5 Hit TV Shows That Deserve Prequel Spinoffs — And Would Be Better for It
TV keeps churning out spinoffs that water down the hits, but the rare prequel can sharpen the original—and Better Call Saul looks poised to be the exception that rewrites how we watch its parent series.
If you live in TV land long enough, everything gets a spinoff. Most of them just wring a brand dry. But prequels - the rare good ones - can actually make the original stronger. Better Call Saul didn’t just justify itself, it turned Jimmy McGill into one of TV’s best characters and reframed Breaking Bad in painful, brilliant ways. HBO clearly clocked that lesson with Game of Thrones, where House of the Dragon and A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms have gone a long way toward restoring luster after that scorched-earth finale.
Done right, a prequel pulls a side character or a whispered backstory into the spotlight and makes every choice in the original hit harder. A lot of great dramas left rich soil unturned - secondary players, half-told histories, whole eras that got a mention but never a scene. These five would actually benefit from a prequel, not just exist because someone found an old logo on a hard drive.
Deadwood - Swearengen before the throne
Deadwood arrived fully formed - Al Swearengen already running the Gem Saloon and playing godfather to a mud-caked boomtown. What we never got was how he built that power from nothing. Set it during the 1870s gold rush, drop Al into a dirt-floor settlement, and watch him outsmart rivals, pimps, and territorial officials until he is the closest thing the camp has to a sovereign. David Milch’s heightened, lyrical dialogue would fit that raw, pre-institution era even better than the later political chess, and Ian McShane always hinted that Al’s defining battles happened before we met him. Deadwood: The Movie closed the book in 2019, sure, but there’s a big, messy prologue still sitting there - before the town had a newspaper, a sheriff, or even the pretense of laws.
The Americans - Directorate S, day one
Joe Weisberg’s The Americans drops us into the Reagan-era grind of Elizabeth and Philip Jennings - espionage as marriage counseling and vice versa. But the show only flashes the Soviet training that forged them and the rough early years of assimilation in the 1960s. A prequel could start with their initial insertion into the U.S.: two strangers shoved into an arranged marriage, sandpapering off their accents and instincts while blundering through early counterintelligence traps. Watching them make rookie mistakes, then slowly, painfully sync up into the elite KGB execution team we know would deepen both the love story and the spy craft. Same universe, fresh energy.
The Wire - building the Barksdale empire
The Wire is the gold standard for how institutions fail people. But when season 1 starts, the Barksdale crew already rules the West Side. A prequel set in the 1990s crack era could map how Avon Barksdale rose and how Stringer Bell deployed strategy to consolidate power - a ruthless origin story for Baltimore’s underworld. Here’s a neat industry tidbit: David Simon actually pitched a prequel focused on this exact period, including a younger Omar Little, and HBO passed at the time. The show’s audience has only grown since, and the core thesis - systems create their own dysfunction - would hit differently if we watched those conditions taking shape in real time, before anyone quite realized what they were building.
Sons of Anarchy - the First 9, for real this time
Out of all the prequels people keep asking for, the First 9 might be the most demanded and the most stalled. Kurt Sutter’s biker saga is drenched in mythology about SAMCRO’s origins, but we mostly get scraps - war stories from side characters and John Teller’s journal. The actual founding is a killer pitch: John Teller and Piney Winston come home from Vietnam in the late 1960s, can’t recognize the country they fought for, and start a brotherhood to fill the hole. Then, slowly, under a young Clay Morrow, that idealistic commune hardens into a violent criminal outfit. Tragedy, baked in. Sutter has said as recently as 2026 that a First 9 prequel is still on the table, and FX chairman John Landgraf is open to it. I’d like that to mean soon, not in another decade.
Succession - Logan ’s rise during the 80s boom
Succession is about who gets the keys to Waystar Royco, but the guy who built the car stays largely myth. Logan Roy wields his hardscrabble Scottish childhood like a cudgel against his kids, yet we never actually see him become the shark. Set the prequel in the 1980s corporate free-for-all and go full financial thriller: deregulation, hostile takeovers, and the early days of ATN - which later distorts American politics - all while Logan is at maximum hunger, not fighting his body the way he does later. Chart him from scrappy outsider to true media oligarch and you’ve got something that stands alone and makes the original colder, sharper, better.
Got a better candidate with unfinished business? Tell me which show’s untold backstory you’d greenlight tomorrow.