10 Prequel TV Series That Were Better Than the Original

When a story is universally beloved, it usually gets a prequel. This phenomenon happens more often than audiences may realize, in books, movies, and television, and it’s always a little weird, at least at first. A well-rounded story doesn’t necessarily need to go back in time and explain the origins of every character and plotline, and yet sometimes it’s exactly what audiences want. Did we really need three movies that explain where Darth Vader came from? (These days, many would argue yes.)

In recent years, we’ve entered a sort of prequel-mania, where almost every popular thing has its vague backstory detailed and dissected. Hell, just this year we’re getting prequel shows for both Outlander and the Alien franchise. It’s almost too much, and rarely ever called for by a story’s original iteration, but sometimes prequels are so good they manage to stand apart from their source narrative as compelling tales of their own. Currently, television seems to be the realm of the prequel, with everything from Dune to Star Wars to The Lord of the Rings to every crime procedural you can think of getting their origins dramatized at length.

A lot of these shows are, let’s face it, pretty bad. If they’re not outright terrible, they’re pointless. (Why were there three seasons about the origin of Batman’s loyal butler Alfred Pennyworth??) Some of them, though, manage to actually be quite good. Some of those, in turn, accomplish the rare feat of being even better than their predecessors, whether it’s because they have more time, a higher budget, a new take on the material, or some combination of everything. These are the prequel series that are so good, you might not even need to watch the original.

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