The original post: /r/television by /u/JakeM917 on 2025-03-12 04:35:12.
I’ve seen this term used incorrectly for a long time, but it seems to be bandied around even more in the last year or so.
“Filler” episodes are, traditionally, episodes that are written to fill a season order for a TV show. Due to this, they pretty much never have an impact on the main story of the show.
Sometimes these are planned in advance of production and are well written. Sometimes another episode gets scrapped or the season order is expanded while shooting, so they’re written during another filming block to be ready for the next one. And sometimes they’re written after everything has been shot and slotted in to air in the middle of the season.
There are multiple ways to handle this — back in the times of broadcast television, “clip shows” were a popular way to minimize new material to be shot to stay on budget. Sometimes a second filming unit is set up and an episode is written around side characters who are not being used in the main filming block so production can happen for two episodes simultaneously.
“Filler” episodes can be quite good. Blink, one of Doctor Who’s most popular episodes, is indeed a filler episode where they wrote a story around a completely original character who never appeared again, with only bits of new footage from David Tennant and Freema Agyeman needed. “Filler” episodes can also be bad — clip shows pretty much always come to mind, like the 100th episode of Seinfeld or The Banker from The Office.
However, as the general aesthetic or “filler” episodes has become a known quantity to audiences and make them easily identifiable, anything that checks some of these boxes is seen as filler. Most notably, character-focused episodes that revolve around side characters and feature few to none of the leads is often deemed “filler”, even if there are revelations about a character’s past or motivations that will inform the main plot going forward. I’m specifically thinking about the latest episode of Severance that focuses on Harmony Cobel’s return to her hometown. Might there be some truth to concurrent filming schedules? Probably. But the episode itself was written with intent. I don’t think they were short of ideas for a full season and wrote this one up.
Six to eight episode seasons of television usually mean pretty tight plotting and planning of the show, so actual, true “filler” episodes are rarer, but somehow the term is used now more than ever. Sometimes an episode is just boring. That doesn’t make it “filler”. Also not every episode can or needs to contribute to a larger story. The story it has to tell in its own is interesting on its own. I wish we’d all stop throwing this term around to talk about episodes we just don’t enjoy as much as others.