Filler - Television Tropes & Idioms

Sakura: So, did we even do anything this episode?
Kakashi: Sakura, welcome to the wonderful world... of filler.
Everyone: Nooooo!''

~Naruto The Abridged Series

Stuff in a show that ultimately is just there to pad it out to a required length, or allow for some changes in set or costumes during live shows. Turns up in the Talent Show a lot, not to mention Telethons. One of the worst offenders is American Idol, especially in the second show each week in which the contestant eliminated from the previous night's voting is announced. Though this could be done in ten seconds, it's padded out to a half-hour, or sometimes a full hour.

In anime, can refer to an episode that does not advance the overall plot, but simply brings the series one episode closer to the end of the season. Frequently sillier than a "normal" episode of the series, like the decent but strange 'Nanami episodes' of Revolutionary Girl Utena. Filler also refers to portions that do not exist in the original work; sometimes entire filler Arcs are created, most often because the series Overtook The Manga. In these cases, thanks to the fact that once the filler is over, any storyline that occurs is promptly forgotten, the filler arcs will occasionally fall into Dis Continuity, unless they're good enough that people consider them on par with the parts that come from the manga. Off Model animation is likely in filler.

The phrase "all filler and no chiller" may have something to with this.

For filler in Webcomics, see Filler Strip.

Examples:

Clips from earlier on in the show.
Clips of contestants training.
What's coming up in the next episode.
What's coming up later in this episode.
The host delivering inane jokes to camera.
Exposition.
Stock Footage.
Montages.
Unimportant side-plots.

Also referred to as Engaging Chevrons. Compare Sidequest and Level Grinding, which sometimes turn into the video game equivalent.

Compare Breather Episode. When the news media is forced to resort to this, it's Silly Season.

Notable, and more specific examples:

