Vignette Episode

An episode in a normal series that is composed of two or more (most commonly three) vignettes. Most times they are unrelated, or only held together by a Framing Device or a common theme. Happens when a writer wants to try a Formula-Breaking Episode.

Note that this only counts for shows that normally have a single, cohesive plot. For example, The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show doesn't count, because all the episodes are a series of shorts.

A literary approximation happens when a book series whose novels generally have only one story release an anthology of short stories about the series universe.

As for video games, this happens when a game has multiple modes with each individual mode having its own story. While they tend be connected in the grand scheme of things, the player will often have freedom in choosing how they tackle all the modes. Alternatively, the game could play just like a TV episode where the storyline is composed of multiple, individual storyline that the player will be transferred between as they progress through the game.

Contrast Three Shorts, Two Shorts, Animated Anthology. Compare Anthology Film.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• In the 80-Page Giant Special comic of Young Justice, the team fights an evil genie who sends them into different genres (Film Noir, Western, Anime, Silent Film Horror, etc.). It's half Trapped in TV Land, half Vignette episode, since every genre gets its own distinct story.

Audio Plays

• A few Big Finish Doctor Who releases have had an anthology format.
  • Circular Time comprises four stories featuring the Fifth Doctor and Nyssa, each set in a different season, both literally and in terms of their friendship.
  • The Company of Friends has four stories about the Eighth Doctor and non-Big Finish companions (Bernice Summerfield^note Who yes, was a Big Finish character at this point, but her previous meeting with Eight was in the final Doctor Who New Adventures novel, Fitz Kreiner, Izzy Sinclair, and Mary Shelley)
  • The Demons of Red Lodge and Other Stories comprises four (mostly) unrelated Fifth Doctor and Nyssa adventures.
  • Recorded Time and Other Stories and Breaking Bubbles and Other Stories, as above but with Sixth and Peri.
  • 100 was the hundredth release and comprises four Sixth Doctor and Evelyn stories linked by the inevitable Arc Number.
  • Forty-Five is a 45th anniversary Milestone Celebration with four Seventh Doctor stories also linked by the Arc Number.
  • 1001 Nights comprises four Fifth and Nyssa stories with a Framing Story in which Nyssa is Scheherazade.

Fan Works

• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series has "Tales of a Tiger", which has a story for the six main protagonists and for two pairs of antagonists.
• Origins (a Mass Effect/Star Wars/Borderlands/Halo Massive Multiplayer Crossover) has a chapter containing a series of news reports that summarize what's happened since State Sec began cracking down in order to defeat the Big Bad.
• The Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "Relatively Speaking" is one where Empath hears mini-stories about the Smurfs' run-ins with three of Gargamel's relatives, all of which are adapted from the comic book stories.

Literature

• The Doctor Who Expanded Universe has had multiple volumes of short stories, but The Story of Martha (four stories about her Walking the Earth during the Year That Never Was) is notable because it was published as a regular New Series Adventures novel.
• Mary Poppins in the Park, fourth in the series, is a collection of short stories about Mary's adventures with the Banks children, rather than a direct sequel.
• The Myth Adventures book M.Y.T.H. Inc. Link would qualify for this. A transition between the usual Myth Adventure books narrated by Skeeve and the M.Y.T.H. Inc. books narrated by members of the team, it was a series of short stories with different narrators, linked by a Skeeve Framing Story.
• Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Book of Dreams comprises several short stories by other authors inspired by The Sandman (1989), and Endless Nights, seven short stories about each of The Endless, written by Gaiman.
• The Star Trek: Deep Space Nine EU had a book called "The Lives of Dax", focusing on the Dax symbiotes former hosts.
• There's a good lit example: Borders of Infinity, from the Vorkosigan Saga, was a collection of three short stories ("Mountains of Mourning", "Labyrinth" and "Borders of Infinity") with a framing device about the main character being in extended surgery, and solving a case thereof. The individual stories have been reprinted in other, later omnibuses of the series; the original whole book has not, and is blastedly hard to find...

