OK. I was supposed to be going away on a trip, but I have woken up with a bad cough (not Covid) and so I am staying in bed today. So let's do this.
What is a "filler" episode? Kurtzman I think here is using it to mean "an episode that's not that good, but got made because you had to air something"
There's a lot of great serialized tv stories but maybe it's a bad idea to make EVERY TV show "let's stretch a story that would've been a 2 hour long movie 20 years ago into ten hour-long episodes." The "tell a story beginning to end inside 42 minutes" format worked for a long time
We need to distinguish between:
- arc episodes: continue a major plotline from from the season/whole show
- standalone episodes: a self-contained story
- monster-of-the-week episodes: a threat comes up & is despatched in one ep
- bottle episodes: core cast get trapped in one set for an episode
these eps have different centres: long plot with many revelations, short plot with a classic three-five act structure & resolution, thrilling monster, or character investigation/revelation
in very good shows, every episode has elements of all of these things, it's just about balance.
so in The Sopranos, The Pine Barrens is a classic standalone episode. a Russian guy who like Rasputin is impossible to whack and Christopher and Paulie end up wandering around the frozen woods going crazy. it also has elements of main arc plot (Gloria and Tony fight) & superb characterisation.
but I mean, also The Knight in White Satin Armour is superb, a culmination of a slow buildup.
if the show is really really good, then the arc episodes are good, and the standalone/bottle/MOTW episodes are also really good. that is VERY HARD TO DO, but there are shows that really manage it.
the X-Files is a show where the MOTW episodes were excellent and the arc plot was ponderous, slow, incomprehensible, never resolved satisfactorily and any time an episode started with Scully doing a voiceover you thought "oh god no". in that case, the *arc* episodes were "filler".
it certainly can happen that a showrunner will decide to keep the juicy bits of narrative for themselves, for the eps that they're going to write. so if you've been building up to a big revelation and then there's an episode that just sidesteps that story completely it can feel pointless to viewers
I’d suggest for the first few years the “what happened to Mulder’s sister?” arc episodes worked since CC was working towards a reveal. The problem was that it kept recycling that arc in more and more arcane loops whilst also not tackling the Mulder/Scully relationship.
In UK series, the early seasons of new Doctor Who generally had them around episode 11 just before a two part series end for filming reasons. Blink (now seen as a classic) is a perfect example, and then there's Love and Monsters, which divides people (but I love it, because of the ELO ref).
The concept of ‘Filler Episodes’ comes from anime where they diverge from the plot of Manga, usually because the Anime has caught up with the Manga and they need to give the Manga artist more time to write the story
Like Dragonball Z is good example of filler episodes you have entire plot lines that weren’t in the Manga like the Garlic Jr saga or they stretch out a story to fill time like Goku’s fight with Freiza on Namek.
This has led an entire generation of needs to debate what is ‘filler’ and what is ‘canon’ and has led them to apply these concepts to non anime media, like Star Trek something which fundamentally misunderstands how TV production is done.
that's interesting! I know nothing about manga at all. I had never heard or thought that "filler" could be the opposite of "canon".
maybe that is what's going on here! I tend to think of "filler" as like in sausages: something that's put in to eke out the good stuff.
With long running Anime series there is a lot of filler episodes where they are rationing out the good stuff. The One Piece anime which has run for over a thousand episodes has a bunch of filler arcs where the characters are just hanging around or go on side quests that go nowhere.
Although there is a big section of fans that enjoy ‘filler’ episodes because they tend to be more slice of life episodes and they give the opportunity to explore certain side characters in more depth.
I think it's when you end up back where you started and you haven't been entertained by the round trip. (And where it's been conspicuously money-saving and lacking in ambition and imagination). I remember a few Avengers episodes like that - or rather, I don't, as they were completely unmemorable.
Isn’t that definition something that people would only say retrospectively? After a standalone that’s not super interesting or an arc episode that doesn’t move anything along much. So it either reflects risk taking (didn’t work out) or budget restrictions (can’t fix it in time).
Murder She Wrote had a whole bunch of episodes where Jessica Fletcher appeared as narrator to bookend a story that she didn't appear in at all.
Quite a few long running sitcoms have had flashback episodes - main cast sit around remembering things from past episodes on some weak pretext.
Apparently the name for this is 'clip show' - and often done for budget reasons. So the purest form of filler you can get.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clip_sh....
I think that is absolutely true, but as far as I’m aware, Star Trek has never done a clips episode of that sort. So yes, I agree entirely but it’s not what he’s talking about here.
Have to say that IMHO Strange New Worlds generally does a great job balancing the episodic and the arc elements. Not every episode hits, but hits much more than it misses - and episodes like the Lower Decks crossover and Subspace Rhapsody show you can do both. But nothing I'd consider pure 'filler'
The one type of episode that reliably feels like filler to me is the “backstory” episode, where we go back four years to see a significant piece of backstory finally played out.
It’s stuff that we already know about, so the only available move is to add a twist that “changes everything”.
Unless this change really was programmed in from the start as the crux of the story, it’s probably going to be a mistake, weakening the character dynamics that we like about the show. And then returning us to exactly where we were, but worse.
My prejudice, anyway.
Except sometimes that can be a fantastic bottle episode. A lot of the vampire flashbacks in Buffy for example. It doesn't need to have a twist to be "our best actor doing his thing in a big way"
I have spent so much time thinking about how and why Buffy works. (When it works, which is a lot of the time. But not Beer Bad and they flumped the Willow 'addiction' arc.)
Buffy deliberately makes every character contain their most unlikely opposite. Spike is William. Angel is Angelus.
The cheerleader is a vampire slayer. Willow is Dark Willow. Giles is Ripper. Anya is Anyanka. Ben is Glory. Sorry, where was I?
Anyway, that "you contain your opposite" is the theme of the show, it's in the title. So backstory where you discover an unlikely past always works for them.
In an odd way, Beer Bad is a perfect example of a bottle episode that works perfectly on its own merits, as I discovered watching it with my daughter and listening to the Rewatcher podcast.
It's enjoyable fun, but it suffers from being in a season that already felt like it was wasting some time.
In Psych they did a ‘reboot episode’ where they reshot an entire episode almost scene for scene with guest stars that appeared in previous episodes playing the characters from the original episode.
It was an interesting take.
