Does anyone know why, for a few decades now, most TV shows don’t put the episode titles onscreen? It seems that dramatic series that put the titles onscreen are the exception.
(It makes some sense with comedies, but with dramas, media frequently discuss the episodes by title.)
Babylon 5 did. Supernatural does right now and has all 10 seasons of it.
I agree that it would be great it they all did.
Does digital tv broadcast in the USA not carry information about the show that can be shown on demand in a separate window? All Japanese tv remotes (for HDTVs) have a “d” button which stands for “data”. We can press this to view information about the show including title, actors, synopsis, etc.
I think that Battlestar Galactica did this. Does anyone else remember the Police Squad show? Each week a title would appear on the screen while the narrator read a different title.
It does, but I think what the OP is basically asking is why the majority of people didn’t even know that individual episodes had titles until DVRs (specifically TiVos) showed up which displayed episode titles as if that were just the norm.
On the one hand, before TiVo (or the other DVRs) the majority of TV’s just didn’t have a built in guide that you could use to pull up information about the show you were watching.
On the other hand, we do get this question from time to time and I think what it comes down to is, why didn’t they display the episode title somewhere in the opening credits?
It’s purely & completely an aesthetic choice.
In general displaying the title was the norm for any hour-length series all thru the 70s. By the 80s it just seemed stilted. silly, and unnecessary. Although science fiction shows seemed to always do it (Battlestar, all the Trek series etc.) Probably due to the inherent ‘geekiness’ of their audiences. Even before the internet these shows were talked about & discussed amongst fans after airing and having the actual title made this much clearer & easier.
I wonder if has anything to do with some shows being writer dominated, like the Treks.
BTW, I don’t know of this is universal, but at least some commercials have titles also.
Except for The X-Files. I used to think that most shows didn’t even HAVE titles, only the ones that showed them. X-Files changed that. I would read stuff with people discussing X-Files episodes by name. I’d be all “where are they getting the episode names??” Pissed me off, it did.
Law & Order mothership showed titles in the first, maybe second season episodes, but stopped. I’ve always wondered why the change.
“Jane the Virgin” does. But in true Jane the Virgin style, the titles are all “Chapter X” (X being the number of the episode), but they are still on screen after the narrator recaps all the action so far.
We’ve had another thread along these lines relatively recently: Why/when did episode titles become Easter Eggs for persnickety viewers?
While searching for it, I also ran across these other, older threads:
Why do TV show episodes have individual titles?
Are episode names supposed to be in the credits?
I wouldn’t strictly call *The X-Files *science fiction, more horror/fantasy/scifi.
As far as L&O ending the episode titles, like I said it just too much harks back to the cheesy days of tawdry prime time soap operas (Dallas, Dynasty etc.), cop & private eye shows (Hawaii Five-O, Starsky & Hutch, Hart to Hart etc.), and mini-series of the 70s and early 80s. Like a sitcom using a laugh track.
But I guess the question is, why would displaying the title be considered cheesy? Why deliberately hide that piece of information from your audience?
As I’m sure everyone knows, that’s where Friends got its episode-naming convention from. Every Friends episode title begins with “The One With…” or “The One Where…”, because in the days before the ready availability of onscreen guides or online episode lists, that’s what you had to do if you wanted to talk about a particular episode. You had to mention some specific element of the plot, and hope everybody remembered which episode you were referring to.
Why force your audience to adopt such a clumsy arrangement, when it would be trivially easy to display the episode title onscreen? And no, it’s not just geeks who want to talk about individual episodes. I’ve seen interviews with the writers of, for example, MASH*, where they’ll say things like, “Yeah, [episode title] was the first time that we ever had a sympathetic character die, and it was a real turning point for the show.” Why not make it easier for the audience in general to have similar discussions?
Edited to add: To the best of my memory, neither Dallas not Dynasty ever displayed episode titles onscreen.
I think it became cheesy because it was an artifact from when TV was really cheesy. A Mannix episode with a portentous title is just kind of embarrassing, so it fell out of fashion.
I think madmonk28 hit on the main reason. But it occurred to me that, from the network’s point of view, “hiding that piece of information from your audience” might be a good thing, because if you start by showing the episode title, it makes it easier for viewers to instantly recognize that they’re watching a (rerun) episode they’ve seen before and change the channel.
I suspect (but don’t know for sure) that such discussions were less common back in the old days (e.g. when MAS*H originally aired), because no one had on-demand access to the different episodes (and, of course, there were no on-line discussions). So, you might talk with your buddies at work about “last night’s episode,” but could you count on them to remember the title of an episode that they saw a couple of months ago?
Doesn’t that kind of assume that the plotlines are so generic that people wouldn’t instantly recognize a rerun anyway, just because they remember the story? 
I recall, as a kid, talking with my friends about Happy Days, at a time when Happy Days was still on the air with first-run episodes, and also showing older episodes in reruns in the afternoons. It’s true that it used to be harder to watch some particular episode from three years ago that you especially liked. But for long-running shows with heavily syndicated reruns, it was still possible to become very familiar with individual episodes from long ago, because you would have seen them four or five times on various stations.
Now maybe it’s only geeky types who do have these discussions–I was, no doubt about it, an exceptionally geeky kid. But many of my friends weren’t, and we still sometimes talked about that episode where Fonzie sold encyclopedias door to door, or the one where Richie took judo lessons from Arnold.
Would titles have helped, or would you still have talked about “that epsode where Fonzie jumped the shark”?
And here I went to so much trouble to avoid using that as an example! There was more to Happy Days than that episode, you know!
Seriously, it’s a good question, and one I suppose we can never really know the answer to. I suppose it gets back to the question of “geekiness”–are you the type of person who tends to memorize episode titles or not? I wonder how kids these days talk about individual episodes, when titles are easily discoverable?
Still, I guess my stance would be that just because not everyone is using a particular piece of information is no reason that information shouldn’t be available. In the grand scheme of things, it’s certainly a minor irritation, but it’s always puzzled me.
Something interesting, now that I think about it. I did memorize the titles of Star Trek episodes as a kid. I was also a big fan of The Dick Van Dyke Show, which also displayed its episode titles on screen–rare for a sitcom. And I didn’t memorize the titles for that show. I was more likely to say “The one where Rob thinks he got the wrong baby,” or “The one where they spend the night in the haunted cabin.” So maybe it’s not just the geekiness of the viewer, but the geekiness of the show!
Further research is clearly indicated.
Quincy’s opening scene had the episode title overlayed.
I find it interesting in that Buffy only displayed the episode title twice. The obvious one is “Once More With Feeling” The other is “Lies my Parents Told Me”
Buffy is the type of show where I would expect (or at least not be surprised by) episode titles.
Brian
Ah, good old pancreas stabbin’! 