Live-Action TV

• The Babylon 5 episode "The Deconstruction of Falling Stars" explores the long-term impact that the events of the series will have on the galaxy in 2362, 2762, 3262 and 1002262.
• Black Mirror:
  • White Christmas, the 2014 Christmas special, is set as a pair of guys who work together in a remote cabin sharing stories of their past lives. The stories involve the creation and usage of digital clones (as menial slaves), the implications of sharing your senses with others (an application of AR), and the potential consequences of being "blocked" by other people and becoming an indistinct and incoherent grey silhouette (another application of AR). The stories converge back into the circumstances of the two guys in the cabin, and that gets its own bitter ending.
  • The episode Black Museum is another story anthology about a British tourist who visits a museum, which is run by a guy who formerly recruited for a company that researched cutting edge medical technology and giving the story behind his star exhibits. The stories are once again about the downsides of digitization and technology creeping into the space of human consciousness. The stories are even more bitter than those from White Christmas, but when they converge back into the story used as the framing device, the ending is much more optimistic.
• The CSI episode "Toe Tags" is split into four different cases, each investigated by a different member(s) of the CSI team.
• This happened in at least one episode of Frasier: "Three Valentines", which shows a different story set on Valentines Day in each of the episode's three acts — the first an almost completely silent skit with Niles preparing for a date, the second having Frasier trying to figure out how to respond to a woman giving him mixed signals, and the last with Martin and Daphne having an inane argument in a restaurant.
• In episode 8.22 of M*A*S*H, "Dreams", various 4077th members (Klinger, Hawkeye, Potter, Winchester, Margaret) have very different nightmares.
• In the pilot for Modern Family, it seems as if three separate stories are being told, until the big reveal at the end.
• The Murdoch Mysteries non-canon Halloween Episode "Station House of Horror" tells seperate stories of Julia, Miss Hart, Brakenreid and Murdoch, with an Amicus Productions style framing story in which they each make a wish on a creepy automaton at a fair. (The final scene reveals that canonically, they never actually went to the fair in the first place.)
• Newhart had the episode "A Midseason Nights Dream", which shows dream sequences for Dick, George, Michael, Stephanie, and Larry.
• The My Name Is Earl episode "Creative Writing". Randy, Joy, Darnell, and Catalina all write stories that are shown, respectively, as Stylistic Suck, an animated morality tale (using Family-Unfriendly Violence), an R&B music video, and a telenovela.
• Sliders: Played with in two episodes
  • In "As Time Goes By", the sliders meet the same people on three worlds, including Quinn's old high school sweetheart Daelin Richards. In the first parallel universe, the Spanish Empire never lost control of the New World to the British Empire. The most powerful country in North America, and possibly this world, is la República de Nueva España (the Republic of New Spain), which seemingly achieved its independence from Spain at some point. Daelin is the maid of a wealthy Latino family in this world. The second parallel universe is quite similar to Earth Prime. In terms of wider history, the only immediately apparent difference is the fact that the San Francisco football team is called the Lions as opposed to the 49ers. Quinn rescues the Daelin of this world from her Domestic Abuser husband Dennis McMillan (who was her fiancé in each of the other two worlds). In the third parallel universe in which time flows backwards, Daelin is a police officer whose murder Quinn prevents, thereby completely disrupting that universe's timeline.
  • In "New Gods for Old", three featured worlds all relate to the nanotechnology and feature the same guest doubles. On the first world, society resisted the Believers (those who used the nanotech) and actively hunted them. On the second world, the Believers won the struggle and were free to spread the nanoprobes. On the third world, development of the nanotech stalled, so neither outcome could occur.
• St. Elsewhere: "Weigh In, Way Out" features four stories each concerning a different stage of life. In the first segment, Morrison and Ehrlich compete to deliver the 100,000th baby born at St. Eligius. In the second, Fiscus decides to perform one last childish act before turning 30, namely gluing everything in Dr. Gideon's office. In the third, Dr. Craig goes to Herschfeld's Boxing Gym and spars with the owner in order to work out his feelings at having turned 56, the age at which his father William committed suicide. In the final segment, a dying elderly man named Richard Welte mistakes Lucy for his late wife Katie and they walk the Freedom Trail together in his imagination.
• Wings: The season five episode "Moonlighting" consists of flashbacks showing what Joe, Fay, Helen, and Brian have done for work during the airport's off-season.

