I’m think What Exit accidentally dropped a word and meant to write that only 13 out of 170 episodes used other sets.
It’s true that Barney Miller was almost entirely filmed in just two sets. The issue I have with calling it a bottle series is the guest stars. That show had extensive guest stars. In fact, I’m not sure there ever was an episode which featured only the main cast.
Cheers is another. We rewatched the first season recently and it struck me that it was like watching a play. Almost every scene took place in the bar (a few were in the back room), characters making well-timed entrances and exits, very dialog-heavy, not a lot of “action” per se. It felt very different from today’s sitcoms. Still funny but..different.
I’ve not heard the terms “bottle episode” or “bottle series” before but it fits Cheers.
Sorry, only 13 episodes of Barney miller went outside the Squad Room & Capt Miller’s office.
I fixed my post.
I agree. Good example. In addition to having minimal set use, Cheers didn’t rely on the regular use of guest stars or effects scenes.
Model? As far as I can tell it was a painted graphic.
It was definitely a physical thing. The writer hated it and challenged Roddenberry, whence emerged the possibly apocryphal explanation that the thing was “a wind sock dipped in cement.”
Bottle adjacent is a good way to put it. I don’t think guest stars rule out being a bottle show, since they are not all that expensive.
As for humor, in the old Mission Log podcast series (I haven’t watched them in ages) produced by Roddenberry’s son, it was mentioned that Gene did not like TTWT or humor episodes in general, since they took away from the seriousness of the concept. The fan base obviously disagreed.
Don’t forget the disguised recap episodes.
TNG did one at the end of season 2. Riker’s memories were clips from the first two seasons.
I recall an Trek old article that said they had used up the 2nd seasons budget and still owed Paramount an episode.
Shades of Gray is also a Bottle episode.
Yeah, “Tholian Web” fits.
Other classic Trek bottle episodes: “The Naked Time” and “The Changeling”
The Empath was shot on a bare, minimal set, although it did have several guest stars.
“Clip shows” – which is the name for those – are what they do when they can’t even afford a bottle show.
A couple of sources say the 1988 strike by the Writer’s Guild limited the amount of time scripts could be assigned, written, and produced. As a result, Season 2 only had 22 episodes - several were leftover scripts that were polished up, but by the end of the shooting schedule, all they could do was throw together a clip show.
In the episode with the spores that made Spock happy; I wouldn’t be surprised if they all just had a cast picnic at Rodenberry’s farm. Cheap set.
According to IMDB, it was filmed at “Walt Disney’s Golden Oak Ranch,” in Newhall CA, about an hour north of Los Angeles. It’s apparently a well-known and frequently-used outdoor filming location (originally used for a lot of Westerns), and still owned and used by Disney today.
When Kevin Smith did an animated Clerks television series, he made the second episode a clip show.
I seem to recall that the office was a redress of the standard Enterprise conference room, and the grain storage area was awfully close to the corridor to the Jeffries tube. But you’re always going to get the production team trying to reuse as much as possible to cut costs.
I think the ultimate bottle series was “I Dream of Jeannie.”
If anything, I’d expect guest stars to be considerably cheaper than the main cast, since they’re likely to be no-name actors just taking whatever gig they could.
One thing I noticed when re-watching Babylon 5 was just how many set pieces got re-used. Like, a hydroponic garden on the station later got turned into a Mimbari temple.
I think a key feature of bottle episodes is that they focus on the existing characters interacting with each other (or for a solo character to emote to himself! (as when Hawkeye monologues in front of a Korean family who exist only to listen to him)); guest stars should exist only to facilitate that feature. By that standard, “The Empath” and “Naked Time” work well as bottle episodes. “Doomsday Machine” is too focused on Decker to meet that standard.
“Community” Bottle Episode. Self-awareness Level One.