 Day 27, inside number 9, suggested by a delicious buttery dong and seconded by 19 people. Also, this is the last day to suggest a subject. The selection will be the 30th and final review of this ridiculous experiment, so I've changed the rules slightly. Check the pinned comment. But first, more British TV. I have never in my life talked about British TV as much as I have this past month. Bottle episode is the term for an episode of television where production is scaled way to heck down. Few actors, few locations, minimal prep work required. When it was coined, it was meant like pulling an episode out of a bottle like one might a genie back when I Dream of Genie was on the air. It's quick, cheap, and effective, but there's another way to define the term, one that's more creative and less cynical. It's like putting the characters in a bottle. Lock folks in a room for half an hour and you are guaranteed to get drama. By stripping back the action and really focusing on character, a bottle episode can be huge for getting audiences to understand who they're watching. Inside number nine is built on bottle episodes. Each of its stories, completely disconnected from any other, takes place in a single location with only a handful of actors. Sometimes this location is a beautiful mansion. Other times it's a single room in a train's sleeper car. The only connecting thread is the number posted on its exterior. 9. It's genius. Honestly, a foundation so broad that it could reliably hold pretty much anything you might want to do with it so long as you can keep it to a single place. It truly feels like a show that could go on forever. This is in contrast to something like Black Mirror, an anthology that really just ran out of steam in its fifth season and I think rightly ended, though it's unfortunate that it seems to have ended mostly due to rights. There are plenty more stories that could be told within its limitations, but producing a bunch of thematically linked feature films, which is really what any given season was if you accept the Oscars definition of a feature film as anything 40 minutes and over on anything like that kind of schedule, is hard especially for one man. Inside number nine, which released its first series in early 2014, addresses most of these issues. Next up, it's got two writers, Rhys Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton, who also act in most of the episodes, meaning there are two minds to mine for material. And while they need to come up with new characters for each episode, there's no need for thematic connection between any of them, which really opens up the possibilities. They're more limited by how they tell the stories than the kinds of stories that they can tell. While there's no thematic link, it's not as though there's no defining traits of an inside number nine episode. Like, even if one story takes place in a suburban family home and the next an actor's green room, there are commonalities. Each episode in some form or another features death. Sometimes that's literally characters dying on or off screen and others it's more of an implication, but it's always in the air somewhere. Also, they're funny, but the way that they inject humor into the often dark narratives changes radically from episode to episode. The pilot has that sort of awkward comedy I mentioned before that I don't particularly enjoy as an increasingly large group of people, many of whom don't really seem to like each other all that much, are forced into a wardrobe for a game of sardines. Most of the episode takes place in an enclosed six by three box. It also takes an incredibly dark turn towards the end, which is probably the most disturbing in its implications of any of the episodes that I saw. And then it was followed in episode two by a slapstick comedy devoid of dialogue. These two in particular really feel like setting the show's limits upfront. They are kind of the extremes and everything else will fall somewhere in between. And there's just, there's just so much that can go in between. So of course the show is still going strong. Within the limitations of this project, I only had time to watch nine episodes, all of series one and half of series two. But they've been plowing full steam ahead ever since, continuing to win critical acclaim and awards each year with a new set of stories. And I like every episode at least a little bit and some of them quite a lot. But the key point of an anthology is that it really doesn't matter if one episode sucks, you can just skip it. Hell, skip a whole series, watch everything in reverse chronological order. You will never know and it doesn't matter because even the biggest nine head is going into a new episode with the same amount of background as a novice. And I like that. It raises the stakes for the characters who may literally all die by the end of it. But it lowers them for me as a viewer and makes it something that I can just chill with. Sure, it is not the best British TV show I have seen or even the best British TV show I have reviewed in the month of January. But I think it's the one that I'm going to just throw on when I want something fun to watch. 8.0 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, hammering Marco, Kat Zaracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Elliot Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I'm the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindy's, Andrew Madison Design, and the folks who'd rather be red than red than red. If you liked this video, that's great. If you want more, I said last, last chance to choose what I'm going to do on the last day. Pretty wild. Thank God. So close. Three more videos. Jaws. Right? Or is it 20, 29, 30? Thank God. Oh my God. I can't do this anymore.