Last name I happened to see a rerun of Scrubs on Comedy Central. It was from the latest season and guest-starred Glynn Thurman from Coolie High as a terminal patient facing his last night on Earth; most of the episode consisted of JD and Turk talking with Thurman’s character in his hospital room. When the episode aired last summer I thought it was something special, and having season the entire 8th season now, I feel confident in calling it the best epsidoe of that season.
Of course, it’s also the least typical episode. But for Scrubs, that combination of excellence and abandoning the usual format is, oddly typical. I’m not saying that I don’t like the surreal hijinks of the average episode; rather, I’m saying that Scrubs is at its best when it does something different. It frees the writers and cast, somehow.
What other shows are like this? For that matter, what shows are best when they stick to their standard format and tend to falter when they try to experiement?
For best at leaving the comfort zone, I’ll nominate Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
For best at staying in the format, I’ll nominate NCIS.
I haven’t seen a lot of episodes, but I have to say, if the folks on Mythbusters aren’t blowing something up, they don’t seem to think they’ve done their job.
I find it hard to believe that every myth that needs busting needs black powder, frankly.
Sitcoms like According to Jim, Full House, etc. never leave their comfort zones. If we’re talking good shows, House sticks to the same formula, though the real story is outside the patient of the week.
Picket Fences always tried to be as different as it could be.
The X-Files was damn good at leaving their comfort zone. Typically there’s myth, murder, and mayhem, but the comedy episodes like “Bad Blood,” “Jose Chung’s From Outer Space,” and “How The Ghosts Stole Christmas” were equally well acted as well as hysterical.
I love House, but for most of the life of the series, it’s done a horrible job of leaving its comfort zone. House formula:
Middle- to upper-class person collapses and becomes unresponsive in front of large number of people. Bleeding may occur.
Forty minutes of the show is dedicated to House and his team citing obscure diseases and ordering drugs/tests/procedures that don’t work. House annoys/berates the ducklings/Cuddy/Wilson/Foreman.
One drug/procedure does work, but only temporarily. Patient is on the brink of death.
Some concurrent issue with Wilson/relationships/Vicodin causes House to realize what the actual disease is. The patient was lying about some aspect of his/her life which kept him from discovering the truth. He administers a cure at the last minute, against Cuddy’s explicit orders. The patient lives and his/her life resumes as normal.
Which happens at exactly the 52 minute mark in the episode, with a shot of House and the figurative lightbulb going off over his head (they really should use a cartoon lightbulb over his head).
There was a show a few years ago that most people probably don’t even remember called Millenium. It was a wonderful show about a clairvoyant who could get in the mind of serial killers by handling objects exposed to them. It sounds hokey, I know, but it was really good until it jumped the shark in the last two seasons.
Anyway, there were several episodes that jumped out of the formula, including one told from the point of view of the person who was killed. I imagine the show must have been a writer’s dream.
Back in the '70s virtually every brainless domestic sitcom succumbed to Very Special Episode Syndrome at least once, which meant pausing the usual madcap hijinks in order to address some very serious issue. They generally had sobbing, rage, and little or no laughter, and almost universally sucked. They frequently involved some ostensibly life-changing trauma that would never be referred to again, and after which life would revert to exactly as it was before. I don’t watch as many sitcoms as I used to, so I don’t know if VES is as prevalent as it used to be.
One show that I thought very effectively strayed beyond the expected was a British comedy called Blackadder. It seems to be pretty popular on this board, but for those unfamiliar with it, it starred Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson as a succession of cowardly, conniving, thoroughly unsympathetic villains. The supporting actors (at times including Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry) played, for the most part, over-the-top buffoons and loonies. Deaths were common and always played for laughs. Then, in the last few minutes of the fourth season, everything got serious. I doubt if there’s any way I can describe the last scene without it looking cheesy and maudlin, but somehow it worked. I’m actually tearing up a little just thinking about, it and it occasionally shows up high on lists of British TV’s best moments.
Norman Lear had a pretty wide comfort zone, but the All in the Family episode in which Edith confronts a rapist in her own home and the Maude episode in which the title character decides to have an abortion are still famous for pushing the boundaries.
I’ve got the whole Millenium series on DVD. I really miss that show as well. They did creepy to funny and did both well. One of my favorites is the demons hanging out in the coffee shop episode.
This is exactly what I came in here to say. MAS*H went from comedy to tragedy smoother than any show I’ve ever seen, with the possible exception of Scrubs. I’m thinking in particular of the Christmas episode where everyone’s celebrating except Hawkeye, B.J., and Hot Lips, who are desperately trying to tide a dying soldier over past midnight so that they don’t have to tell his family that he died on Christmas.
I also loved the episode filmed as a wartime documentary, with each of the characters speaking as though to a news reporter. Brilliant.
Ah, the “why gramps never talked about The Great War” episode.
It would not have been nearly as effective if there hadn’t been four seasons of nonsense leading to it. Rarely have war movies captured that sense of For King and Country fatalism.
True, but when House DOES leave its comfort zone, the result is usually brilliant: “Three Stories”, “House’s Head” & “Wilson’s Heart”, last season’s “Both Sides Now”.
House has left its comfort zone at least once that I can recall - it’s actually also the first House episode I ever saw and how I got hooked on the show.
There have also been a few other episodes that have been a bit different, and next week’s season opener is going to be completely different.
CSI often focuses on 2 or more cases an episode, but all the best episodes in my opinion only feature one. Butterflied, The Accused is Entitled, Bloodlines, Jackpot. I haven’t watched the show regularly since season 5 but I still love all these episodes I mentioned, plus some others I may be forgetting. The one-case episodes to me have a different feel, more movie-like than TV-like.
*I took so long to post this the poster above said the same thing as me about House plus more examples I forgot