Almost any long-running manga-based anime action series will tend to have gargantuan amounts of filler, because the Japanese networks, unlike western ones, pretty much don't do reruns or season breaks at all. Some of the best known examples include Sailor Moon, Naruto, Bleach, and Dragon Ball Z, all of which have at one time or another been criticized for their overuse of filler, and, generally, the lack of quality in the filler episodes.
- Naruto's filler famously went for over a year (80 weeks to be precise) after it Overtook The Manga, and by the end it was being described by fans as a form of torture. The producers of sequel Shippuuden seem to be taking careful steps not to have that many at once again: even though the manga is three or four entire arcs ahead of the anime, they've cautiously gone back to filler after the first arc.
  - Also notable about the Shippuuden fillers is that they are a remarkable step up in quality compared to the pre-Time Skip versions. Rather than a long series of Monster Of The Week episodes evenly mixed with random variations of Defeat Means Friendship, the Ninja Guardians arc actually details a full-on storyline with an interesting backstory. True, this troper thinks they could have been a bit braver and made Sora an actual jinchuuriki instead of...whatever the hell he was supposed to be. There were plenty of off-screen candidates to make that happen. But at least they gave Asuma a story to call his very own; which is a good thing, too, since he probably isn't gonna get another chance.
- Bleach seems to avoid the "quality of fillers" bit; the general complaint on the Bount filler arc has usually been "the filler exists". When asked to elaborate, a fan will usually say "it's not that the filler arc was bad, it's just that the original story is better." The current filler arc, meanwhile, started pretty randomly in the middle of an established story arc. "Orihime was kidnapped by Aizen's group, but let's take a break and look at something else." It addresses issues that will eventually need to be looked at (i.e. the lack of captains for squads three, five, and nine) but it's just so random. And awful.
  - They even acknowledged the worthlessness of the filler arc in The Stinger of its final episode. Ichigo trots back to Hueco Mundo like nothing happened (and nothing did),and Orihime shows him the point in the manga where they left off when he arrives.
- To show where Filler can go dangerously wrong, Rurouni Kenshin was actually cancelled due to the extremely low quality of its Filler Arc, and given a movie with a Gecko Ending.
By contrast, short Anime First series like Cowboy Bebop, Samurai Champloo and Darker Than Black, were highly episodic, and, being limited to 26 episodes from the start, had said "filler" as part of its overall story.
Going against the grain, Nadia And The Secret Of Blue Water, despite being only 39 episodes, wound up having a filler arc added in the middle of production. These were the dreaded "island/Africa episodes" (episodes 23-34) in which the entire quality of the production, from the animation to the storyline, sank like a stone. They were commissioned only because the ratings were very high and imposed on the production team against their will. Hideaki Anno actually had nothing to do with their production because he was so taxed with just fulfilling his original duties and in later interviews expressed that of the episodes, he would only keep parts of two of them at most because they were so unimportant to the story.
Any "Chii and [insert name here] Talk" episode in Chobits. They were considered so pointless and unnecessary to the plot that they were completely excised from the first North American DVD release, and only released as a bonus disc after fans complained.
Somewhat justified in certain live action SF and fantasy series like Doctor Who and Buffy The Vampire Slayer, because the series or season arc would generally unfold slowly over the course of many episodes. This is true even of long-running series like Stargate, in which each season has its own Story Arc, and most episodes at least address the main arc at some point - and even then some of the episodes that have very little effect on the arc have proven to be popular with fans due to being humorous Breather Episodes, such as the Groundhog Day episode "Window of Opportunity", or the self-parodying episodes "Wormhole X-Treme!" or "200" (all from Stargate SG-1), or the Halloween episodes of Buffy.
- Related example: Super Sentai and Power Rangers mostly follow the "half arc, half filler" formula, but each Sentai series has to run for a whole year's 48-52 episodes, whereas Power Rangers are usually much shorter. Some fans feel that the short seasons are sometimes an improvement, since 32-episode PR season is much more story intense and less filler-ridden than a 50-episode Sentai.
  - Others argue that the PR seasons are too story intensive, as the writers try to condense as much of the original material- both story and filler- as possible into a smaller number of episodes. At best it spoils the pace of the story (e.g. fitting a two-episode storyline into one twenty-two minute episodes) and at worst it results in something barely watchable.
Less justifiable in the original series of Doctor Who, however. Serials running for five to seven episodes or more usually have so much padding, contrivances and irrelevant storylines they can get hard to watch. This was reduced in later series (starting around the Third Doctor), with a more manageable four episodes per serial and rarer six-part episodes. Even in the Sixth Doctor season 22, where the runtime was temporarily switched to 1 hour instead of the usual half, the serials go over the two parts only once.
- In particular, the First Doctor serial The Dalek's Master Plan, a massive 12-parter (plus a prologue episode broadcast weeks earlier and notable for not featuring any of the main cast), had a Christmas Episode intentionally meant as filler.
Saint Seiya managed to have, as a result of Overtook The Manga, an entire filler arc (the Asgard arc) that was as good as (if not better than) the other arcs.
Hayate No Gotoku's first season of 52 episodes contained almost as much anime-original filler as manga-based episodes. Given the nature of the show, many fans who hadn't read the manga (this troper included) often couldn't tell which was which.
- Ditto Gintama. However, the very first episode of the anime was completely filler, and managed to initially put this troper off when she couldn't understand what the hell was going on.
The Pokemon anime only starts a new game-based arc on the day the games in question are released, in Japan at least. This has led to both filler episodes and filler arcs. While the Orange Islands filler arc was considered to be well executed by the fandom, the Johto arc is considered terrible due to the many bad filler episodes and poor pacing. The Hoenn arc however was considered an improvement, as May's quest was given same the importance as Ash's and thus reduced the fillers between plot advancing episodes. The Battle Frontier arc was a mixed bag, due to uneven placement of the filler episodes. Time will tell however whether the Sinnoh arc will be done well, as it looks to be even longer then the Johto arc.
Avatar The Last Airbender had a few episodes per season, which includes both "The Runaway" (one of the more popular episodes of the series) and "The Great Divide" (generally the least liked episode of the series). Lampshaded in a recap parody towards the end of season three:
Aang: "Look, it's the Great Divide! The biggest canyon in the Earth Kingdom!"
Sokka: "Ehh.. Let's keep flying."
- A better lampshading is the actual introduction to the recap episode:
Sokka: "Come on, a day at the theatre. This is the kind of wacky time wasting nonsense I’ve been missing."
This troper actually prefers the filler episodes of the various seasons of Slayers.
A few seasons into The X Files, the show settled into a mixture of "mythology" episodes and "Monster of the Week" episodes. If you were watching for the myth arc, the Monster of the Week episodes were filler. Towards the end, though, this troper preferred them to the impenetrable, contradictory mythology episodes....
The Slayers TRY season, while still helmed by the original creators, has a storyline not adapted from the original Light Novels. It dealt with a threat of Lina's world being destroyed by a Mazoku Lord from another universe, when said Dark Lord only had a small appearance in the original novels as the creator of Gourry's Sword of Light. The new season Slayers REVOLUTION returns to adapting events and characters from the novels that have not yet appeared.
The third season of the Ikki Tousen anime, Great Guardians, has no basis in the original manga and has little bearing on the overall plot. The slightly slower pace and bigger emphasis on character interaction still make it a fairly enjoyable watch though.
Roughly half of the early episodes of Smallville used MonsterOfTheWeek formats and had little to no character development.
A large part of Rockman.EXE Stream was like this. In fact, this troper remembers being surprised when the series put forth actual plot.
The Prisoner was originally intended to be a seven episode miniseries. The network wanted more, and so ten standalone episodes were created and intermixed with the main Story Arc. Less noticeable than in other series with a high filler percentage, as most of the filler episodes are still good.
The manga version of Detective Conan does this - most of the Mysteries of the Month have nothing to do with the Myth Arc. The anime, which is almost entirely episodic, has even more. (It helps that most of the manga arcs fit nicely into a one-mystery-per-episode structure.)
Of the the twenty stories found in volumes III, V and VI of the Suzumiya Haruhi series, only three have any relevance to the overarching story. To be fair, they're still well written and entertaining, but one can only read about Kyon snarking about Haruhi's latest antics so many times before wanting to get back to the aliens and time-travelers.

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