The spin-off’s spin-off’s spin-off
17 May 2011
Categories: Watching television
For the past few months I’ve had a puzzler simmering on the back burner.
It was triggered by MeTV airing, the Sunday before Valentine’s Day, a marathon of Love, American Style. Amidst the episodes was the segment “Love and the Happy Days” which, as any classic TV fan knows, spun off into the long-running sitcom Happy Days—a show that spawned several spin-offs of its own. More recently, Fox aired an episode of Bones that was obviously—nay, blatantly—a set-up for its next-mid-season replacement series The Finder, something known in the biz as a “backdoor pilot.”
At any rate, here’s my puzzler: What’s the longest chain of spin-offs in television history?
