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Formula-Breaking Episode

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An installment that departs dramatically from its series' general formula. Events are played out from the point of view of the family pet, or are presented completely out of order, or it's an A&E biography of one of the characters, etc. May feature a Special Edition Title, and depending on the type of show it is, it either be a Breather Episode or an Unexpectedly Dark Episode.

Sub Tropes:

  • Bottle Episode: An episode that's produced to save money, usually by featuring a single set and pared-down cast.
  • Bizarro Episode: An episode that is very weird.
  • Breather Episode: A lighthearted episode that comes after or before a very emotionally grueling story arc or episode.
  • Clip Show: An episode that mostly or entirely consists of highlights from previous episodes.
  • A Day in the Limelight: A character who's usually a side character gets the main focus in an episode.
  • Documentary Episode: We're shown an in-universe documentary that someone has made about the characters.
  • Dream Episode: The episode depicts a dream experienced by one or more of the characters.
  • Grand Finale: The final episode is more grand-scale than the rest.
  • Lower-Deck Episode: An episode that focuses on a supporting cast.
  • Musical Episode: The characters spontaneously break into musical numbers, in a series that isn't normally a musical.
  • Pilot: The first episode which is only a test run of the whole show.
  • Unexpectedly Dark Episode: An episode that is more serious or gritty than the rest of the series.
    • Very Special Episode: Sub-trope of Unexpectedly Dark Episode, where the darkness is used to discuss a serious real-world issue.

A Poorly Disguised Pilot can be a Formula-Breaking Episode. See also Breaking Old Trends, where smaller trends within a series diverge from what was considered the formula. Not to be confused with Creator's Oddball, where a work breaks the formula of a creator rather than associated works in a series.

Example subpages:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 
    Advertising 
  • Metro Manners usually involves Super Kind having a Transformation Sequence, performing a song and dance routine about Metro behavior, and then using her super powers to vanquish the villain. But "Wait your turn to enter" instead features the main characters standing around awkwardly while Danny Trejo delivers the aesop instead, with some Lampshade Hanging:
    "There was gonna be a whole song and dance routine about how you should wait your turn to enter the train, but they got me, Danny Trejo, to talk to you instead"
    Animation 
  • Happy Friends is typically about the main characters, a group of superheroes known as the Supermen, fighting monsters. With that said, Season 2 episode 20 puts absolutely no focus on that formula, instead being about their non-biological father Doctor H. wishing on a genie to be married to his Celeb Crush Miss Peach, only to get some unwanted side-effects from making the wish with no effort.
  • Lamput: It usually has a Road Runner vs. Coyote premise with Lamput as the Road Runner and Specs Doc and Skinny Doc as the Coyotes, but "Toy Car" doesn't make any reference to the docs chasing Lamput for the most part, focusing on Lamput helping a kid whose toy car has broken.
    Comic Books 
  • The Avengers: The shift from the Brian Michael Bendis Era to the Jonathan Hickman Era is a very noticeable example. From the more accessible, Bendis-voice-filled Avengers to the more high-concept, sci-fi Hickman Avengers.
    • After Hickman's Avengers ended, the tone changed during All-New, All-Different Avengers, with a focus on teenage superheroes and a slightly lighter and softer tone more akin to the Bendis run of Avengers.
  • Fantastic Four:
    • Walt Simonson wrote a three-issue arc in Fantastic Four (1961) (with art by Arthur Adams) in which the FF are temporarily replaced by the four most over-exposed (during the '90s) characters in the MU: Wolverine, Hulk (during his gray-skinned Mr. Fixit phase), Spider-Man, and Ghost Rider as the New Fantastic Four.
    • The Fantastic Four Roast (February, 1982) was a one-shot all-humor special where everyone in the Marvel Universe showed up at a fete for some good-natured riffing on the titular team. Written and laid out by Fred Hembeck, it took the liberty of changing why Dr. Doom became a villain and harbored such hatred for Reed Richards—in college, he wasn't invited to a panty raid with Reed and his college buddies.
    Dr. Doom: If I had been invited on that panty raid, the Dr. Doom you see before you would not exist! I could have been a fun guy!
