Out Of Genre Experience / Live-Action TV

• 30 Rock: There are two episodes that parody Reality TV (especially those on the Bravo channel) with their Show Within a Show "Queen of Jordan".
• 8 Simple Rules was a situation comedy, but written as a drama, with drama writers, for the episodes dealing with the main character Paul's death, following the death of his real-life actor John Ritter.
• Blackadder was a historical comedy with an emphasis on witty dialogue. Blackadder's Christmas Carol throws ghosts into the mix, of course, and then Back and Forth has Baldrick build an actual working time machine.
• "Mazey Day" is the first Black Mirror episode to have a supernatural hook rather than a high technology one.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • It has 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. Really, Buffy's eclectic combination of "Horror-Comedy-Romance-Action-Drama" meant that it felt a little unusual for any individual episode to lean hard on any one genre.
  • The episode "Helpless" left Buffy without her super Slayer strength for an episode, preventing her from just beating down the villain as usual. This made the episode have much more of a "horror" feel than any other episode in the series.
  • The 7th Season episode "Conversations With Dead People", felt by many to be a stand-out from a mostly lackluster final season, featured three A-plots and one B-plot that feel very surreal, even for this show. Buffy doesn't usually have a long heart-to-heart with a vampire before killing him. Tara supposedly reaches out to Willow from beyond the grave, but indirectly. Dawn spends the entire episode alone in her house, having to fend off a demonic disturbance that, unlike the norm for this show, is played for pure horror instead of action/laughs. Finally, in the B-plot, Spike, who has spent the last four seasons "de-fanged" by a secret branch of the US military and unable to harm humans, walks a lady home... and bites her, draining her dry.
• Community does this for about a quarter of their episodes. They've covered a lot of ground from mafia movies to The Western to Zombie Apocalypse.
• The finale of Crossing Jordan has all the characters stranded after a plane crashed, and try to survive in the cold long enough for rescue to find them.
• Doctor Who has a lot of range, but even so has some stories that stick out a mile:
  • "The Chase", a Dalek story which, uniquely for a Dalek story, is a straight-up comedy story with semi-sympathetic Comic Trio Daleks and almost no horror elements. It has outrageous comedy setpieces, Slapstick, a Fake American laughing at the Daleks, a subverted Journey to the Center of the Mind in an amusement park, and a much rarer plot structure to usual as well (the characters go to a different location each episode when almost every other Classic story kept them in the same location). The only other Dalek comedy was "Destiny of the Daleks", which is an otherwise fairly formulaic Dalek story with jokes added in by a bored script editor.
  • "Mission to the Unknown", a one-parter (at a time when serials were the norm) Bottle Episode which is still unique in not having either the Doctor or any of the companions in it — it's a kind of extreme Lower-Deck Episode with just victims and Daleks. This had a reason behind it.
  • "The Gunfighters" is the show's only Musical Episode, though most of the singing is not done by the characters. (There has been a stage musical and an audio drama musical in the Expanded Universe, though.)
    • In the liner notes for the Doctor Who Series 7 OST, Murray Gold complains that no-one told him "The Rings of Akhaten" was going to be a musical.
  • "The Highlanders" is the only "pure historical" the Second Doctor ever did before the format was abolished, making it into a bit of a hangover from the Hartnell era. Considering how much his Doctor unbalances the story, it's easy to understand why. On the opposite side of things, "The Tenth Planet" (Hartnell's last story) is a Hartnell story that feels strongly like proto-Troughton, being that it follows the "Base Under Siege" format associated with that Doctor and features the Cybermen, a villain used heavily in Troughton's tenure.
  • "The Enemy of the World", which is suddenly Spy Fiction — the Doctor goes undercover like a 60s super-spy, and the villain is an evil human politician 20 Minutes into the Future with no monsters involved. It's also the only story in the whole season that isn't a Base Under Siege.
  • "The Invasion" is a Troughton story that isn't a base-under-siege, features UNIT, a Diabolical Mastermind Villain with Good Publicity and Cybermen invading modern-day London, and feels like a test-run for the Pertwee era (because it was).
