TV Actors Who Returned To Television With A Hit After Failed Movie Careers

These days, television and movies are almost indistinguishable from each other to an extent. Things all sort of blur together on streaming services, where viewers often don't differentiate between films and extended episodes of series — and this is spurred on by the fact that most series have the look and the budget of a major Hollywood production. Furthermore, when actors like Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Julia Roberts, Matthew McConaughey, and Paul Giamatti are all doing TV shows, the previous sharply-drawn line between the big and small screens is virtually nonexistent.

But it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, there were "TV stars" and "movie stars," and the only time there was crossover was when an actor graduated from television to film. TV was seen by many as a mere starting point to their careers, with getting to be a movie actor being the ultimate end goal. While plenty made that transition just fine and stayed on the big screen once they got there, some actors took a swing at movie stardom and missed so hard that they had to return to television — which used to be seen as having to take a step backwards. Luckily, that stigma is gone now, but it definitely had to hurt for some of these people. 

Matt LeBlanc has done something that few actors manage to pull off — appear in several successful television shows. It's already pretty rare that a member of a show as huge as "Friends" even finds a second series that lasts, let alone a third. But LeBlanc has done exactly that, having appeared in both "Episodes" and "Man with a Plan," which lasted for two and four seasons, respectively — not to mention an extended stint on the car show "Top Gear." 

He didn't roll smoothly from "Friends" right into his subsequent shows, though. Beyond the failed spin-off "Joey," LeBlanc did take a stab at a movie career for a few years. The results included a baseball movie where his co-star was a monkey, and the critically panned 1998 reboot of "Lost in Space," among other things. LeBlanc would eventually take a bit of a break to reassess his career, which turned into a six-year hiatus from acting (per The Hollywood Reporter). The time off was obviously the right move, as his first post-hiatus project was the acclaimed "Episodes." 

LeBlanc has been in only one movie since his return to acting, and that was 2014's "Lovesick" — so he's clearly decided that the small screen is where he does his best work. 

Scott Bakula had been a steadily-working television actor throughout the 1980s, with multi-episode stints on "Gung Ho," "Designing Women," and "Matlock." But his breakthrough and first major lead role began with the debut of inventive sci-fi series "Quantum Leap" in 1989. He played physicist Sam Beckett, who was forced to inhabit random people's bodies and help them navigate a pivotal moment in their lives.

It didn't take long into his time on "Leap" before Bakula tried his hand at movies, appearing in the 1990 film "Sibling Rivalry" and then playing the lead role in the 1991 football comedy "Necessary Roughness." Neither of those had set up a super successful movie career for Bakula, and even after "Leap" ended in 1993, he didn't get anything close to a big breakout movie role. In fact, Bakula's 13 episodes on "Murphy Brown" in the mid-'90s had been his most noteworthy post-"Leap" role, seeming to hammer home that TV was a better fit for him. 

Other than a minor role in the award-winning "American Beauty," Bakula continued to flounder on the big screen before finally scoring another major role — again on a sci-fi television series — when he landed the part of Captain Jonathan Archer for four seasons of "Star Trek: Enterprise" in 2001.

Whereas David Caruso became the cautionary tale for leaving an acclaimed drama series to become a movie star and not having it pan out, George Clooney proved that some were able to walk that path to great success — with Clooney's film career even managing to survive "Batman and Robin." With that in mind, some of Clooney's "ER" co-stars felt emboldened to depart the long-running medical drama in order to try making their way in Hollywood, though obviously Clooney remains the biggest movie star among "ER" alums. 

Julianna Margulies left Cook County General Hospital in 2000 after six seasons, initially because she wanted to do more live theater but also in an attempt to make more time for movies. Six years into focusing on her film career and having appeared in stinkers like "Ghost Ship" and little-seen films like "Evelyn," she starred in "Snakes on a Plane," which illustrates where said career was at that point. 

While she did continue to dabble in minor television roles throughout the 2000s, Margulies finally landed another prominent project that she could be proud of: she played the lead role on seven seasons of "The Good Wife," for which she won two Emmy awards. 

Even though "Firefly" was famously short-lived, it very quickly became a major cult hit whose fandom grew rapidly after the show's cancellation and especially after its subsequent release on DVD. The series also helped launch movie careers for several of its cast members, including Alan Tudyk and Morena Baccarin. Interestingly, lead Nathan Fillion wasn't quite so lucky — despite buzz from the media (via EW) at the time that lavished him with praise for being a genuinely nice guy and implying he could be his generation's Harrison Ford.

It's telling that Fillion's most high-profile movie role post-"Firefly" was 2005's "Serenity" — the film that served as both the sequel and finale to "Firefly." He did play the male lead in indie darling rom-com "Waitress" three years later, but it's not exactly the kind of movie that makes a guy an A-list leading man. After failing to find that movie star vehicle to catapult him into major Hollywood success, Fillion returned to television in 2009 for the police dramedy "Castle," in a role that would earn him five People's Choice awards for Favorite TV Crime Drama Actor across the show's eight seasons. He has since followed that up with another successful law enforcement-based series, starring in ABC's "The Rookie" since 2019. 

It can be difficult to break away from a character like Fox Mulder, the FBI agent who is open-minded to the paranormal on "The X-Files." It was one of those shows that develops the kind of fandom that makes it hard for people to separate an actor from the character they play. To his credit, after exiting "The X-Files" before it ended, David Duchovny did attempt to play against type when he was the lead in the 2000 romantic dramedy "Return to Me." But that didn't make him the next go-to rom-com lead, and Duchovny quickly settled into a movie career where he appeared in silly comedies and mostly played conspiracy theorists that all felt like spoofs of Agent Mulder.

Despite Hollywood initially seeming unwilling to let Duchovny play roles that weren't within his "X-Files" wheelhouse, he did eventually get the chance to play a completely different character in another successful project — though it would mean returning to television for the Showtime series "Californication." For his role as Hank Moody, Duchovny was nominated for the Golden Globe for best actor in a musical or comedy series four times, winning the award in 2008. 

The late Kirstie Alley had the unenviable and seemingly impossible task of having to fill the shoes of Shelly Long — who herself had left television behind in a failed attempt to become a movie star — on the all-time classic sitcom "Cheers." But Alley's performance as Rebecca Howe fit the show just fine, and she managed to insert herself into a cast that had already been working together for years and still had plenty of chemistry with all of them. In fact, she was actually on the show for six seasons to Long's five, all the way through its 11th and final season.

During her time on "Cheers," Alley had already appeared in the hit comedy "Look Who's Talking" and both of its sequels. But final installment "Look Who's Talking Now" flopped at the box office and holds a dreaded 0% on Rotten Tomatoes. The movie came out in 1993, the same year "Cheers" ended, and it looked like her TV and film career had both come to a crashing halt at the same time. Subsequent appearances in the panned 1995 remake of "Village of the Damned" and the Olsen twins' movie "It Takes Two" didn't do much to revive her already-floundering movie career. 

So it went for the rest of the '90s, until Alley starred in and produced the sitcom "Veronica's Closet" in 1997. It lasted for three seasons, earned Alley an Emmy nomination, and paved the way for a revitalized career on the small screen.