the same reason that That 80's Show was cancelled. THAT is why spinoffs rarely work, Charlie Brown.
 
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