An installment that departs dramatically from its series' general formula. Events are played out from the point of view of the family pet, or are presented completely out of order, or it's an A&E biography of one of the characters, etc. May feature a Special Edition Title.
Sub-tropes:
- A Day in the Limelight: A character who's usually a side character gets the main focus in an episode.
- Grand Finale: The final episode is more grand-scale than the rest.
- Lower-Deck Episode: An episode that focuses on a supporting cast.
- Pilot: The first episode which is only a test run of the whole show.
- Unexpectedly Dark Episode: An episode that is more serious or gritty than the rest of the series.
- Very Special Episode: Sub-trope of Unexpectedly Dark Episode, where the darkness is used to discuss a serious real-world issue.
A Poorly Disguised Pilot can be a Formula-Breaking Episode. See also Breaking Old Trends, where smaller trends within a series diverge from what was considered the formula.
Example subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Music
- New Media
- Theatre
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
Other examples:
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Advertising
- Metro Manners usually involves Super Kind having a Transformation Sequence, performing a song and dance routine about Metro behavior, and then using her super powers to vanquish the villain. But "Wait your turn to enter" instead features the main characters standing around awkwardly while Danny Trejo delivers the aesop instead, with some Lampshade Hanging:
"There was gonna be a whole song and dance routine about how you should wait your turn to enter the train, but they got me, Danny Trejo, to talk to you instead"
Animation
- Happy Heroes is typically about the main characters, a group of superheroes known as the Supermen, fighting monsters. With that said, Season 2 episode 20 puts absolutely no focus on that formula, instead being about their non-biological father Doctor H. wishing on a genie to be married to his Celeb Crush Miss Peach, only to get some unwanted side-effects from making the wish with no effort.
Films — Animation
- The Disney films Sleeping Beauty, The Black Cauldron, and The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Disney) are some of the darkest films produced by the studio known as the trope namer for Disneyfication.
- Oh, you think that's bad? You should check out Disney's Pinocchio. That thing was dark both literally and metaphorically. There's a few really horrifying sequences such as the scene where a boy is seen turning into a donkey, made even worse when we see tons of other boys being turned into donkeys who are either sold to the salt mines or kept to pull the carriage to take more boys to the island to meet the same horrifying fate. Even more unusual for a Disney film, there are three different people who serve as villains (four if you count Monstro), and all of them get away with the things they do, including the ruthless coachmen who kidnaps boys and turns them into donkeys.
- Disney is rather famous for their Princess movies but Aladdin is arguably the only Disney Prince movie.
- Similarly, though Disney has done many movies featuring talking animals, the only times that they've dabbled in full anthropomorphism have been, The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland, Robin Hood (1973), Chicken Little, and Zootopia. Oddly enough, three of these movies feature a fox as a prominent character.
- Other unusual Disney work includes The Emperor's New Groove - which, in contrast to the examples above, is actually much lighter and more comical then standard Disney fare - and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which is a sci-fi/action film without any songs instead of a fantasy musical. Atlantis also has barely any romance to speak of and the villain isn't revealed as such untill very late in the film (This being almost a decade before plot twist villains became a recurring theme in disney movies).
- Chicken Little can also be seen as an attempt by Disney to copy the then-successful Dreamworks formula of a CG cartoon full of smart-aleck characters, pop culture references and zany humour. Audiences didn't like it and they went back to their usual style.
- The Three Caballeros might as well be called Disney Acid Sequence: The Movie.
- Fantasia represented a fairly radical departure from Disney's usual fare when it was first released. It was all music, no dialogue and didn't have one continuous story, just segments.
Magazines
- Doctor Who Magazine #428
is a special issue about connections and similarities between Doctor Who and Soap Operas. It's redesigned to look like an issue of Inside Soap◊, not just in the cover dress (hidden behind a polybag with a more conventional cover, so fans would recognise it on the shelves) but inside, with the regular columns getting "soapified".
- One issue of MAD had the Fold-In double as the front cover, instead of its usual spot on the inside back cover.
Pro Wrestling
- The Jumping Bomb Angels were definitely this for WWE fans in the late Eighties, as demonstrated by commentator Jesse "The Body" Ventura at Survivor Series 1987.
"You know, I'll tell you, I have seen a lot of good tag teams, and The Glamour Girls, I'm gonna go on the record, they're in trouble. Because the Jumping Bomb Angels are something else. I've never seen lady wrestlers with the kind of moves that they got. They're like watching a Dynamite Kid or like watching a Randy 'Macho Man' Savage or like watching a Ricky Steamboat with those aerial moves. It was just fantastic, I enjoyed it."
- Sabu was so much this in The '90s, given his emphasis on using tables in his matches, to the point that he would celebrate winning a match by moonsaulting himself through a table.
Radio
- Hancock's Half Hour would occasionally deviate from the usual sitcom format and do an episode that was either a series of sketches or a parody of a film (Blackboard Jungle and The King and I were used), with the regular cast besides Tony Hancock playing different characters. Ray Galton and Alan Simpson said that they did this if they couldn't think of a regular script for the week. One of these episodes features the most famous part of the programme, the 'Test Pilot' sketch.
Sports
- Due to a player's strike, the 1982 National Football League season was shortened to 9 games. Thus, for the 1982-83 playoffs, the divisional standings that would determine which teams would qualify for the postseason were ignored, with the top 8 teams from each conference getting a playoff berth into a bracket similar to the NBA's playoff system. And for the first time in NFL history, teams with losing records made the playoffs (the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions both finished 4-5).
Web Animation
- The OMORIBOY Chronicles: MESSENGER!!! follows up on the previous video's Gecko Ending, and then becomes an announcement that the acapella for "Redditor Too" is being released in the description. No comic posts are dubbed.
