Mr Robot, the recently launched US hacking drama with a cool retro logo and an in-your-face marketing campaign, feels like a show with potential. It wraps the hot-button issue of hacking in a dense weave of conspiracy and features Christian Slater as a techno-anarchist who calls himself “Mr Robot”. That last detail alone is probably enough for most of us to hope it gets picked by a UK broadcaster or streaming service pronto. But, sight unseen, there’s already one massive problem with Mr Robot: it features easily the worst episode titles in living memory.
The show has been praised for its technical accuracy when depicting the nuts and bolts of hacking, but calling your first episode eps1.0_hellofriend.mov doesn’t seem like an additional layer of technical veracity, it feels more like straight-up trolling. Charitably, you could accept that using different filename formats is thematically appropriate, and something like eps1.3_da3m0ns.mp4 might even stymie amateur attempts to search the web for illegal downloads of Mr Robot, a sort of baked-in anti-hacking device. But it isn’t half going to make TV listings look messy. Somewhere, a Radio Times subeditor is banging their head against a wall.
There is a real art to naming TV episodes. Deployed well, they can provide extra context, offering a parallax view of what you are watching, or even function as a communication channel between producers and writers and their audience. Perhaps due to the breakneck pace of the action both on-screen and off, 24 never bothered with anything more informative than a terse timestamp. Comedies, most famously Friends, often come up with a naming convention – such as “The One With …” or Chuck’s “Chuck Versus …” and fill in the blanks. Even if devised as a timesaver, this approach can potentially backfire: surely the Big Bang Theory must be running out of vaguely scientific-sounding paradigms and paradoxes like The White Asparagus Triangulation or The Psychic Vortex sometime soon?
TV’s current heavyweight champ Game of Thrones has some evocative episode titles, which is fitting for such an epic monument of world-building built on an almost fetishistic obsession with naming things. Most fans remember the epic King’s Landing siege in season two as Blackwater but, for good or ill, they’re also more likely to furiously debate the Red Wedding than the Rains of Castamere, the episode in which those notorious nuptials were framed.
These days, if you can’t do it well, maybe don’t do it all. The rise of streaming services mean episode titles are more visible than ever. Sharp-eyed viewers of Better Call Saul, likely watching on Netflix in the UK, will have noticed that every episode in its first season ended in “-o”, a coincidence that presumably carries some deeper meaning. (Frustratingly, episode five is titled Little Alpine Boy, although the rumour is it was originally called “Jello” until the producers realised they couldn’t use a trademarked product.)
Can we compete in the UK? The most notable recent dramas – Line of Duty, Happy Valley, Downton – stick to plain old “episode one”, although after doing nothing fancy with The Shadow Line, Hugo Blick named each instalment of the Honourable Woman, and cumulatively, they achieved a sort of terse, doomed poetry (Two Hearts, The Paring Knife, The Hollow Wall …). Back in the day, a Doctor Who story arc like Terror of the Autons or Meglos would function as an umbrella title for four to six episodes: in modern Who, every episode is marketed as a mini-event with its own blockbuster name – The Pandorica Opens, Let’s Kill Hitler, Dinosaurs on a Spaceship – pre-empting and facilitating a thousand online discussions about which one is the best/worst/scariest/funniest. (Blink. Whatever the question, the answer always seems to be Blink.)
These titles might appear to be fixed. But some seemingly prosaic names gain a second resonance once you have actually watched the episode in question. This technique was perfected by Breaking Bad’s Box Cutter, but perhaps the most devastating example of a title becoming freighted with almost unbearable significance after the fact is The Shield’s Family Meeting. If that sounds like too much of a bummer, it worked out much more happily on the first season of Silicon Valley. Mike Judge’s start-up satire initially seemed to have frustratingly dull episode titles – Articles of Incorporation, Fiduciary Duties, Third Party Insourcing – with even the season finale (Optimal Tip-to-Tip Efficiency) sounding like something you might find scribbled on a whiteboard in a tech firm. Then you watched the finale, and realised Judge had quietly been preparing the ground for an uproarious punchline all along.
The West Wing, Deadwood, Hannibal … do you have any favourite, or hated, episode titles? Let us know in the comments below
