Updated October 15, 2023 6.6K votes 1.4K voters 71.5K views
Over 1.4K Ranker voters have come together to rank this list of TV Shows with the Best Episode Names
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Vote up the shows with the best episode names.
Are you one of those people who tracks and remembers the TV episode names of your favorite shows? Yeah, us too. And the Internet has made that much easier than just trying to store TV episode titles in your old nerd noggin. Thanks to early Star Trek conventions, Trekkies got to know the names of episodes from blooper reels.
Unless you read Film Threat,EW or TV Guide religiously, you probably talked about episodes like this, “Did you see the one where Starsky shoots the bad guy and then Huggy Bear says that thing about keeping his pimp hand strong?” Okay, that never happened but that is the way it goes when one does not have a television episode title to reference.
Creating titles for TV series episodes is part of the creative process, sometimes an after thought or a mere functionality to describe the storyline of that particular episode. Due to the fact that every detail of a TV show is now online, writers are fairly aware that audiences do remember and reference the episode names. Everyone knows about “The Contest” on Seinfeld. People still talk about Lost’s “The Constant.”
There are tons of TV episode titles out there that are clever and amazing and we tried out best to give you a solid collection of some of the standouts. Many times a TV episode name may be clever but the actual episode is kind of meh. Sometimes we favor a episode name because we have serious feelings about that particular one. Fans agree on one thing, though: Too damn many shows use “Tabula Rasa.”
Sometimes there are clues in the episode titles, references to a large or subtle storyline or character arc. Sometimes there is snark or poetry. Whatever the case, the shows that put some umph into their episode names made this list. Who’s clever? Who’s cryptic? Who’s a tease? Upvote the television series with the best episode titles below!
Latest additions: iCarly, Freaks and Geeks, Everybody Hates Chris
Since the earliest days, The Simpsons has had a field day with episode names, playing off of original titles and notable aspects of pop culture, for instance, “The Last Temptation of Krust,” “Bart of Darkness,” “A Fish Called Selma,” and “I Love Lisa.” But sometimes, the episode names were simply about their subject and didn’t need any punning, like “Mr. Plow” and “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween special series.
With some of the most whip-smart people in the writers' room, The Simpsons episode titles are weird, brilliant, and a cultural encyclopedia - just like the show is.
Standouts:
“The Crepes of Wrath”
“Revenge Is a Dish Best Served Three Times”
“D’Oh-in in the Wind”
“Much Apu About Nothing”
“Guess Who’s Coming to Criticize Dinner”
“Beyond Blunderdome”
“Two Cars in Every Garage and Three Eyes on Every Fish”
"El Viaje Misterioso de Nuestro Jomer (The Mysterious Voyage of Homer)"
Friends creators David Crane and Marta Kauffman wanted a unique way to remember each episode and knew that the titles wouldn’t be shown in the credits. So, the writers’ running gag was to refer to each episode by prefacing it with “The One…” The only exception was the series finale, which was titled “The Last One.”
Standouts: “The One Where No One’s Ready” “The One with All the Thanksgivings” “The One with the Prom Video” “The One Where Ross and Rachel… You Know” “The One With the Embryos” “The One Where Ross Got High” “The One with the Holiday Armadillo” “The One with Unagi”
The smarty pants writers over at Supernatural are totally all about their episode titles. With TV episodes names derived from various forms of pop culture from books to songs, fans love to dissect and collect the episode names and meanings. The show could spawn dozens of trivia questions - and has.
Standouts:
“Children Shouldn’t Play with Dead Things” - The name of a low budget horror movie from the ‘70s. “Bad Day at Black Rock” - A wonderful little film starring Spencer Tracy from 1955. Tracy plays a man who faces off against a whole town fighting an injustice. Dude only had one good arm, too. A must see. “Malleus Maleficarum” - Latin for Hammer of the Witches and name of a guide that encouraged people to seek them out and murder them back in the good old fifteenth century. “Criss Angel Is a Douchebag” - No explanation needed, really. “Jump the Shark” - A playful reference to that Happy Days thing...
Aside from being full of snarky snark snark, it stands to reason that the episode titles of Psych would be amusing. But you already knew that.
Standouts: “Spellingg Bee” “Woman Seeking Dead Husband: Smokers Okay, No Pets” “Poker, I Barely Know Her” "He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not, He Loves Me, Oops He's Dead" "Gus' Dad May Have Killed an Old Guy" “Any Given Friday Night at 10PM, 9PM Central" (Psych's time slot) "There Might Be Blood” “You Can’t Handle This Episode” "Black and Tan: A Crime of Fashion"
Futurama’s whole thing is punning its way through space and time. In fact, the episode titles were never allowed to just lie there and do nothing like Leela’s bifocals.
Standouts: “I, Roommate” “A Fishful of Dollars” “Hell Is Other Robots” “Fry and the Slurm Factory” "Why Must I Be a Crustacean in Love?" "A Clone of My Own" "How Hermes Requisitioned his Groove Back" "War Is the H-Word" "Amazon Women in the Mood" "Parasites Lost" "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" "Loves Labor Lost in Space" "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" "The Devil's Hands are Idle Playthings" "Roswell that Ends Well" "In-A-Gadda-Da-Leela" "Möbius Dick" "Luck of the Fryrish"
Considering that George R.R. Martin titles each chapter in his A Song of Ice and Fire book series with a character’s name, creators David Benioff and D. B. Weiss had the added task of naming each episode to reflect a little about the storyline, while also not giving anything away. And that’s a tricky task.
Standouts:
“The Rains of Castamere”
“Fire and Blood”
“Breaker of Chains”
“Blackwater”
“The Mountain and the Viper”
“Valar Morghulis”
“The Lion and the Rose”
“The Laws of Gods and Men”
“Baelor”“Second Sons”
“And Now His Watch Is Ended”
“The Watchers on the Wall”
“Winter Is Coming”
“The Pointy End”
“Kissed By Fire”
“A Golden Crown”
