10 TV Spin-Offs Better Than The Original

10. Daria

Original Show: Beavis & Butt-head

Beavis & Butt-head, which itself spun-out from short film Frog Baseball, was lewd, crude, and frequently hilarious. A clear forerunner to South Park, it mixed satirical observations and outlandish humour to often great effect, although its very nature meant it was often hit and miss.

Daria, which wasn't created by Mike Judge but did centre on a character established in Beavis & Butt-head, took a very different approach. It distanced itself, quite literally, from the off with Daria's family moving to a new town, and that distancing would only continue through the show's five seasons.

Smart and sophisticated where Beavis and Butt-head was dumb and silly, Daria was one of the first shows to truly capture the essence of high-school. Like, say, Freaks and Geeks that would arrive a couple of years later, the show was not only incredibly fresh, but also authentic. It helped that the writing was razor sharp in its observations and genuinely funny to boot, but with a sweetness not found in its parent show to make it much more rounded. With Daria herself fleshed out into a high-school protagonist unlike any audiences were really used to at the time, mixing her smarts with an acerbic bit, this was ahead of its time and ahead of Beavis & Butt-head.