History Main / OutOfGenreExperience

* In ''MasterAndCommander'', Maturin takes shore leave from the naval warfare to explore the fauna of the Galapagos with an interested Midshipman student.

* Once again in ''MasterAndCommander'', the crew rests a few days on the island and turns the show to a nature documentary for a while.

* Mass Effect is pretty much a straight Bioware RPG SpaceOpera. Commander Shepard wanders around the galaxy performing quests and beating up bad guys. Then there are two quests worth of downloadable content which turn the game temporarily into a heist movie and a detective movie respectively, with the appropriate mood, camera work and tropes.

* The ThursdayNext books are... [[GenreBuster sort of]] an urban fantasy mystery series about nineteenth century literature. Once per book, there's a chapter wherein Thursday teams up with Spike [[MeaningfulName Stoker]] to fight vampires, ghosts, demons or what have you, usually just so she can pay the rent. The narration shifts to a style that would not be out of place in {{Dracula}} or the more serious modern horror novel. And then things are back to normal next chapter.

This trope is often paired with MoodWhiplash. For a permanent genre change, see HalfwayPlotSwitch. See GenreRoulette for a more extreme version, and CourtroomEpisode for a common subtrope. For the same principle applied to video game genres, see UnexpectedGameplayChange, {{Mundanger}}.

* ''AvatarTheLastAirbender'' has a couple of episodes like this. "Zuko Alone" is a random Western, complete with a ShowdownAtHighNoon. "The Beach" is a random TeenDrama, complete with {{Fanservice}} and a WildTeenParty.

* ''BuffyTheVampireSlayer'' had a hilarious musical episode. There's also the episode "The Body" which is a "pure" drama with no supernatural elements until the last few minutes.

* SinCity is mostly a crime-noir comic series set in a somewhat realistic world. Despite this, we've had a few departures.

** The Farm is often described as effecting the characters mentally. Everytime anyopne goes there, they always feel something in the pit of their stomachs and think ot themselves, "People have died here." It's also said to be haunted, giving it a weird horror vibe even though we don't see anything.

* In ''MasterAndCommander'', Maturin operates on himself.
* If not for the fact that it doesn't work very much, the scene in ''Film/{{Superman}} Returns'' where the Man of Steel is brought into a hospital.

* The ''{{Firefly}}'' episode "Ariel" has Mal and crew robbing a hospital in the Core while Simon and Jayne smuggle River into the hospital and to an imaging suite so that Simon can find out what the Alliance did to her. Simon, the ship's doctor and once one of the best trauma surgeons in the Core before the events which led to him and River becoming wanted fugitives, poses as a doctor and gets some awesome moments, including one where he saves a patient's life even though it posed a danger of blowing his cover and then ''thoroughly'' chews out the guy who was treating him.

* In the {{JAG}} episode ''Each of Us Angels'' is about an old man telling stories about his experience on a hospital ship during the [[WorldWarII storming of Iwo Jima]].

* ''{{Firefly}}'' episode "Ariel" begins with the characters infiltrating a hospital to steal medical supplies. Simon, the doctor, is trying to stay undercover, but in the middle of it all, he jumps into action and operates on a hospital patient. Remember, this series is a space western.
** The Ariel incident was also an example of BavarianFireDrill. Simon succeeded because he simply acted as he would if the same incident had taken place when he was back home and it worked because no one would ever believe he had the confidence to do so if he didn't belong there.
*** The episode overall is more of a polished heist plot in comparison to the crew's generally less sophisticated crime.
*** That's because it was Simon's idea and not Mal's.

* ''{{Peanuts}}'' had a few arcs in which characters ended up in hospital, including Charlie Brown and Lila (Snoopy's original owner), which were dealt with seriously in comparison to the rest of the series.
* Morrison's run on ''New Comicbook/{{X-Men}}'' was a succession of these instead of the routine superhero stuff: high school drama, sci-fi, murder mystery...

* The ''{{Ryu ga Gotoku}}'' series, known as ''Yakuza'' outside Japan, is a crime drama about life in the [[{{Yakuza}} Japanese underworld]]. The upcoming fifth game, ''[[WorldSaladTitle Ryu ga Gotoku Of the End]]'', is set during a ZombieApocalypse. SoYeah.

* An upcoming DLC pack for RedDeadRedemption, "Undead Nightmare" will turn the game into a ZombieApocalypse story in a new campaign mode.

* The ExcelSaga anime is, for the most part, the epitome of a GagSeries. So naturally one of the last episodes was played completely straight, as if it were a drama.
* Halfway through MayoiNekoOverrun, the viewer gets an entire episode about {{mecha}} and later about a simple game that was made so [[SeriousBusiness dramatic]] it goes on par with [[{{Saki}} a certain mahjong anime]].

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