They may have saved money on the location, but it seems to me they would still have to abide by the SAG basic agreement when it comes to paying actors.
IIRC that episode was also filmed live.
For a while, it seemed that EVERY show had a “pregnant woman is having a baby NOW” episode. Never mind that it usually takes women more than half a day to have a baby…she’s gonna have that baby NOW, in half an hour or less. And sometimes, yes, she was Trapped in an Elevator as well.
Road trips and cars are also good for bottle episodes. Requires a car set obviously but any studio would have one of those.
There was a Facts of Life episode in which the entire episode was the four girls driving around Peakskill cruising guys, lipsynching and chewing the fat. An episode of Roseanne featured a couple of road trips and one in the final episode of Roseanne and Dan trying to sort out their marriage from their cars on cell phones.
Just off the top of my head, Night Court and 7th Heaven had “give birth NOW while trapped in an elevator” episodes.
Wrong again. The Pen (a 2 parter!) aired a season later and didn’t have Kramer OR George - and Jason Alexander was the one who stepped up and said that if they did any more episodes without George, then he was done with the show. This is why a couple of seasons later, when Julia left the show for her pregnancy, they still included a couple pointless shots of her being on a romantic vacation in Europe.
However, The Chinese Restaurant did cause Michael Richards to rethink Kramer - since he was originally a guy who never left the apartment, he was forced out of that episode, and Michael didn’t want to miss out on any more iconic adventure episodes, which later led to The Keys, a 3 part episode where Kramer finally re-enters society.
Couldn’t tell you the name of the ep, but there’s an episode of Law & Order: SVU that takes place almost entirely in the interrogation room, that featured just the main cast (mostly Stabler) and the actor playing the bad guy. No new sets, no extras to pay, even the “Doink doink” guy got a day off.
So did The Jeffersons, Saved by the Bell, and All in the Family. No idea how Lucy and Ricky and Fred and Ethel actually managed to make it to the hospital as Lucy would have seemed prime to give birth while hanging from a clothesline or whatever.
When Gloria went into labor on All in the Family she was trapped in a phone booth that had to be laid on its side, but they got her to the hospital before it was born. (Reno 911, which is always over the top, had a character who went into labor while popping out of a cake to give a lap dance to the gay officer she’s in love with while he was on his way to his gay wedding.)
Saved by the Bell and Amen are two shows I can think of offhand- but I know there are others- in which babies were born without umbilical cords. Once the babes were born the characters who delivered them (Zach and Deacon [Sherman Hemsley’s character]) wrapped them up and put them in the mother’s arms, no cord or afterbirth or ‘goop’ of any kind. (On the AITF elevator baby episode I don’t think you ever actually see the baby.)
Kramer first leaves the building on screen in The Jacket (2.3), a full eight episodes before The Chinese Restaurant (2.11) and a season and a half before The Keys (3.23). He comes and goes freely in nearly all of the episodes of season two and season three. His “never leaves the building” quirk was quietly dropped after the first season and was never a major plotpoint to the show.
Yeah, I put “Kramer never leaves the apartment” in there with Jerry having no bedroom and Jerry calling Kramer “Kessler”.
Here’s the Onion’s list of great bottle eps (a few already having been listed in this thread).