  • "The Seeds of Doom" feels more like an action spy thriller akin to James Bond or The Avengers (1960s) than Doctor Who. We have the Doctor as a violent action hero and a diabolical mastermind bent on world domination.
  • "The Deadly Assassin", the only truly companion-free serial (all other storylines in solo travel periods give the Doctor a temporary companion-figure), meaning the Doctor narrates a lot of the action. It's the only story where every single character, including all the people travelling in the TARDIS, is an alien from the planet where the story is set (Gallifrey), which gives it a weird feel as there are no cultural outsiders. It's also a Noir Episode.
  • "Midnight" (though it does still involve the Doctor trying to outmanoeuvre aliens in a sci-fi setting) has a very different tone from most Tenth Doctor episodes; pretty much the entire episode takes place in a single vehicle a little bigger than a bus, the alien is never identified or even seen, the basic moral of the episode is Humans Are Bastards when they get scared (shattering the Doctor's usual belief that Humans Are Special), the Doctor's usual manner and tactics backfire spectacularly at every turn, and the Doctor comes as close as he's ever come to dying properly, and has to be saved by a Heroic Bystander, who dies without anyone knowing her name.
  • "Heaven Sent", despite being the penultimate episode of Series 9 (and part two of a three-part story), is an Ontological Mystery with a Minimalist Cast (other than the Doctor himself, and the mysterious Veil, the only characters to appear are an imaginary version of Clara and a Gallifreyan boy, and the Doctor carries 90% of the episode on his own). Add to that the extended scenes in the Doctor's "Mind TARDIS", which are explicitly not actually happening, and you have a very unique episode.
  • "The Return of Doctor Mysterio" has the Doctor team up with a superhero in New York City in a story with plenty of affectionate nods to the Silver Age of comic books. Needless to say, this is hardly the usual format for Doctor Who.
  • "Spyfall", the Series 12 premiere, goes full-blown Tuxedo and Martini Spy Fiction.
• Farscape dabbled in:
  • Cowboy Episode ("Home on the Remains", "Different Destinations")
  • Courtroom Episode ("Dream A Little Dream")
  • Slasher Movie ("Eat Me")
  • Tex Avery cartoon ("Revenging Angel")
• Firefly is usually a Space Western. The episode "Ariel" has a Medical Drama scene. The episode involves the crew of Serenity robbing a hospital in the Core, while Simon and Jayne smuggle River into the hospital's imaging suite so that Simon can use their equipment to make a better diagnosis. At one point Simon — their ship's medic and formerly one of the best trauma surgeons in the Core — poses as a doctor (or rather, a doctor who works there) and risks blowing his cover to save a patient's life, and then thoroughly chews out the guy who was inadequately treating him. It's also something of A Day in the Limelight for Simon. He spends most of the show far out of his comfort zone. and this is a chance to demonstrate that he's Graceful in Their Element.
• The Haunting Hour: The Series:
  • "The Most Evil Sorcerer" plays out more like a medieval fantasy with supernatural elements.
  • "Le Poof de Fromage" plays out like a parody of an alien invasion story.
    • Similarly, "Best Friends Forever," is a parody of zombie stories and the sitcom episode premise of "Kid keeps pet after his parents forbid it and tries to keep the pet under wraps."
  • "Headshot", "Terrible Love", "Uncle Howee", and "Near Mint Condition" are more like surreal and/or darkly funny satires ^note (of fame, teenage love, the over-reliance of television as a babysitter, and obsessive geeks who are into 1980s cartoons and toys respectively) mixed with supernatural elements.
  • "Goodwill Toward Men" was more of a Twilight Zone-style morality tale with the only supernatural element being the Christmas angel statue that came to life and cursed Missy's greedy, social-climbing family into a life of poverty and homelessness in order to teach them humility^note though Missy was the only one who actually learned that lesson. When the Christmas angel visited Missy, she warped reality again so that way Missy would be the daughter in a different rich family while her parents and brother from the former reality have to live life again as working-class people.
