Bottle episode

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The term bottle episode or bottleneck episode is used in episodic television to refer to episodes which are produced using the least amount of money. The majority of a television series' budget generally goes into producing episodes meant to pique audience interest, such as season openers and closers; bottle episodes are produced using whatever money is left over. Most bottle episodes are shot on sets already built for other episodes, frequently the main interior sets for a series, and they consist largely of dialogue or scenes for which no special preparations are needed. An often parodied feature of bottle episodes among series that are rarely studio based is the means in which the cast are forced to stay in the same location, for example large external forces such as natural disasters or something as simple as an accidentally locked door.

In the making of Quality of Mercy feature in the The Outer Limits season 1 DVD set, Executive Producer Pen Densham describes that most cop shows would have a Dog Day Afternoon episode which would house the entire show in a single room or set, referring to the movie which, for the most part, takes place in and around a bank.

Scott Brazil, executive producer/director of the FX series The Shield, described bottle episodes as "the sad little step child whose allowance is docked in order to buy big brother a new pair of sneaks" [1].

Bottle episodes from the Star Trek franchise are known for occasionally becoming among the most popular with fans. Prominent examples include "The Tholian Web", "Journey To Babel" and "Balance of Terror". The phenomenon has persisted to a lesser extent in contemporary incarnations, with "Duet" (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine) has been celebrated by Startrek.com and Amazon.com among other sources as "[a]rguably one of the best episodes of Deep Space Nine and a jewel in the entire Trek canon".[2][3]

Bottle episodes should not be confused with filler episodes; while many bottle episodes are fillers, this is not always the case. In fact, while the higher-priority episodes may be more visually appealing, bottle episodes are sometimes the ones in which actors give their best performances. In this respect, bottle episodes are a "make-or-break" process because they tend to be among the best or worst episodes in a series. For example, the Friends episode "The One Where No One's Ready" only features two sets and no guest stars, except for Peter Dennis for a few seconds at the end, yet it has been voted up to the third best Friends episode.

The Goodies finished off series 5 and series 7 with bottle episodes The End and Earthanasia, the latter of which occurs in real time between 11:30pm on Christmas Eve and midnight, at which point the Earth is due to be destroyed, and the episode focuses on their attempts to decide how to use their last minutes. Both episodes are notable for featuring just the three stars, and take place entirely within their one room flat.

The third serial in the classic series of Doctor Who was both a filler and a bottle episode: the original commission was for 13 episodes, but the two serials chosen to open the series were four and seven episodes long respectively, so a two part story featuring only the four leads and set entirely within one location was written, using the remainder of the budget and filling the commission. In the 2005 series, Russell T Davies, the lead writer, has stated that several episodes which were written to be budget light have resulted in consuming more money than intended (The Long Game and Boom Town are two examples cited in the 2005 book "Doctor Who: The Shooting Scripts").