Why are off-format episodes so often among a series' best?

Cafe Society
1

I’m pretty sure I’m not being crazy on this one, but I couldn’t find any discussions about this online. It seems to me that when an established series deviates from it’s usual format, it often results in some of its best and most memorable work. Exactly what qualifies as “off-format” is a bit of a judgement call and varies from series to series, but it can mean focusing on different characters, having an unusual setting (including perhaps alternate universes, dream sequences, etc.), or being an example of a different genre entirely (e.g., we’re watching a faux documentary about the show’s characters).

Ok, some examples, so we know what we’re talking about. Most of these generally show up on their shows’ best-of lists:
House, " Three Stories" – House teaches a class to students on diagnostics, challenging them to evaluate three former patients (one of whom turns out to be himself). Most of the story is shown in reenactments, with a healthy dose of unreliable narrator. Probably the single best episode of the series, and it won an Emmy.

**The West Wing, “In the Shadow of Two Gunmen” and “Two Cathedrals” **-- both are largely flashback episodes; they sort of half-qualify.

NewsRadio, “Sinking Ship” – “What if WNYX wasn’t a radio station at all, but rather a massive luxury liner called: Titanic!” If you’re not laughing already, I just don’t know what to tell you.

Mad Men, “The Suitcase” – Starts off as a normal episode, but the last 3/4 of it is basically just Don and Peggy alone together during a (very) late night at the office. Usually considered the best single episode.

Seinfeld, “The Chinese Restaurant” – The whole episode takes place at a Chinese Restaurant as the gang waits for a table. Not entirely sure it qualifies, but it’s different enough to be notable.

Simpsons, “Behind the Laughter” – Faux documentary that presents the show as fictional. Not a classic, but better IMO compared to the other episodes in one of the first weaker seasons of the show.
X-Files
“Bad Blood” – A Rashomon-style retelling of the case, Scully’s version followed by Mulder’s version.

“Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” – A major antagonist’s history and rise to power, as relayed by the Lone Gunmen and CSM’s own hacky roman à clef stories.

“X-Cops” – Basically an episode of “Cops,” but following Mulder & Scully. Not a classic, but a good episode in a weaker season.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
“The Inner Light” – Picard lives a whole lifetime as a man in an alien civilization that died out centuries ago. Amazing television, won the Hugo award.

“Yesterday’s Enterprise” – An alternate universe where the Federation is fighting a losing war against the Klingons.

“Below Decks” – Whereas the show is normally about the command staff of the Enterprise, this one is told from the point of view of some junior officers, with the main cast existing only in the background. Great episode!

***** “Sub Rosa”** – A major counter-example. A romance-ghost story: Dr. Crusher spends half the episode literally boning a specter. One of the worst episodes of any Star Trek show, excepting that it’s so bad it’s fascinating.
Star Trek: DS9
“Trials and Tribble-ations” – They edit in the DS9 cast to the original series episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” in a time travel plot.

“Far Beyond the Stars” – The series’ lead actor plays a sci-fi writer in 1950’s America, dealing with racism.

  1. So, other examples?

  2. What exactly qualifies an episode as being “off-format”?

  3. Is there already a different name for this sort of episode?

  4. Are these episodes actually better than average, or are they just more memorable because they’re different?

  5. If they actually tend to be better, then why are they better?

2

Not to mention having been lifted whole from an Anne Rice novel series.

3

Thought of another example episode from House: “Wilson.” Instead of focusing on House and his team, the episode is told exclusively from Wilson’s point of view, dealing with things that really have nothing to do with House. What’s neat about it is that you just see or hear about House and his team in the background, doing all the crazy shit on their patient of the week that they normally do. It’s as if they were filming two episodes at the hospital simultaneously, this one following Wilson and a regular one about House, and they decided to show the Wilson story instead.

4

Huh, I didn’t know that.

The AV Club’s review of Sub Rosa is great. It takes the form of a running diary of the episode and the writer’s comments on said diary entries.

5

Another one is Blink from Doctor Who. Yet another example of the usual protagonist mostly working in the background, and showing the effect on people around them. I like these episodes because they often give a little more depth to the characters by showing the context in which they live and work, and the consequences of the usual dramatic plots on the ordinary Joe Public.

6

Buffy the Vampire Slayer seems to support the hypothesis. Some of the best episodes were one offs:

Once More, With Feeling (musical)
The Zeppo (focus on secondary character, with main characters in background)
Hush (nobody speaks for a third of the episode)
The Body (complete genre shift, from comical absurdity to deadly serious drama)

7

The Doctor-Lite episodes are often excellent: because they shoot a feature-length Christmas special every year, there’s generally one regular series episode where whichever actor plays the Doctor is largely absent due to the added filming commitments, so the writers are forced to work around having only 10 minutes or so of the main character. They often do it by clever writing which turns the absence of the Doctor into the focus of the episode, and it’s almost become a competition for whose writing can be most ingenious and creative, and the results have been some of the best episodes. Blink brilliantly did it by having him send messages from the past through DVD Easter Eggs, Turn Left showed a nightmarish world in which a changed decision in the past meant that the Doctor had died and hadn’t been able to help during crises, and my favourite, Flatlined, had a full-sized Doctor trapped in a Tardis shrinking on the outside, and with only a lunchbox-sized influence, forced to get really creative to save himself and help a full-sized world.

8

Battlestar: Galactica had a few scattered episodes in which they pretty much ignored the humans and showed the Cylons society and the various models’ interactions with each other. And if I’m not mistaken, BG was the show that popularized the almost-instantaneously-cliche “one year later” episode - wherein the entire story-line jumps forward a whole year and there are significant status quo changes that have to be filled in later.

