![]() I don’t know if this counts, but I loved the second “30 Rock” live episode, “Live from Studio 6H.” Essentially set up as a Season 6 bottle episode with Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) locking most of the TGS staff inside Tracy’s (Tracy Morgan) dressing room after Jack (Alec Baldwin) decides that the show would start pre-taping, the action only jumped outside of the room for faux commercials and “flashbacks” to classic live-TV moments that were as fictional as they were effed-up. Plus it features an homage to Stomp!, an imaginary dinner party, and Glenn Howerton’s excellent CCH Pounder impression and Kaitlin Olson’s truly awful Obama impersonation. It’s hilarious! Like any great bottle episode, it shows off what the show does best: has its characters talk to each other and lets the actors deliver great performances. 2.” To summarize, the gang is in the brig of a sinking Christian cruise ship because they are a bunch of hedonists, and the room begins to fill with water to kill them all. I would have said “Community’s” “Cooperative Calligraphy” but someone else has probably blurbed that, and then I would have said “Breaking Bad’s” “Fly” but same same, so let’s just go with “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s” “The Gang Goes to Hell Pt. It’s a spellbinding blend of dialogue (the only “Homicide” episode to win a writing Emmy), acting, and directing, made all the more intense because it feels like we’re stuck in that room with the three men, desperate to find answers about what really happened to poor Adena. Seinfeld’s “The Chinese Restaurant” is the more famous one, and the more historically important one, as a half-hour of Jerry, Elaine, and George waiting for a dinner table became the key that unlocked the entire series for Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David and helped it transform from a funny but uneven young comedy into one of the best ever made.īut the best bottle episode ever made is “Three Men and Adena” from “Homicide: Life on the Street.” The conclusion to the first season’s arc about the murder of little girl Adena Watson, virtually the whole episode is just detectives Tim Bayliss and Frank Pembleton in an interrogation room with their chief suspect Risley Tucker, aka the Araber, in a last-ditch attempt to get him to confess before they’re forced to abandon the case. Instead, I’d like to go back to the early ’90s to a pair of bottle episode classics, one comedy, one drama. I suspect that contractually I’m obligated to pick “Fly” from “Breaking Bad,” which is a great (if divisive) example of what an episode can be even inside a small space with only a few characters. “One Day at a Time” has had a few, though really it’s not exactly fair to keep listing comedies, which usually have the advantage of fewer sets in the first place and always have the advantage of needing to only fill a half-hour, which isn’t nearly as hard, which isn’t to take anything away from something like “The Conversation” from “Mad About You.” I might want to mention great NEAR bottle episodes like “The Suitcase” from “Mad Men” or “Fight,” the last good episode of “Masters of Sex.” “Black-ish” had a great one with “Hope” two seasons ago, and that episode was basically just the entire Johnson family on the couch watching TV for a half-hour. I’m partial to some fairly obvious sitcom bottle episode classics, including the “Friends” episode, “The One Where No One’s Ready,” and a couple “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” bottle episodes, probably with “Chardee MacDennis” as the pinnacle. I guess “American Bitch” from “Girls” probably counts and that was a good one (though “Girls” probably had another bottle episode or two that were at least equally strong). Last season’s Harriet Tubman-centric “Underground” episode “Minty” was a wonderful and unique bottle episode, not just a single location but effectively just a single character doing a monologue. This week’s question: What is the best bottle episode? (Current and past shows are fair game.) Daniel Fienberg The Hollywood Reporter ![]() (The answer to the second, “What is the best show currently on TV?” can be found at the end of this post.) ![]() Every week, IndieWire asks a select handful of TV critics two questions and publishes the results on Tuesday or Wednesday.
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