14 TV Shows With Infuriating Episode Title Formats

Orphan Black’s five seasons each have a theme across their titles (Season One is all Darwin quotes, for instance), which seems to have more to do with being all clever and fancy than helping to identify actual episodes.

Two and a Half Men named its episodes after a snippet of dialogue lifted from them  — all well and good if you know every line of all 262 (mostly, if we’re honest, crappy) episodes, but otherwise fairly unhelpful. 

While many episodes of The X-Files have totally sensible titles, there are plenty that smack of the writers feeling a little too pleased with themselves — episodes have titles in German, Latin, French and occasional gibberish.

Every Monk episode starts with “Mr. Monk,” e.g., “Mr. Monk and the Employee of the Month.” That’s fine, unless you’re using a phone, in which case they’re too damned long, and Mr. Monk needs to sort his shit out. 

Mr. Robot’s episodes are titled in a very clever, apt way — titled like file names of different video formats complete with production codes, such as eps1.7_wh1ter0se.m4v. However, they ran out of video formats, so it all became increasingly less clever.

Third Rock From the Sun found the character name Dick hilarious, using it in the titles of 102 out of 132 episodes, including “Angry Dick,” “I Enjoy Being A Dick,” “Assault With A Deadly Dick” and “Gobble Gobble Dick Dick.”

Every episode of ALF is named after a song. Occasionally there’s a link — an episode where Brian has to dress as asparagus in a play is called “It Ain’t Easy Bein’ Green” — but for the most part it’s just completely arbitrary. 

The Big Bang Theory’s titles are a lot more based around being fun to say and sounding nerdy than being useful for identifying the episode. What happens in “The Veracity Elasticity,” “The Proton Displacement” or “The Friendship Turbulence”? Who knows. 

At first, Desperate Housewives’ episode titles were incredibly impressive — they were all named after Stephen Sondheim songs, but in ways related to the plot. Keeping that up was understandably difficult, so soon enough the titles started to seem pretty arbitrary.

During Season One of The Drew Carey Show, a half-assed attempt was made to theme episode titles around science, but by Episode 10 — “Science Names Suck” — the wheels had fallen off. The show stuck around for 223 more science-less episodes. 

Every season of The Good Fight had a different gimmick — one year they titled episodes like Friends, one year like Sunny. Second season episodes, however, are named after how many days into Donald Trump’s presidency they aired, which is… difficult.

The fault lies with the public, who outside of Hawaii mostly don’t speak pidgin, but Hawaii Five-O’s penchant for giving every episode a pidgin name makes it very difficult for non-pidgin speakers (and, yes, more of us should learn pidgin).

The makers of Clerks: The Animated Series gave its episodes such wilfully unwieldy, lengthy titles that one of them, the penultimate episode, had a 49-word title too long to fit on a Wikipedia title page. That’s just showing off.

Robot Chicken occasionally had actual episode titles, but generally used it as a space for more silliness. Season Four’s titles make a message from a man trapped in a DVD factory but, broadcast out of sequence, make no sense whatsoever.