Hey, if you liked everything about the Brady Bunch except for those darn Bradys, then the Kelly’s Kids episode was perfect for you.
Another thing is that in pre-youtube days, people didn’t just casually make their own ‘highlight’ episodes that you could watch on your own phone. Today I have gotten into several shows because I watched a video or series of clips and liked what I saw, back in the day video editing and splicing clips together was much rarer, as was sharing them. “Clip show” episodes were a good way for someone to check out the show and see if they like the feel of it.
Also, pre-2000s shows were written to be way more episodic than most shows running now. Most people watching a series like “Moonlighting” or “Family Ties” today would start at episode 1 and go to the end, while I remember starting somewhere in the middle, catching some reruns in syndication, and missing current seaon episodes if I was busy on the day that it aired. So today having a clip episode seems like a huge waste because you’re burning 10% of a season of tightly (by old standards) plotted shows, while back in the day it would likely show you something you hadn’t seen, and probably wasn’t taking the place of a ‘proper’ episode anyway.
So they’re ‘terrible’ in the sense that they don’t serve a purpose when you’re binge-watching the series on DVR or streaming and catching highlights on youtube when you want them, but back in the last millennium they served a useful purpose for the show, might have even been what got someone interested in the first place, and didn’t really cut down the amount of ‘real’ episodes that you got. If a series like Better Call Saul now ran a clip show episode for one of it’s 10 episodes per season, yeah I’d call it terrible. But if AMC strings together a dozen of their 3-minute teaser scenes into a ‘best of BCS’ video on their website, I wouldn’t call it a terrible idea, and that’s really what older ‘clip show’ episodes are.
Hell, it made #1 on this list of best episodes of any TV series in 2018. The idea that it is a terrible episode is definitely a minority opinion.
ETA: And #2 in an IMDB ranking of all Bojack Horseman episodes, with a rating of 9.8 (which is the same as the #1 episode, “Time’s Arrow”, so it may well be tied for #1.)
The Seinfeld finale. Maybe it was that it just failed to live up to expectations. Or maybe it was that is was not funny.
The point of view episode of MAS*H. Many will disagree, but I thought it got boring quickly. POV is ok for short stretches only.
The *Planet of the Spiders * episode of Classic Doctor Who, the final episode with Jon Pertwee. Starts out OK, but just goes on and on and on for no real reason.
This is probably an unpopular opinion, but the episodes where the aliens dream for the first time on 3rd Rock. The whole story arc was interesting, and Dick and Sally stoned on Valium (or whatever it was) while Harry and Tommy try to run things was pretty funny, but I thought the dream sequences themselves went on way too long. When I watch the show now, I FF through the dreams. Harry’s is especially annoying, and I’m annoyed at myself for being annoyed, because French Stewart is so good in it-- the whole concept is just stupid. Sally’s isn’t much better. Yes, all the references to old films are fun, down to the Freaks one, but I swear, it seems like it goes on for 45 minutes.
I get the comment on “Aftershock” for L&O:TOS, but I think that the writers and producers did what they meant to do, and really, it was all just a setup to put Claire Kincaid on a bus. I didn’t like it either, but I don’t think is was actually bad in and of itself. Maybe a misreading of what the audience would want, but the acting was good, and the filming and everything came together.
The episode of L&O that I think didn’t come off at all, and was bad in any context, was “Castoff,” (season 8) their “ripped from the headlines” take on the Andrew Cunanan story. It was flat, uninspired, the actor in the Cunanan part was miscast, and it was badly edited, so it was a little confusing.
Something I hate in general is crossover episodes. There are a couple of L&O crossovers for which pt. II is a Homicide episode, so if you see pt. I in a rerun, you have to go hunting for someone running Homicide. There’s an L&O: SUV that crosses over with L&O: Trial by Jury, which is nowhere. Not Netflix, not Hulu, not Amazon, no torrents, nothing. And it doesn’t seem ever to have been released on DVD-- not surprising, since I’m not even sure it completed two seasons. But damn-- the SUV ep is interesting, and I’ve never seen the TBJ ep.
I didn’t like it because I thought it was crappy. I thought the idea was good, but the filming looked like some high school kid’s project. Wagging the camera up and down to show someone nodding his head is amateur. That’s not what it looks like when you nod your head, fer cripes’ sake. Nod your head. You keep your eyes focused forward.
The whole thing was like that. Made me nuts.
Doctor Who has had a number of stinkers. “Kill The Moon” is the one I hear most often cited as the worst, most stupid episode. The Moon is actually a big egg, and gives birth to creepy spider-like boogums, with legs and teeth and other body parts, that are still somehow unicellular creatures. Umm, whut?
Was that the episode where Picard goes home to France, and briefly contemplates retiring from Starfleet and taking a job as an engineer on a seafloor farming project? If so, I liked that one for showing him dealing with the aftermath of what the Borg did to him. Back then, PTSD was not as widely acknowledged, and I appreciated the producers acknowledging his trauma, and that it wasn’t something he could simply shrug off. YMMV, of course.
I can think of one that was good – Troi was taking a test for bridge command, and the Holodeck was simulating an engineering crisis that threatened the ship. She could not find a solution, so she finally had to order Geordi LaForge to perform an external repair that would almost certainly cost him his life. Which was, of course, the real test – could she deliberately send a shipmate to his death, to save the rest?
That was using the Holodeck for a legitimate, valid purpose, both in universe as a training aid, and to tell the story and deepen Troi’s characterization.
