We’re going to start calling it a “suitcase episode.” Everybody get on board!
It is not! A! Bottle episode! This kind of episode is often so compelling and exciting, though - it deserves its own name.
COMMUNITY BOTTLE EPISODE QUOTES FULL
There are lots of sets, lots of little minor character roles, and the first 15 minutes are full of other characters and stories. Peggy spends much of the night dodging a dinner she’s supposed to be at, and the episode cuts back and forth between the office and the restaurant. Mad Men’s “The Suitcase” from season four is another version of “feels like a bottle episode but is not one.” Peggy and Don are on deadline, and almost all of the episode is just them trying to work out a new campaign for a luggage company while also talking around (and eventually about) their whole relationship. But the complex horror-movie production elements actually ended up blowing through the budget, particularly because the episode required a fair amount of CGI. The X-Files’s season-one episode “Ice” is one example: Originally intended to be exactly the kind of cost-saving idea bottle episodes are designed to provide, “Ice” is set in an arctic-exploration station with a lurking monster and a very small cast. It’s why viewers (and even some critics) have fallen into the habit of expanding the idea to include anything that feels like a bottle episode.
COMMUNITY BOTTLE EPISODE QUOTES TV
The characters can’t leave, so “Fly” is this intense, wordy, emotional TV episode that feels set distinctly apart from the rest of the series.īut that kind of fictional experience can be created without actually making a bottle episode. Director Rian Johnson confirmed that “Fly” was written and filmed to be much cheaper because the show needed too much money from the season’s budget for other episodes, and that budgetary circumstance created the fictional result. A classic example is Breaking Bad’s season-three episode “Fly,” which centers on the two lead characters, trapped inside a large underground lab, who have nothing to do but talk to each other.
Bottle episodes often create some reason for everyone to get stuck inside this small place: a door is locked, there’s a deadline, there’s a bomb threat, there’s something to wait for.
That underlying financial pressure has a tendency to produce a certain kind of story. As a result, the strictest definition of a bottle episode is an episode that’s filmed entirely on one prebuilt (“standing”) set, includes only main cast members, and is cheaper and faster to produce than a standard episode. Factors like building new sets, filming outdoors or on location, adding guest stars who don’t have full-season contracts, or requiring significant visual effects all make an episode more expensive, and the point of a bottle episode is to save money so that other episodes in that season can go big. Bottle episodes, an idea that may have come from Star Trek but also originates in the 1960s with a show called The Outer Limits, are first and foremost a money-saving strategy. But maybe?) What is “small cast” - does that mean two or three people, or can it be more? (Yes, but possibly no!) What if there’s a tiny piece of the episode that’s in a different setting? (Could still be a bottle!) What if there’s one main cast member and one guest star? (Maybe?) Also, wait, why does it have anything to do with the setting? Isn’t a bottle episode more like “an episode that feels separate from the rest of the show”? (Absolutely not.)Ī more complete definition of bottle episode is also more precise: It’s about how and why a specific episode is made, and it has nothing to do with what the episode feels or looks like or what kind of story it tells. The Merriam-Webster definition adds another piece, describing it as “an inexpensively produced episode of television that is typically confined to one setting.” But both of those definitions lead to confusion: How do you define “confined place”? (Depends.) If an episode takes place entirely on a cruise ship, does that count? (Probably not. The most familiar definition of the term bottle episode is an episode of TV that takes place in one confined place with a small cast and few or no guest stars. “The One Where No One’s Ready.” It’s a bottle episode.
0 kommentar(er)
