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There's no better way to create a hit TV show than to take familiar characters and place them in new situations. Familiarity breeds success, and popular shows will often spin off or give birth to new shows. To find out what program spawned the greatest number of new TV shows, we went to the Television Shows History category in the Yahoo! Directory and searched for an answer. We started with the TV Acres web site. We clicked through to the site index and knew we were in business when we found an entry for spin-offs. The site provides a great list. Unfortunately, it's in plain old alphabetical order and doesn't give any
immediate indication as to which show was the most prolific. Scrolling through the list, we were able to whittle down the possibilities and come up with some nominees for the all-time leader. Depending on how strictly you define a spin-off, there are several contenders for the title. All in the Family is one candidate -- Archie Bunker and the gang inspired four separate shows, and those four spin-offs inspired yet two more shows for a grand total of six. But Happy Days (who can forget Joanie loves Chachi?) and Star Trek each led to four more shows. We suggest you take a look at the list and see what you think. If nothing else, it will
bring back memories of turkeys like The Ropers, The Brady Brides, and The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo. We stopped by Thom Holbrook's Crossovers Spinoff Master Page to double-check our work. Checking the three titans above, we found that Thom noted a fifth spin-off from All in the Family missed by the TV Acres site. So it looks like famous bigot Archie Bunker takes home the trophy.
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