There are some TV series where the title of every episode follows some pattern. The ones I can think of are:
Monk: “Mr. Monk and . . .”
The Wild Wild West: “The Night of . . .”
The Rat Patrol: “The . . . Raid”
The Man From U.N.C.L.E.: “The . . . Affair”
(And before the nit-pickers jump in, I know that one episode of The Wild Wild West, one of The Man From U.N.C.L.E., and two of The Rat Patrol did not start with the word “The”.)
There have to be more, which shows can you add to this list?
“The One Where…” My friends know what I’m talking about.
Scurbs:
“My …”
Farscape tried to make puns or jokes on famous titles/phrases. “A Clockwork Nebari” “The Way We Weren’t” and so forth.
Police Squad! where the episode title the narrator announced was never the same as the one shown on-screen.
The titles on Desperate Housewives are all Stephen Sondheim songs.
The exceptions being “His Story,” “His Story II,” “His Story III,” and “Her Story.” (Was there a “Her Story II” at any point?)
Usually.
They’ve had “Anything You Can Do” and “What I Did for Love” and “One More Kiss” as well as others. But there’s a definite pattern there.
For some bizarre reason, both “Newsradio” and “That 70’s Show” used Led Zeppelin song titles as episode titles. (I remember this because my local paper always listed episode titles in show descriptions). Eventually, “That 70’s Show” had to switch to a different method because they ran out of song titles.
3rd Rock From The Sun - (nearly) all the episode titles have ‘Dick’ in them.
Heh!
Not TV, but similar - one of the Far Side collections had an index - but everything was filed under “T” for “The one with the cow…” “The one with the headhunters…” etc.
Grey’s Anatomy uses various song titles for episode titles as well.
King of Queens uses puns as episode titles.
NewsRadio did use Led Zepplin song titles, but just for a short stretch in the second season.
Why not use chapter titles from the actual book, Grey’s Anatomy? Does everything have to be baby boomer songs? Sheesh.
Sailboat
Animated Tick used “The Tick Vs. …” for its titles.
Almost all (I think there were only two exceptions) Seinfeld episodes were titled “The _____.” (With subject of episode in place of space.)
I am sure there are exceptions, but most of the Strangers with Candy episodes had the word “Blank” (main character’s last name) in them.
La Femme Nikita - the number of words in the title corresponds to the season number.
Susan
The key to these episodes, of course, is that they are the few where the majority of the voice-over narration is not provided by J.D. (Zach Braff).
The Sharpe series on BBC.
All of them start with *Sharpe’s . . . *, like Sharpe’s Sword, Sharpe’s Siege, etc. After awhile, we started making up titles of our own: Sharpe’s Pissed, Sharpe’s So Not Getting Laid This Episode, Sharpe’s Getting Shat On By The Brass Again, ad infinitum.
Now that’s cool.
The last season of Get Smart had great puns…The Mess of Adrian Listenger,The Treasure of C. Errol Madre
The overwhelming majority of the titles of *Law & Order: Special Victims Unit * consist of one word. They had a handful of titles with more than one word in the first season, but since then, they’ve only done so a couple more times.