We're in the midst of a spinoff explosion. Every established property now gets the extended universe treatment: new shows emerging from successful franchises, legacy characters getting their own vehicles, entire narrative worlds expanding outward like corporate franchises at a mall food court.
The obvious explanation is that studios love a sure thing. Spinoffs built on existing fan bases feel safer than rolling the dice on original concepts. There's logic to this, especially in an era when streaming services must justify their subscriber counts to nervous investors. Why gamble when you can leverage what already works?
But this reasoning only scratches the surface of what's actually happening in television right now. The real story isn't about risk aversion, though that's certainly part of it. The real story is that the traditional mechanisms for developing and launching original shows have fundamentally broken down.
Television once operated on a predictable pipeline. Networks would develop dozens of pilots, test them with audiences, and greenlight a handful each season. Some would fail spectacularly. Others would quietly disappear. But occasionally, something would click. That system wasn't perfect, but it had a built-in randomness that allowed for genuinely unexpected hits.
That pipeline is effectively dead. The economics have shifted. Development is expensive. Marketing is expensive. The threshold for what constitutes a "successful" show has risen dramatically, even as the total number of available viewers remains finite. Networks can no longer afford to develop and promote as many original concepts. They can't subsidize the creative experimentation that sometimes produces lightning in a bottle.
So what do they do instead? They reach for the spinoff. It's not cynicism so much as mathematical necessity. A spinoff comes pre-loaded with narrative infrastructure, character recognition, and existing fan investment. The marketing problem becomes simpler: "Here's a character you already know in a new context" is far easier to sell than "Here's a completely original world you've never heard of."
This isn't sustainable, though executives would rather not admit it.
The spinoff strategy only works if the original property has genuine cultural staying power. But the more networks rely on extending existing franchises, the less oxygen flows to the creation of new ones. In five years, when those original hits are finally exhausted or culturally irrelevant, what will networks have in their development pipeline? Not much, if they've spent the last half-decade focusing primarily on spinoffs and sequels.
We're watching an industry slowly paint itself into a corner. The decision to make a spinoff instead of investing in an original series might make perfect sense from a quarterly earnings perspective. But collectively, across the entire industry, this strategy is cannibalizing the very resource that keeps television healthy: a steady stream of genuinely new ideas that capture cultural attention.
The real question isn't whether individual spinoffs will succeed. Some will. The question is whether networks will eventually realize they've created a structural dependency that leaves them vulnerable. Once the well of established franchises runs dry, what happens to the industry that spent years training audiences to only care about extensions of existing properties?
The spinoff boom isn't evidence that television has figured out a winning formula. It's evidence that television has stopped trying to develop one.