  • Gen¹³: Adam Warren started the last run of volume 2 by doing a whole issue in the style of VH-1's Behind the Music, featuring each character's fake demise in ironic ways.
  • Hawkeye: Hawkeye (2012) #17 mostly takes place in a dream Clint has where he and everyone he knows are dogs in a holiday cartoon wonderland.
  • Jon Sable, Freelance: Issue #33 is about the children's books that Jon writes and tells the story of a group of leprechauns living in Central Park. Aside from a framing sequence, the art is by Sergio Aragaones instead of Mike Grell.
  • The Mighty Thor:
  • Rat Queens: The series had one story where the party is working as freelance mercenaries in the ShadowRun universe as a Breather Episode after the Fleshwarper arc.
  • Runaways: After Joss Whedon took over the series, he veered sharply away from the usual storyline of the Runaways dealing with some Monster of the Week by sending them back in time to 1907, where Victor falls in love with a local girl, Chase and Nico discover that an earlier version of the Pride is trying to start a gang war, and Karolina and Molly try to rescue a young girl stuck in an abusive marriage to a much older man.
  • Sandman Mystery Theatre: The antepentultimate arc "The City" and the final arc "The Hero" both differ considerably from the comic's usual formula where Wesley Dodds faces a Monster of the Week in a four-part arc. The former only has Wesley as the protagonist for the first chapter in a self-contained adventure with the remaining three chapters each being a P.O.V. Sequel starring Dian Belmont, Dodds' butler Humphries and Lt. Burke respectively, while the latter is a two-part arc that concludes the series with Wesley choosing to leave with Dian to find his brother while he lets other people deal with the current mystery.
  • Strangers in Paradise: The series had a Superhero Episode, as well as a send-up of Xena: Warrior Princess, after it was pointed out by fans that Francine and Katchoo resembled Xena and Gabrielle. (Katchoo was less than thrilled to wind up as Gabrielle.)
  • Ultimate Marvel:
    • Ultimate Spider-Man (2000): Initially, the comic book was starred by Peter Parker, reimagined as a teenager. In one of the stories some years later, The Hero Dies. Miles Morales, another teenager with no previous relation with Parker, becomes the new Spider-Man. It wasn't just a change of main character, but a change of secondary characters as well, as Miles had his own cast.
    • Ultimate X-Men (2001): Initially, the status quo was basically similar to the standard one: Charles Xavier has a mansion where he recruited and trains the X-Men, who go to superhero adventures, and Magneto has a villain team that opposes them. Things changed in Ultimatum: Most of the cast is killed off for good (including the four sacred cows, Xavier, Magneto, Wolverine and Cyclops), Storm and Collosus are jailed, and the X-Men break up and destroy the mansion in the aftermath. And it was also revealed that mutants are not the next step of human evolution, but common people with their DNA rewritten by nanobots. From then on, the comic became a Fugitive Arc.
    • The Ultimates (2002) were a reimagination of the Avengers, a government sponsored team of the most badass heroes around, that provides national security and got involved in international crises as a result. When they break up, the All-New Ultimates replace them. They are a street-level team of teenage superheroes, fighting against street gangs.
  • What If? (Marvel Comics): Issue #34 in both series were all-humor issues.
  • X-Men:
    • Peter David, fed up with the Wolverine Publicity that drives the X-Men franchise, once wrote an issue in his X-Factor featuring none of the usual cast, instead focusing on popular characters like Wolverine and Cable.
    • The classic Uncanny X-Men story Kitty's Fairy Tale. The cover even featured Kitty Pryde announcing, "And now for something completely different!"
  • Y: The Last Man: The series has two issues that focus on a theatre group trying to make important work about the post-Gendercide world. Their first effort is not received well. Later they try films and comics. Also, a supermodel whose profession is obsolete and is now clearing bodies (a minor character from early in the story) gets a issue later on.
    Films — Animation 
  • The Disney:
    • Pinocchio (1940): There are a few really horrifying sequences such as the scene where a boy is seen turning into a donkey, made even worse when we see tons of other boys being turned into donkeys who are either sold to the salt mines or kept to pull the carriage to take more boys to the island to meet the same horrifying fate. Even more unusual for a Disney film, there are three different people who serve as villains (four if you count Monstro), and all of them get away with the things they do, including the ruthless coachmen who kidnaps boys and turns them into donkeys.
