Forgotten Sci-Fi TV Spin-Offs Based On Hit Movies

A surprise success, "Alien Nation" hit the big screen in 1988 with a story set three years after an alien race called the Newcomers arrive on Earth and integrate into human society. James Caan stars as Detective Matt Sykes, who's partnered with Newcomer Detective Sam Francisco (Mandy Patinkin) to hunt down a killer on the loose. A mix of crime noir, science fiction, and buddy cop tropes, the film yielded a TV spin-off one year later, with Gary Graham and Eric Pierpoint in the lead roles.

This new version, as reimagined by series creator Kenneth Johnson, is less a buddy cop action series and more of a gritty cop drama that explores real issues. In an interview with Games Radar, Johnson said he wanted to use the science fiction elements of the film to examine social and political problems and racial politics. On top of the police stories, the series put a focus on the problems of bigotry faced by Francisco's alien family as they integrate into Earth culture.

The series garnered mixed reviews upon release, and ratings at the time weren't strong enough to keep it afloat, leading to cancellation after just 22 episodes. Thankfully, perhaps due to the success of "The X-Files" later that decade, Fox was able to resurrect "Alien Nation" as a series of five television movies, with its final entry landing in 1997.

While HBO's "Westworld" reboot series is the franchise's most popular entry today, it's originally based on a 1973 science fiction film of the same name written by "Jurassic Park" author Michael Crichton. The movie even received a sequel in 1976 called "Futureworld," but what's rarely talked about is the spin-off television series broadcast later that same year, "Beyond Westworld."

Where the films see malfunctions lead to disaster in the titular android theme park, the series took a new angle. "Beyond Westworld" features a recurring villain, the sinister Simon Quaid (James Wainwright), who's stolen androids from the park for his own nefarious purposes. Looking to get their intellectual property returned, Delos — the corporation behind Westworld — sends security chief John Moore (Jim McMullan) to hunt them down. But the androids have infiltrated human society, and the series becomes a clever sci-fi procedural as Moore sets out to capture a new android replicant each week, whether it's a robot posing as a rock star, a corporate board member, a military sub commander, or a police officer.

A promising premise, it may have been a little ahead of its time, and it never quite took off. The fact that only five episodes were ever produced may account for why the series has faded into obscurity. 

In 1968, Charlton Heston's "Planet of the Apes" became a huge hit, telling the upside-down story of an astronaut who lands on a world where apes rule and humans are slaves. With its shocking twist ending, it became a cultural phenomenon, and the studio rushed a sequel into production. Between 1970 and 1973, there were four more entries in the series. But with box office results dwindling, the franchise tried a different approach with a prime-time network television spin-off. 

Debuting in 1974, the "Planet of the Apes" television series takes place some decade after the events of the films, when another team of 20th-century astronauts crash-land on the world ruled by apes. It sees the return of the film's star Roddy McDowall, but in a new role — that of Galen, a young and curious chimpanzee who begins to question the origin of his people and is sentenced to death for heresy. After Galen is rescued by two of the astronauts, the trio escape the city and criss-cross the landscape having weekly adventures fighting ape oppressors.

In addition to McDowall, the show's cast includes "Star Trek" veteran Mark Lenard and future "Land of the Lost" star Ron Harper. Despite the popularity of the films, the TV version of "Planet of the Apes" couldn't find much success, and it was canned after just four months and 14 episodes. The network would try again a year later with an animated adaptation, which didn't fare much better.

The 1994 Jean-Claude Van Damme movie "Timecop" is a sci-fi adventure that follows Max Walker, an agent of the Time Enforcement Commission, which tracks time-traveling criminals. When Walker goes back in time to stop a killer, he uncovers evidence that a powerful political figure has been using the government's temporal technology to reshape the future into his own dark design. Based on a comic book of the same name, "Timecop" was a surprise hit in 1994, and a few years later a television spin-off came to fruition.