• Hercules and Xena did this rather frequently, with the latter being by far the worse offender. This tendency would eventually be lampshaded later in the latter series.
• Heroes is a sci-fi drama, but has a tendency to shift to different genres depending on who is being focused on. It can be a political drama when following Nathan Petrelli (in season one and late season three), it can be a high school/college drama when it follows Claire, or a cop show when following Matt.
  • Volume 2 featured a Jidaigeki Period Piece following Hiro's trip to ancient Japan, and the Tie-In Novel Saving Charlie is a Romance Novel.
• Homicide: Life on the Street is a gritty, realistic crime drama for most of its run, but the final scene of ''the television movie finale is the recently deceased Giardello entering the afterlife and playing cards with Crosetti and Felton's ghosts.
• House, which is actually a medical drama, has an arc in which Dr. House hires a private investigator to spy on Wilson. Instant detective drama!
  • Two seasons before that, it also dipped into courtroom drama for part of an episode for the conclusion of the story arc featuring Detective Michael Tritter.
  • And then the two-hour Season Six opener was a psychology/rehab drama.
  • The Season Six episode "Lockdown" was a character-driven mystery drama.
  • Ever since the mass-firing/departure of House's fellows at the end of season 3, the show has done a fairly consistent job of mixing in genre-bender episodes that break with the standard format it had established. Since the end of season 5, in particular, this has become more and more common. These writers really know what they are doing in terms of keeping the show fresh.
  • Thirteen's life outside the hospital is a crime drama replete with drugs and sex.
  • A season 7 episode has some fun with this, throwing in multiple dream sequences in which the hospital is overrun by zombies and another one in which the characters are in a Dom Com.
• The IT Crowd is normally a Work Com set in a Standard Office Setting, but the beginning of "Men Without Women" takes place in an "Arabian Nights" Days type fantasy setting. Douglas journeys through the desert in search of a wizard living in a tent, to whom he pays 20 gold pieces for a love potion. The rest of the episode takes place back at the office.
• JAG:
  • The first few acts of "Sightings" play more like an episode of The X-Files.
  • The episode "Each of Us Angels" is about an old man telling stories about his experience on a hospital ship during the storming of Iwo Jima.
• The episode of Jericho (2006) that dealt with April's death played out as a medical drama.
• The Knots Landing Season Three episode "The Three Sisters" was a Paranormal Episode in which the women of Seaview Circle visit a supposedly haunted house.
• Lost: Lost's use of flashbacks and flashforwards allows it to dabble in other genres frequently. Examples include:
  • Jacks' episodes are mostly medical dramas.
  • Ana Lucia's flashbacks become a cop/crime drama.
  • Kate's flashbacks feature a fugitive drama.
  • Nikki and Paulo became a one-time relationship comedy. Or rather, tragicomedy.
  • Ben and Sayid had a James Bond/Die Hard episode.
  • Sayid had flashbacks about his time as a torturer in the Iraqi army and his later attempts to lead a normal life after the war.
  • Another Sayid flashback had him infiltrate a terrorist group that was planning a bombing in Australia.
  • Desmond's episodes had him involved in a Mental Time Travel back when other characters would dismiss the thought of that nonsense outright.
  • And some consider the Sun/Jin flashbacks to be a full-fledged Soap Opera.
  • The flash-sideways frequently switch genre. Flash-sideways Locke appears to be in some sort of dramedy about coping with his disability, Ben's are a drama set in a high school (yes, a canon High School AU), Sawyer and Miles are in a buddy cop movie...
• May to December is a Britcom about a lawyer who mostly deals with dull routine cases, which are just the background to the character comedy. The Christmas Episode is largely set in his fantasies of being Perry Mason, with the characters all taking appropriate roles. His secretary Ms Flood is Della Street, his younger partner Miles is Paul Drake, and so on.
• In the third-season finale of Modern Family, Cam and Mitchell are trying to adopt a newborn baby from his Latina mother, and suddenly find themselves embroiled in a Telenovela plot.
