TV show: The Movie!

Star Trek: Voyager “Living Witness” “Muse” “Author, Author”Stargate SG-1 “Wormhole X-Treme!” “200”The X files “Hollywood ad”Supernatural “The Monster at the End of This Book” “The Real Ghostbusters”

The characters meet someone who creates a story about their adventures, but they get the details all wrong! Do they have no respect for canon? If there’s one thing a bored or slightly disgruntled writers’ room loves to do, it’s break the fourth wall and get really meta with it. Sometimes it’s a book, a play, a TV show, or a historical reenactment, but mostly it’s an opportunity to poke fun at the characters, the tropes the show itself uses, and of course, a writers’ worst enemy: the audience.

Everyone goes to Las Vegas for some reason

Classic examples: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine “Badda-Bing Badda-Bang”Angel “The House Always Wins”Stargate Atlantis “Vegas”The X files “Three of a kind”Friends “The one in Vegas”Modern family “LasVegas”Alias “The coup”Lexx “Long live Lexx Vegas”

This is perhaps the pinnacle of reusable episode formats. When all the options have been exhausted, when all the ideas have been exhausted and the pizza in the writers’ room is really cold, at some point someone will finally say, “Never mind. Let’s do a Vegas episode.”

Taking your characters to an exotic location is a great way to flesh things out, but for some reason, of all the places a TV series could visit, Las Vegas, Nevada, tops the list. Maybe it’s the thrill of high-stakes gambling, the storytelling potential of all that flashy glamour sitting so close to the seedy criminal underbelly. Maybe it’s that so many of the attractions are indoors, in windowless rooms that could easily be recreated on a sound stage. Who knows?

The only thing we know for sure is that, if the show’s budget can handle the royalties, there will at some point be a chase scene on the casino floor featuring Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas.”