The skeleton of 'Controlled Experiment' was typed up by Stevens on a New York to LA flight, and the show took four and a half shooting days to complete.
BOTTLE EPISODE SERIES
Schow and Jeffrey Frentzen attribute the coinage of bottle show to Leslie Stevens, producer of the series The Outer Limits (1963-65): "No one believed Leslie Stevens when he proposed to complete an Outer Limits episode in four days … until he went ahead and did it. In The Outer Limits: The Official Companion (New York: Ace Science Fiction Books, 1986) the book's authors David J. Justman, Inside Star Trek: the Real Story, Pocket Books, 1996, p. In discussing the alternation of "planet shows" with "ship shows" on the series, Justman mentions that "most other series called them 'bottle shows,' but regardless of what they were called, their purpose was the same: to save money by 'bottling up' the action … Our ship shows took place entirely on board the Enterprise and cost much less to produce" (Herbert F. Justman, a coproducer of the original Star Trek. Sci-fi lends itself well to the bottle format – not just in the original Star Trek series but with Deep Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica, The X-Files and even light-hearted sitcom Red Dwarf.The notion that the phrase grew out of the television series Star Trek is contravened by Robert H. A 2008 episode, “Midnight”, with David Tennant’s Tenth Doctor, echoed the premise. Based on a haunted-house horror, it enabled the show to flesh out its new characters and explore the Time Lord’s ship. Doctor Who episode “The Edge of Destruction” was written in two days as “filler” to pad out the debut series, with William Hartnell as the Doctor. Three years later, another BBC institution followed suit. “The Bedsitter” was a tour-de-force that saw his life essentially held in stasis. Hancock palpably relished the chance to showcase his comic skills in a 25-minute one-man show. Its title was tweaked to Hancock and when we rejoined our down-at-heel hero for a seventh (and, it turned out, final) series, he’d dropped sidekick Sid James, East Cheam had been swapped for Earl’s Court and he was all on his own on a humdrum Sunday afternoon. Hancock’s Half Hour had been a Fifties stalwart, both on radio and TV, but as the new decade arrived, Tony Hancock fancied a freshen-up.
The earliest home-grown example came in 1961. They’ve gone from penny-pinching workaround to artistically liberating premise – and there are some bona fide classics. Nowadays they’re used for dramatic effect, with their narrow focus allowing for a more thoughtful pace and a deep delve into characters. Whichever explanation you prefer, these claustrophobic marvels have certainly evolved. Others claim it’s because they could squeeze through a budgetary bottleneck. However, Star Trek fans insist that because such instalments were set solely aboard the Starship Enterprise, they became known as “Ship in a Bottle” stories. Leslie Stevens, creator of The Outer Limits, is frequently credited with coining “bottle show” for an episode made in little time at little cost, “as in pulling an episode right out of a bottle like a genie”. There’s debate about how the term originated, but it was certainly during the Sixties. Despite such prosaic practical motivations, they’ve become beloved by the cognoscenti. Scott Brazil, a seasoned producer and director, memorably described bottle episodes as “the sad little stepchild whose allowance is docked in order to buy big brother a new pair of sneakers”. Told through dialogue rather than action, they often feel theatrical and appealingly old-fashioned. If a series was at risk of going over budget, producers would rein things in by inserting an episode with restricted scope: regular cast only, a single set, no special effects. There’s never been a more apt time to explore this fascinating screen subgenre, which finds our favourite characters under their own forms of lockdown – from Tony Hancock bored in his bedsit to Don Draper pulling an all-nighter at his ad agency.Ī bottle episode’s original purpose was money-saving.
BOTTLE EPISODE TV
Not just our current reality but also the set-up of a classic TV “bottle episode”. Confined to a single location, cheek-by-jowl with a handful of other people, idly passing the time.
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