Best And Worst TV Spinoffs Of All Time

Not all spinoffs are created equal. Just ask Joey Tribbiani.

When the New Yorker made his way to Hollywood with his own Friends offshoot, little did he know that 14 years later he would land on TVLine's list of the worst TV spinoffs. But for every Joey, there's an Angel, a continuation that makes its mothership series so proud, it lands in the "Best" column.

Here, Team TVLine has gathered our picks for the cream of the spinoff crop... and the failures we wish we could unsee. Our selections include recent shows like The Originals, Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, The Flash and Ravenswood. But we also dug deep to uncover which classics were winners (The Jeffersons!) and which failed to impress (The Brady Bunch as a melodrama, anyone?).

Scroll down to see 30 of TV's best (and worst) spinoffs, then drop a comment with your own picks below.

WORST: AfterMASH

Spinoff of: M*A*S*H

The concept wasn't terrible (heck, an episode even got nominated for an Emmy), but the continued adventures of the 4077th just weren't the same without Hawkeye, Hunnicutt and Hot Lips. You didn't need to be Radar to hear this cancellation coming.

BEST: Angel

SPINOFF OF: Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Featuring a talented ensemble and complex characters, Angel was heartbreaking, funny, intelligent and inventive — all the things you would expect from an offshoot of Buffy.

WORST: Baywatch Nights

SPINOFF OF: Baywatch

What's worse than giving lifeguard Mitch Buchannon (played by David Hasselhoff) a night job as a P.I.? Turning the struggling spinoff into a very poor man's X-Files in Season 2.

BEST: Better Call Saul

SPINOFF OF: Breaking Bad

Little did we know when the prequel series first began that we'd dread the day that small-time lawyer Jimmy McGill breaks bad and devolves into the cheap-suited, ambulance chaser eventually employed by Walt and Jesse.

WORST: The Bradys

SPINOFF OF: The Brady Bunch

Sixteen years after the classic sitcom signed off, the massive success of a Christmas-themed reunion movie led series creator Sherwood Schwartz to think The Brady Bunch could live on... as an hour-long melodrama about local politics, paraplegia, interracial adoption and abusive girlfriends. Schwartz thought wrong.

WORST: The Cleveland Show

SPINOFF OF: Family Guy

The only spinoff in recent memory more ill-conceived than Joey was this Seth MacFarlane offshoot, which took the barely developed character of Cleveland Brown and put him at the center of what was essentially a watered-down version of Family Guy.

WORST: Criminal Minds: Suspect Behavior

SPINOFF OF: Criminal Minds

Reviewed as "familiar," "boring" and especially "sadistic," the Forest Whitaker-led spinoff lasted just one season, earning the dubious honor of being CBS' first failed crime drama spinoff (of several).

BEST: Daria

SPINOFF OF: Beavis and Butt-Head

After mercilessly mocking Beavis and Butt-Head on their MTV series, bitingly sarcastic teen Daria Morgendorffer went on to mock everyone else on her own show, a perfectly angsty late-'90s time capsule — and a refreshingly jaded look at teen life far removed from The WB's glossy portrayals.

BEST: The Facts of Life

SPINOFF OF: Diff'rent Strokes

Helping Mr. Drummond raise Arnold and Willis was merely preparation for Mrs. Garrett's true calling: looking after a group of young women and teaching them the facts of... oh, that's where the title comes from.

BEST: Family Matters

SPINOFF OF: Perfect Strangers

Steve Urkel may have stolen the spotlight, but never forget that Family Matters was born of Perfect Strangers, on which Harriette Winslow worked as Chicago's most charismatic elevator operator.

BEST: The Flash

SPINOFF OF: Arrow

The charming Barry Allen first captured our hearts on that show about a bow-wielding vigilante — but he sped off with them on its buoyant offshoot.

BEST: Frasier

SPINOFF OF: Cheers

Just the thought of this smart, character-driven sitcom — which ran for 11 seasons, tying its predecessor — makes us hungry for tossed salad and scrambled eggs.

WORST: The Golden Palace

SPINOFF OF: The Golden Girls

Saying goodbye to The Golden Girls after seven wonderful years was hard... but watching three-fourths of those girls flounder their way through this clunky, uninteresting one-and-done spinoff was even harder.

BEST: The Good Fight

SPINOFF OF: The Good Wife

A whole show centered around the incomparable Christine Baranski as the elegant badass Diane Lockhart? And she can curse?! They should have called it The Great Fight.

BEST: The Jeffersons

SPINOFF OF: All in the Family

This offshoot was groundbreaking, taking on issues of race and class by focusing on an upwardly mobile African-American family living in a "deluxe apartment" on the East Side of Manhattan in the 1970s. (One episode even featured a transgender character... on CBS in 1977!) Perhaps most importantly, it was funny, thanks to to a strong ensemble led by Sherman Helmsley and Isabel Sanford.

