Leftridge: TV Time: The Best Worst Spin Offs

Better Call Saul premieres Sunday night (and Monday night, kinda), and like everyone else who knows what’s good, my bowels are quaking in nervous, anticipatory terror. The anticipation is one of both dread and glee; riding the coat tails of the legendarily great Breaking Bad means that it’ll be really good or an abject embarrassment. (For what it’s worth, the more I read makes the former seem more likely than the latter, so WHEW.)

The nervousness isn’t without merit. For every successful spin-off (Barnaby Jones, A Different World, The Andy Griffith Show, Dance Moms: Miami), there are 375 godfuckingawful abortions. Here are the worst:

11. Do you remember the five episodes of Mr. T and Tina that aired in 1976? Of course you don’t! A spin-off of Welcome Back, Kotter, MT&T as it’s known to its rabid fans (just kidding, there are none), starred Pat Morita as a Japanese inventor. Whatever you say, ABC. LOLZZZZZZ.

10. 21 Jump Street was a cool show about cool, hip, young police being hip and young and cool while working undercover to catch bad teens. It begat Booker starring Richard Greico, which was not hip, young or cool for 22 interminable episodes. (Despite Greico being like, super cool and attractive at the time.)

9. Columbo had a total of 10 seasons (69 episodes) spread out over five decades. (Don’t ask me how any of that math makes sense.) In 1979, his wife Kate (played by the excellent-on-Orange-Is-The-New-Black Kate Mulgrew) got her own show, Mrs. Columbo. Mr. Columbo never made an appearance, though. Reception was immediately poor. So they  called it Kate Columbo. Then they called it Kate the Detective. Then finally, they called it Kate Loves a Mystery. Oh, and then she was renamed Kate Callahan and all references to the original detective were dropped. So was the show, shortly thereafter.

8. Designing Women was popular with some people (though for the life of me, I can’t figure out who or why), and ran for seven seasons on CBS. Two years after it ended, Delta Burke returned to television in Women of the House. In the program’s 13-episode run, she resumed her role as Suzanne Sugarbaker, only this time she found herself assuming her husband’s role in the US House of Representatives after his death. She was brash! She was outspoken! She had a handicapped brother! She also formed a bond with fellow southerner Bill Clinton! (Clinton was heard, but never seen—ala George Steinbrenner on Seinfeld. Oh, but this show wasn’t quite as good as Seinfeld.)

7. In a 1996 episode of the immensely popular Home Improvement, Dave Chapelle and Jim Breuer made an appearance on the show’s meta-program Tool Time as two dudes in the audience who wanted love advice. Their appearance was so well received that the pair of comedians (and real life friends) were given their own television show, Buddies. Breuer was canned before the show even filmed and after five poorly received episodes, the show itself was axed. Both primary participants faded away, never to be heard from again.

6. Despite beating Walker, Texas Ranger in the ratings while the Ranger program was on hiatus, spin-off Sons of Thunder was cancelled by CBS after a scant six episodes. Co-creators Chuck and Aaron Norris were perplexed. Norris reportedly slammed several revolving doors, started a fire by rubbing ice cubes together, and made a Happy Meal cry. (God, I am so, so sorry.)

5. Al Bundy had an old, shyster buddy named Charlie Verducci (Joseph Bologna) who showed up in an early episode of Married with Children. His son Vinnie (Matt LeBlanc) dated Al’s daughter Kelly. The disgruntled shoe salesman and his dysfunctional, cartoonish family had a decade of somewhat unlikely success; the same could not be said for the Verducci’s on seven episodes of Top of the Heap.

4. All in the Family spun off Maude, Good Times, The Jeffersons and even Archie Bunker’s Place which somehow managed to run for four years. AITF’s worst child? Easily 704 Hauser. Crash landing in 1994, and for a paltry six episodes, 704 Hauser told the story of Ernie Cumberbatch (John Amos) who bought Bunker’s former residence in Queens. And that was the whole premise of the show. So…

3. Apparently, Fred and Lamont Sanford moved to Arizona and sold their property to one of Fred’s old army buddies, Phil Wheeler (Theodore Wilson, who is maybe best known for his portrayal of Sweet Daddy Williams on Good Times, or if you’re a hardcore fan of black sitcoms from the 1970s like me, Earl on That’s My Mama). Anyway, Sanford Arms mostly centered around Phil’s efforts to turn a rooming house on the junkyard property into a working hotel. Well, for four episodes at least.

2. Happy Days spawned some successful spin-offs—Laverne and Shirley and Mork and Mindy—but it also spawned the short-lived, much-maligned Joanie Loves Chachi, wherein Scott Baio and Erin Moran move to Chicago to become fleshy, standalone beings before ridicule and poor ratings forced them back to Milwaukee for the final season of their birthing program.

1. Cheers spun-off Frasier (which ran for 11 years, won 37 Emmys, and was named the 34th Best Show on 2002 TV Guide’s 50 Greatest TV Shows of All Time) but it also spun off The Tortellis, which ran for like, three months and left 13 unremarkable episodes. See, Dan Hedaya played Carla’s ex-husband Nick, and The Tortellis was about Nick moving to Vegas to reconcile with Loretta, his next ex-wife. He opened a TV repair business to prove that he was no longer a conniving, good-for-nothing dirt ball. And that was about it.