Claustrophobia
Here's a list at the A.V. Club of 19 great episodes of TV that take place mostly in one location. The choices aren't that great, at least the ones I've seen.
Breaking Bad's "Fly" was one of their episodes where we got to zero in on some small story while the main story was put on hold. As such, it was more annoying than illuminating. Much better would be something like season 2's "4 Days Out," where, as in "Fly," Walt and Jesse cook, except here it's in a desert setting that almost becomes their gravesite.
I like "Balance Of Terror," (better choice than "The Empath"), but with the ships flying through space it doesn't feel that claustrophobic.
"Pine Barrens" doesn't even fit the premise, as the writer somewhat admits.
Battlestar Galactica's "Unfinished Business," where they have a boxing match, was one of their weaker episodes.
But the real problem is the list includes sitcoms, such as Bewitched, Seinfeld and Friends. Once you go to that well, forget it. There were so many great sitcoms, especially pre-Seinfeld, that had limited set use that you can find a bunch of great episodes within one series that fit this list. (The Honeymooners regularly stayed at home. Same for the gang at All In The Family. And look at Barney Miller--the whole show was set in the squad room.)
posted by LAGuy @ 12:03 AM
7 Comments:
Remember that episode of Star Trek where Sulu never came out of the closet?
I recently watched teh forst 3 seasons of Barney Miller. I noticed that in the first season they had two or three episodes outside the station (We saw barney and Fish's homes; one was on a stake out; and the season finale we saw Chano's apartment). After that they never left the station (except when they featured Fish's home again to introduce his spin off). I felt like Barney Miller was staged as if it were being performed in a live theater, with a set that never changed.
Yes, and that was intentional. It took a while for the show to find its format, but producer Danny Arnold liked it as a small play. He was also a maniacal rewriter and shooting would often go well into the early morning.
The famous Honeymooners episode were done live as part of Jackie Gleason's show. He'd change sets when the script called for it, but the heart of the show was understood to be in Ralph and Alice's cheap apartment.
The only way a list of this kind would be worthwhile would be if the series in question (1) did not typically stay in a single location, and (2) if the episode in question was particularly good.
As you point out, rule # 1 eliminates most traditional sitcoms.
And a lot of these episodes violate rule # 2 as well. The episodes they cited from Buffy, Firefly, and ST:DS9 are not particularly great episodes of those shows. I love both Buffy and Firefly, and rewatch both of them frequently, and yet the episodes that appear in this list aren't particularly special.
The Angel episode they listed was one of the best. However, one reason that episode is so good is that there is a framing story, and the way that the episode cuts back and forth between the main story and the frame is quite ingenious. (Lorne, who is in both stories, occasionally "breaks frame" in the main story to turn to the audience and narrate to them, as if he were in the framing story instead of the inside story.) Since the framing story is so key to the episode, I think it is wrong to describe it as "mostly set in one location".
By the way, why are so many entertainment magazines and web sites (including TV Guide itself) pay so much attention to science fiction, sci fi, and fantasy shows? I like these shows a lot, but they certainly don't account for a large proportion of television, and are almost invisible at the Emmys... and yet the TV Guide writers still remember every single Star Trek episode while having completely forgotten hugely popular shows like Who's the Boss and similar garbage.
I guess fans of sf and related genres are more obsessed, and more likely to read and write about what they love.
By the way, I'm interested to know how you distinguish between science fiction and sci fi?
I tend to follow the nomenclature common in the 1980s:
Science fiction takes science seriously and attempts to be scientifically rigorous. The author may postulate new scientific rules (e.g., faster than light travel) but even the new rules must be consistent. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Niven, as well as many (most?) classic Star Trek episodes fall into this category.
Sci-fi doesn't attempt to take science seriously, even though scientific words will be thrown around as if they meant something. Japanese monster movies, Edgar Rice Burroughs, "X-Men" and "Legion of Super-Heroes", Firefly, the original Battlestar Galactica, and (more controversially perhaps) Star Wars.
Space opera overlaps with both of these. It refers to high adventure where ultra-virtuous handsome heroes have to fight ultra-wicked and ultra-frightening villains and rescue ultra-beautiful women. Therefore some space opera is also sci-fi (Star Wars, the Barsoom stories) whereas other space opera is at least borderline science fiction (E.E. Smith's Lensman and Skylark series).
SF can be an abbreviation for "science fiction", but it can also be an abbreviation for "speculative fiction", which is an umbrella term that includes the science fiction, fantasy, and horror genres.
At some point around the year 2000, cynical SF fans attempted to introduce a new term -- spelled "sci-fi" but pronounced "skiffy" -- to replace "SF". I went to a con last month with my sister and it was hard to tell whether this succeeded. Hardcore fandom seems to be aging and in-bred. When I went to my first con 33 years ago, I was in junior high school, and the attendees ranged from my age to forty years older than me. And then at the con last month, the attendees ranged from my age to forty years older than me.
Also, there are dozens of words for sub-genres:
* "Cyberpunk", of course.
* "Steam punk": science fiction or sci-fi set in the 19th century with bizarre inventions that one might imagine could have been created then, like Wild Wild West, the new Sherlock Holmes movie and the "Girl Genius" comic books.
* "Urban fantasy": vampire stories set in the inner city, usually with lots of gratuitous sex.
* "Paranormal romance": stuff like the Twilight saga. Last time I was in a Barnes & Noble they had an entire shelf devoted to Young Adult vampire romance novels. Ugh.
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