Top 10 Worst TV Spin-Offs

Private Practice, the ABC spin-off of the hit hospital drama Grey's Anatomy, is back for a second season. Not all spin-offs are so fortunate, however: TIME looks back at the most absurd, ill-planned and disastrous TV-show spawn of the past few decades.

The Lone Gunmen, 2001

Tom Braidwood, Dean Haglund and Mitch Pileggi, in The Lone Gunmen

20th Century Fox Film Corp
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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.

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