
#Bottle episode movies tv#
The upcoming TV slate includes a host of bottle shows, including Starz’s upcoming Courteney Cox–starring horror-comedy Shining Vale, about a New York woman who moves with her family to a haunted house in the suburbs of Connecticut.

“It’s an exciting high-wire act,” because “the burden of proof is on the storyteller to make the characters more interesting.” “There’s something very engaging and compelling about this structure of, you have all these people from different walks of life, and there’s a little bit of mystery to it,” he says. Focusing on a single place grounds the action, and can also have the counterintuitive effect of making the setting less important. “Whatever we can do to keep those costs down,” she says, “helps us get more money on the screen.”Īs Levine points out, these shows are also more tactile and tangible than the majority of current blockbuster movies, which lean on green screens to evoke far-flung locations. Craft reminds us that the cost of routine COVID testing alone-especially for a crowd scene with a lot of background performers-eats majorly into a show’s budget. But as limiting as the concept may be, it seems likely that the trend won’t abate any time soon. Night Shyamalan’s Old-are stories that revolve around vacations.
#Bottle episode movies series#
The rise of the bottle show does raise an important question: How many plot options are actually available for a show like this? All three of the series mentioned here, as well as a recent hit bottle film- M. Today’s bottle series, Armstrong says, seem like “a combination of that concept of the one location with prestige television.” But now, she continues, “instead of going back to basics, and looking pretty cheap to modernize, they spend the money to be in a beautiful location, but keep it just in that location.” Derek Kompare, the chair of the department of film and media arts at Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, also points to classic series like Gilligan’s Island or The Love Boat, where the show’s bottle setting was dictated by its plot.

Star Gertrude Berg layered her clothing so she could easily run off stage and do a quick costume change, Armstrong notes. “I had wondered, when we were going into COVID, if we were going to see a return to super traditional, stripped-down sitcoms,” says Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, a television journalist and author of such books as When Women Invented Television: The Untold Story of the Female Powerhouses Who Pioneered the Way We Watch Today.Ĭlassics like The Honeymooners and The Goldbergs were largely filmed on a single stage, with Armstrong pointing out that the latter aired live. In a lot of ways, the concept of a bottle TV series isn’t that different from the medium’s rudimentary early days, when television shows were more like filmed plays.
