BOTTLE EPISODE HOW TO
BOTTLE EPISODE SERIES

Few shows would choose to send off a main character this way but this exemplifies how Community mastered the deployment of these types of episodes.Ĭommunity made the bottle episode matter and avoided being dispensable filler for bloated seasons.

The final goodbye has the emotional strength of five seasons of character development within a bottle episode. Geothermal Escapism a.k.a 'the floor is lava' episode contains the most pathos for a bottle episode as Abed deals with the departure of his best friend Troy (Donald Glover) while caught up in a game that sees the Greendale campus reduced to Mad Max levels of degradation. It became a joy to be in the company of these characters navigating each wild situation, with an excitement in seeing how they’d react.

Seasons five and six would be defined by the lucky dip of each episode, but over the course of the show’s run it had earned the adoration of the study group and all the wonderfully odd side-characters of Greendale. Joe-style cartoon.Īs Community went on it would slide into the strength of these bottle episodes, comfortable in its skin. Modern Warfare would spawn several sequels: A Fistfill of Paintballs, For a Few Paintballs More and Modern Espionage.Ĭommunity later placed multiple pop culture references into a narrative blender and built bottle episodes around each core premise a Dungeons and Dragons tabeltop episode, a claymation Christmas episode, an episode inside a videogame, and even one set inside a G.I.

BOTTLE EPISODE HOW TO

Community figured out how to do it, while indulging in a little fun the bottle epsiode allows. Bottle episodes usually do a little character work but rarely progress anything. In Modern Warfare, the sexual tension between Winger and Britta (Gillian Jacobs) finally broke after a circling the ‘will they or won’t they?’ for most of the first season. The study group were united by the concept episodes that took the conventions of a bottle epsiode, but transformed into something that would revel in the core idea or homage, while still working to resolve or progress character beats and contribute to the overall arc of the show.

BOTTLE EPISODE SERIES

Modern Warfare would become a cornerstone of the series as a loving tribute to action movies (directed by Justin Lin, who helmed Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, Fast and Furious, Fast Five, Fast and the Furious 6 and Star Trek Beyond). Then a shift occurred with episode 23 of season one: Modern Warfare a.k.a the paintball episode. Community began by exploring the weird world of Greendale while teaming up each character in various sub-plots that would revolve around whatever odd classes they had signed up for. At Greendale, Winger formed a study group with a group of misfits he hopes will help him graduate with minimal effort. The show begian with disbarred lawyer, Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), returning to Greendale Community College to redeem his illegitimate law degree. And then Community comes along to ask the question: can you make a series out of bottle episodes?Ĭommunity didn’t start out with this proposition, but the series would develop and perfect it over 5 seasons, disregarding the horrid season 4 without the show’s creator, Dan Harmon (fired over clashes with Chevy Chase and writing delays which continually halted the production). The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer would evolve the bottle episode into the ‘monster of the week’ format to have characters taking a break from the through-line plot of the season.

Seinfeld has the The Chinese Restaurant, Breaking Bad has The Fly, The X-Files has Ice (and so many more).

The success of the Friends episode, The One Where No One’s Ready, led to the show’s creator demanding there be one deliberate bottle episode per season. There’s also the dreaded episode where it’s all juts a dream after someone gets a bump to the head. The bottle episode has appeared in many different shapes and forms over the years: Halloween specials, detective noir episodes, the one where it’s a musical or the main characters are trapped somwhere.