(I know “Most Unique” is grammatically wrong but it feels right:))
Modern Family had an episode where the entire show was the desktop of her Mac and all the characters appeared via texts, Facetime and videos. I thought it was pretty clever.
I remember Just Shoot Me structured an episode as if it where an episode of the show Biography (and I realize half the people reading this forget or never heard of either of those shows).
30 Rock did an episode that was a episode of a fictional Reality show.
So what other episodes played with their structure in unique ways?
There was a BBC show called One Foot in the Grave that had a few interesting episodes. In one, it’s just three characters in a car stuck in traffic. And the last episode is very dark for a comedy.
My first thought was of the backwards Seinfeld. Harold Pinter did it earlier, of course (with his 1978 play Betrayal).
But for “playing with the conventions,” I liked the episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which the heroics of Buffy et al were seen off in the distance while the story concentrated on the usually-less-heroic Xander. This would be the third season, 1999 episode “The Zeppo” (the title of which annoys me as I’ve always been a fan of the work of Mr. Marx.)
The BtVS episode’s underlying idea wasn’t new, either–it was very reminiscent of Tom Stoppard’s 1966 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. But that’s television for you. There’s not a lot that’s genuinely innovative, due to the ‘creativity by committee’ nature of the medium.
If you accept “Late Night With David Letterman,” one episode they spun the image 360 degrees over the hour. In another one, the reverse-imaged the show.
The Love Boat had an episode where the doc had to actually provide some life-saving surgery aboard the ship. The one where they were shipwrecked on an island with a mad hermit played by John Astin from the Addams Family was maybe the most unique in the series.
When the networks started doing overnight news, they seemed to all be hosted by smartasses. There was the double-deck bus count when their English correspondent gave the market report. One network did the World News Polka every Friday. And once I swear they gave the hockey scores multiplied by pi.
ST: Voyager. The crew and ship were really a life-form from the demon planet the real Voyager had visited a few episodes before. When the crew figures out their existence, they decide to really be the Voyager crew and travel “home” to Earth. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that scenario (clone/replica/etc.) played out like that before.
One episode was from the point of view of a wounded soldier. Another was done in “real time” with a ticking clock down in the corner–it even took in to account the commercials, which hardly seemed fair.
One that comes to mind is the Babylon 5 episode “The Illusion of Truth”, where the first half follows a group of ISN reporters visiting the station and the second half consists of the propaganda hit piece they constructed out of the footage on behalf of the Clark regime.