WORST: Joanie Loves Chachi

SPINOFF OF: Happy Days

Perhaps an overestimation of "Choanie" fans (did 'ships exist in 1982?) led ABC to attempt this fourth offshoot of the feel-good Happy Days, which almost inexplicably moved the young vo-dee-oh-do-doh'ers away from Milwaukee to pursue music-making fame in Chicago. Its biggest claim to infamy, though, may be TV's most treacly theme song ever.

WORST: Joey

SPINOFF OF: Friends

The actor's cheesy solo move to Los Angeles proved that you really do need your friends. But we didn't need a pilot to know that taking one-sixth of a popular ensemble show wasn't going to fly.

BEST: Law & Order: SVU

SPINOFF OF: Law & Order

We're oddly comforted by the reliability of a 20-season (!) procedural that has survived multiple cast changes... and then we remember that it's a show about the most deplorable sexual violence humans can inflict on each other. (Looks like it's time to book an appointment with Dr. Huang.)

BEST: Major Crimes

SPINOFF OF: The Closer

Five months after Kyra Sedgwick announced that her days as Brenda Leigh Johnson were done, TNT revealed that Major Crimes was officially a go, rather seamlessly putting onetime foil Sharon Raydor (played by Mary McDonnell) in charge of the MCD. Lasting nearly as many episodes (105) as its predecessor, the offshoot also copped just as loyal an audience.

WORST: Models Inc.

SPINOFF OF: Melrose Place

Amanda Woodward's estranged mother, Hilary Michaels (played by Linda Gray), popped into but one episode of Melrose before fronting this lukewarm look at a Los Angeles modeling agency. Emma Samms was brought on to spice things up midseason, Heather Locklear-style, but even she couldn't beef up the size 0 premise.

WORST: Once Upon a Time in Wonderland

SPINOFF OF: Once Upon a Time

Even a promising cast and a wonderous setting couldn't help Alice & Co. capture the magic of the drama's predecessor as it fell down the rabbit hole.

BEST: The Originals

SPINOFF OF: The Vampire Diaries

The Mikaelsons proved their memorable run on TVD was no fluke as the richer and more adult spinoff dug into the clan's tortured history. And when you've been around for a thousand years, there's plenty of family dysfunction to mine.

WORST: Pinky, Elmyra & the Brain

SPINOFF OF: Pinky and the Brain

We believe this lyric from the theme song says it all: "Now Pinky and the Brain share a new domain" — with Tiny Toon Adventures' Elmyra Duff — "It's what the network wants. Why bother to complain?"

BEST: Port Charles

SPINOFF OF: General Hospital

Spinning off the characters of Lucy Coe, Kevin Collins, Scott Baldwin and Karen Wexler, Port Charles was Grey's Anatomy years before the primetime soap ever existed, focused as it was on a group of interns. But once the vampire story kicked in, we were all in.

WORST: Ravenswood

SPINOFF OF: Pretty Little Liars

As if the PLL universe wasn't ludicrous enough, this one-season spinoff introduced ghosts and demons into the mix. Needless to say, it didn't earn an "A" from viewers.

WORST: Saved By the Bell: The New Class

SPINOFF OF: Saved By the Bell

The only thing more inexplicable than the fact that this largely forgotten offshoot ran for seven — yes, seven — seasons is the fact that... actually, there's nothing more inexplicable than that.

BEST: The Simpsons

SPINOFF OF: The Tracey Ullman Show

Arguably the most successful spinoff of all time (30 seasons and counting!), it's hard to believe this global phenomenon began as a series of crudely animated shorts on a sketch comedy show.

WORST: The Tortellis

SPINOFF OF: Cheers

Remember Frasier, the critically acclaimed and wildly successful spinoff of Cheers? Yeah, this isn't it. Carla's slimeball ex-husband Nick Tortelli and his bimbo bride Loretta were fun in small doses at Sam's bar, but they quickly began to grate when given their own show, which lasted a mere 13 episodes. 

BEST: NCIS: Los Angeles

SPINOFF OF: NCIS

Born of NCIS' two-part Season 6 finale, LA took the mothership's basic premise and added to it a hangout much cooler than the orange room, plus ample doses of octane. Arguably the best NCIS of the current bunch.

WORST: Phyllis

SPINOFF OF: The Mary Tyler Moore Show

Though blessed with a cushy timeslot — between All in the Family and MTM's first spinoff, Rhoda — this offshoot about Mary and Rhoda's newly widowed former landlady (Cloris Leachman) was mainly cursed. The San Francisco-set sitcom underwent a major overhaul after Season 1, and when two cast members passed away during Season 2 — and a third fell ill — Little House on the Prairie put it out of its misery.