Weird, out of place episodes of a TV show.....

lol at the wrecking crew destroying Kate & Allie's place. Only thing I remember about that show is crushing big time on Susan Saint James.

The Taming of the Shrew episode of Moonlighting.  It was fantastic so people didn't have an issue with it, but it was kind of a bizarre detour from the normal show.

The final episode of the UK's FAST SHOW was a tremendous out-of-leftfield surprise. The show was a long-running sketch comedy based around characters hitting catchphrases with bizarre things leading to them, almost an ARISTOCRATS format. The punchline for each character was always the same, but the body of each scene would be different.

 

Anyway, with the final episode, every character turned dramatic/serious. It really showed the talent and versatility of the show's crew that this array of silly characters suddenly pulled off these little touching/affecting variations on what had been lowbrow gags/punchlines.

Drew Carey Show immediately comes to mind.  Then stops coming to mind after remembering how overdone it got.

Wasn't Drew in a coma, and then was reborn out of Mimi?

Buffy: The Vampire Slayer had alot of these.  "Once More With Feeling" comes immediately to mind.   Also, I don't know if this counts exactly but the "backdoor pilots" sitcom episodes were always weird and frankly felt like a bait and switch.   You know the drill.  Your favorite sitcom family/star/ whatever makes an appearance for the first 2 minutes of the show and then the rest of the time, you are dropped into some lame spinoff show.   I remember this happening with Different Strokes (in what would become Facts of Life), The Cosby Show, and Martin.   I'm sure there are others out there that I'm thankfully forgetting.

The classic "In Space!" & "TITANIC!" episodes of Newsradio immediately spring to mind.

The child molester episode of Diff'rent Strokes. As a kid, I couldn't believe what I was seeing.

I never was a big fan of that episode of "Family Ties" that centered around Alex's unseen friend dying in a car accident and becomes a bleak, "Our-Town"-esque, one-man show for Michael J. Fox. 

 

 

Whether they loved it or hated it, I think most MSTies agree that Mike and the bots taking on (an admittedly dreary version of) Hamlet in the show's last season made for quite the bizarre episode.

I'm not sure how out of place these are, since they appeared in the context of shows designed to be a bit gritty (for their time anyway), but the coma/sub-conscious episodes of both Miami Vice and the Professionals (the seventies UK series) left a massive impression on me for how unusual they were. Both featured one of the central characters being shot and falling into a coma, then wove two parrallel storylines, one set in the real world as the shooter is tracked down, and either a whole storyline or just scenes set in their sub-conscious or dream state.

 

That and the episode of the X-Files where they visited the set of the movie being made about them. But then I was ill at the time, so it's possible I just fever dreamed it.

The "Western" ep of The Prisoner must've been particularly jarring upon it's original broadcast.

I theink Once More With Feeling is pretty in tone with the whole Buffy series, The Body however was a real tonal shift.

 

I'm in the minority, but I really love this episode. 

 

How fantastic was that? I particularly remember the Rowley Birkin sketch. Damn near heartbreaking. 

Does anybody remember that creepy, unnerving episode of RUGRATS where Tommy puts the other babies on trial for breaking his favourite lamp? And it was animated with lots of weird angles and dark shadows. "Chucky - you broked da lamp?"

 

 

 

 

 

Or that other creepy, unnerving episode of RUGRATS where Tommy was kidnapped by two old women and held captive in a scary mansion, and the old women renamed him Bostwick?

Holy shit..I hate the fact that I can recall that almost directly from memory. Real weird Grey Gardens type of vibe with that episode, which confused the hell out of me as a wee one.

 

Doesn't Tommy get dressed as a judge at one point?

The last episode of Dallas. Jr meets the Devil

Dinosaurs wins this thread with its series finale.

Good old Frank Grimes...he liked to be called Grimey.

I guess I'm going to be the person that has to bring up that 50 years in the future episode of Nip/Tuck where Dylan Walsh and Julian McMahon wear the WORST old people make-up, and implausibly sets up the future of Matt becoming a doctor following their footsteps. After that episode, the show realized that it hated Matt, and made him a bank robbing mime that would pragged out in prison by Patrick Kilpatrick!!!

Weirdest for me were the Happy Days episodes that introduced Mork and some angel who also got his own show (the devil popped up in that one as well).  SciFi and fantasy elements just shoved into what had been a still more or less realistic version of the 1950s, the Fonz's semi-magical powers aside. As a kid, it just felt off.

