A lot of shows try the spinoff approach once they get successful; that’s how you launch a franchise, after all. Just earlier this week we looked at Babylon 5‘s far less popular spinoff, Crusade, which died very early. The successful spinoffs speak for themselves: Star Trek TNG, or Stargate Atlantis. Sometimes, like in the former’s case, they practically eclipse the parent show in popularity, but those cases are few and far between. Most spinoffs don’t really go anywhere, dying quietly and languishing in the original’s shadow. Today we’re looking at these, 4 spinoffs that are nowhere near as well known as the popular programs that spawned them.

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Ever heard of “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” It’s a little game people like to play with celebrities, based on the idea that you can get from any one actor to another (typically the aforementioned Kevin Bacon) by naming someone who was in a movie with another actor, who starred alongside a third in a different movie, and so on, until you make it to an actor who appeared on screen with Kevin Bacon. Today’s Friday Four (well, six, this week) is going to engage in some fun trivia by pulling the sci-fi version of this–counting each jump from universe to universe, how many jumps away are some of the biggest Sci-Fi heroes from each other? Let’s find out!

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News all across the spectrum this week, with developments in Star Trek, Marvel, Star Wars and many others. Too bad there’s not a lot that’s pic worthy. Read more

Sci-fi shows tend to be set in a time and place very far from modern day Earth, which means that their stories don’t always have to respond to recent events or even the time of year, like some shows do. And yet some people just can’t help themselves, so when a holiday comes rolling around, they embrace it, like with Doctor Who‘s many Christmas specials over the years. The Doctor even has a new one coming up this year where it looks like he’s meeting the “actual” Santa Claus. Better get busy picking up the pieces from that Series 8 finale, Santa.

But while Doctor Who‘s Christmas specials are generally well-received (and not a great divergence from the rest of the show in tone), other series weren’t so lucky. Just try asking George Lucas about the Star Wars Holiday Special, eh? So in the spirit of the season, here are four sci-fi shows you’d never have guessed would have Christmas specials.

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Sometimes writers make missteps in their shows. They make a move, be it killing off a character, or retooling the show, or what have you, that enrages the fans. A lot of the time, this will kill the show, but not always. If not, the writers will backpedal, returning things to the way they were in the hopes of maintaining the show a little longer. But once in a while that misstep just happens to be right at the end, when the show was scheduled to finish anyway, and there’s no chance to correct it. And when that happens, the lackluster finale can be enough to, in retrospect, ruin the entire experience of watching the show. That’s what happened with these four, finales and final seasons that so radically changed what we knew about the work that it’s no longer enjoyable. This is a highly subjective thing, so I’m sure that plenty of people will disagree with my list, but all I can do is describe it from my perspective.

With that said, here we go. Naturally, it’s nothing but spoilers past this point.

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There’s been a bit of a theme as of late, with most of my recent posts dealing with cancellation and renewal and cliffhanger endings. So today we’re going to keep that rolling by taking a look at how the Netflix binge-watching trend has affected the development of TV versus the way things used to be in the past.

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Crossovers are a funny thing; as I alluded to earlier in the week, most early crossovers were between popular shows on the same network that weren’t necessarily meant to be in continuity with each other when they were created. That’s how we end up with things like Adam West’s Batman and the original Green Hornet in the same universe. This tends to have some strange consequences, where previous in-jokes (like Batman watching Green Hornet on TV) no longer make sense or cause outright contradictions when trying to combine the two continuities. And while a main character crossing over is by far the easiest, most obvious, and hardest to deny of all the crossover types, there are many, many other ways for two shows to imply that they coexist in the same universe–some of which don’t even necessarily require permission from one of the shows! And that’s how we end up with these, some of the weirdest crossovers seen on TV.

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