Video Games

• While most games in the Kirby series have one main plot, Kirby Super Star stands out as being the one that's comprised of multiple individual (albeit connected) adventures that each tell their own story and has a unique set of mechanics to it with 7 main games overall. The DS remake expands this with another 4 modes.
• Gacha sets Ensemble Stars! normally come with an associated story that features all of the characters in the related cards, which can be unlocked through nodes on any of those cards' idol roads. (This means that you can see the whole story without needing every card from the set.) However, rarely the gacha story will actually be a collected set of individual stories for each of the card characters, where the chapter of each vignette can only be unlocked on that specific character's idol road. This seems to be associated with New Year's, as it's happened with both the 2018 and 2019 New Years sets.
• Live A Live consists of seven separate storylines in seven different time periods only connected by the names of their villains, which are some variant on "Odio". There are actually eight storylines, and the protagonist of the eighth storyline eventually incarnates into the villains of the other seven chapters.
• The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky the 3rd has several magical "doors" that can be unlocked by answering their riddle and display memories of characters' pasts. Some of these are A Day in the Limelight for minor characters, such as the orphan Mary starring in essentially a fairytale or the mini-adventure as the Ravens Quirky Miniboss Squad graduating Heroes "R" Us to become Junior Bracers. 

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers has done a number of episodes revolving around stories made up by Tina, Gene, and Louise:
  • In "The Frond Files", Mr. Frond complains to Bob and Linda about a set of unflattering stories Tina, Gene, and Louise wrote about him for a school essay contest.
  • "The Gayle Tales" has the Belcher kids coming up with stories about their eccentric Aunt Gayle to get out of being grounded.
  • In "Sliding Bobs", the kids wonder what would happen if Linda hadn't broken up with Hugo and started dating Bob because Bob didn't have his trademark mustache.
  • In "Mom, Lies, and Video Tape", when their camcorder breaks on the day of the Mother's Day pageant, the kids tell their own wildly-exaggerated versions of the pageant to Linda, who missed it due to illness.
  • In "Bed, Bob, & Beyond", Bob and Linda are having an argument on Valentine's Day, and when a trip to the movies is cut short, the Belcher kids try to come up with their own ending to the movie.
  • In "The Handyman Can", the Belcher kids try to build up Teddy's confidence with a series of stories where his handyman skills save the day.
  • "Diarrhea of a Poopy Kid" is the first vignette episode where Gene isn't the one telling a story. Instead, his sisters and father cheer him up with a series of food-themed parodies of action movies after he misses Thanksgiving dinner thanks to a bout of stomach flu.
  • "Interview with a Pop-Pop-Pire" starts out as one of these, with Louise, Gene, and Linda speculating on what happened during the "tree incident" that happened when Bob's dad "Big Bob" Belcher was younger. Linda's story is cut off by Big Bob's arrival, and the rest of the episode is devoted to exploring Bob and his father's relationship.
  • "What About Job?", Louise has a project for school that requires her to write about what job she wants to have when she grows up. When Louise can’t pick a job Tina, Gene and Bob all come up with stories about jobs she could potentially have.
• The Simpsons has a few episodes that consist of three mini-stories. All of the "Treehouse of Horror" Halloween Episodes qualify, since they're three Halloween skits that aren't connected, but there are several examples outside of them.
  • In "22 Short Films About Springfield", Bart and Milhouse wonder if the citizens in their town have interesting lives. This leads to over 20 skits featuring various main and secondary characters. For example, Smithers gets stung by a bee, Dr. Nick redeems himself in the eyes of the malpractice board by operating on Grampa, and Lisa gets gum in her hair.
  • "The Simpsons Spin-Off Showcase": Troy McClure shows "pilots" for three imaginary Simpsons spin-offs.
  • "Simpsons Bible Stories" tells three Bible stories with the Simpsons characters inserted.
