May 16th, 2008
Show With the Best Titles?
Here’s a not-very-significant question: which current show do you think has the best episode titles?
The elaborateness (is that a word?) of episode titles seems to fluctuate a lot. A lot of shows used to have very elaborate titles for two reasons: a) Most dramas actually showed the title at the beginning, requiring the writers to come up with a cool title that summed up the episode, and b) Comedies, which didn’t usually show the title, would have punny in-joke titles based on the writers’ belief that nobody would ever see them. That’s how you got episode titles like “Dwarf in a Helium Hat” (my personal favourite, from The Rockford Files), and “Warning: Live Blueberries” (from the soon-to-be-released first season of Mannix) and another of my all-time favourites, “Bob Has to Have His Tonsils Out, So He Spends Christmas Eve in the Hospital” (The Bob Newhart Show — if the title had bee shown onscreen, we wouldn’t have had to watch the episode).
There were always some shows that had simpler titles, like Dragnet, which called every episode “The Big _____” and later just “The ______.” But more shows started moving towards simpler titles as producers realized that writers were spending too much time coming up with titles that no one would ever see (especially once dramas stopped putting the title at the beginning). That’s why Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, influenced by Dragnet, decreed that all Seinfeld episodes would just be “The _____,” because they said they didn’t want the writers wasting time on writing awesome titles. (If you look at the titles from the first season of Law and Order, they had crazy titles like “By Hooker, By Crook,” which they mostly dropped after the first season in favour of one or two-word titles.)
But then in the mid-’90s, with the rise of the internet, it became apparent that many if not most fans would, in fact, see the title and they’d want something interesting or funny. That’s how Dawson’s Creek gave us titles like “First Encounters of the Close Kind” or King of the Hill came up with “Little Horrors of Shop” (rule of thumb: taking a famous movie title and reversing it — title gold). The Sopranos, which started in the late ’90s, had some insane titles (”The Telltale Moozadell”).
Tags: goodbye, office, toby