“Two’s a Crowd” All in the Family (the “Shoe-booty” episode)
“Fly” Breaking Bad
One of those hours of television you watch knowing “There’s going to be some awards here”. (Actually I don’t know if there were or not, but there should have been.)
“Two’s a Crowd” All in the Family (the “Shoe-booty” episode)
“Fly” Breaking Bad
The Tholian web - Star Trek TOS
The first season of Cheers
Most Episodes - The Honeymooners
Nearly every episode - Barney Miller
Cooperative Calligraphy- Community (in which Abed was conscious of being in a bottle episode)
“Midnight” - Doctor Who
“Maude Bares Her Soul” - Bea Arthur solo, talking to her (unseen) psychiatrist for 30 minutest. No other actors appeared
“O.R.” - MAS*H
“My Name is Alex” - Family Ties 2-parter where Alex talks about a (previously-unreferenced and never mentioned again) friends death with a psychiatrist. Bonus in that he was in a black room, the shrink was never seen, and the rest of the family didn’t appear either (to the best of my memory.)
“Two’s a Crowd” All in the Family (the “Shoe-booty” episode)
“Fly” Breaking Bad
The Tholian web - Star Trek TOS
The first season of Cheers
Most Episodes - The Honeymooners
Nearly every episode - Barney Miller
Cooperative Calligraphy- Community (in which Abed was conscious of being in a bottle episode)
“Midnight” - Doctor Who
“Maude Bares Her Soul” - Bea Arthur solo, talking to her (unseen) psychiatrist for 30 minutest. No other actors appeared
“O.R.” - MAS*H
“My Name is Alex” - Family Ties 2-parter where Alex talks about a (previously-unreferenced and never mentioned again) friends death with a psychiatrist. Bonus in that he was in a black room, the shrink was never seen, and the rest of the family didn’t appear either (to the best of my memory.)
Road Runner cartoons
Warner Brothers gave their animators a tight budget and schedule. Road Runner cartoons were cheap and easy to make. So the animators would make some of them to put themselves ahead and then use the time and money they had saved to make more elaborate cartoons.
I’ve always suspected that show’s creators made up the concept of bottle episodes. The reality is they like doing these episodes that focus on character and dialogue rather than special effects and action scenes and exotic locations and guest shots.
But if they went to the studio executives and said “We want to do an episode that focuses on just our regular cast doing a lot of dialogue in order to develop their characters and advance our story” the executives would say “What are you, nuts? The audience doesn’t want to see that crap!”
But if they go to those same executives and say:
*“Hey, we wanted to talk about the budget for our upcoming episodes. We’ve got this great script and we were wondering if you’d give us the money for a big car chase scene?”
“No, that would cost a fortune. What other ideas do you have?”
“Or we were thinking about an episode with a big fire. That would be spectacular.”
“No way, the special effects would kill us.”
“Maybe we could have an episode where the characters go on vacation to the beach or a skiing resort?”
“And pay for location shooting? Not going to happen.”
“We could write some episodes around a big guest star appearance.”
“And pay some celebrity’s salary? I don’t think so.”
“Well, I guess we could do an episode that focuses on just our regular cast in our regular sets doing a lot of dialogue in order to develop their characters and advance our story.”
“Now you’re talking sense. It’s a good thing you creative types have people like us to remind you how the real world works.”
“Too true, we’d never get anything we wanted done with nothing to use except our creativity.”
*