We’ve probably all seen them. You sit down to watch your
favorite television show, ready to relax and enjoy a visit with your favorite
fictional friends, but something is different this week. There are a lot of new
characters, or maybe a minor character from the past has returned, but seems to
be playing a much larger role, and they’ve brought friends. All the sudden your
favorite show has taken off in a different direction for that episode, and
that’s when you realize you’re watching a backdoor pilot.
Backdoor pilots happen every season. A popular show is deemed successful and
interesting enough that the studio feels the formula will work again and allows
the producer or shows creator to attempt to recreate this kind of hype on another
show. If the pilot is successful
they will order the series to production. Spin-offs are nothing new, this
season alone there will be spin-offs proposed from
NCIS :LA and Vampire Diaries
just to name a couple. There was news
this week that Dick Wolf’s popular first year drama, Chicago Fire, could result in a spin-off having to do with the
Chicago Police Department if all goes according to plan.
The idea of a spin-off is a tricky one, sometimes the
popularity of a show cannot be explained, people love what they love, but that
does not mean that all of those fans will follow to another show. Especially
when spin-offs will often have a similar tone as the original because a lot of
the same creative forces are behind it and that tone does not always work with
other characters. Procedural dramas may be the best place for these kinds of
experiments.
NCIS: LA, itself a
wildly popular spin-off proves that perhaps there is room for those kinds of
shows to result in a spin-off. There is always another layer of police work
that seems to become the popular trend, from the classic Law and Order format that spawned a whole slew of adaptations, even
as far as Law & Order: UK. Then
it was the CSI boom. Now it seems to
be NCIS’ turn to take another stab at
a hit. It worked out very well for CBS the first and second times, but only
time with tell if they strike gold for a third time.
However, one must beg the question, does the same translate
to non-crime oriented shows. Private
Practice was a rather successful spin-off of Grey’s Anatomy, but still never had the staying power of the
original series. As the storylines became more outlandish over the course of
the series it was hard for viewers not to think, would it have been better if
Addison had stayed at Seattle Grace and never made the move to Los Angeles?
It can be hard for loyal fans of the original show to
embrace a spin-off. To combat this
issue they should be seen as stand alone shows judged on their own merit
instead of against the original. This can be difficult, especially if the
spin-off is created from an already popular character on the original show.
With the Vampire Diaries backdoor
pilot for the spin-off based on “the originals” is scheduled to air in late
April it will be hard not to ask, do we really need this show? Or should the
characters remain on the original?
Only time will tell which of these pilots will be picked up, or if fans
will follow, but I guess I will be trying to keep an open mind.
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