    • Disney is rather famous for their Princess movies but Aladdin is arguably the only Disney Prince movie.
    • Though Disney has done many movies featuring talking animals, the only times that they've dabbled in full anthropomorphism have been The Wind in the Willows, Alice in Wonderland (1951), Robin Hood (1973), Chicken Little (2005), and Zootopia (2016). Oddly enough, three of these movies feature a fox as a prominent character.
    • Other unusual Disney work includes The Emperor's New Groove - which, in contrast to the examples above, is actually much lighter and more comical then standard Disney fare - and Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which is a sci-fi/action film without any songs instead of a fantasy musical. Atlantis also has barely any romance to speak of and the villain isn't revealed as such untill very late in the film (this being almost a decade before plot twist villains became a recurring theme in disney movies).
    • Chicken Little (2005) can also be seen as an attempt by Disney to copy the then-successful Dreamworks formula of a CG cartoon full of smart-aleck characters, pop culture references and zany humour. Audiences didn't like it and they went back to their usual style.
    • The Three Caballeros might as well be called Disney Acid Sequence: The Movie.
    • Fantasia represented a fairly radical departure from Disney's usual fare when it was first released. It was all music, no dialogue and didn't have one continuous story, just segments.
  • Pixar:
  • DreamWorks Animation
    Films — Live-Action 
  • Halloween III: Season of the Witch ditches Michael Myers and instead has a story about evil masks that possess little children. The original plan was to turn the franchise into a Genre Anthology series, with a new standalone horror story released every year around Halloween. The movie tanked, so they haven't made another non-Michael version since.
  • Home Alone 3 takes place after Christmas, contrary to the other five Home Alone films taking place before.
  • Scream:
    • Scream 3 is the only film in the series in which there is only one Ghostface, as opposed to there being two.
    • Scream VI also dispenses with the usual formula of there being two Ghostfaces. There are five — three official, and a pair of wannabes.
  • Part of why the James Bond film Licence to Kill was poorly received in its original release (at least in the US) was how extremely atypical it was compared with previous Bond films. This time, Bond was not on a mission with MI6, fighting for king and country, he was on his own, fighting for himself and his friends in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • This is explicitly stated to be the reason why Marvel made the Guardians of the Galaxy movie for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Each of the previous movies depict the origins of the Avengers, with top of the line Marvel characters such as Captain America and Thor, culminating in The Avengers movie. Guardians of the Galaxy is pretty much a gathering of C-list and D-list Marvel characters that nobody would have expected to be featured in a film.
  • Monsieur Verdoux was a Charlie Chaplin film that broke with tradition: it a Black Comedy about a serial killer who murders women where Chaplin didn't play his familiar tramp character. The audience didn't like it that much and it would only become a Cult Classic later.
    Literature 
  • Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: Each of the tales in this Short story collection is about the autobiographical Slice of Life recollections of the author growing up in 1950s-1960s Georgia. The last is much more strange, especially when it delves into Time Travel, angels, and... well that's quite an Out-of-Genre Experience. Though it's worth noting that the story, "My Trip to the Rome of the Ancient Past", was a contribution from another author altogether.
  • The Chronicles of Prydain is a five-part series. Of the five, Taran Wanderer is the only one that doesn't have "The [Noun]" for a title, doesn't feature Princess Eilonwy, and (most importantly) is more of Coming of Age story than the others, which revolve around a Black-and-White Morality conflict.
  • Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The original gimmick of the series was that it was a cringe-inducingly nostalgic lookback on middle school. As such, Dog Days was unique because it was the first one that took place entirely away from middle school and instead focused solely on Greg's summer vacation.
  • The first Dinotopia book was presented as a diary written by the protagonist. The next two books told the story from a third-person perspective.
