In fairness, E.R. did have at least one VSP that actually was very special. Loves Labor Lost has Mark Greene starting out with a minor pregnancy complication and ends with a nightmarish delivery. The final scene has Greene sitting on the L train, where he bursts into tears.
One of the best episodes of any series.
Forgive me, erie774, for a brief hijack. I don’t normally nitpick people’s spelling, but kumquat really must be spelled with a K. Particularly if preceded by the word ‘sucked.’
Now if someone would be so good as to scrub my brain with a brillo pad . . .
My So-Called Life and The Bernie Mac Show were both brilliantly well-written shows, so it puzzles me how each of them let a VSE slip in. In MSCL it was “So-Called Angel”, the one where Rickie gets thrown out of his house and Angela’s mom meets what she thinks is a homeless girl, but of course she turns out to be…an angel! And just to make sure we get it, the last shot of the episode includes a flutter of wings. Bernie Mac’s VSE was also a Christmas episode, involving a dog that vanished into thin air after he’d brought the family together.
I guess by TV standards, those were not the hokiest episodes ever. But both shows were so adept at tapping into the characters without cheap devices like that, I wonder why the writers were compelled to fall back on cheesy devices. Ratings, probably. Producers told them they had to do a Christmas episode, and had to make it all holy.
Oh, and on the old Fametracker boards, the “moment of shit” was characterized by “The Full House Plinky-Plunky Music of Life.”
I liked the G.I. Joe anti-Drug episode, where they teamed up with Cobra to take down a drug lord.
Mostly because,
a) Cobra’s motivation—one of their field commanders wanted revenge for his sister’s becoming a junkie, and he convinced the higher-ups at Cobra to go along with it because they could loot the druglord’s riches. 
b) They killed said druglord at the end of the episode. Let me say it again: This is G.I. Joe, an American cartoon in the early 1990s, and they actually showed a guy getting killed, and his corpse, on camera.
Killing and robbing the “bad guys.” Has there been a better lesson in a very special episode? I think not.
Of course, the anti-drug episode of Dinosaurs was good, too, but only because of the last five minutes. 
Now that I think of it, virtually every episode of Scrubs is a VSE - it always ends with J.D. musing over some lession he learned. Still a great series.
Also My Name is Earl, which is one of the more morally aware shows on television, but still manages to be a straight comedy.
Thanks for the correction…I couldn’t remember the specifics. But it seems like the whole thing was just a setup for the VSE.
True, the fact that they did one isn’t remarkable. They happened to do it well.
Sorry for the mental image Hoops. I’ve always spelled it with a “c”.
Hijack: Last night I saw a “Growing Pains” with a young rock star in it, played by a young Brad Pitt.
I love coincidences like this.
My favorite VSE is the one where “Blossom” gets her period. I was seven, and utterly confused by the whole thing. At the end my Mom pulled out the old Encyclopedia and preceded to explain The Facts of Life. Nope, not forgetting that one.
Speaking of “The Facts of Life” I seem to remember recently seeing an episode in which Tutti ran off to New York and ended up befriending a pimp and almost becoming a hooker. Please tell me I’m not crazy.
Yes, that did happen. It was the 14~ y/o hooker who befriended her, on the orders of the pimp. On the grounds that “She’s got the look,” even though at the time, Tootie had that awful mushroom haircut. Mrs. G and the other girls showed up at the last minute and saved the day…for Tootie. The teen prostitute was left to her own fate. :dubious:
This was just on recently in syndication, the Scrubs episode where Jordan’s brother and Perry’s best friend Ben died of cancer. Ben was played by Brendon Fraser, and my daughter, who hadn’t seen it, burst into tears at the end. I think we all did, the first time we saw that one.
They walked through the steps of grief, with denial, anger, and ending with acceptance, and John C. McGinley acted the hell out of that part.
Cumquat is a perfectly good alternateg spelling.
Oddly enough I have also seen it spelled with a q. One of those oddities of chinese transliteration like Qan for Khan.
Phenomenally good episode. I remember it so clearly and it had me glued to ER for several seasons after.
Unfortunately, the writers then tried to turn every single episode into something over the top and extreme. Then their marketing department took it a step further, so that every single week you got promos for “The most shocking episode of ER ever!” and “The ER episode that will… leave… you… STUNNED!”
Then you watched and it turned out to be either a) not so stunning (Another car crashes through the front door) or b) just plain ridiculous (Colombian drug cartel takes the ER hostage during a hurricane that hit during a nuclear explosion…).
I had to stop watching. But that one episode was golden.