TV shows that were based on action films

The TV adaptation of “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” a film more notable for what was happening behind the scenes than on the screen, has as much in common with “The Americans” as the movie. In the film, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie play an unhappy married couple who find out that both are secretly assassins. In the TV show, Donald Glover and Maya Erskine play two strangers who are asked to pose as a married couple by a spy agency they work for.

There are a few action series set in the “Star Wars” universe now, but not all of them are derived from the films in a real way. “The Book of Boba Fett” is a different story. The bounty hunter first rose to (inexplicable) prominence in the original trilogy, before getting some backstory in the woeful prequel trilogy. Alas, the quality of the show leaned a bit more toward the latter, but it had some moments.

There is no Arnold in “Terminator,” but there are some Terminators in the mix. The focus, though, is on Sarah Connor and her son John, the famed future leader of the resistance against the machines in the future. While the show only lasted two seasons, it garnered a cult following.

George Lucas thought to himself, “What if we built the whole plane out of the River Phoenix cold open to ‘Last Crusade’?” Then, he created “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.” Lucas had his hands in the show in a major way. There were some preteen adventures, but much of the show focused on Indy between 16 and 21. The show was entirely recut, and they now exist as 22 TV films, which means, in a way, there are 27 Indiana Jones movies.

Bruce Campbell’s rise to B-movie icon began when he and his childhood buddy Sam Raimi joined forces to make the low-budget horror classic “The Evil Dead.” From there, though, the world of Ash shifted and changed and got weirder and funnier. Eventually, Campbell would end up playing Ash in a TV series that was heavy on gross-out humor, making it sort of an “Evil Dead 2” continuation more than anything else.

The Nicolas Cage “National Treasure” movies are goofy fun. We did say they were Nic Cage movies, after all. You won’t find Cage in “Edge of History,” the Disney+ series, though Harvey Keitel and Justin Bartha did pop in to reprise their roles. Sans Cage, and sans the joyful silliness of the films, “Edge of History” was axed after one 10-episode season.

Before USA was the “blue sky” network, and before it was whatever it is now (where they show Marvel movies and “SVU” reruns?), USA was a place to find sleaze-adjacent TV shows. The 1990 film “La Femme Nikita” is a stylized, over-the-top movie about a female assassin (who is also a teenager, because this is a Luc Besson film), and the TV adaptation for USA keeps some of that. A key difference is that Petra Wilson’s Nikita is innocent and framed into doing a shady organization’s dirty work. You may not remember this show, unless you watched anything on USA in the 1990s, but it ran five seasons and 96 episodes.

The “Buffy” TV show is beloved to many, and show creator Joss Whedon has spent plenty of time thumping on the original film, which he has screenplay credit on but didn’t direct, as being an affront to his vision. This is where we say we think the “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” movie is actually a lot of fun, even if it is a different thing. Feel free to give both a try.

There can only be one…or maybe not. In “Highlander” and its sequel films, Christopher Lambert plays Connor MacLeod, who is an immortal Highlander, and of course there can only be one Highlander. Except, when they wanted to turn the cheesy fantasy movies into a syndicated TV series, Lambert showed up as Connor in the pilot to introduce us to his cousin Duncan MacLeod, who is apparently also a Highlander? Hey, they got six seasons of 119 cheaply produced episodes. It all worked out.

We could have seen it working. You take the plot of James Cameron’s “True Lies,” turn that into the pilot, cut out the racist stuff, and then go from there. Alas, the TV show about a woman who discovers her husband is not a mild-mannered (yet buff and handsome) computer professional but a suave spy only lasted one season. On CBS! Where procedurals run for like 400 episodes!

“Westworld,” the film, is straightforward. It’s a taut, sci-fi horror flick about a gunslinging android gone buggy hunting down guests at an amusement park. This conceit was extrapolated upon for a TV show that starts from a similar place and then gets weird…and heavy on the nudity.

Before he was a Best Director winner, Bong Joon-ho was still doing interesting things, and often turning to fantastical ideas to get into social commentary. “Snowpiercer” is one of those movies, and it was turned into a story about class warfare aboard a speeding train that circles the globe containing what’s left of human society. Strangely, but less strange by modern standards, the show was picked up for a fourth and final season by TNT, and produced, but then TNT decided it did not want to air that season of TV. So, for now, the 10 final episodes of “Snowpiercer” don’t have a home.

Once more into the realm of, “Yes, USA had a TV show based on that movie.” We didn’t even get to “The Dead Zone” or “Weird Science!” These days, people mostly chortle at “The Net,” what with its very-1995 fear of the internet. By 1998, when the show debuted, the internet was slightly better understood. Maybe that’s why the show only lasted one season.

Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy film “Willow” is one of those polarizing ‘80s works that some who grew up with it love, but others consider mediocre at best. It had enough cache to earn a much-belated TV continuation, with Warwick Davis returning as Willow. Unfortunately, it landed at a rough time. Not only did “Willow” not get a second season from Disney+, but Disney purged it from the service, which basically means you can’t see it anywhere.

Mismatched cops. That’s a simple enough idea. It’s been done in film and TV dozens of times, and “Lethal Weapon” provided a nice template for a show. Riggs is a renegade, self-destructive cop. Murtaugh is too old for assorting things. While the show lasted three seasons, it was as chaotic behind the screen as on it. Clayne Crawford, was such a burden to deal with on set that he, and Riggs, were given the boot, with the character being replaced by Seann William Scott as Wesley Cole. Then, as the third season ended, Damon Wayans said he did not want to return to play Murtaugh again. That never came to fruition, as the show did not get a fourth season.

Jim Henson and Frank Oz’s “The Dark Crystal” is a cult ‘80s classic, beloved by puppetry fans and those who saw it as kids and appreciated that it was “darker” than much fare for family audiences. Many years later, those “Dark Crystal” lovers likely helped bring a prequel series, still puppet-based, to Netflix. While the show won the Emmy for Outstanding Children’s Program, it was canceled after one season.

“12 Monkeys” is one of Terry Gilliam’s more enjoyable head trips, helped by a cast headlined by Bruce Willis and burgeoning A-lister Brad Pitt. It also has a plot that you can’t really build on, so you really just need to stretch it out. Well, SyFy is not exactly a channel with a history of original programming that is so robust that it needed to worry about that. It got four seasons and 47 episodes out of “12 Monkeys,” which is frankly impressive.

There is not a ton of action in the action-comedy “Turner & Hooch,” but it is a buddy cop film (about a cop and a dog) and there are gunfights and such. It’s not a stretch to count it, even if we only remember the film because it was an easy outing for Tom Hanks as a leading actor. Alas, the TV adaption was another Disney+ purge. It was canceled after one season and removed from the streaming service.

“Stargate,” the movie, was a big hit, but kind of has been forgotten. What it did do, though, was lend itself to the building of a series of also-forgotten TV programs. “Stargate SG-1” starred Richard Dean Anderson (MacGyver himself!) and ran for 10 seasons and 214 episodes. There have been three other “Stargate” shows as well on top of that. Yes, in terms of creating TV fodder, few movies have been as successful as “Stargate,” a movie you may have never heard of.

We end by going back to the “Star Wars” well one more time. Hey, it’s a fruitful well here on the internet. Plus, “Andor” is kind of a perfect embodiment of the ethos that has come to define the “Star Wars” universe. “Rogue One” is a prequel to “Star Wars,” showing how the Death Star schematics got to Princess Leia. “Andor” is a prequel to “Rogue One,” showing how the titular character came to be a key figure in the resistance.