In all of the history of television, there’s only one pair of shows that were anagrams of each other on purpose: Doctor Who and its spinoff Torchwood.
I don’t think too many people would count the Canadian SportsCentre and the American SportsCenter, but I’ll mention them just for completeness’ sake.
The award-winning Norwegian teen drama SKAM has much less in common with the toyetic adventure cartoon M.A.S.K. The former was a smash hit for its pull-no-punches approach to adolescence. The latter was basically a cross between G.I. Joe and The Transformers where the vehicles transformed into other vehicles, and while it didn’t outperform those toy-to-media powerhouses, it’s fondly remembered by children of the Eighties.
E-Ring’s title is explained in its intro: “Before any mission can be undertaken anywhere in the world, the mission must be approved in the outer and most important ring [of the Pentagon]—the E-ring.” Reign offers up a different sort of political intrigue, following the life, marriages, and strategies of Mary, Queen of Scots.
Cheaters and Teachers are the names of two movies…and four different TV shows! The first Cheaters was definitely the tawdrier side of early-2000s reality TV, and I can’t find a lead-in to it now (I found one earlier, but it’s been kicked off YouTube). Today’s Cheaters is a Britcom about two people who fool around on their girlfriend and husband and then find themselves neighbors.
Teachers in 2006 was a there-and-gone TV comedy from the producers of Scrubs that lasted only six episodes. Teachers in the late 2010s, though, was a Web-based set of comedy shorts that blossomed into a 50-episode TV series.
And finally…The Real L Word is a follow-up to the relationship drama The L Word, but despite somewhat similar subject matter, it’s a reality show, not a fictional series. The whole modern reality genre, of course, takes a lot of its cues from the success of The Real World.