Watch: Survey of "Bottle Episodes," inexpensive but oft-great TV

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My “Bottle Episodes” involve a fair amount of Whiskey.

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Interesting! Great to learn about this.

This seems to be the case with my favorite episode of Masters of Sex, the one about boxing that all (or nearly all?) takes place in one hotel room. The writing for that episode was fantastic, had to watch it twice.

Not so much the Sopranos one with Tony in a hotel room, all dreamy and horny and shit. I dunno, loved the show otherwise, maybe just me on that episode.

Isn’t it nice that tvtropes has so many interesting articles?

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Fans of Community already know what a bottle episode is.

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Are any of them willing to own the label of “hipster”?

And, of course, one of the very best Next Generation episodes was named “Ship in a Bottle”. It seems that that title was also a little inside joke. Neat!

One of the things left unsaid is that “bottle episodes” are often produced in order to allow a larger-than-usual budget on another episode. Kinda funny how the bottle episodes often end up of higher quality than the more ambitious ones where they spent more money, for the reasons outlined in the video.

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Often overlaps with the theatrical “two-hander”, or story for only two characters.

When a mutidimensional show is shoehorned into a thin budget, is it called a Klein bottle episode?

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I’d rather see a bottle episode any day over one of the flash back montage filler episodes.

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I’d rather see a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. :stuck_out_tongue:

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I didn’t know that was the term, I just thought of them as pure situation (as in situation comedy).

My favourite bottle episode of anything would be BBC’s Bottom - “Hole” (the ferris wheel one)

Is the theme for every bottle episode that they are trapped? Hmmm

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