Word: spin-off
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...second season on NBC as the highest- rated dramatic show on TV's highest-rated network. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a sensitive San Francisco cop, is one of the season's top-rated new series and an ambitious pioneer of TV's newest form, the "dramedy." A potential spin-off is already in the works, focusing on a dwarf private eye named Nick Derringer, to be introduced in a segment next week. In addition, Bochco has signed a development deal with ABC that calls for him to create ten more series over the next nine years. Even if only...
...moguls ground out 40 or 50 pictures a year, then consigned them to rot in the vaults, Disney made a few superior films that could be recycled for a new audience of children every seven years. A half-century ago, he had anticipated the principle of ancillary markets -- the spin-off of theatrical releases into sound-track LPs, sequels, pay-cable airings and TV series -- that drives the movie industry today...
...Today TV show will be a fast-paced potpourri of news and features, divided into four sections: money, sports, life and USA (hard news). Except for one "cover story" of four minutes or so, the pieces will be brief and numerous (about 35 a half-hour). This broadcast spin-off of "McPaper" -- McRather, perhaps? -- has impressive parentage: it comes from GTG Entertainment, the new company headed by ex-NBC Chairman Grant Tinker (in partnership with Gannett, USA Today's publisher), and is being produced by Steve Friedman, the respected former executive producer of NBC's Today show...
...larkish effrontery. In George Baxt's The Tallulah Bankhead Murder Case (St. Martin's Press; 228 pages; $15.95), the ferocious actress is joined by such other real-life viragoes as Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman. Baxt's comic turn mingles the actual and the imaginary like a pun-obsessed spin-off of E.L. Doctorow's Ragtime, and has a similarly political bent. Set in 1952, it sketches deft parallels between the paranoia induced by a serial killer and the mania generated by McCarthy-era blacklisting. The plot is merely serviceable and the cast of characters sprawling rather than sharply defined...
...private-eye hero Spenser embarked on studiedly medieval quests to rescue damsels in distress. Some fans admired the chivalric plots and illuminated prose; others, finding these adventures merely portentous, longed for a return to the snarly, wisecracking style of Parker's earlier books and the ABC-TV series spin-off, Spenser...