A bottle episode is an episode of a TV show that is designed to cost as little money as possible.
Producers like to have the occasional bottle episode because it frees up part of the budget so they can spend more on other episodes in the season, and they do provide opportunities for some creativity. Bottle episodes are cheap because they usually have no guest stars and are shot entirely in existing sets, often in one room. Frequently they will use only part of the regular cast.
Some examples, courtesy of TV Tropes:
–MAS*H, “O.R.,” set entirely in the operating room.
–Frasier, “The Dinner Party,” which showed a dinner party at Frasier’s apartment in real time.
–Mad About You, “The Conversation,” which was actually shot from a single camera angle.
There have been a lot of sitcoms where almost every episode is kind of like a bottle episode, because they only show the main location and the focus on guest stars is minimal. Examples would include Cheers and Barney Miller. Therefore, bottle episodes are more noticeable in hour-long shows with a lot of different locations.
So what bottle episodes can you think of? What series basically adhered to the bottle formula for most of the episodes?
(Note that TV Tropes counts clip shows as bottle episodes because they’re cheap. Let’s not include them here.)
You almost touched on one that I immediately thought of: The MAS*H episode where Hawkeye spends the entire episode talking out loud to a Korean family in their little hut.
I wonder if some the ‘film-clip’ episodes were bottle episodes too? You know, like where there’s not much scenery, but a film guy comes in to interview the medical staff to show the families back home?
I just thought of the recent family guy episode w/ Stewie and Brian in the vault. Does that really count though? I can’t imagine an animated show could really save all that much money by doing that. Then again maybe so… a lot less scenery to draw. However don’t the actors get paid for the season, and not necessarily the episode they work in?
“Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” on The Twilight Zone. In order to stay under budget, Serling bought the rights to an existing French dramatization of the Ambrose Bierce story. Since it had no dialog, he was able to just add his narration.
The Doctor Who episode “The Edge of Destruction/The Brink of Disaster” was shot entirely in the Tardis, using only the cast regulars. "Love and Monsters may also qualify, since the Doctor only puts in a very brief appearance; it was written because David Tennant and Billie Piper had done a particularly strenuous episode immediately before. It was set on Earth and had very little in the way of elaborate effects.
There was another Frasier episode in which half of the episode was basically a silent comedy slapstick piece of Niles in Frasier’s apartment setting out to sew a button on a shirt (or something like that) and ending up taking off his pants to iron them, passing out when he pricked himself with a needle, landing on the iron, etc… There was almost no dialogue. After that it passed to a completely unrelated moment that took up the rest of the episode, so it was a “miniature bottle” episode I suppose.
There was an episode of All in the Family in which Mike and Archie are trapped in the storage room of Archie’s bar and almost the entire episode is them talking. There’s another much earlier episode in which Archie is trapped in the basement of his house. While both required sets that weren’t usually used they were super simple- any high school drama club could have put them together- and they used no guest stars.
Maude had a couple of episodes in which she went to a psychiatrist and the entire episode was a monologue as she lay on his couch. The psychiatrist was only seen from the back and his only dialogue was “M-hmmm” or “Okay”- rarely more than a syllable or two and very few of those.
“Love & Monsters” was a low-budget epsiode but still involved lots of sets, some exteriors, a CGI monster, special-effects make-up & prosthetics. So far the best example of a bottle episode on new “Who” would be Midnight – three or four relatively small and simple sets, a few digital matte paintings and a monster that’s never seen.[del]I guess nearly every episode of Barney Miller could be considered a bottle episode. As I recall, 99% of the action took place on a two-room standing set.[/del]:smack:
“Star Trek” had some classic “shipboard only” episodes, like “Balance of Terror,” a futuristic reworking of “The Enemy Below,” and “The Immunity Syndrome.” Used to love those.
Chuck Jones said that the Road Runner cartoons served this purpose for their animation department. They were the quickest and cheapest cartoons to make so they freed up time and money on the schedule for more ambitious cartoons.
A lot of classic “three-camera” sitcoms (such as the “Barney Miller” example) would qualify, because they shoot the majority of scenes on existing sets.
“WKRP in Cincinnati” is another example; most episodes take place fully inside the station, on one of five sets:
The reception area
Mr. Carlson’s office
The broadcast booth (and the hallway outside of it)
The “bullpen”
Andy’s office
If memory serves, the bullpen set was constructed partway through the first season. As the series went on, they constructed other sets which were used semi-regularly (notably Jennifer’s apartment).
I can think of a couple of Firefly episodes that took place entirely inside the ship - most notably the one with Jubal Early, which was one of the best.
I just happened to see the Friends episode “The one where no one’s ready.” It’s set entirely in Monica’s apartment with the main cast only; no other actors to pay. As I recall they did maybe one episode per season like this, often the Thanksgiving show.
Do flashback episodes count as bottle episodes? Many if not most long running shows have had them; some (Golden Girls comes to mind) have more than one.
This may not be the same thing since the only money saved was on script, but… there were at least two episodes of Bewitched that recycled earlier plots. One involved Esmerelda becoming a babysitter to mortal children, getting sued for telling them she’s a witch, and then being asked to babysit the children of the judge who hears the case- the exact same plot had been done years earlier with Aunt Clara. Another involved Darrin being replicated by Endora- one Darrin is a workaholic who couldn’t care less about leisure or family and the other is a doting husband and father who couldn’t care less about work; it was done first with Dick York and later done again with Dick Sargent.