• Murdoch Mysteries does this quite a bit. Any episode featuring Terrence Meyers is Spy Fiction (if he and Murdoch are working together) or a Conspiracy Thriller (if they're not). "Mild Mild West" is a Western. "Friday the 13th 1901" is a Slasher Movie. "Kung Fu Crabtree" is Wuxia. And all set in turn of the century Toronto.
• After 14 seasons of busting Myths and getting a series finale, The Science Channel suddenly announces that it is rebooting the MythBusters franchise, with the next season being swapped to Reality TV (albeit only for one season).
• Mystery Science Theater 3000 played this for laughs with the episode featuring Samson vs. the Vampire Women, where it starts as a horror film with a professor using his Heroic Willpower to drive off a group of vampires… only for El Santo to suddenly show up more than halfway through, throwing Mike and the Bots for a loop.
• Mythic Quest: Season 1's "Dark Quiet Death". The series is overall a Work Com about a zany game studio behind a popular MMO, however, this episode takes it back years to the past to focus on the couple that originally started said studio. The episode plays as a straight drama, accompanying the couple from the day they meet, to their creation of a hit horror game, to how the success of it, as well as the creative concessions they have to make and the stress of running said franchise, causes them to break up.
• Our Miss Brooks: "Postage Due" is a mystery, turning into a Noir Episode by the end.
• The Outer Limits (1995): The series typically consisted of quite dark to very dark dramas but it did produce three comedy episodes, the first two being black comedies: "The Revelations of 'Becka Paulson", "What Will the Neighbors Think?" and "Down to Earth".
• "The Rescue Mission", a mid-season episode of Power Rangers Lost Galaxy, features Terra Venture answering a distress signal left by an alien spaceship - as a result, there are no Zords, Sentai footage or regular villains, and most of the fight scenes are unmorphed. It's more like a Survival Horror movie than an episode of Power Rangers.
• The Prisoner (1967):
  • For one episode, "Living in Harmony", the series' plot is transplanted onto a Western setting.
  • Another, "The Girl Who Was Death", changed the format from a serious espionage drama with sci-fi overtones to a parody of other spy dramas including The Avengers (1960s) and James Bond.
• Scrubs, a medical dramedy about a young doctor who is constantly daydreaming, is naturally prone to bouts of Mood Whiplash and surreal, though usually hilarious sequences. (For example: medical serials are not normally known for having lightsaber battles in the lobby, love trains in the hallways, or epic kung-fu fights in the parking lot.) However, two especially unusual episodes transform the episode format into a musical ("My Musical") and a bedtime story ("My Princess") respectively.
• As far as the individual episode plots, Sliders is almost Genre Roulette, except that it still manages to stay sci-fi most of the time.
• Stargate Atlantis Season 5 Episode 19 "Vegas". An Alternate Universe version of Shepard is a Las Vegas cop chasing a serial killer who is actually a Wraith. The first act looks and feels like an episode of CSI, right down to the zooms in to extreme close-ups of the evidence he is describing.
• In Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Vic Fontaine himself is a walking Out-of-Genre Experience. Introduced in the second-to-last season, Vic was an intelligent, self-aware hologram who played lounge music in a 1960's Vegas club holosuite program, and not in the "Take Our Word for It" way, oh no. More like in the "actually plays entire songs in the middle of an episode" kind of way. When he wasn't busy crooning to his fellow DS9 regulars (and the audience at home), he was helping them find love by setting up relationships, including one (Odo and Kira) that possibly saved the entire Alpha quadrant. One entire episode was committed to saving poor Vic in something that would fit right in with a 60's gangster movie; holodeck\suite episodes were nothing new to Star Trek by this point, but this is one of the few where there is no outside-the-box trick and everything happens irrespective of the fact that it's a simulation.
  • The series also branched out into Courtroom Drama in "Rules of Engagement", Sub Story in "Starship Down" (intended to be Das Boot Recycled In Space) and even a very literal Baseball Episode in the middle of the Dominion War arc.
