This led to Leach and her team creating an episodic version of the show for television. Barney & Friends would go on to air 268 episodes between 1992 and 2010. The show also spawned a series of books and toys which were extremely popular in the early to mid 1990s. In 2013, Sheryl Leach’s son Patrick, who inspired the series 20 years earlier, was charged with the attempted murder of a 49 year old man named Eric Shanks in Malibu, California.