Exemplary Episodes

Scott Hardie | November 5, 2011
Think of one or two of your favorite TV series. If you could pick one episode to introduce someone to the show that would demonstrate its best qualities, and it couldn't be the first episode, which episode would you pick and why?

Tony Peters | November 5, 2011
Seinfeld=master of my domain

Steve West | November 5, 2011
In the first season of The West Wing was an episode the features Toby and Mrs. Landingham. They attend the funeral of a Korean War veteran whom they know only because he was wearing a coat Toby had donated to Goodwill when he died. We find out that Mrs. Landingham had twin sons who were killed in Viet Nam. The episode touched me on several levels and shows that despite our outside view of politicians serving at the highest levels, they're still human beings.

Tony Peters | November 5, 2011
The West Wing Esp. about standing for the president is especially poignant in todays Washington

Scott Hardie | November 5, 2011
The best episodes of The X Files were driven by intellectual curiosity, as if the writers poured through mountains of research material in preparation and wanted to fit in as much neat information as they could. (I try to do the same with Gothic Earth when I can.) The series really hit its stride in the third season, when an episode about cockroaches leads to discussions about how humanity has had a complicated mutually-dependent history with insects, how long-distance space travelers are likely to take the form of insectoid robots, how mass hysteria can form over something as simple as a bug sighting, and how irresponsible scientific research can adversely affect human life via the butterfly effect, a pet topic of the series as a whole. The episode is funny throughout, but takes some jokes to a meta-textual level, such as having a fake roach run across the screen, and having the main characters mock the writers' tendency to cram the show with bizarre facts. For someone considering watching the complete series, I'd recommend watching this episode as a test case: It's as exciting and thought-provoking as any, but this one in particular has a sharp sense of humor that makes it easy to like, and its scenes with squirmy cockroaches are a good test of one's fortitude for sitting through plenty of other gross moments. Like the rest of the series, it happens to be on Netflix.

Samir Mehta | November 6, 2011
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Erik Bates | November 7, 2011
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Tony Peters | November 7, 2011
Thanks Erik now I'm gonna have to re-watch FireFly again this year

Erik Bates | November 7, 2011
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Tony Peters | November 7, 2011
yeah I watched it.....I soo miss that show, pissed that fox never put anything behind it

Scott Hardie | November 13, 2011
ER is a tough show to choose an exemplary episode for, since nearly every hour features running plots that intertwine through the season and require knowledge of what came before, sometimes going back years. Even when the show got out of the hospital for an entire episode to focus on a main character going through a non-professional situation such as visiting family or being robbed, you had to know where these people were coming from to appreciate it.

That's what was striking about two episodes in season 11 that broke with the formula by telling their stories from the patient's perspective: The protagonists didn't know these doctors or nurses, and you don't have to either. One featured Cynthia Nixon as a stroke victim, literally portraying the drama from her point of view. The other showed Ray Liotta as an alcoholic who staggers into the ER in the final terminal stage of liver failure, hallucinating and paranoid.

Liotta is not the most handsome movie star, but the makeup artists really made him look like shit for this part. His performance is engrossing and deeply moving; he earned an Emmy for creating such a complex, tragic character in 43 minutes. And those 43 minutes unfold in real time, as the episode tells just his story with no subplots. We feel the sting of his regret over losing his kids, and root for him to accept the inevitable with dignity. Harsh lighting gives the ER scenes a haunting sadness, to say nothing of the hallucinations that suggest psychological trauma that drove him so deep into the bottle. The episode is one of the very best of ER's 15-year run, and it's available on Amazon.

Erik Bates | November 14, 2011
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Erik Bates | November 14, 2011
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Ryan Dunn | November 14, 2011
Star Trek TNG: TAPESTRY

Scott Hardie | November 15, 2011
"Tapestry" is a good one. "Family" is my favorite of the Picard episodes, for its unexpected depth coming out of nowhere. "The Inner Light" is most people's favorite, but I always thought that one was a little overrated. The profoundness of the reveal at the end -- an entire lifetime had happened in mere moments -- would have hit a lot harder if the show hadn't cut away to the bridge crew trying to revive Picard after every scene, giving away the ending and breaking his point of view. It's weird that we're sometimes harder on the shows and movies that come close to greatness and miss it, than we are on the junk.

The finale of M*A*S*H remains my favorite, but there were lots of good ones, yes. Does the emotional effect of "Abyssinia, Henry" depend on viewers having a relationship with the character after watching the show for a while, something that would be lost on first-time viewers trying it out as an example of the series? Or is it just so good that anyone can appreciate its impact?

Ryan Dunn | November 15, 2011
I almost went with The Inner Light.

Picard is by far my favorite TV character, ever.

