The Law and Harry McGraw

This was sort of a dry run for Jerry Orbach. Years before appearing as Law and Order’s Lennie Briscoe, Orbach starred as the titular private detective in this Boston-set Murder She Wrote spin-off. He was gruff and hard-edged (but with a soft center), yet a brilliant private eye. Nothing we hadn’t seen before. The title rhymes, though. So that’s cool.
The Lone Gunmen

This X-Files spin-off starred the trio of dweeby conspiracy theorists who helped out Mulder and Scully from time to time. Often serving as comic relief on the original series, Byers, Frohike and Langley (first names were almost never used) similarly took on a hapless, Three Stooges–esque pose on their own show, which did not last very long at all. Creepily, the series premiere, in March 2001, involved a government conspiracy to crash a passenger airliner into the World Trade Center. Four months later, the show was canceled. Adding insult to injury, the Lone Gunmen themselves were killed off almost a year later on an episode of The X-Files.

























