Has real life become a never-ending ‘bottle episode’? It certainly feels that way. Think about it for almost a year now, our entire lives have revolved around a single setting (our homes). The only ‘characters’ are the people we live with. There is no plot.
Some of us have begun to reveal a tad too much about our inner workings. Oh, and time is at a standstill.
That’s exactly what makes a great bottle episode work. The term originated in the 1960s to describe a self-contained instalment on episodic television, reconfigured at the last minute to keep costs down. Some considered it a creative afterthought; others an excuse to quietly and cheaply develop a show’s mythology. Nobody expected these tilted, slow-burning, character-driven and drama-and-dialogue-based segments to take off.