Last Year’s “far west” episode of Supernatural was a lot of fun during a very average season.
The episode where everyone in Buffy is mute for almost the entire time was excellent.
I think there was an episode of Drew Carey like that. It might not have been live but there were no do overs. Even worse I think they had to adlib as the went along as details of the plot were variable or they didn’t know what they were ahead of time. Or something like that. It wasnt great but then again it wasn’t terrible. Just being able to do that (and the whole cast could) says something. Does anybody else recall this or something like it?
House’s flight over the cuckoo’s nest was also pretty different and fairly good, if a bit cliché and thoroughly unrealistic (but then, House. Reality takes a seat so far back I think it’s somewhere in Swaziland)
I liked the Northern Exposure episode where Shelly had to sing the whole episode.
There was a Torchwood episode where the “Monster of the Week” turned out to be completely non-supernatural. I forget the exact plot, but people were being kidnapped and slaughtered, and the team goes out to investigate, assuming there’s an alien or other sci-fi creature. Turns out to be just two crazy old people with no special powers. Not that I’d want the whole series like that, but it was interesting to be surprised in that way.
I came in here to list those. I also enjoyed Triangle in season 6, but don’t know if that counts as “standard” or not.
Good call Tangent.
Jose Chung’s From Outer Space was also about different accounts of one story… GREAT episode.
That’s actualy a legitimate piece of authentic vampire lore – one that you never hear about in movies when they recount the lore of vampires. I’m not an X-Files fan, so i didn’t realize they’d mentioned it in the show. AFAIK it’s the first time it appeared in a pop culture vampire appearance.
Well, to be fair, it WAS the one ep that was affected by the writer’s strike of that year.
There were a couple of episodes of Bonanza that were comedies. The best one was when Ben, Hoss and Little Joe were each taken by a con man.
Not just two crazy old people. The whole town. The episode was called Countrycide. It was also apparently the first Whoniverse story to feature no supernatural/scifi elements in 25 years. (If you ignore the Doctor arriving and leaving in the TARDIS…if not, it may well be the first ever. Obviously, the Doctor being an alien and Jack being immortal have to be ignored for this to work, but when those aspects don’t play into the plot, that’s acceptable, really.)
MAS*H also did an episode where Hawkeye’s Jeep crashed; he had a concussion, and most of the episode was him trying to keep himself awake by pacing and talking at the Korean family that found him.
I can think of at least one other pop-culture vampire that loves to count..ha..ha..ha.hah.
Triangle is one of my favorites. I loved the “split-screen” filming techniques they used in that one.
Another Star Trek: TNG one is “The Inner Light”, which was possibly the best episode of the show, despite Patrick Stewart being the only one of the regular cast who was in most of it, and him not even exactly playing Picard.
Family Guy had “Brian & Stewie”, which was a complete departure from the norm for them. It featured absolutely no cutaway gags and featured only Brian and Stewie as characters. Watching for the first time, not knowing what it was, was surreal. I kept waiting for it to turn into a normal Family Guy episode, but it just insisted on being this weird little character piece, exploring the relationship of these two characters. It was funny seeing how, despite how out-there the show usually is and how the characters are often treated as nothing more than props to set up gags, there really are well-defined characters there that can be explored in a serious way. Even if they are a talking dog and a super-intelligent infant.
It’s not something I’d want to see from them all that often, but they tried something different and it was successful.
This is what I came in here to post. This episode was unique for the original series in that it showed in detail the private lives of the characters. Until this episode the camera had almost never followed them home or shown them doing anything not directly related to their jobs. Quite possibly the success of this formula is what led to its adoption for SVU.
I remember an episode of Riptide (way back in the 80s) where they basically ripped off Moonlighting. It was quite amusing, especially for such a formulaic show. Though undoubtedly Moonlighting’s influence was what inspired it to twist off into a surreal direction in the first place.
Oh, there were also a couple of cool episodes of Married With Children, one where Buck the dog can talk and was played by a man in a suit (that in turn inspired the recent Aussie/US show Wilfred) and they also had one where the cast played Pirates.
The Dollhouse episodes Epitaph One and Epitaph Two, at the end of each season, were like a completely different show - a far, far better one.
Of course it is probably the only Character Study that had one character eat the other character’s poop.