The attempted spinoff episode

It doesn’t happen too often anymore, but there was a time when this odd variety of an episode would show up on your favorite show. You’d be watching and something odd would happen, a character who was obviously only meant for this episode had a major part where they almost took over the episode like and alien showing up on Happy days to battle the Fonz or a time traveling dude with different gizmos trying to one up Kirk and Spock in the 1960’s. Even stranger was when the regulars from your show were hardly in the episode like the Brady Bunch where the Brady’s were barely in it, but instead we saw a couple adopting three boys or the MacGuyver where he quickly goes away and the episode instead focuses on a pair of bounty hunter brothers. Sound weird? It should, these often well established shows decided to focus on another character in the hopes of getting a great audience response and getting the network to agree to give the character their own show. For Mork it worked, but for most others they didn’t get their own and instead just stick out like a sore thumb when you watch the whole show. In the case of the Brady Bunch and MacGuyver it came in the last season and you have to wonder if the creator knew the show was nearing it’s end so they used it as an outlet to pitch a new show hoping they could pick up and start that one off in the next season instead. Feel free to add in the comments any others you can think of. I hope to review some of these episodes soon. Likely it will be Star Trek, Happy Days and MacGuyver.