Once a staple of broadcast television, the ‘clip show,’ wherein the majority of the episode is made of pieces of other episodes, and the new scenes are usually the cast on one set with some reason to recall past episodes, thankfully (at least in the shows I know) has been relegated to the dust bin.
Was there ever a good clip show ep?
I know this is a tall order, gang, but we’ve been through tough scrapes before. We’ll just have to stick together. I remember the thread before where we discussed bad clip shows like it was yesterday…
Clerks: The Animated Series had the clip show as the second episode (after the pilot), and in addition to showing clips from itself and the only other episode, showed flashbacks to events prior to the show’s start.
The last episode of Seinfeld wasn’t bad. All the side characters from the show came on to testify against George, Elaine, Kramer and Jerry in court, initiating a flashback clip each time. It wasn’t as funny as the original episodes, but it was a pretty good sendoff.
South Park did something similar; it took scenes from previous episodes and made slight changes to them. For example, they took the scene from the episode where they revealed who Cartman’s father was (the first time) and changed it so that it was John Elway.
Ever hear the story about how the second clip show came about?
In April of 1994, Fox surprisingly outbid CBS for the NFC portion of the rights to air Sunday afternoon NFL games. 1994 was also when The Simpsons moved back to Sunday nights after four seasons on Thursday nights (its 13-episode first season was also on Sundays). Fox decided that it wanted new Simpsons episodes to air in each of the first four weeks of the NFL season; however, there were only two new episodes ready. The staff made a few changes to an earlier episode (where Lisa was an expert at picking football winners), but still needed one more episode with only five months (instead of the usual 8-9) to make it, so they took large parts of three previous episodes and cobbled together a clip show.
I wouldn’t call this good, but it is a ‘must see’ episode in the same way a train wreck is a must see event.
It’s the Deep Space 9 episode wherein the crew goes back in time to help captain Kirk with some odd ball mission that involved Tribbles.
I’m a BIG DS9 fan, but that episode left me thinking: “WTF did I just watch?”
In the first season of Gilligan’s Island, they had a Christmas episode in which they used not only clips from the first thirteen weeks but from the unaired pilot as well.
I think Dick van Dyke, Cheers!, and Frasier all had good clip episodes, especially toward or at the ends of their runs. That Girl did too, but I don’t recall it was anything special.
The all-time worst clip episode was “Shades of Grey” at the end of ST: TNG’s second season. My own name for that one is “Good-Bye, Dr. Pulaski!”