The Best TV Bottle Episodes, Ranked

Television shows are so time-consuming and expensive to make, they occasionally take refuge in a bottle episode. Typically, a bottle episode takes place almost entirely in one set, and features only a few of the regular cast members. But while this unique approach might be most famous as a cost-cutting maneuver (and occasional last-minute save when plans for a different episode fall through), the bottle episode has also become a form unto itself. 

Normally expansive shows use the bottle episode to explore their characters in greater depth, dream up surreal scenarios, and experiment with their own themes. In the age of binge-watching, a good bottle episode does something unique: It slows down to focus on the apparently mundane, often in real time, and consider the subtleties of the story being told. It's easy to imply big, important things when you cut together a montage that covers huge stretches of a time, but by focusing on characters in a single room, a good television show can tell us everything with only the potent details. In celebration of this stupendously spare approach, we're ranking the best bottle episodes on television, from the merely great to the absolutely sublime.

"One Man's Trash," a Season 2 episode of "Girls," doubles down on everything that makes lead character Hannah (Lena Dunham) such a controversial figure. She displays her major lack of self-awareness, details her problems with almost no subtext, and makes some very questionable decisions. But in showcasing her brief, idyllic connection with a rich, handsome doctor played by Patrick Wilson, "Girls" plays to its greatest strengths and explores privileged ennui in an entirely new way.

Hardly anything happens as Hannah and Joshua hang out for a couple of days in his expensive brownstone. They play ping pong, they have sex, and they talk about loneliness. It's a chance to see Hannah outside of her normal context, and builds up to a cathartic monologue in which she tearfully admits that she wants to be happy, and is coming to resent the shell of sadness and self-loathing she's adopted in the pursuit of experience for her art. "One Man's Trash" makes the viewer spend time with the self-absorbed, deeply tragic figure at its center, which probably doesn't sound like an enticing idea to anyone not already on the show's side. But this episode makes it clear that "Girls" doesn't actually require viewers to like Hannah: It's a plainly fascinating look at the embodiment of Millennial angst as she makes peace with the comforts she's been telling herself she doesn't want.

The beloved and unjustly canceled "Firefly" at least got to produce "Out of Gas" during its brief run. An episode that functions as a tribute to the show itself and the chemistry of its cast, it's an especially bittersweet watch nowadays, when every viewer knows the show's fate. "Out of Gas" is a deceptively complicated bit of storytelling that takes place in three different timelines, all bottled up on the spaceship Serenity. Captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion), near death, struggles to restart the derelict ship all alone. This is intercut with flashbacks that explain how the ship got this way and where the crew went, along with even older flashbacks that explore how Mal met each member of his team and surrogate family.

At this point in its short run, "Firefly" has a truly firm grip on its characters. The stories of how they all joined this crew are hilarious and dripping with dramatic irony. They play wonderfully against Mal's struggle to survive and get an engine part all the way across the ship, which really makes you feel the geography of Serenity's interior. "Out of Gas" is "Firefly" at its sentimental, dramatic, and witty best.

Sometimes, a bottle episode is a compromise between the grandiosity of artistic vision and the constraints of reality. In terms of the former, Season 2's "Blackwater" represents a stunning step forward for "Game of Thrones," as it glimpses the full breadth and scale of the Battle of Blackwater Bay. In glimpses, we follow Tyrion from place to place as he peers into the darkness, over barricades, and into the proverbial fog of war. There are moments boasting huge amounts of green wildfire, fierce swordplay, and sneak attacks.

But the true drama of the episode is with Queen Cersei (Lena Headey) and the noble ladies locked up in Maegor's Holdfast, who have no clue how the battle is going. As she drinks, Cersei grows more and more prickly, revealing the brutal bargains women of Westeros must strike to survive. Of all the war-centric episodes on "Game of Thrones," "Blackwater" is the best, because it grounds its bloody pyrotechnics in small, vivid character moments.

"BoJack Horseman" spends its entire run looking for new and surprising ways to be a hilarious bummer. This leads to Season 5's "Free Churro," a bottle episode which stands out as a major rarity — animation doesn't tackle this form very often. Nearly all of "Free Churro" consists of BoJack (Will Arnett) delivering a eulogy for his recently departed mother. True to character, he makes the eulogy all about himself as he wanders from story to story, mentions getting Jack in the Box (and a free churro) on the way to the funeral, banters with the organist, and generally savors the chance to hold an entire church full of people hostage.

Will Arnett's delivery gets a well-deserved workout, as BoJack manages to tell an entire story without going anywhere over the course of the episode. Little by little, and with many tangents along the way, BoJack realizes his mother's last words, "I see you," weren't a cryptic acknowledgment of his personhood — they were merely his hospital-bound mother reading the letters "ICU." "BoJack Horseman" has a well-earned reputation for the shatteringly sad plot developments it drops towards the end of each season, but "Free Churro" is a mid-season classic that balances light and dark with devastating aplomb.

The brilliance of "Fleabag" is in the way star Phoebe Waller-Bridge breaks the fourth wall with cutting asides and conspiratorial glances; it makes you feel as if you're part of the show itself. In Episode 1 of Season 2, Fleabag brings us along to a dinner with her family and a priest, who knows her godmother. Things start out tense and quickly snowball into chaos as we're bottled up alongside the attendees in a miasma of restrained politeness, resentment, and passive aggression.

Setting the tone for what ends up being a powerfully emotional Season 2, Fleabag begins this episode with a bloody nose in a restaurant bathroom. "This is a love story," she promises us, as the blood drips — a telling symbol of the mixture of longing and humiliation that follows. The episode hits the ground running, catches us up on the year that passed between seasons, and seamlessly reintroduces old familial tensions, all within the space of one awkward dinner. 

The "Pine Barrens" episode of "The Sopranos" is a masterpiece that feels like a 21st century update of Samuel Beckett's "Waiting for Godot." Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and Paulie (Tony Sirico) try to make a collection from a cantankerous Russian, but after Paulie provokes a fight, they think they've killed him. When they try to dump him in the Pine Barrens, he wakes up and escapes. They spend the rest of the episode wandering in the snow, unable to find the lost Russian and increasingly desperate to survive themselves.

"Pine Barrens" occasionally departs from the woods to tell a small story about Tony's (James Gandolfini) burgeoning relationship with the unstable Gloria (Annabella Sciorra), but calls from Christopher and Paulie keep interrupting him. The story in the woods simply can't be resisted. It's bleak, hilarious, and indistinguishable from outright farce at times. Impressively, it manages to create a believable bond between two characters who previously had nothing but contempt for one another. Simply put, "Pine Barrens" is one of the best episodes of one of the best television shows of all time.