The best TV shows based on movies

Donald Glover and Maya Erskine star in 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' in 2024

The 2024 TV reconsideration of the movie 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith' arguably outdid its progenitor

(Image credit: Prod DB / Amazon Prime Video / Amazon Studios / Alamy)

published 17 July 2025

On Aug. 12, FX will release the first two episodes of its highly anticipated series "Alien: Earth," helmed by "Fargo" creator Noah Hawley. It's hardly the only television adaptation of source material drawn from a feature film or franchise. With studios increasingly reluctant to take a chance on completely new material, popular movies represent an attractive source of built-in audiences. FX surely hopes "Alien: Earth" will join the club of these standout shows.

'Buffy the Vampire Slayer' (1997-2003)

Creator Joss Whedon's iconic 1990s vampire saga was so successful that it became more prominent than the film it was based on — which Whedon also wrote. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" ranked just 84th at the box office in 1992, but the series, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar as the titular teenage vampire hunter, became an era-defining hit. It turned television "into something radical and groundbreaking," offering a propulsive narrative that was a "mythic, feminist-inflected meld of horror, comedy and teen drama," said The New Yorker. The show concluded with its seventh season in 2003.

Kyle Chandler's starmaking role as Eric Taylor, a sought-after Texas high school football coach, turned "clear eyes, full hearts, can't lose" into an enduring sports slogan across five seasons. Like the 2004 film, creator Peter Berg's intense series was based on the 1990 book by Buzz Bissinger and followed the exploits of a team from a small Texas town where football is virtually a religious obligation. A "quiet but brilliant sports drama" that ran for five seasons, the show is about "how football, hometowns and big dreams shape us" and reminds us to "take chances, to follow your heart" and to "embrace change," said Paste Magazine.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Noah Hawley's spin on the 1996 Coen brothers crime comedy expertly grafts the basic formula of a down-on-their-luck knucklehead triggering a cascade of violence with an inept criminal scheme onto a new setting each season. Even though "some fans weren't crazy about the idea of anyone reworking their favorite dark comedy," the FX show's first season was a success "filled with allegories and digressions and asides that may or may not mean something," said Entertainment Weekly. Four more seasons, all set in Minnesota but with mostly unconnected plots and implausibly massive body counts, have followed, with the fate of a potential sixth season unresolved.

The hit horror-comedy series borrowed the mockumentary comedy format from the 2014 movie about a group of ancient vampires sharing an apartment together during the present day. But FX's "What We Do in the Shadows" moves the location to Staten Island while preserving the basic idea of fish-out-of-water vampire roommates trying to navigate the mundane challenges of modernity while also getting their fangs into enough necks to survive. The cast members "deliver hilarious performances" in "one of the funniest, most original shows on television," said The Mary Sue. The sixth and final season concluded in December 2024.

Cocreators Donald Glover and Francesca Sloane reworked the splashy 2005 Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie spy vs. spy thriller into something wildly different. Glover and Maya Erskine play two struggling millennials who take jobs as spies for a mysterious company that establishes the pairs' cover as a married couple — John and Jane Smith — in a preposterously lavish New York City brownstone. The episodic storytelling follows them as they navigate each new, extremely dangerous assignment. The show "wrestles with the idea of compatibility" in a way that makes it feel like it's "about dating first and spying second," said Vox. A second season is in production.

Explore More

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.