  • Star Trek in general is quite happy to take a break from philosophy discussions with aliens and delve into medical dramas, courtroom dramas, or murder mysteries depending on what crew-member is getting the most focus.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation, in addition to the usual holodeck episodes, has the infamous "Sub Rosa" which is an 18th-century ghost story in Space Scotland.
  • Star Trek: Discovery is generally a Darker and Edgier show compared to the earlier ones, but one scene in the episode "Terra Firma, Part 1" suddenly features a guy named Carl just appearing on a deserted planet with tomorrow's newspaper and a door that seemingly leads nowhere. His behavior and powers are heavily reminiscent of the Q, and he fancies himself a Pungeon Master, making the whole thing feel like a throwback to TOS or the sillier episodes of The Next Generation. This turns out to be deliberate, as the next episode reveals that he's the Guardian of Forever.
  • The Star Trek: Strange New Worlds episode "Those Old Scientists" takes this up a notch. SNW is a Wagon Train to the Stars series similar to the original series. However, the episode is a crossover with Star Trek: Lower Decks which is a Deconstructor Fleet set 120+ years after SNW at a time where Starfleet has gotten heavily bureaucratic. Thus, the main drawing point is what happens when a Military Maverick and a Professional Butt-Kisser ends up stranded in the past with a team of more straight-laced yet relaxed officers. This is followed up by "Subspace Rhapsody", the franchise's very first Musical Episode.
• Supernatural is a Walk the Earth Horror Fantasy show that likes to play Genre Roulette with various action and horror sub-genres but they love to do out-of genre episodes:
  • "The Benders" and "Family Remains" are shocking because it's revealed that there's nothing supernatural going on and the enemy is evil humans..
  • "Ghostfacers" is a parody of Reality Television and Found Footage horror, from the POV of minor characters who had been a thorn in the heroes side.
  • "Monster Movie" is shot in black and white and has the heroes face off against classic movie monsters that turn out to be a shape-shifter.
  • "Changing Channels" shifts genres throughout the entire episode, from cheesy sitcom, to medical drama to cop procedural.
  • "Frontierland" is a western/parody of westerns.
  • "ScoobyNatural" is a crossover with Scooby-Doo/cartoon episode.
• The flashbacks in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles episode "The last voyage of the Jimmy Carter" look more like scenes from a Darker and Edgier version of SeaQuest DSV.
• Torchwood, a show in which aliens and the supernatural are commonplace, has the episode "Countrycide". The main characters are just as surprised as the audience, as both believed aliens were involved somehow until the last act of the episode, in which the killers turn out to be nothing more than humans. Cannibals, but humans nonetheless.
• Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps does this with its Halloween special "When Janet Killed Johnny". Usually Halloween episodes from sitcoms balance scares with laughs. Not so here. For one thing, it transitions the series from video to film and the make-up and gore effects are far from cheesy. The lighting and the music are incredibly eerie and for some reason even the fact that they kept the laugh track for the episode makes everything scarier. The plot has the gang break back into the pub after it's closed down in order to drink up the remaining stock of brew, activating an ancient curse that whoever enters the property without permission will be killed by the thing they love most...and boy, are they ever, in increasingly sickening ways. The end of the episode shows it to be a dream - or is it!?
• The West Wing is normally a very grounded political drama dwelling on the ethics and contradictions of the highest office in The United States. Conspiracy theories are laughed at and the supernatural is entirely absent. Except that one episode where the President of the United States was trying to decide how to handle a health scandal that called his fitness for office into question along with his integrity in hiding it. He makes up his mind after talking to the ghost of his recently dead personal secretary.
• Most of Sense8 is a James Bond-esque zany action thriller+romance: and it has the aesthetic you would expect for that sort of movie. However, it occasionally detours into other genres when focusing on a single one of the eight protagonists. Particularly notable, are the times when the show drops into Lito's movies mid-scene: and the entire aesthetic changes completely to let you know it's a movie. He's making a western.

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