  • invoked Out of Terry Pratchett's widely acclaimed Discworld series, Going Postal is especially beloved for just how different it is from any of the preceding novels. For one, it introduced a never-before-seen and quickly beloved protagonist in the form of Moist von Lipwig (a former Con Man tasked with fixing Anhk-Morpork's Postal Service), which significantly aided in revitalizing the series and keeping it relevant. Going Postal is also rather notable in that, unlike previous Discworld novels, it's all built around making a dead-serious point about the dangers of privatization—while prior Discworld novels certainly had serious points to make, it can be reasonably argued that out of the previous 33 books, only Equal Rites (a Feminist Fantasy about Breaking the Glass Ceiling), Small Gods (a critique of religious fundamentalism), Jingo (a military satire taking jabs at neo-colonialism), and Night Watch (a Darker and Edgier analysis of Full Circle Revolutions, how people view the police, and the concept of justice) had made the humor take a back seat to the well-delivered Aesops in the same way that Going Postal did. And finally, Going Postal is also the first Discworld novel since The Light Fantastic to include chapters (which Pratchett did in part as a Take That! towards a literary critic who complained about the lack of chapters in his work).
  • The Goosebumps series has had a few books that stray from the standard formula in some way.
    • The Ghost Next Door has an incredibly somber, dirge-like tone, and the main twist is slowly built up to instead of being suddenly delivered for the series' usual "Gotcha, suckers!" effect.
    • How I Learned to Fly: While most of the other books dealt with kids squaring off against monsters, vampires, ghosts, goblins, ghouls, and other freaky creatures, How I Learned to Fly doesn't have much in the way of supernatural elements (except for the book that teaches humans how to fly) and the real scares come from the downside of fame (Jack and Wilson become famous for their ability to fly and it cuts into their normal lives) and how greedy people exploit the talented (Jack's father is a talent agent who puts his son in local car dealership commercials).
    • Fright Camp, Are You Terrified Yet? and Scream School all end up having no supernatural events. Are You Terrified Yet in particular plays out more like like a slice of life comedy.
    • The Mummy Walks plays out like an espionage thriller about a kid who discovers he is the prince of a fictional Middle Eastern country and is forced to locate a treasure he has no memory of.
    • Slappy's Nightmare is a Villain Episode for Slappy the Dummy, as he is forced to do three good deeds, or he will be put to sleep forever.
  • The Horse and His Boy is the only book in The Chronicles of Narnia that is set entirely within Narnia and its surrounding countries, with protagonists who are born there instead of visitors from our world.
  • Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book are a collection of stories set in India, though each one has a short story that has nothing to do with jungles or India: "The White Seal", set in the northern oceans, and "Quiquern", which is about huskies and Inuits.
  • Mog:
    • "Mog and Barnaby" is a lot less wordy and has no narration, only dialogue.
    • "Mog's Amazing Birthday Caper" (in addition to being a Dream Episode) has lots of alliteration, while most of the books don't feature wordplay at all.
    • "Mog's Family of Cats" doesn't have a plot. It just documents Mog's relatives.
  • A More Perfect Heaven is a fairly typical biography of Copernicus (the astronomer). Two-thirds of the way through, right before the chapter where On the Revolutions was published, there is a sudden genre shift in the form of a three-act screenplay starting where the previous chapter's biography left off. This isn't a short thing either. The performance in audiobook covers a full hour and a half. At the conclusion of the screenplay, the next chapter picks up the biography right where the chapter before the screenplay left off.
  • In the Murdle series, the logic puzzles involve Deductive Logico and/or Inspector Irratino investigating a crime (usually murder); sometimes the crimes take place in Dream Sequences, Shows-Within-A-Show, or flashbacks that provide exposition, but consistently involve discovering the culprit of the crime...except for Volume 3, Case 99. For this one, the Big Bad (CEO Indigo) is about to have Logico and Irratino killed, so they have a Distracting Fake Fight to get the drop on him and another, lesser antagonist who was The Woman Behind the Computer; in the scuffle, one of the four goes over the edge of Mount Aegis and falls to their death. Instead of finding the killer, the reader has to discover who died, with our two main characters being two of the options (luckily, not the correct ones), and the "motives" clue is replaced by what the last words of the victim would be if they were the one to die. Luckily, Indigo is the one who kicks it.
  • Pump Six and Other Stories is a collection of futuristic, sci-fi stories that tend to be either Bio Punk or set After the End (some of them both). And then there is Softer, which is a story of Jonathan Tilly, a regular, mild-mannered guy in contemporary world, who in a random fit kills his wife. He spends rest of the story dealing with the fact and his ever-growing realization that this is not the end of the world as the pop-culture have taught him.
