Top Ten Bottle Episodes

Bottle episodes can be a fun thing in a television series. Let’s throw all our actors in a confined space, sprinkle in some secrets and let them have at it. Sometimes it’s done intentionally due to the sheer ability of the actors, like in (spoiler alert) Homicide: Life on the Streets. A more common reason for bottle episodes, especially in sci-fi series, revolves around the show’s budget. Bottle episodes can usually be made for a significantly less amount of money, which in any economic condition is positive. Common plots for these bottle episodes include becoming trapped (Get a Life‘s “Neptune 2000″), voluntary or involuntary (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia‘s “The Gang Gets Held Hostage”), or a Groundhog Day situation (Stargate SG-1‘s “Window of Opportunity”). Still some series, especially those older ones that relied on a fixed studio set and filmed in front of a studio audience, exist solely as bottle episodes (i.e., Night Court and Cheers).

Here is the top ten you must see.

10. Black Books – “Party”

In its final episode, the three sat around the bookstore trying to decide what to do that night. As usual, they get drunk. Bernard (Dylan Moran) seemingly opens up and finally shows that perhaps he isn’t as cold as he had seemed in the first two series. Though, the series ends with him pulling a cigarette from Fran’s (Tamsin Greig) mouth, still an ass.

9. Friends – “The One Where No One’s Ready”

It may be one of Friend’s most prolific episodes, but their best episodes are arguably the ones where all six are together with no other characters. The episode shows the group’s preparation for one of Ross’s (David Schwimmer) boring museum things. Though, everybody else is preoccupied with more pressing matters, Monica (Courtney Cox) frets over a message from Richard (Tom Selleck), Joey (Matt LeBlanc) and Chandler (Matthew Perry) fight over a chair and Rachel (Jennifer Anniston) can’t decide what to wear.

8. Sealab 2021 – “In the Closet”

Sealab 2021 was already a low-budget affair; the show reuses animations from the original Sealab 2020 series. This isn’t the only Sealab episode to use minimal animation either, another more daring episode features a shot of the exterior of Sealab as the voice actors talk for its entirety. Another episode featured the cast being held hostage in “Bizarro” and Captain Murphy (Harry Goz) found himself stuck under a vending machine for most of one in “All that Jazz.” “In the Closet,” as the title of the episode suggests, takes place in a supply closet with a broken door as crew members slowly become trapped. It is interesting that an animated show could actually do a number of these episodes this well, but considering its surrealist themes, it shouldn’t be that surprising that it has the capacity to produce them habitually.

7. Seinfeld – “The Chinese Restaurant”

This may be one of the most well-known bottle episodes in television. Coincidentally, it may be the episode that solidified Seinfeld’s position as a respectable comedy. The episode features, like many early Seinfeld episodes, mundane aspects of life that are frustrating yet very relatable. The gang is waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant as people pass ahead of them and George (Jason Alexander) deals with the dated problem of trying to get a phone call as they watch their movie time slowly approach. Though, seeing as the movie was Plan 9 from Outer Space, it may have been a blessing they miss it. For the show about nothing, it has shown that bottle episodes come quite naturally, also seen in “The Parking Garage.”

6. The West Wing – “17 People”

Aaron Sorkin, former playwright, has a knack for writing dialogue, naturally a bottle episode would be one of The West Wing‘s best. The show went over budget and needed to have an episode made as cheaply as possible. Fortunately, a lot had been going on in the weeks leading up to the episode so there was no shortage of material. Shifting between political debates over a Constitutional amendment and the President’s health revelation, a series of potential Correspondents’ Dinner jokes aptly served as a foil to the ongoing emotional drama rooms away. To see Aaron Sorkin’s ability to have such a firm grasp over how he writes the characters, personally, this is the best episode of the series.

5. M*A*S*H – “O.R.”

“O.R.” was important to M*A*S*H in so many ways. CBS had allowed the show to stay on the air and find its place. The show, which already had a very limited set, staged itself almost entirely in the operating room. Most notably, this episode tossed the laugh track aside for the first time in the series’ three seasons. It’s not that the show abandoned its comedic charm, rather, the show found it was a better drama with comedy than a comedy with drama.

4. Firefly – “Out of Gas”

In one of Firefly’s best episodes, the ship is running out of gas. Stranded, an injured Mal (Nathan Fillion) struggles to place a part in the ship’s engine while the episode uses flashbacks to show 1) how he ended up injured and 2) how everybody joined the crew. Aside from the last flashback, all the others were also set on the ship. The show, which immediately became a budget burden on FOX, has a couple of episodes set entirely on Serenity, including its final episode, “Objects in Space.”

3. Homicide: Life On The Streets – “Three Men And Adena”

Most of the episode takes place in an interrogation room, which Tom Fantana wrote due to the actors’ ability he had seen while filming the pilot. The detectives have twelve hours to obtain a confession before Risley Tucker (Moses Gunn) walks free. Director Martin Campbell said he did his best to shoot it from different vantage points each time for fear of the claustrophobic environment becoming stale. Though it may seem difficult to do an hour-long bottle episode (compared to the half hour shows or Sealab‘s eleven minutes), out of the four hour long shows on our list, three are in the top four.

2. Breaking Bad – “Fly”

Our last hour long bottle episode began with such a simple premise: there’s a fly in our meth lab and it may be contaminating our cooking, accounting for the diminishing yields of our product, so we must kill the fly – at whatever cost. It serves the purpose of bringing up a lot of unspoken, lingering issues by confining Walt (Bryan Cranston) and Jesse (Aaron Paul) in such a tight space. Walt and Jesse both have tendencies to keep their thoughts and emotions bottled up (terrible pun, I know), so the fly works as the perfect vessel to force them to open up. From a cinematographic standpoint, the director (Rian Johnson) had the ability to use angles in ways that Breaking Bad doesn’t employ because this truly is a different episode.

1. Community – “Cooperative Calligraphy”

Community’s tendency to draw awareness to it being a satire of television sitcoms combined with it habitually going over budget makes bottle episodes a frequent thing. Annie’s (Alison Brie) pen goes missing and the group begins to turn on each other, fearing that one among them is not who the others were led to believe. In highlighting each of the group member’s eccentricities, it forces them to realize they truly are meant to be together. Collectively they decide to forget their accusations and settle that a ghost must have taken the pen, which is not far off, as the pen actually disappears on screen by Troy’s (Donald Glover) runaway monkey. Another wonderful bottle episode, “Remedial Chaos Theory” is not only a bottle episode but one that exists in multiple timelines (think Sliding Doors or Run Lola Run).