MASH was the king of “off-format” episodes:

  • An episode depicted an entire year’s worth of events.
  • A real-time operation on a wounded soldier.
  • A dream episode, depicting the regular characters’ nightmares.
  • The ghost of a deceased soldier wandering around the 4077.
  • The single-person perspective of a soldier getting wounded in combat and seeing the 4077 from his POV.
  • A documentary episode in which a news crew film interviews with the 4077 staff (one of the most copied “off-camera” types of episodes ever.)
9

Came in to mention “Once more with Feeling” but was beaten to it.

A lot of folks think that “The Constant” was the best episode of “Lost”. Totally Desmond-centric and not at all into the over-arching mythos of the series. Also the episode featuring the Richard Alpert character, (Ab Eterno)?

10

What makes the Constant great is not only that it has one of the most memorable climaxes in TV history, but that they did two additional things:

  1. The episode did not indicate from the get-go that a huge, powerful, emotional climax was coming.

  2. They earned it by setting up a key relationship beforehand.

Specifically, I will spoiler:

We had zero idea Desmond and Penny would reconnect through the phone, a moment of re-connection we had waited for. As the episode continues, you begin…to slowly…wonder…and wonder. Hey…wait…she is his constant? He’s needs his constant…he’s going to get her on the phone! When it happens, it is amazing and well earned.

That key moment is one of the greatest moments in television history, and I don’t say it lightly.

11

Community had a strange love for one-off episodes. There was the Christmas episode done in stop-motion like Rudolph, the paintball wars (A Fistful of Paintballs, and For a Few Paintballs More, Digital Estate Planning,, which was animated as an 8-bit video game, and my favorite, Remedial Chaos Theory. In this episode, the kids are playing D&D while waiting for a pizza. When the delivery guy gets there, they roll a die so decide who has to go down to meet the delivery. At that point, the episode splits in to six parallel story lines, which play sequentially. Although the outcomes are extremely different, the pacing of each of the story lines is so symmetrical that they can be played side by side in the same screen and the pacing lines up (It’s still on YouTube).

12

Would the West Wing episode “Isaac and Ishmael” count as “off-format”? It was certainly non-canonical. They come right out and say so before the episode starts.

13

Two from Homicide: Life on the Street -
Subway - Usually, the detectives arrive after the person has died, but this episode is centered around Pembleton interviewing and comforting a man pinned between a subway car and the platform.

Three Men and Adena is another episode centered around just a couple of people. For some reason, the police only have eight hours to get a confession from a man suspected of killing a young girl. Most of the scenes are in the interrogation room, with the two detectives trying to break this guy. It won an Emmy.

14

To offer my thoughts on these, I think it’s a little of both.

From a production standpoint, an off-format episode would be very easy for the production staff to reject. “We don’t do musicals here, bye.” The fact that such an unusual idea is accepted and then produced would tend to favor the best examples of those ideas.

I also think writers often use those off-format shows to try out some idea they’ve had for a while that doesn’t normally fit the show. Again, if the idea wasn’t good, they probably wouldn’t have bothered.

But on the other hand, off-format shows often work only because they’re done once. If every episode of X-Files was shot like Cops, it would never have made it past a first season. Buffy done entirely as a musical or House told entirely from Wilson’s point of view… total flops. The novelty of the idea makes it fun as a single off-format episode in a way that wouldn’t be fun one week after another. So I think they sometimes get too much credit for being good.

Plus, these shows attract more votes in viewer polls. Remember that Buffy episode where demons wanted to take over the town? You’re not sure which one I mean. But you do remember the one that was a musical. Give ten choices, the one that stands out tends to be it.

15

It’s basically the underlying plot to “The Witching Hour”. A spirit has been the companion of the Mayfair women (Scottish in general, though a strong line of French blood comes into it, too) for centuries, generally protecting and “fog-banging” them to keep them favorable to it. There’s the spirit, the generations of women (beginning in Scotland), the sexual nature of it, and there’s also even a piece of jewelry that’s handed down that symbolizes the bond (as opposed to the candle in the ST episode). There are way too many similarities for it to not have been at least “inspired” the TWH.

16

An episode that subverts audience expectations isn’t necessarily going to be a good one, but subverting expectations is an important element of comedy and in a different way can be a bonus in tales of mystery, horror, etc. I doubt anyone ever praised an episode for being predictable and formulaic.

Of course, if there’s no established pattern for a typical episode of a show then there’s not much to subvert, and failing to give the audience what they expected to see can go horribly wrong. But if done occasionally then a well-executed off-format episode will be a pleasant surprise to the audience. Since an off-format episode must differ in some important way from a standard episode, it’s also a good opportunity to show off potentially underutilized talents. Again, this can go wrong if the talent isn’t there, but if an episode demonstrates that a supporting character can carry an episode, an established dramatic actor also has great comic timing, the writers and production crew can pull off a dead-on parody of another genre, etc., then that’s going to seem more impressive than an episode that only shows the audience that the cast and crew can do what we already expect – even if they do it very well.

17

ST Enterprise, Carbon Creek. T’Pol tells the guys a story about the REAL first contact between Vulcans and humans. T’Pol’s great grandmother gave us Velcro!

Great episode!

18

“West Wing” has been mentioned a couple of time but no one has brought up the “Debate” episode between Jimmy Smits and Alan Alda.

19

For sure it counts, I’d say. It is something of a counter-example, since the critical consensus seems to be that it was a misstep.

20

Another West Wing example (because I just watched it last night): Access. This is documentary-style following CJ through her day, while a Ruby Ridge type situation is unfolding in the background. This included interview pieces with actual former Press Secretaries. .

There was also another House episode, 5 to 9 follows Cuddy around, like the Wilson episode did. Another standout episode was Locked in, with the locked-in syndrome patient.