Erik Bates | November 15, 2011
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Tony Peters | November 16, 2011
as much as I liked the Radar Eps. I though the following eps

"Period of Adjustment"

was much better in my opinion for showing what the show was about but in general Mash is a difficult show to just pick one

Scott Hardie | November 16, 2011
Picard was great. He would have been merely good if not for the producers going out of their way to hire Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart, who elevated the character and invested him with unshakable dignity.

Samir Mehta | November 16, 2011
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Scott Hardie | November 16, 2011
I've wanted to watch it for a while. I wouldn't think that a show about a crooked cop would appeal to me, but then I doubted the appeal of a certain show about a New Jersey mob kingpin until it sucked me in.

The Shield and especially The Wire are two shows that I wish were on Netflix streaming so that I could watch them easily. Instead, I'm going through the mediocre Law & Order: Special Victims Unit simply because it's available. It has its moments, but I don't think I'm going to offer an exemplary episode of that show any time soon.

Samir Mehta | November 16, 2011
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Ryan Dunn | November 17, 2011
Ha! Thanks Scott. Never seen that! I have Man Love for Patrick Stewart.

Scott Hardie | November 19, 2011
Kelly just agreed to check out The Sopranos if I joined her in watching Doctor Who. Sounds like a win-win to me.

Samir Mehta | November 19, 2011
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Scott Hardie | November 20, 2011
If you watch the whole series, yes. It's so old that copies of the earliest episodes no longer exist. We plan to focus on the reboot from the last few years, which is a few dozen episodes, and maybe go back to some classic episodes if we feel like it. Netflix has a spotty collection anyway, so no worries. Apparently it's all being rebooted again as a movie, as if the storyline wasn't complicated enough already.

Erik Bates | December 1, 2011
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Scott Hardie | December 2, 2011
We're five episodes into Christopher Eccleston's run, just before David Tennant. The show's pretty fun. I enjoy its willingness to go for effects and jokes that American TV would consider too campy or uncool; it makes them work. I've only ever seen Eccleston in tough-guy action roles, so it's really weird to see him play a goofball free-spirit. Kelly tells me he's the darkest, most grim Doctor, but it's hard to imagine that from the wacky way Eccleston plays the role, as least in the first few episodes.

Erik Bates | December 2, 2011
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Scott Hardie | August 26, 2012
The AV Club and I aren't always in sync in our opinions, but it's rare that I find their coverage almost offensively wrong. They recently started a feature much like this discussion in which they list ten essential episodes of a TV series that give a good impression of what the rest of the show is like, even if they aren't the best single episodes in quality. So far they haven't chosen exactly the same episodes I would have, but that's fine; I can appreciate the slight differences in their point of view. When they announced that ER would be next, I looked forward to seeing how they handled the Herculean task of whittling down a great 15-year series into ten essential episodes, especially when the storylines are so heavily interwoven between episodes.

As it turned out, they handled it by declaring seasons 7-15 garbage and only covering the first 6. WTF? That's not just materially wrong, as the later seasons produced many excellent hours of television, but it feels wrong on principle to write about an entire series by only covering its first third. Do they review only the first few songs of an album, or the first hundred pages of a book? The whole point of the "ten episodes" feature is to choose ten episodes that truly represent the series, so if the author's opinion is that seasons 7-15 are lousy, should he not choose some lousy episodes from those years to demonstrate his opinion? As a huge fan of the show, I'm mad and disappointed. Boo to this article, and to the AV Club for letting it break their own rules.

As a rebuttal, here are ten good episodes solely from seasons 7-15 that they could have included:
"Rampage" (7.22) - A great ethical quandary for Greene, a surprise culmination of Weaver's season-long storyline, and an exciting season finale.
"On the Beach" (8.21) - The show's single most heart-breaking episode. Its characters aren't just cogs in a storytelling machine; they're human beings.
"Hindsight" (9.10) - One of ER's many narrative experiments, taking us backwards through Kovac's awful day until it reveals what set him off.
"When Night Meets Day" (9.21) - The scenes of trauma care in this episode build in tension until they reach an operatic pitch.
"The Lost" (10.2) - ER did several episodes about Africa. This was the best and bleakest, grounding the drama in relationships from back home.
"Time of Death" (11.6) - I wrote about this above (the Ray Liotta episode).
"I Don't" (13.21) - The best and worst elements of the relationship-heavy final years are all present in this wedding episode with a cliffhanger.
"Under Pressure" (14.17) - ER did its share of hostage scenarios and other TV cliches, but rarely better than this tense hour.
"Heal Thyself" (15.7) - A gut-wrenching hour for Banfield, grounded in the show's middle years.
"And in the End..." (15.22) - An inspired choice for the series finale: Show life at the hospital through the eyes of a brand new intern. So many episodes over the years had a "first day" feel (including the pilot) that this feels eerily perfect.