Guess the TV show by emoji

Friends — Six actors who weren't the network's first-choice leads walked out of the finale earning $1 million an episode each, because they negotiated as one unit and refused to let anyone get split off.

The Simpsons — Matt Groening sketched the whole family minutes before a pitch meeting and named most of them after his own relatives. It's now the longest-running scripted show in American TV history.

Breaking Bad — Bryan Cranston was best known for playing a goofy sitcom dad before this, which is exactly why the casting felt wrong right up until it felt like the only possible choice.

Game of Thrones — Adapted from novels the author still hasn't finished, which meant the writers eventually ran out of book and had to land the plane themselves.

SpongeBob SquarePants — Created by an actual marine biology teacher, which explains why a sponge living in a pineapple under the sea reads less like a fever dream and more like a lesson plan.

Stranger Things — The Duffer Brothers first pitched it under a different title, set in a real Long Island town, before Netflix nudged them toward a fictional one in Indiana instead.

The Office — The American remake was nearly cancelled after a shaky, six-episode first season. Nobody involved expected it to outlive, let alone outgrow, the British original it was copying.

Money Heist — It was written as a self-contained miniseries with a definite ending. Then it became one of the biggest non-English shows Netflix ever had, and the ending stopped being definite.

Squid Game — The creator reportedly shopped this script around for over a decade before anyone would fund it. It became Netflix's most-watched series ever within a month of finally airing.

Seinfeld — Pitched to network executives as a show about nothing in particular, which is the kind of pitch that usually gets you laughed out of the room. This time it didn't.

Survivor — Adapted from a Swedish format, and it went on to outlast nearly every reality show that copied its homework in the years right after it premiered.

Rick and Morty — It started life as a crude parody short of Doc Brown and Marty McFly, before the names — and most of the resemblance — quietly got filed off.

The Mandalorian — The internet fell for its breakout character months before the show ever gave it an official name, so everyone just kept calling him Baby Yoda anyway.

Peaky Blinders — Loosely inspired by real gangs working the Birmingham streets around the First World War, filtered through stories the creator grew up hearing from his own family.

Twin Peaks — The central murder was only ever meant as a doorway into a stranger show. The network forced an early reveal of the killer, and the ratings never quite recovered.

The Wire — Created by a former Baltimore crime reporter working real sources, it's now routinely called one of the best shows ever made — and somehow never won a major award while it was still airing.

Fawlty Towers — Only twelve episodes exist, total, inspired by a genuinely rude hotel proprietor that John Cleese and the Monty Python crew once had the misfortune of staying with.

Columbo — The killer is revealed to the audience in the opening minutes, every single episode. The entire appeal is watching a disheveled detective slowly catch up to what you already know.

Cheers — It debuted so low in the ratings that it was nearly cancelled after season one, then ran for eleven more and spun off a sequel set clear across the country in Seattle.

The X-Files — Filmed for years in Vancouver, partly because the near-constant grey drizzle was cheaper to shoot in than faking that atmosphere on a soundstage back in Los Angeles.