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Sorry for the mixup
Sorry isn't GOOD enough! You have to get these things right! For the sake of the children!

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I never watched it but I always thought the 2nd Saved by the Bell was a "spin off" since two main characters stayed with the show.
Nope. Sequel. If it simply recast the original characters and started over, it would have been a remake. But in all possible incarnations, it was wholly unnecessary, I hope you know.

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Just curious how would you define the college years. A spin off or sequel?
A sequel. Also a crime against humanity, but that's for a different court to adjudicate.
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Or Melrose Place in relation to 90210?
Oh most certainly a spinoff, though not of the most classic type. Jake wasn't really a central 90210 character, and they were just looking for an excuse to do a show about slutty 20somethings, since their show about slutty teens had worked out so well for them.
A variation on the spinoff, which is still within the classic definition, would be Green Acres, which expanded upon the fictional mileau of Hooterville--that's a locale spinoff, which also happened in the case of Mayberry RFD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hootervillehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayberry Fascinatingly, The Andy Griffith Show was a spinoff of The Danny Thomas Show--the sitcom genome is amazingly diverse!
However, the most typical type of spinoff is when a well-known character from a popular show moves to an entirely different locale, and makes a lot of new quirky friends--Gomer Pyle USMC is one good example, but this variation on the spinoff form is truly endless, and some shows were especially prolific. All in the Family gave birth to Maude, Good Times, and The Jeffersons--but Archie Bunker's Place was clearly not a spinoff, but a follow-up. And Gloria, which premiered well after All in the Family was canceled, is simply a pointless exercise in stringing things out. But at least Burgess Meredith got some money out of it.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show produced two of the most obvious, yet overall, least successful spinoffs--both her wacky neighbors got their own shows, and neither was any damn good. But Lou Grant wasn't a spinoff because it wasn't a comedy, and wasn't filmed before a live studio audience. Or a laughtrack, same thing. Lou Grant, like Trapper John, is a PSEUDO-spinoff.
Some spinoffs (and pseudo-spinoffs), are shows the original show's creators wanted to do, and simply used the popularity of an earlier show they did to get it greenlit.
Frasier is centered around a character who had been well-established for years on a popular sitcom, and is widely CONSIDERED a spinoff--yet it is clearly set in an alternate Cheers dimension, where Frasier is much less pathetic, has an improbably bluecollar dad, and a never-before-seen brother. It takes on all the trappings of the spinoff, including multiple appearances by cast members from the earlier show--but none of those cast members appeared on Frasier until it was an established hit.
And this, more than anything else, dispatches the notion that Frasier was a spinoff.
Tomorrow we'll be looking at the etymology of the eponymous sitcom. Does The Chris Isaak Show break with tradition by actually having Chris Isaak play a fictionalized version of himself named Chris Isaak, who keeps putting off his inevitable dalliance with his hot blonde manager, and has a mermaid in his rec room--as opposed to a neo-rockabilly singer named Chris who has an entirely different and somehow less ethnic-sounding last name?
Please do all the assigned viewing, and remember--the final exam will constitute one third of your grade.
