Aha! That explains why, of all people, Drew Carey would show up at a successful party.
Actually, Babylon 5 did a good number of unusual episodes. One was set in real time, with one character being interrogated. Except for the end, it was all in one room, with those two characters. Another had several acts that took examined the legacy of B5 in the distant (hundreds, and then thousands of years) future. Another was a series of interviews with B5 personnel, culminating in a surprising finished product. And so on.
Drew Carey also did shows with all the mistakes and pop ups.
I was watching the First & Second Season DVD set for Quincy and was surprised to watch an episode in which Quincy did not appear! All the other regular characters were there, but Quincy’s function in the show was taken over by a visiting Japanese doctor.
I think that was the same one with The Sims – that was one of the mistakes.
They also did an episode live, in Whose Line format.
This reminds me of an episode of Star Trek Voyager that takes place hundreds of years in the future of the show’s timeline. The holographic doctor is stored in some kind of memory pod that was left on a planet they original crew visited. He is reactivated by an alien archaeologist to find that Voyager is remember in that planet’s history as a conquering warship. He sets the record straight, and the show fades into an ending set another several hundred years in the future with a speaker explaining how the Doctor changed the planet’s history, etc.
Xena had an episode set in the 1940s with reincarnations of Xena, Gabrielle, and Joxer discovering the tomb of Ares and accidently freeing him. Another episode had the trio reincarnated in the '90s, but with Xena in Joxer’s form and vice versa (Annie Bannie, she kicks fannie).
Law and Order also did an episode where McCoy and his ADA and Briscoe and his partner witnesses an execution and then reacted to it. There was also a 3 parter that took the cops to LA.
The episode title was “Isaac and Ishmael”, and it was the first prime-time network show to air a brand new episode after the attacks.
As for TWW debate episode, Brad Whitford (Josh Lyman) had a couple of lines in the first minute backstage (he was Jimmy Smit’s campaign manager by then), but otherwise, yeah, no original series cast members.
Reminds me of when Thomas Magnum found himself in 1930s Honolulu.
ER did the same episode live twice – once for each coast.
Buffy did an episode as a musical
Didnt CSI recently do an episode live as well? It was filmed as a reality Tv Documentary if I remember correctly
There were two ISN episodes, actually – one was a series of interviews conducted against the backdrop of the Narn-Centauri war and an incident impacting the station, the other one was after it became a propaganda arm of the Clark dictatorship (the first half was the interviews being conducted; the second half was the resulting broadcast, in which the interviews were edited out of context as part of a total pack of lies).
The latter had a transition gag in which the characters are about to watch the ISN broadcast, and Sheridan turns on a screen, muttering “It’ll probably be a commercial”. At that moment, that portion of the episode ends (and a block of commercials begins).
Similarly, The Prisoner epsiode without Patrick McGoohan- be seein’ you.
the Drew Carey Show did a great episode that started with the cast all complaining that nobody’s ever won an emmy on the show. Somebody points out that actors usually win emmies for ‘Very Special Episodes’ featuring highly gimmicky storylines (character suddenly comes down with a trendy illness, characters step out of the scene to speak directly - and DRAMAHHHHTICALLY - to the camera). Carey then states that they are going to do the Most Special Episode ever, and during the course of the next half hour, everybody on the show has some ‘dramatic’ problem to work through. IIRC, the episode ended with everyone single character coming out as gay at the end.
Oh and that reminds me! The Ellen episode where she buys a puppy-- I mean, comes out.
While CSI: Original Recipe did have an episode that featured a documentary crew filming the lab, it wasn’t live.
Stargate SG-1 has a fictional science fiction show Wormhole X-Treme!, which is a campier version of the actual Stargate SG-1 show. In one episode, the producer wants to make a movie and the SG-1 team pitches various ideas. We get to see how these would have worked out. This includes hilarious parodies of The Wizard of Oz, Star Trek and Farscape, one sequence with marionettes, as well as SG-1 in the style of an “edgy, hip” show (like Dawson’s Creek or The O.C).
Campier? It goes to 11?
The “Atomic Shakespeare” episode of Moonlighting.
A high school student imagines The Taming of the Shrew, as done by the cast of Moonlighting.
There were a lot of unusual episodes in Moonligthing. It happened often enough that format breaking episodes were almost expected.
Another episode of MASH, the ghost of a soldier wanders rounds the 4077th invisible to most people except for Klinger.
Letterman did a fair number of shows like when he was on NBC. There was the one with the “Monkey-Cam” where they put a small camera on a chimp on roller skates and turned him loose on the set. They also had a show shot with the “Cow-Cam” which was the same thing as the “Monkey-Cam” only with a cow who just basically stood over by the band the whole time. (There was also the “Tiger-Cam” but that wasn’t as successful. 
)
It’s too bad Letterman hasn’t done too many shows like these since he went over to CBS.
Those of us *between * the coasts just had to watch a test pattern.