  • "Simpsons Tall Tales" is a successor to "Simpsons Bible Stories", this time featuring three stories of classic literature and folk tales.
  • "Trilogy of Error" tells the same story from different characters' points of view: first Homer, then Lisa, then Bart. Thus, there are a lot of moments that seem strange until we see the episode from another perspective.
  • "Tales from the Public Domain" is an anthology of three classic stories (such as the Odyssey) after Homer finds an overdue library book.
  • "Margical History Tour" tells three stories about global history.
  • "Simpsons Christmas Stories" tells three tales about Christmas. First, Homer gives a sermon of the Nativity with Bart in place of baby Jesus, Grampa tells Bart and Lisa about his feud against Santa Claus, and Homer goes Convenience Store Gift Shopping to find a last-minute gift for Marge (to the tune of The Nutcracker Suite).
  • "The Wettest Stories Ever Told": While waiting for their meal at a seafood restaurant, Homer, Bart, and Marge insert themselves into stories about famous ships.
  • "Love, Springfieldian Style": When Homer and Marge are stuck in a Tunnel of Love, they tell three stories about romance.
  • In "Four Great Women and a Manicure", Marge takes Lisa for her first manicure. They tell four stories about great women in history.
  • "The Fight Before Christmas" is a Christmas Episode with four Christmas tales. Bart tries to accost Santa for a bad gift, Lisa has a WWII-era story about Christmas trees being banned, Marge gets a surprise visit from Martha Stewart, and Maggie's segment Art Shifts the characters into Muppets.
  • "Four Regrettings and a Funeral" follows four characters' separate regrets at the funeral of a supposedly-beloved character who we've never seen before. The stories all converge at the end.
  • "Revenge is a Dish Best Served Three Times" tells three historical and fictional tales about revenge when Homer gets a case of road rage.
  • "My Way or the Highway to Heaven": God and St. Peter want to let new people into Heaven. We follow three stories of Ned Flanders' past as a trampoline salesman and eventual encounter with Jesus, Marge's Nazi grandmother, and Lisa's tale about a Buddhist princess.
  • "Now Museum, Now You Don't": Lisa wants to learn about Western art, leading to four stories about famous historical artists.
• Futurama has its two Anthology of Interest episodes, which feature Fry, Bender and Leela suggesting plots to a machine that can create a simulation of anything asked of it.
  • "Three Hundred Big Boys" is a multi-plotted episode showing how everyone spends their government-issued $300 tax refunds.
  • Season 6's "The Futurama Holiday Spectacular" (focusing on Xmas, Robanukah, and Kwanzaa) and "Reincarnation" (featuring Medium Shifts into a 30s cartoon, a video game, and an 80s anime) also count. As well as Season 7's "Naturama" (a parody of nature documentaries) and "Saturday Morning Fun Pit" (making fun of Saturday morning cartoons).
• The Avatar: The Last Airbender episode "Tales of Ba Sing Se" is broken down into different chapters, each showing a Day in the Life of one of the main characters.
  • Done again in Legend of Korra with the episode "Remembrances", where Mako, Korra, and Verrick tell stories about the previous events of the show.
• The Batman: The Animated Series episode "Holiday Knights", which had three vignettes about the Bat-family dealing with holiday crime.
  • Also "Almost Got 'Em," where each villain tells a story about how he or she almost defeated Batman. A bit more Framing Device heavy than other examples, but it's still a series of vignettes.
  • And again in "Legends of the Dark Knight," with the three kids telling stories about how they perceive Batman; as they tell their stories, the animation shifts to better suit the story they're telling.
• A number of these on Family Guy: the "Viewer Mail" (Family Guy Viewer Mail #1 and #2), the "Stephen King" episode (Three Kings), the Fractured Fairy Tales episode ("Grimm Job"), "High School English", which adapts three well-known School Study Media, and "Three Directors", an episode with the same plot done in the style of three famous movie directors, among others.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic has "The Cutie Mark Chronicles," which has a story for how each of the mane cast got their cutie marks.
