Also, all Grey’s Anatomy episodes are song titles.
A Hard Day’s Night
Shake Your Groove Thing
Owner Of A Lonely Heart
Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer
etc.
Also, all Grey’s Anatomy episodes are song titles.
A Hard Day’s Night
Shake Your Groove Thing
Owner Of A Lonely Heart
Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer
etc.
One Tree Hill episodes are song titles too - “The First Cut Is the Deepest,” “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” and so on.
As did The Tick cartoon.
Gossip Girl episodes are always spoofs of movie titles, like “The Hurt Locket” and “The Blair Bitch Project.”
And Supernatural episodes are titles of all sorts of other things (tv shows, short stories etc) sometimes spoofs, sometimes not. “Appointment in Samarra” - novel. “All Dogs Go to Heaven” - movie. “Like a Virgin” - song. “Family Matters” - tv show. “Twihard” - spoof.
New Zealand show Being Eve used the constuction “Being [ ]” for every episode.
ABC Family channel plays re-runs of Still Standing. They all have titles such as “Still (something)”. Still Drinking, Still Lying, Still Cheating - based on whatever storyline they will play out.
Call me silly, but I like the show.
Each episode of Everybody Hates Chris was titled “Everybody Hates [something].”
I like it, too. It’s got its own charm and the relationships ring true.
The Amazing Race uses a quote from one of the Racers from that episode as the title.
I’ve always sort of liked Smallville’s convention, which is to use single-word titles. Some are very short and ordinary, some very long and/or obscure. There’s an interesting mix of nouns, adjectives, and a few verbs in there too, but most of them fit the episode pretty well.
The one time they really bent this rule, (beyond the webisodes, which I’m not sure about,) was the Justice Society two-hour-episode, which had a two word title. “Absolute Justice.”
The first season of “Stargate Universe”, and most of the second, have one-word titles.
“Meet the Browns” has “Meet the _____”.
During the original run of “MAS*H”, the episode titles weren’t shown except for the finale.
They also have one of the more surprising episode title I’ve ever seen, “Criss Angel is a Douchebag”. Since the episode was about a guy clearly based on Criss Angel, but wasn’t Criss Angel himself, it was an awfully…assholish…title.
The short-lived show Day Break, where the main character wakes up to the same day and has to keep trying different things to keep his wife from dying that day all started with “What if […]”
examples:
“What if They Run”
“What if He Lets Her Go”
“What if He’s not Alone”
“What if She’s the Key”
“What if He Can Change the Day”
Also the mini-series The Lost Room, about a mysterious hotel room that granted everyday objects within that room with odd powers (like tapping a pencil would produce a penny), which when combined with another object from that room would do something even more extraordinary. Each episode was about the featured two objects:
“The Key and the Clock”
“The Comb and the Box”
“The Eye and the Occupant”
Isn’t that true of most shows anyway? In fact, the TV Guide doesn’t have the actual titles, either, instead just giving a plot summary. Usually you don’t learn of the episode titles until the show comes out on DVD, or if you find it online.
When I look through my guide on the TV it is included in the information about the show. (Not always the case with reruns or things in syndication but true for new shows.)
The new version of Hawaii 5-0: every episode is titled in Hawaiian. No idea what they mean or if they’re relevant (and the CBS website provides no insight).
The old version didn’t have any naming conventions, but they did come up with come interesting titles, like “Bomb, Bomb, Who’s Got the Bomb?” “Why Wait Til Uncle Kevin Dies?” and “To Hell with Babe Ruth.”
Tivo provides an episode name for everything it records.
For a lot of cable systems, there are two “TV Guides.” One is a scrolling list that you have no control over that is always on a certain channel. That doesn’t always list an episode name. The other is the more advanced menu accessible from the cable/satellite provider. That almost always shows the episode title.
As noted above, though, it’s very common for the episode title to not be actually listed onscreen, especially in sitcoms.
For the majority of its run, Rawhide episodes were all called *Incident of the [object] * or *Incident at [place] *
In keeping with Erle Stanley Gardner’s practice, almost all of the episodes of Raymond Burr’s ***Perry Mason ***series had titles like:
“The Case of the Adjective Noun”
And whenever possible, the adjective and the noun that went together were alliterative.
Sometimes, the episodes were based on real Perry Mason novels by Mr. Garder, like ***The Case of the Shapely Shadow ***or ***The Case of the Moth-Eaten ***Mink. But even episodes that were NOT based on actual stories by Gardner usually had titles that followed the same format (“The Case of the Clueless Client” or “The Case of the Sexy Siren”).
TV episodes have always had titles (maybe since the very beginning, certainly for decades), but until the advent of DVR’s and interactive program guides, you wouldn’t ever see them for most shows. (Although they were typically given in the newspaper’s channel listings.)
Boston Public, that David Kelley show about teachers in a public school in some city, were titled “Chapter One,” “Chapter Two,” etc.
iCarly episodes are all titled i[Something], Sometimes it makes a regular sentence, like “iHate Sam’s Boyfriend” or “iHatch Chicks,” but sometimes it’s just a word with an i in front of it, like “iPie.”
NYPD Blue eps didn’t have a particular format, but (and I think this is true of all Bochco shows) it did usually have goofy titles, often with awful puns, that were completely inconsistent with the vibe of the show. “Bats Off to Larry,” “Tempest In a C-Cup,” “A Murder With Teeth In It” (a very moreose episode about a cop who lost his dentures during a con by a hooker and ended up killing a pimp about it in his rage and shame), and of course the all-time favorite: “As Flies to Wanton Boys Are We to the Gods, Or This Bud’s For You.”
–Cliffy
Glory Daze used a bunch of 80’s songs as titles, but changed them slightly to reference what happens in the ep.
For instance, “Shamrock You Like A Hurricane” had them kidnapping a rival school’s leprechaun mascot, “What’s Love Got To Nude With It” had the lead character accidentally seeing the girl he’s got a crush on naked, etc.