The best TV spin-offs are often those based on films that were nothing special – just look at ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’

At the same time, nobody could ever accuse it of being a particularly good film. Doug Liman’s middling action comedy thriller about married assassins received lukewarm reviews and is mainly remembered these days for bringing together Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, thus inflicting the dreaded “Brangelina” fixation upon a blameless world.

​Mr & Mrs Smith the series, on the other hand, is a different matter. Amazon Prime’s reboot, starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine, is sparkling entertainment, clever, funny and exciting.

Glover, who developed the series and has co-written several episodes, is too smart to go for a lazy reheating of the original — a mistake made by a 2007 attempt at a series that never got beyond the pilot episode.

This Mr & Mrs Smith starts over from scratch with a completely new set-up. It behaves as if the original doesn’t exist. If there’s a lesson to be learned here, it’s that the best TV spin-offs are often those based on films that were nothing special.

There are notable exceptions, of course. M*A*S*H, one of the most acclaimed and adored TV series of all time, was based on Robert Altman’s 1970 film, which was nominated for four Oscars, won one (for adapted screenplay) and was long considered one of the greatest pictures from Hollywood’s greatest decade — although the film’s nasty streak of misogyny and smirking homophobia, unremarked upon at the time, is hard to stomach today.

The classic teen comedy Clueless (1995) spawned a well-received series — minus the film’s star, Alicia Silverstone — that ran for three seasons in the 1990s.

For five seasons, only one of them less than excellent, Noah Hawley’s Fargo has done a wonderful job of both honouring and expanding the universe of the Coen brothers’ 1996 masterpiece.

An honourable mention also goes to the much-missed Hannibal, the prequel series detailing the relationship between cannibalistic serial killer Dr Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI special investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) before the events of Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon.

For every one of these, however, there are countless series that either sank like stones or struggled along for a few seasons in the face of public disinterest.

Anyone remember the TV versions of Ferris Bueller (set before he took his day off), Uncle Buck (two separate failed series in 1990 and 2016), RoboCop or Minority Report?

This is just the tip of a very big iceberg. The television landscape has long been littered with failed attempts to cash in successful, critically lauded films. Among the choice misfires were Shaft (1973), Beyond Westworld (1980), Blue Thunder (1984) and Starman (1986).

Sometimes you have to wonder what was going through the heads of TV bosses. For instance, who in their right mind would think a series based on the timeless classic that is Casablanca was a good idea?

Back in 1983, someone thought just that — and acted on it. Poor David Soul was the unfortunate actor lumbered with the job of slipping into Humphrey Bogart’s white dinner jacket as Rick in a series set a year before the events of the film. Only three episodes of Casablanca were aired before the plug was mercifully pulled.

‘The television landscape has long been littered with failed attempts to cash in successful, critically lauded films’

Interestingly, there’d been an earlier Casablanca TV series in 1955. Unsurprisingly, that had also bombed.

If you need proof that the people running American television never learn from their mistakes, look no further than last year’s insipid small-screen True Lies, cancelled after one season.

It seem to be a lot easier to make a silk purse of a TV series from a sow’s ear of a film. The supreme example is Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The original film, released in 1992 and starring Kristy Swanson, was critically mauled. Writer Joss Whedon blamed studio interference.

But Whedon — whose career has been derailed by accusations of abusive behaviour towards cast and crew — rectified the damage with the Buffy TV series, which ran for seven seasons and is a beloved classic that continues to find new audiences every year.