But like your Lou Grant example those were all preexisting characters, who were already popular, and who was played by a popular actor, so this is not the same thing.
How is Alfred Pennyworth
not a popular pre-existing character? Heck, I'd love the idea of an Alfred prequel if it weren't from the
Gotham creators.
I think if a spin-off becomes too divorced from its source material you run the risk of alienating the audience and losing their interest.
What people keep missing, though, is that the purpose of a spinoff or an adaptation to a new medium is to attract a
new audience, not just the same old one. The whole reason for expanding to a different venue is to increase the size of your audience, to attract people who weren't interested in the original version. There are people who love
Supergirl or
The Flash but have never seen a single episode of
Arrow. There were
Star Trek: Voyager fans who had no interest in TNG or DS9. And of course
Torchwood was deliberately aimed at a very different, far more adult audience than
Doctor Who.
So it doesn't matter if what you make doesn't appeal to every viewer of the original show, because the whole point is to add new viewers, so that the two shows together have a larger audience than either one alone.
There might be a good series that could be made about the Picard family's struggles to run a vineyard but it might be better to just create a completely unconnected story at that point.
Better by what standard? From a creative standpoint, it doesn't matter either way, as long as the stories are good. But from a business standpoint, from the perspective of the show's owners, it's definitely better to use a character you already own the rights to than a new character created by someone else.
The thing is, fans tend to exist in a bubble where we assume that everyone out there has the same knowledge we do about genre fiction. Adam-Troy Castro has
just been talking about this in a Facebook thread. There are people out there who have no idea that
Smallville was based on Superman or that
Deep Space Nine was connected to
Star Trek. There are people who just don't register those connections, to whom any given show is not a spinoff or an adaptation or what-have-you but just the show they're watching now. That's a much, much larger part of the audience than we fans usually realize. And that's the target for a show like
Pennyworth. The target audience is people who want to see a spy show with an interesting lead character. And somebody at Warner Bros. probably thought, "Hey, Alfred's an interesting character who used to be a spy, and we own him, so we could get a show out of that." Which is cool for people like me, Batman fans who are interested in that untold part of Alfred's life, but it's also cool for people who just want to see a retro spy show with a charismatic, English-accented lead.
I think as an author that perhaps
@Christopher has the perspective that the creative spark or inspiration is the only point of a spin-off but I feel that enticing and interesting an existing audience is also the point and shouldn't be entirely discounted from evaluation.
Of course, but the two are not competing or mutually exclusive choices. The goal, naturally, is to have as large an audience as you can get. So it should be obvious that the ideal is to appeal to
both the established audience
and a new audience. The problem exists only in the minds of gatekeeper fans who feel they have to build walls between themselves and other audiences, to lay claim to a fandom and be purist about it. There's no conflict between appealing to the existing audience and attracting a new, different audience. They're both parts of the same overall strategy to increase viewership.
