The limitation of the bottle episode: Hegel in Community

ABSTRACT In recent years, television has undergone an artistic and critical reevaluation. This essay aims to add to the study of television aesthetics by examining a form particular to American television: the bottle episode. The bottle episode first arose as a solution to the budgeting ‘bottlenecks’ experienced by U.S. television series in the 1950s and 60s. I find that this form presents a logic of the limit, establishing a formal, narrative, and existential aesthetic that is unique to television. Far from simply being cheap TV, a close study of the bottle episode shows that what began as a financially necessary production format works through the dialectical method of thought that unfurls in G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. I turn to NBC’s Community (2009–15), a series replete with bottle episodes, to show that by pushing through bottled confinement, the new and transformative take place. Ultimately, I argue that bottle episodes show how dynamic collectivity forms through isolation.