Create your favorite supporting TV character's own spin-off show

Online polls are invariably worthless. So let's talk about one.

TV.com asked people which TV character they'd most like to see have their own series, and 8,000 people had enough free time on their hands to respond (after all, they were at TV.com).

They released their results, but didn't discuss their methodology. For example, were those who turned up on the forthcoming list offered by TV.com as examples? Was there even a list, or did they just let people name characters at random, and as late-coming voters turned up, too lazy to think through the hundreds of characters on TV, just look at those who had already received votes and picked one of those? Did they just pull these numbers out of their @ss?

So many questions, so few answers. Anyway, the results:

Barney, "How I Met Your Mother" (22%)
Sawyer, "Lost" (20%)
Lex Luthor, "Smallville" (19%)
Claire Bennet, "Heroes" (10%)
Elliot Reid, "Scrubs" (8%)
Chuck, "Gossip Girl" (8%)
Gabrielle Solis, "Desperate Housewives" (6%)
Joy Turner, "My Name is Earl" (5%)
George O'Malley, "Grey's Anatomy" (3%)

To which I can only respond: Are you people kidding me?

First off, several of these characters - Barney, Joy and Gabrielle - all adhere to the less-is-more edict for supporting players and ensemble cast members: They come in, they work their magic for a few scenes, and they shuffle off, leaving viewers sated. Any more of them and you'd actually kind of get sick of them. (30 solid minutes of Joy in particular would truly be nails on a chalkboard.) One spinoff show based on a peripheral character, "Frasier," worked because they tamped him down a smidge and surrounded him with characters even more neurotic than he (and, in the early seasons at least, had inspired writing).

As for Elliot, Chuck and George: People want spinoffs (or, in the case of George, more spinoffs) of "Scrubs," "Gossip Girl" and "Grey's Anatomy?"

Sawyer, Lex and Claire are vaguely more intriguing (though Lex'd never happen, since Michael Rosenbaum has finally bolted from the show so he can grow his hair out again). "Lex's Lair" might be a fun show, essaying the further development of a sociopath, but there was a show that tried this, "Profit" (starring, coincidentally, "Heroes"' Adrian Pasdar), and, good as it was, no one watched it. And what would Claire's spin-off show be? Claire breaks free of the worldwide conspiracy, locates a high school where she can be a cheerleader but never quite fits in, and still finds herself battling evil? Again, already been done: It was called "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." And Sawyer's penchant for being a selfish Southern con man who dispenses annoying nicknames to everyone is President Bush's shtick.

Get ready, because I'm going to ask you to consider this same question, but I'm not only going to answer it, but present a pitch of each resulting spinoff show. And, after I land four or five development deals based upon my inspired ideas, will stand down as Mayor of Television and ascend to my celebrated new title, Lt. Governor of Television:

* Bunk of "The Wire;" "Bunk Beds... :" Tiring of the unwinnable war on drugs in Baltimore, former cop Bunk (Wendell Pierce) decides to traverse the country and find out how many fine ladies his smooth act as a hard-drinking, stogie-chomping charmer he can actually seduce in this reality series.

* Peggy of "Mad Men;" "California Dreamin':" In this hard-hitting drama set in 1967, up-and-coming ad executive Peggy (Elisabeth Moss), disgusted with being exploited by The Man (or Mad Men), heads to San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, where she uses her Madison-Avenue-honed rhetorical skills to create such memorable anti-war slogans as "Hell no, we won't go, unless you ask nicely!", "You knocked my block off, LBJ!" "You sank my battleship, LBJ!" and "Make Love with Weasly Little Advertising Bastards, Not War with Weasly Little Advertising Bastards - Wait; Let Me Rethink That One."

* Mel of "Flight of the Conchords;" "Mel, Born Again:" Power-groupie Mel (Kristen Schaal), having underscored her resolve for personal glory in utterly emasculating her disgraced husband Doug, opts to prove once more that she gets whatever she wants by running for President of the United States, which she continues to pursue despite Barack Obama having instituted several restraining orders against her by the United States of America.

* Earl of "Saving Grace;" "Paradise Lost" AKA "Heaven Help Us" AKA "Earl Is My Name" AKA "It's a Miserable Life:" After God discovers how Earl (Leon Rippy) has been goofing around with Grace's spiritual life to no apparent result, He banishes him to his most difficult assignment - rehabilitating and bringing back into the fold such insufferably nutball preachers as Jeremiah Wright and John Hagee.

* That extra off to the left in that scene set at a crummy chain restaurant in "According to Jim;" "Spreading My Trimmed Wings:" Meg (Denise Thorne-Stoukas), an attractive if humble and roundly ignored young woman who believes better things await her if she accepts Tom Stoppard's philosophy that all dramatic characters are the stars of their own dramas, attempts to break out of her stereotype as a bit player eternally consigned to the sidelines of other, more charismatic characters' sagas. Her aspirations to relevance are routinely rebuffed as she attempts to essay the lives of an E.R. nurse, a Senator's assistant, a druglord's lover and an alpaca farmer in this wacky sitcom/powerful avant-garde drama.

* Dick Cheney of sundry Fox News interview shows, "All in the Military-Industrial Complex:" This cutting-edge, socially relevant sitcom features a Lion in Winter sitting in his favorite easy chair and dismissively insulting his wife, neighbors and anyone who questions his foreign policy as "dingbats;" routinely mocking his daughter's lover as "Tofu-head;" and launching pre-emptive nuclear strikes against Iran, North Korea and France.

OK, what are your thoughts? What supporting character would you like to see get his/her own series? Brilliant - well, at least coherent - responses of more than 7,105 words will be eligible for a brand new iPhone! Maybe.