8) Girlfriends
When Friends ended after ten seasons in 2004, fans were desperate for more from the gang. Unfortunately, their prayers were answered with the underwhelming spinoff Joey, which didn’t even make it to a full two seasons before being cancelled.
At one stage, though, there was another Friends spinoff in the works. The idea was to build a show around Lisa Kudrow’s Phoebe Buffay, where she would move in with latter-day Friends character Charlie (as played by Aisha Tyler). Naturally, the show would have been called Girlfriends.
Despite plans to feature former Friends regulars like David Schwimmer in recurring roles, the show failed to come to pass. The problem might have been that, to make the premise work, Girlfriends would have had to undo Phoebe’s ending in the original show, where she was happily married to Paul ‘Ant-Man’ Rudd. Still, it very well could have been more successful than Joey.
7) A Seinfeld Off-Shoot Starring Jackie Chiles
A Seinfeld spinoff could well have been great, as there were a bunch of characters who could have gone solo. However, the Seinfeld spinoff that did actually get to the discussion stages would have focused on a pretty minor character.
Though Phil Morris only appeared in just six episodes of Seinfeld, his character Jackie Chiles (a parody of O.J. Simpsons’ lawyer Johnnie Cochran) was deemed worthy enough of his own show. According to Morris, the idea that he, Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld had come up with was that Chiles would find himself as the only black employee of an all-white law firm.
Somewhat strangely, NBC outright denied that they had any knowledge of such a show – so it’s possible Morris was stretching the truth a bit. In any case, he later played the role again in a series of Honda commercials and Funny or Die videos.
