I love Ghostbusters too and I could see a lot of room to potentially explore the ideas and mature (not too excessive) ribald humour of the film but I think the mistake was making a film sequel.

If you look at M*A*S*H the television series, it managed to keep of the tone of the film (even with the cast changes) but took the comedy to frequently much greater heights.

If you look at Buffy The Vampire Slayer, the television series, it took what was (at the time) a reasonably well received (but hardly seen) film concept and took it into areas where a film continuation could never have traveled.

The Real Ghostbusters animated show managed to put out some strong stories for a Saturday morning cartoon show aimed primarily at children but that wasn't really the tone of the humour in the film (in the film the jokes were near the knuckle and while they never went further they kept balancing that fine line).

The horror aspects were more jump scares (the librarian ghost was a real kapow! moment but there wasn't anything really dark like in Brain Dead or An American Werewolf In London). I don't think you need to spend a lot of money to produce that sort of scare on television, the only expensive thing might have been animating the proton streams but this was an era of television where Automan and Manimal were getting a chance and neither of them had the good will behind them that Ghostbusters did.

I think it's too late now but back then if it was written as well as Taxi or early Cheers, I'd have watched a live action Ghostbusters show even if a few of the original film cast wouldn't be in it.