  • Roys Bedoys:
    • In one video, the family parodies the Baby Shark song and in another, Roys and his friends and teacher parody “The Wheels on the Bus”.
    • “Let’s Make a Rainbow, Roys Bedoys” doesn’t really have a moral like most of the stories, and neither does “Roys Bedoys’s Spectacular Halloween Party!”.
    • “Roys Bedoys & the Three Little Pigs” is just a retelling of The Three Little Pigs done with a school play. Similarly, “Roys Bedoys and Little Red Riding Hood” is just the kids reenacting Little Red Riding Hood.
    • “‘CAN’ You Play with Me?” doesn’t teach a moral; it just teaches the vocabulary word “can”.
  • Most chapters of Sailor Nothing are straight prose, but Chapter 7 is an animation in the style of an 8-bit video game, and another is a set of four "mini-chapters" from different points of view.
  • Spectral Shadows might end up having this if the other serials get written. It can especially be this if one were to read Serial 1, then skip forward to 11.
  • Time Warp Trio: While most of the books are time travel adventures, "It's All Greek to Me" and "Summer Reading is killing me" has The Book taking them into fiction. The former has them going into the world of Greek myths, while the latter has them in a mash up of all the books on their summer reading list.
  • You'd be shocked to learn that the first novel V. C. Andrews (Yes, that V.C. Andrews) ever wrote was Gods Of Green Mountain, a sci-fi novel taking place on another planet. It should be noted that it wasn't published until almost twenty years after Andrews' death, probably because it was so different from her work.
  • The Whateley Universe was strictly a light-hearted Superhero School comic book realm, until "A Simple Game", the first Carmilla story, which dove head-first into Lovecraft Country.
    • And even then, the stories are all 'protagonist in a superhero setting' except for "Tales of the MCO' in which some of the main characters sit around and watch television. And heckle.
    Magazines 
  • Doctor Who Magazine #428👁 Image
    is a special issue about connections and similarities between Doctor Who and Soap Operas. It's redesigned to look like an issue of Inside Soap👁 Image
    ◊    , not just in the cover dress (hidden behind a polybag with a more conventional cover, so fans would recognise it on the shelves) but inside, with the regular columns getting "soapified".
  • One issue of MAD had the Fold-In double as the front cover, instead of its usual spot on the inside back cover.
    Podcasts 
  • Kevin and Ursula Eat Cheap have the letters shows, often recorded in advance of con appearances as filler episodes, which generally do not include any food at all.
  • Random Assault: The show runs on this. It's ostensibly a gaming podcast, but the topics are all over the place.
  • Welcome to Night Vale has a couple examples of this. The most obvious one is "A Story About You", in which the usual news style is discarded in favour of a second-person narration describing the day in the life of an 'ordinary' Night Vale citizen. "The Sandstorm, Part B", is also an example, as the majority of it is narrated by Kevin, Cecil's Desert Bluff's counterpart.
    • An even better example is "The September Monologues," which changes the entire episode formula. It begins differently, without the usual "Welcome to Night Vale" catchphrase, and ends without the usual "good night." The episode itself is a series of 3 monologues from various characters, each one with a brief introduction from Cecil. What is even more unusual is the lack of weather, (save 6 seconds of generic music that are immediately cut off.)
    • There's also The Weather, where the report stops and a song plays, typically around the climax of the episode.
    Pro Wrestling 
  • The Jumping Bomb Angels were definitely this for WWE fans in the late Eighties, as demonstrated by commentator Jesse "The Body" Ventura at Survivor Series 1987.
    "You know, I'll tell you, I have seen a lot of good tag teams, and The Glamour Girls, I'm gonna go on the record, they're in trouble. Because the Jumping Bomb Angels are something else. I've never seen lady wrestlers with the kind of moves that they got. They're like watching a Dynamite Kid or like watching a Randy 'Macho Man' Savage or like watching a Ricky Steamboat with those aerial moves. It was just fantastic, I enjoyed it."
  • Sabu was so much this in The '90s, given his emphasis on using tables in his matches, to the point that he would celebrate winning a match by moonsaulting himself through a table.