With a premise tailor-made for weekly adventures, the small screen adaptation follows the exploits of officer Jack Logan (Ted King), who goes back in time each episode to stop a criminal in the past. With scripts by the film's writer Mark Verheiden ("Starship Troopers") and the team of Alfred Gough and Miles Millar ("Smallville"), it seemed primed to be a long-running hit. Unfortunately, the series was dragged down by a lack of ambition and a lower budget that limited the scope to relatively modern settings.

Beyond its inability to dream big, the "Timecop" show was simply cheap looking, poorly produced, and often just plain boring. In the end, just nine episodes were aired. The fact that nobody really remembers this one is sadly no surprise.

Paul Verhoeven's 1987 hit "RoboCop" is a sci-fi classic with a dystopian view of the future that feels eerily prescient today. Packed with social allegory that touches on corporate greed, class inequality, and the militarization of law enforcement, "RoboCop" is much more than a thrilling sci-fi action adventure. Starring Peter Weller as Alex Murphy — a cop who's critically wounded in the line of duty and turned into a cyborg as part of a new police program — "RoboCop" is one of the best action movies of the decade. A pair of big-screen sequels followed in 1990 and 1993, and a live-action TV spin-off landed a year later.

With a fairly sizable budget for its day, the series looked pretty good at the time. The original film's screenwriters, Ed Neuemier and Michael Miner, both returned, and they effectively erased the two sequels from their continuity. While the creators returned "RoboCop" to its roots with plenty of social commentary, being confined to television meant ditching the ultra-violence of the films, which turned off some fans. However, the addition of Murphy's parents expanded the character's story, and the return of the classic satirical commercials was a highlight as well.

Disappointing ratings saw the network fail to renew the series for a second season, though producers tried another live-action reboot a few years later in 2001 with the TV miniseries "Prime Directives."

The 1989 sci-fi comedy "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" was an unexpected indie hit starring Alex Winter, Keanu Reeves, and George Carlin. Filmed in 1987, the film was delayed two years, but it soon became the talk of the town. Following a sequel and a cartoon, a live-action television adaptation became the next world the two dim-witted misfits would travel to, and "Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventures" hit the small screen in 1992. None of the original cast returned, but the series follows the same concept as the first movie, seeing Bill S. Preston, Esquire and Ted "Theodore" Logan traveling through time each week to both the past and the future.

In between trips through time, Bill and Ted work in a hardware store under an iron-fisted boss who mistakenly ends up in the dark ages and must be rescued by our heroes. While the episodes have a few moments that might elicit some chuckles, most of whatever humor is to be had is lost without the endless charm and chemistry of the film's original stars. Additionally, the characters were barely ever compelling enough to sustain more than a movie or two, making it a struggle for them to hold viewers' attention for a weekly series. 

Sure enough, nobody was that entertained, and the show was quashed after less than 10 episodes.

A forgotten film in its own right, the 1979 time travel mystery "Time After Time" sees famed science fiction author H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowall) use a very real time machine to chase Jack the Ripper (David Warner) into the 20th century. A remake of sorts came about more than 35 years later with the 2017 television series of the same name starring Freddie Stroma as Wells.

The first pair of episodes of the series act as a retelling of the events seen in the film, with Wells using his time machine to travel to the present day (now 2017 instead of 1979) to stop Jack the Ripper. Like in the film and the book it's based on, Wells is stunned by the future that greets him in our present. Where he thought he'd find a peaceful world inhabited by an enlightened populace, he instead finds all manner of chaos. But he's also astounded by the wonders of modern technology, which are far beyond anything he'd ever dreamed of in his books.

Interestingly, each episode of the series is named for a line in the song "Time After Time" by Cyndi Lauper, who herself named the hit tune after the movie version of the story. But as noted by The Hollywood Reporter in their review, the series runs out of ideas rather quickly and doesn't have enough to say about the modern world to captivate audiences past its first pair of episodes.