This whole holodeck discussion has reminded me of “Schisms”, which had an overall kinda cheesy pulpy plot (although it did give us “Ode to Spot,” so there’s that). But it did have a brief holodeck scene where Riker, La Forge, Worf, and Ensign Ricky all kind of collaboratively build a holographic representation of a room where they keep getting abducted to while sleeping and subsequently having their memories (imperfectly, I guess) erased. I thought the alien abduction plot was kinda dumb but that scene was pretty cool.
To the thread topic, most of the first season of TNG would qualify, although “Code of Honor” is certainly, as has been mentioned, a standout. And Breaking Bad’s “Fly”, put me in the minority of those who liked that episode. For a show that has so many scenes in wide open deserts, the claustrophobia of this episode is really something. I liked it.
Yes, most every holodeck episodes sucked, and I would add every Q episode.
“The Chinese Restaurant” and “The Parking Garage” are two of my favorite Seinfeld episodes. All in one basic location, simple plot, just the characters doing the banter that makes people love Seinfeld.
True, but it had one great scene, where the Egyptian guy at the funeral says “We commend the body of Hammentotep to the abode of the damned. The damned good looking! Pharoah commanded me to tell that joke at his funeral.” The look on his face after telling the joke was great.
Any episode where the characters sing the dialogue. I was reminded of this when I recently caught the several episodes of Northern Exposure where Shelly is pregnant and (inexplicably) starts singing her thoughts and dialogue. I can only guess that producers eventually have to give in to the whining of cast members about how they are multi-talented and would love to show off their abilities.
Yeah, that scene was both a decent use of the holodeck and effectively creepy.
Failed uses of the holodeck - too many to mention, but one that stands out is when Picard is studying for a diplomatic mission (he has an important speech to give) and takes a holodeck break (naturally enough he gets stuck there for a while). Wouldn’t it make more sense to practice the speech in the holodeck (where he could simulate an audience) and take a relaxation break in his quarters?
Another bad episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation is “Sub Rosa”–which is the one where Dr. Crusher is haunted by a “ghost” from her past.
As for Futurama i think the worst is probably “Decision 3012” in which Leela becomes a campaign manager for a presidential candidate whose birth certificate is missing. Frankly the episodes of the original run on FOX from 1999 to 2003 are lot better than the episodes from its revival on Comedy Central from 2008 to 2013.
I honestly don’t think Law & Order has had a bad episode. And yes I have watched all twenty seasons.
I’ve also seen reviewers arguing that “Fly” is one of the best episodes of Breaking Bad, but it looks like I’m not alone in not liking it (judging by this thread).
Does 11001001 count as a holodeck episode of NextGen? That’s the one where aliens program the holodeck with a jazz club and a sultry woman to keep Riker distracted while they steal the Enterprise. Always thought it was clever of them to use Riker’s horndog tendencies against him.
My favorite episode of The Twilight Zone is A Game of Pool with Jack Klugman and Jonathan Winters.
Any Magnum P.I. episode that had anything to do with his ‘wife’ Michelle. What Dreck.
Grace Under Fire sure probed a lot of uncomfortable grey-area topics. I just looked at the episode guide and there was apparently one more season that I never saw. I vaguely recall an episode where Quentin accidentally shoots Wade and may have quit watching mid-episode.
The X-Files did succeed in having their craptacular series finale also be a craptacular clip show, so, really, it’s the obvious winner here.
Also, on a personal level, I absolutely detested the Buffy episode where it was postulated that Buffy was a girl in an insane asylum who was imagining the whole Buffyverse. Now while I get that none of the shit in fiction is real, if you want me to be involved, it must be real within the context of the work. I was, to be honest, a bit offended that the writers would even pull that sort of idiocy - “haha, you’re watching a show which isn’t even real in the show itself, so joke’s on you! You like Willow? She doesn’t even exist! Anya? A figment of some girl’s imagination” and etc.
Ugh. I probably would’ve been equally pissed seeing Bobby Ewing in the shower, had I followed Dallas.
There was also the fact that while the show was in its main run on TV, you might get re-runs of the current season, but if you were in say… the show’s sixth season, the other 5 seasons were unobtainable ancient history.
So if something interesting was going to happen story wise, they’d gin up a clip show to fill the newer viewers in on what’s going on. To use a modern example (don’t recall if they actually did this or not), in the Big Bang Theory, when Sheldon and Amy got married in Season 11, it would have made sense to have a clip show at some time during that season before the actual weddign detailing how they met each other, and how their relationship developed, etc…
Also outside of clip shows, the more episodic and less accessible style of TV viewing meant that there were always going to be some “fluff” episodes with less than stellar plots that were used primarily to fill the schedule and to develop the characters. It’s only now in the age of tightly scripted story arc shows that we expect every episode to have some kind of point and to lead somewhere else.
But… some of them were just godawful. Count me in the group that thought the vast majority of the holodeck-centric episodes on ST:TNG were atrocious.
There was an episode of Red Dwarf where the characters were trapped under water and attacked by a giant squid. They were all killed and woke up to discover that they’d been playing an immersive virtual-reality game, and not very well. Their real identities are complete opposites of their game personae; the cat, rather than suave and debonaire, is awkward and geeky, etc. After being appalled at their real selves, they decide to commit suicide.
[spoiler alert]The “real” world they woke up to turns out to be an hallucination. The squid ink contained a chemical that caused people such despair that they would kill themselves. It was a brilliant mind fuck for most of the episode, and didn’t do anything to diminish how much I cared about the characters.