• Phineas and Ferb with the episode "Ferb TV", which featured the different characters of the show engaging in different genres of TV shows, ranging from sitcom,variety show, cop drama, and reality TV all with fake commercials too, and all being connected with a brief wraparound of the brothers showing these shows to Candace, who of course tries to bust them for it.
• The 1967 Pink Panther cartoon Pink Outs is a series of 12 quick unrelated vignettes. Many of them were reused as bumpers for The Pink Panther Show.
• Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Every episode has a vignette in the form of an unrelated teaser sequence before the main plot, but there are also at least two special vignette episodes: "Bat-Mite Presents: Batman's Strangest Cases!" and "Four Star Spectacular!"
• The Halloween Episodes of Regular Show, a clear spoof of The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror (entitled "Terror Tales of the Park"), with the characters telling scary stories to each other.
• Samurai Jack:
  • One episode showed Jack at four different times of a year, defeating seasonal-themed enemies.
    • In Winter, a tribe used all of their resources to create an incredibly powerful weapon, and fought each other to find the most worthy to wield it against Jack. Jack wins.
    • In Spring, what appears to be a nature spirit offers Jack a chance to rest. He realizes in time that it's a trap, and continues on his way.
    • In Summer, Jack crosses a desert, and is attacked by strange shadowy creatures. His sword passes right through them. He almost overexerts himself in the heat trying to fight them off, but realizes they can't actually hurt him, so he doesn't have to fight. He walks through them.
    • In Fall, a scientist gathers fallen leaves to make a deadly poison. He pours it into a well, which Jack later drinks from. Jack collapses, and the Scientist goes up to check his work, only for Jack to spit the water into the scientist's mouth.
  • There's also "Jack Tales", three unrelated stories of some of Jack's adventures, featuring a two-headed worm, a family of metal-eating people, and a pixie trapped by a gargoyle.
• Gravity Falls:
  • In "Bottomless Pit!" Mabel, Dipper, Soos, and Grunkle Stan are falling into a bottomless pit, and tell stories to pass the time.
  • "Little Gift Shop of Horrors" has Grunkle Stan regaling a lost tourist who's stranded at the Mystery Shack after-hours with a series of "Tales Designed to Sell My Merchandise".
• Adventure Time has the roughly once-per-season "Graybles" episodes, which all feature five short stories that merge at some point, and are related by a common hidden theme.
• Every season of The Amazing World of Gumball but the first has several episodes that are collection of sketches. Generally, there is a single theme, a narrative stringing the sketches loosely together, or some sort of Framing Device.
  • "The Tape" is a video full of sketches and videotaped pieces made by Darwin, Gumball, and other students of Elmore Junior High.
  • "The World" shows the lives of on the sentient objects in Elmore.
  • "The Extras" focuses on the background and one-shot characters that have appeared in minor roles in past episodes. It's prompted by a Hostile Show Takeover by said extras in response to Darwin and Gumball having an uneventful day.
  • Most of "The Procrastinators" is Gumball and Darwin finding different ways to waste time so that they don't have to take out the trash.
  • "The Butterfly" is about the very loosely connected series of events set off by Gumball letting a butterfly out of its cage.
  • "The Uploads" shows many online videos (the majority of which feature established characters) with Darwin and Gumball watching them as a Framing Device.
  • "The Love" is a series of shorts about love, all of which are being told to Bobert to try to teach him about it.
  • In "The Night", the Moon examines the dreams of the main and minor characters of Elmore.
  • "The Compilation" is another series of internet clips, presented as a "best of Elmore Stream" compilation.
  • "The Boredom" is a series of interesting events that Darwin and Gumball just barely miss.
  • "The Singing" is a Musical Episode with a Random Events Plot where a series of adjacent but otherwise unconnected people suddenly burst into song.
  • "The Spinoffs" is a sketch show about how the show would be if the main character was someone other than Gumball.