 

Speaking of Mork & Mindy, a couple of episodes had huge tonal shifts. Early on, Mindy gets threatened by the KKK and Mork has to save her--it was creepy to have such a real world threat in an otherwise goofy show. Then, at the end of the show's run, they introduced two bounty hunters--from Ork, or maybe a Federation/Alliance stand-in, can't remember--whose stated goal was to kidnap Mork and kill his son. I can't think of another sitcom that's touched on themes of half-breed genocide since.

 

 

 

I forgot all about Michael J Fox's dramatic showcase episode on Family Ties but that definitely counts.   Even when I was a kid, it felt like a cynical attempt to get Michael J Fox his Emmy.

The Conspiracy episode to Star Trek: TNG was a bit of What the Fuck, back in the day.  Really, who was expecting to see Picard and Riker explode a dude's head and then blast open his chest at 7PM on a Saturday night in 1988?

 

Family Matters.

 

I'm going to let this thread do all the talking for me.

But with Family Matters, wouldn't the show before Urkel arrived be considered the oddball episodes?

The fact that you're sincerely asking that question is answer enough to your question.

That episode was such a jewel, though!  A riff on It's A Wonderful Life, with a Satanic Clarence showing JR how much better everyone's life would be if he'd never been born.   

 

Dynasty spin-off The Colbys ended with Fallon getting abducted by a UFO.  She later turned back up in Dynasty; I think I remember the writers retconning the UFO as a nervous breakdown, but I'm afraid to look it up in case it's something even sillier.

 

I dimly recall Fantasy Island turning in a couple of bizarre episodes where Roarke becomes the center of the action and fights Roddy McDowell's Mephistopheles.

 

 

 

So, yeah.  The 80's.  It was a wacky time.

 

It worked.

 

Didn't know that.   Good for him

 

It's been awhile since I've seen Spaceballs.

 

So I'm saying -honest to god- that I thought the singing chestburster was a real extension of that scene.

 

I love how Louie is a whole SERIES of out of place episodes strung together. Some with out of place scenes strung together. It's what makes it so amazing.

Weird out of place episodes of a tv show. What you mean the musical episode of Grey's Anatomy in a few days?

Since that looked really interesting, yeah, that is weird and out of place for Grey's Anatomy.

 

Eh oh! They've done a few others. The episode where they blew up Coach Taylor and made Christina Ricci cry for one, last year's finale and the one where the lead character died and was being told to except it from other notable dead characters. It's the out of place episodes like that that carry you through all the boring as hell ones.

Some other ones might be the "musical" episode of House, every other episode of Xena, and that episode of Home Improvement where they thought JTT was dying of cancer.

Pretty sure just about every sitcom has a WTF episode that's super dramatic.

Will Smith getting shot by a mugger in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air comes to mind on that score.

 

To be fair, they kind of intergrated his recovery into some soft humor in the following episodes.

How do I not remember this episode at all?

It was way, WAY late in the series. Like, about 5 episodes before it went off the air. Maybe that's why.

"As I held her in my arms....I'm afraid I was very, very drunk."

 

The devil tended to come out a lot in TV shows in the late 70s/80s...the most striking one to me is the possessed baby in "Soap".  I would include that series of episodes, and the whole "Bert kidnapped by aliens" series of episodes in this list, but that was pretty much "Soap" in a nutshell.

 

But I will throw out there the Terrance and Philip episode of South Park that pissed off a ton of people.  I read a recent interview with Parker & Stone, and they said they would do a whole season of T&P if they could, just so they could laugh their asses off, whether anyone else liked it or not.

 To be sort of fair to Family Ties there was also the episode early on where Steven Keaton father dies which is more or less a dramatic showcase for Michael Gross.

 

As far as most out of place episode though, goes to the Dukes of Hazzard episode where the General Lee never jumps anything.

 

As a "It's Always Sunny" fanatic, I've always felt like "The Gang Cracks the Liberty Bell" is slightly out of place.  It just seemed so out of context to have an episode set in Revolutionary Philadelphia.  I think the show is elastic enough that it works, especially with the episode's framing device, but still... Admittedly, I may be biased because it's one of my least favorite episodes of the series.  Oddly, Glen Howerton ranks it in his top 5 of all time.

Behind The Blow is fucking brilliant.

A better example would be when Will's dad (Ben Vereen!) comes back into his life. Will Smith does some genuinely good dramatic acting there.
 

 

That was good work, but I think it didn't set my "WTF?" alarm due to the deadbeat dad backstory being established before Vereen made his appearance.