The Seven Worst TV Spin-Offs That Breaking Bad Should Learn From

While we may not have wanted Walt and his rag-tag team of neo-Nazis to leave us just yet,  getting out early was probably the best way to preserve the credibility of Breaking Bad. So how were we supposed to react to the announcement last month that AMC had finally green-lit the much-rumored Better Call Saul spin-off: a one-hour series which will prequel the show?

With joy, in parts: Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman is a great character, and the idea came from Breaking Bad writer-producer Peter Gould and showrunner Vince Gilligan, who haven’t lead us astray before. But we must also approach with caution: there aren’t too many spin-offs that have done justice to the source material.

Whether you have high hopes or not will likely depend on whether you thought the series finale was the best ever, a cop-out, or possibly good if you somehow conceive of the whole thing as a Mulholland Drive-esque revenge fantasy. But even if Gilligan and co. still have what it takes to bleed good TV out of their veins, they face an uphill battle running with the smarmy lawyer. Saul provided some much-needed humour in a show that threatened to kill most of its viewers from anxiety, but that won’t necessarily make him a compelling lead. Compared to Walt, he was resolutely two dimensional , and hardly relatable. Of course, that’s part of why he worked, but it mightn’t translate into the type of broad watchability an entire series requires.

It seems like Gilligan is trying to have it both ways, concluding his show with integrity while also stringing it along — because, like us, he can’t stand to say goodbye. We’ll have to wait for a year or two to find out just how it’ll play, but let’s take a look back at look back at the spin-offs that came before to see what company Saul Goodman may find himself in.

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AfterMASH (1983-1984)

Origin: M*A*S*H  (1972-1983)

A situation comedy with plaintive undertones, the original M*A*S*H focused on the real-life experiences of surgeons in the Korean War, while also serving as allegory for the war America was still fighting in Vietnam while the show aired. The whole thing was kind of sui generis, and demonstrated just how much you could do with a medium if you surrounded yourself with good writers and a great ensemble cast.

When M*A*S*H finally drew to a close after eleven seasons, Fox waited all of eight months before freaking out and launching the spin-off no one ever asked for. Set immediately after the war ended, the imaginatively titled AfterMASH followed three of the original characters back home in normal civilian life, at a Missouri veteran’s hospital. Removed from the whole “war is hell” MO of the original, the show descended into an oddball hospital procedural that gave itself no cause to exist.

It was cancelled after two seasons, only to be replaced by another equally perplexing spin-off based on Radar’s post-war attempt to join the police force, for some reason.

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Dusty’s Trail (1973-1974)

Origin: Gilligan’s Island (1964-1967)

When a long-running and beloved TV show ends, the network has two choices: they can fill the gap with new content, which is of course insane, or they can just syndicate it ad nauseum before re-making the entire series, but with different hats.

While not technically a spin-off, Dusty’s Trail was quite literally Gilligan’s Island set in the Wild West. Everything — from the premise to the cast to the already paper-thin characters they played — was a cowboy dress-up version of the tiresome show that preceded it: a series-length fever dream that Gilligan couldn’t wake up from, no matter how many times the Skipper swatted him with his hat.

Dusty’s Trail ran for one appalling year before being axed, and though the show has since become a textbook example of how not to do television, actor Bob Denver (who played both Dusty and Gilligan) claimed that the show was “my best year in front of a camera”, which is as depressing as it is true.

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The Golden Palace (1992-1993)

Origin: The Golden Girls (1985-1992)

As a sassy, female-dominated show, which will perhaps unfairly be remembered as Sex in the City for old people, The Golden Girls was way ahead of its time. The series ended when Bea Arthur married Blanche’s uncle (just like Sex in the City, sort of), except that it didn’t — because within a year, the other three women were given their own show. In The Golden Palace, Rose, Blanche and Sophia purchase a hotel for some reason, turning their once irreverent brand of humour into a second-tier Faulty Towers rip-off coupled with a touch of racial tension, with the three white retirees having to work with – wait for it – a black man and a Mexican.

Like many other shows in this list, the thing was cancelled after a year and never spoken of again by anyone who had anything to do with it.

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Frasier (1993-2004)

Origin: Cheers (1982-1993)

Frasier is one of the few successful spin-offs — if you consider propelling a middling comedy of manners into an eleven-year feat of endurance a success. A ratings winner, Frasier was also a decidedly MOR affair, with at least half its audience only tuning in for the dog.

The show’s longevity is also an argument in favour of giving spin-offs to the less crowd-pleasing of a show’s characters: as one of Cheers’ savourless barflies, the writers had room to evolve Frasier in ways that may not have worked for the rest of the cast.

Having said that, a mere five years after Cheers ended, Ted Danson would go on to play more or less the same role in Becker — which, given that it wasn’t even an outright spin-off, just makes that whole series more deplorable. Maybe Frasier wasn’t so bad.

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The Lone Gunmen (2001-2001)

Origin: The X-Files (1993-2002)

Turns out Vince Gilligan has had some experience with spin-offs. As writer of the first X-Files episode to feature “the Lone Gunmen” — a band of disheveled hackers that would later serve as the archetype for Anonymous forum users — Gilligan was also co-creator of their own short-lived spin-off. The show attracted approximately zero viewers despite presciently predicting 9/11 six months before that even happened, and featuring an opening credits sequence so ’90s that it’s hard to distinguish from one of those parodies doing the rounds.

Here’s hoping Gilligan has learnt from his mistakes.

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NCIS (2003-)

Origin: JAG (1995-2011)

It’s hard to gauge whether NCIS has done justice to the genetic coding JAG bequeathed it, given how shitty a show JAG was in the first place. If the original was “Law & Order meets Top Gun”, the spin-off was pretty much “both of those things meets CSI”. And it was all confined to the navy, as god knows viewers don’t want their naval-related forensics dramas being diluted by the other military wings.

Because everyone is likely more familiar with the spin-off than the now long-gone original, here are the beautifully ’90s opening credits to JAG instead.

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Joey (2004-2006)

Origin: Friends (1994-2004)

Literally any other character – even Gunther – would have made a better Friends spin-off than Matt LeBlanc’s doleful puppy dog, Joey. Set in LA, the show followed the titular buffoon as he attempted to pursue his embarrassment of an acting career (how meta). A better way to watch the show is to pretend that it’s a Sopranos spin-off, with Joey’s sister Gina reprising her role as Adriana in an alternate universe where she manages to dodge Silvio’s bullets and run all the way from New Jersey to Hollywood.

The show features the only opening music more insufferably upbeat than the one The Rembrandts hocked off in the original.

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Chris Harrigan is the editorial assistant at Smith Journal. He tweets @TheRealChirsp, but wishes he could change that handle because it’s stupid.