Alan Sepinwall, probably my favorite TV journalist, explained what a bottle episode is in his recap to the fascinating episode "Fly" of Breaking Bad that recently aired. And I thought he had some interesting insights:
I am going to talk to you for a few paragraphs about how the sausage gets made in television. If you'd rather not think too much about production logistics and budgets and whatnot and just focus on why "Fly" was such an unusual, incredible hour for this series, just skim until I start talking about "The Sopranos."
But I want to start off with sausage-making because it was clear to me that "Fly" was what's known in the industry as "a bottle show" - that is, an episode of the series shot almost entirely on existing sets, with a minimum of guest stars. The idea is to keep the budget as small as possible, so that you can then spend whatever money you saved on another episode down the road. (Or, in some cases, so you can compensate for a previous episode that cost more than anticipated.)
Last year, "Breaking Bad" tried to do a bottle show with "4 Days Out," the episode with Jesse and Walt trapped in the desert after the RV's battery runs down. The idea was that it would only feature Cranston and Paul and take place largely on the standing RV set and therefore be dirt-cheap. Instead, it wound up being one of that season's most expensive episodes, as more and more of the action began creeping outside of the camper and into the desert itself, which meant lots of location filming, often at irregular hours (a lot of that episode, you may recall, took place around dawn and dusk to get a particularly beautiful light quality), and that costs man-hours, it costs crew overtime, and it costs simply to transport all the men and materials back and forth from the studio to the desert.
Still, the basic idea of that episode went to the core of "Breaking Bad" - that of teacher and pupil stuck together, getting on each other's nerves, and revisting all the damage they've done to themselves, to each other, and to the world at large since they teamed up. So it wasn't surprising that the show would try to revisit the basic conceit - nor that Vince Gilligan and company (here with Sam Catlin and Moira Walley-Beckett on script, and Rian Johnson directing) would find a way to do a bottle show as a bottle show. Having already spent the money to build the huge Walt-cave set, they were able to dwell inside it for 95% of an episode, with no castmembers other than the two leads (which is valuable, since most TV shows these days can only sign a few regulars to appear in every episode), and no other speaking parts.
And it was through that attempt at minimalism and frugality that we got the "Breaking Bad" equivalent of the "Pine Barrens" episode of "The Sopranos." Only this one was, heresy though it may be, better.
Both "Pine Barrens" and "Fly" were black comedies about crooks out of their element (Paulie and Christopher lost in the woods, Walt and Jesse trying to play exterminator), but much as I love "Pine Barrens," it stayed in that minor key. "Fly" started out as slapstick; one critic on Twitter compared it, not inaccurately, to Wile E. Coyote trying to catch the Road Runner, and certainly Walt's fall off the railing was as broad a moment as this show has had. But as Jesse realized the only way to control Walt's obsession with the fly was to play along, it turned into something much darker, and deeper, and tenser, until we got to that riveting scene where Jesse is standing atop the rickety ladder, with his only support coming from a Walt who's barely conscious from sleeping pills, and Walt is talking about Jane, and we wonder..
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