  • In "The Ghouls", Carrie shows Gumball and Darwin how people aren't afraid of ghouls anymore, leading a wide variety of horror villain parodies either failing to be scary or trying to make a living elsewhere.
• We Bare Bears:
  • "Everyone's Tube" and its sequel "More Everyone's Tube" has the Framing Device of someone watching a bunch of Internet videos made by the Bears.
  • "Charlie's Halloween Thing" is a Halloween Episode featuring a pair of short stories told by Charlie to some passers-by on Halloween night. This was followed up by a double-length episode with four short stories, "Charlie's Halloween Thing 2".
• The Halloween special Scared Shrekless revolves around Shrek and company telling each other scary stories.
• Used at least Once a Season in Rick and Morty.
  • Season One had "Rixty Minutes", where Rick hooks up an "interdimensional cable box" to their TV, and they start watching TV from many different universes. Most of them are bizarre TV shows or ads for products or movies, and all done in an improvisational style (which Morty lampshades). Beth and Jerry get a somewhat heartwarming subplot where they discover that even in alternate dimensions where they didn't get married and became incredibly wealthy and famous, they still end up together in the end. Summer, instead, gets one where she has to deal with the fact that she was almost aborted, and that her birth prevented the aforementioned wealth and fame.
  • Season Two had "Interdimensional Cable 2: Tempting Fate", where the framing narrative is that they watch TV in the waiting room of a hospital. Jerry gets a subplot where he must choose to give his penis to an alien for whom it is a valuable, life-saving organ, and Rick lampshades the fact that they're doing Interdimensional Cable again.
  • Season Three has two: "The Ricklantis Mixup", a Day in the Life of the Ricks and Morties on the newly rebuilt Citadel following it's destruction by Rick in the season opener, and "Morty's Mind Blowers", where Rick and Morty relive the memories so horrible Morty had them removed, and then accidentally erase each other's memories. As Rick points out:
    Rick:"Yeah, we're doing this instead of Interdimensional Cable."
  • Episode six of Season Four, Never Ricking Morty, has Rick and Morty find themselves on a mysterious space train where everyone seems to have a story to tell or a flashback to have about Rick. It rapidly turns into a Mind Screw as it turns out that the Rick and Morty we've been following throughout the episode, as well as the episode's 'villain' and the train itself, are actually action figures; part of a playset sold on the Citadel that randomly generates Rick and Morty adventures. Once again lampshaded by Rick:
  [holding a gun on the conductor] "If we wanted an anthology we'd just do Interdimensional Cable again."
• Steven Universe has "Letters to Lars". Lars receives a letter from Steven while he's in space, updating him on various things that have happened in Beach City in his absence.
• The Patrick Star Show: Most of "The Yard Sale" consists of Grand Pat's four stories about history: being a carnival clown in ancient Rome, a dentist in the Middle Ages, a traveling vacuum salesman in the Old West, and returning to his clown job in the far future. Not all of the vignettes are of equal length; for instance, the third one is only two minutes.
• Kamp Koral: "Are You Afraid of the Dork?" is a collection of scary stories told by the characters, tied together with a Framing Device.
• SpongeBob SquarePants: "Sea-Man Sponge Haters Club" tells four stories by SpongeBob's biggest enemies, about how he ruined their days this week. There's a fifth story, but it never amounts to more than an Orphaned Punchline.
• The Fairly OddParents!: "Dimmsdale Tales" has the characters telling three stories around a campfire to pass the time. In the first story, Cosmo and Sparky are playing a video game, and Wanda accidentally locks herself outside. A series of Contrived Coincidences make them think she is the banshee they just beat in the game, so they prevent her from getting back in. The second is a Deliberately Monochrome story where Timmy's dad boards a plane, only for everyone aboard it is his Sitcom Arch-Nemesis, Dinkleberg. In the last story, Cosmo and Wanda are teenagers having a first date at a cliff, but they're scared by tales of a dead fisherman who might come back to attack them.

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