This has always baffled me. Especially in pre-internet and pre-DVD days, I had no idea that individual episodes had their own titles, because most shows never announced it. But apparently all these shows have titles. Shows like The Simpsons often have witty titles and it’s a shame that they’re never given with the episode. So why even bother with them?
Is it mainly for the production staff so they can reference episodes easily? I can imagine numbers like 2x23 don’t convey very much information except for the very obsessive.
No answers, but a follow-up question. Before internet fandom had truly spread, were there ways for devoted, hard-core, cultlike fans to find out these titles?
I remember getting a guide to star trek the next generation (only up to the end of season 5.) But that was one of the few shows that did include ‘title cards’ of a sort along with the on-screen credits after the main title. (with italic blue letters showing up over the scene, IIRC.)
What about for other shows that didn’t do that. Were there books that listed episode titles that weren’t displayed on screen pre-net? Did rabid fans get lists from the producers and distribute then and fancons?
Mine was called “The newspaper’s TV listings section”, which generally included episode titles for prime-time shows in the little capsules where it would tell you what each episode was about, and if it was a rerun, available in closed caption, etc etc.
I think TV Guide did (does?) the same thing.
This may be a long shot, but did references like TV Guide include the episode title? Titles do show up in their online listings (and in the episode info I get from my digital cable), but I don’t know how long that practice has been done.
I always thought it was funny that Friends went ahead and titled their episodes by what people were probably going to call them anyway. Thus, all their titles started with “The One”, usually “The One With”. As in, “The One With The Breast Milk,” “The One With Ross’s Tan,” and, “The One With The Free Porn.”
Lots of times the writers will try to come up with some consistent gimmick for naming all the episodes. For example, they tried to make all the episodes of Family Guy have something to do with death in the title:
Death Has a Shadow
I Never Met the Dead Man
Chitty Chitty Death Bang
Mind Over Murder
Death Is a Bitch
The King Is Dead
But they gave up on that pretty quickly. Another funny one is titles for episodes of the Drew Carey Show:
Pilot
The Joining of Two Unlike Elements is a Mixture
Nature Abhors a Vacuum
No Two Things in Nature are Exactly Alike
Drew Meets Lawyers
Science Names Suck
The Electron Doesn’t Fall Far from the Tree
Isomers Have Distinct Characteristics
Drew and the Unstable Element
There is No Scientific Name for a Show About God
…And so on. They gave up on that pretty quickly too.
How about because even tv shows are written by writers, and writers actually care about the stuff they’ve written even though they get no recognition and people seem to think that the actors make the stuff up? :smack:
Anyway, this has been true for a very long time. Star Trek: TOS fans knew the episode names for the shows early on and always referred to them that way. The creation of a real fandom around television was the tipping point for other shows to inspire one.
There’s also the very prosaic economic and financial necessities to pay writers for their work, to register copyrights, to enter the shows into award competitions, to pay royalties, and all the hundreds of other pieces of everyday minutiae that the real world demands for a real and individual product.
Newsradio had a whole string of episodes named for Led Zeppelin albums, for no apparent reason.
I seem to remember a lot of older shows having actual title cards. Of course my work-addled brain can’t come up with any specific examples right now, but I’m sure I saw them.
And I know there were fan magazines long before the interweb. I’m sure the rabid fanboy has always found a way.
The TV version of Clerks had very long names for all of its episodes, excluding the eponymous last episode. I can’t find them online, but I remember one was something like “Dante Learns a Lesson Plus Homages to The Last Starfighter, Madame Butterfly, The Bad News Bears, and The Temple of Doom.”
1: Pilot or Leonardo Leonardo Returns and Dante has an Important Decision to Make, The
2: Clipshow Wherein Dante and Randal are Locked in the Freezer and Remember Some of the Great Moments of Their Lives, The
3: *Leonardo is Caught in the Grip of an Outbreak of Randal’s Imagination and Patrick Swayze Either Does or Doesn’t Work in the New Pet Store *
4: Dissertation on the American Justice System by People Who Have Never Been Inside a Courtroom, Let Alone Know Anything About the Law, But Have Seen Way Too Many Legal Thrillers, A
5: Dante and Randal and Jay and Silent Bob and a Bunch of New Characters and Lando Take Part in a Whole Bunch of Movie Parodies Including, but not Exclusive to, The Bad News Bears, The Last Starfighter, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Plus a High School Reunion
6: Last Episode Ever, The
Incidentally, episode 6 was given that name long before the first episode ever aired.
Almost all the episodes of Seinfeld (I think there were two that didn’t) are called “The (focus of episode),” i.e. “The Contest,” “The Dog,” “The Puerto Rican Day.”
All the episode titles of Monk have the same format: “Mr. Monk and…” or “Mr. Monk Goes to…” &etc. This show also shows the names of the titles in the opening credits.
As for the question in the OP, it never occurred to me that you wouldn’t title TV show episodes. Everything has a title. That’s how you know what you’re talking about. It is a lot easier to remember something by a title than by “season four, episode three” or something.
I’d like it if they started showing titles on The Simpsons since some of them are funny.