    Radio 
    Sports 
  • Due to a player's strike, the 1982 National Football League season was shortened to 9 games. Thus, for the 1982-83 playoffs, the divisional standings that would determine which teams would qualify for the postseason were ignored, with the top 8 teams from each conference getting a playoff berth into a bracket similar to the NBA's playoff system. And for the first time in NFL history, teams with losing records made the playoffs (the Cleveland Browns and Detroit Lions both finished 4-5).
    Theatre 
  • Ani is a departure from the rest of Team StarKid's work in that it's not a musical, per se; it doesn't have nearly as many songs as their other shows, and the songs are performed in the background instead of by the characters.
  • Animal Crackers, in a sequence absent from the movie version, has a scene in the second act that changes the time and place to Ancien Régime France, with Spaulding as Louis XV, Mrs. Rittenhouse as the Queen, Mrs. Whitehead as Du Barry, and John as the great painter Monsieur Jean Jacques Beaugard.
  • Cirque du Soleil has mounted no less than eight ongoing shows in Las Vegas at once, each at a different casino, as of 2010. How? While Mystere, the first, is basically a touring show taking advantage of a fixed abode, most of the other shows put a twist on their style:
    • "O" uses a giant pool for its stage, so all the acts incorporate water in some way (i.e. diving and synchronized swimming).
    • Zumanity is adults-only.
    • KA has a linear plotline told through its acts, plus two moving stages to create its settings.
    • LOVE is themed around the music of The Beatles; there's more dance than usual, too.
    • Criss Angel BeLIEve was initially a magic show/circus hybrid where the troupe played a supporting role to Criss Angel, but after a Retool it's a conventional magic show with some Cirque filigree.
    • Viva Elvis (now closed) was built around Elvis Presley's life and music, but more straightforward in its approach than LOVE. Michael Jackson: ONE has taken up that stylistic mantle.
  • The Hungarian, Finnish, Polish, Norwegian, and Czech versions of The Phantom of the Opera are non-replica productions that look nothing like the Broadway/London ones—hair, costumes, sets, blocking, etc. The Polish production even looks far more like the 2004 movie rather than the musical—the "Masquerade" sequence is in black and white, like the film. The producers actually had to get special permission from TPTB for this.
    • The recent US and UK tours have some considerable differences as well.
  • Tachyon Drift - the episode where the ship forces everyone to speak in Norwegian, to make Doctor Jensen feel more included.
  • The Yeomen of the Guard is very different from Gilbert and Sullivan's other collaborations, to accommodate Sullivan's desire to do more serious work. Yeomen is much darker in tone than other G&S works; it's an outright tragedy instead of the usual light comedy, with a downer ending instead of the usual armload of marriages; it alone has no satire of British institutions; it alone has a cast that includes someone who actually existed; it alone starts with a solo instead of the usual chorus; and it alone has an opera-style overture instead of the usual medley of tunes from the show.
    Web Animation 
  • Episode 5b👁 Image
    of Battle for Dream Island Again, which is a Platform Game, when compared to 5a👁 Image
    and 5c👁 Image
    , which are both regular animations.
  • DEATH BATTLE! typically has the hosts Wiz and Boomstick analysing two (or more) characters in a lab without a story of their own. Episode 150 on the other hand tells a story about Boomstick trying to find his father. Wiz and Boomstick spend the whole episode outside of the lab and interact with the fighters (Macho Man and Kool-Aid Man). The typical structure of "analyse first combatant, then analyse second combatant, then show the fight animation" is not used, instead the analysis covers both combatant back-and-forth and some of it are explained in the middle of the fight.
    • Excalibur vs. Raiden also breaks the usual formula, though not to the extent of the previous example. We see Wiz and Boomstick in the lab on their day off and Wiz staring at his computer curious about Warframe, and the two then start having a personal argument about which Warframe would be beating Raiden in a fight, like the playground debates we used to have as kids.
    • Raven vs Twilight Sparkle has Raven winning but Twilight's fate is completely ambiguous.
    • Scooby-Doo vs Courage is a spat between two friends and ends in a draw because the post-show analysis reveals they couldn't permanently kill each other and they were evenly skilled while Eustace (the one who started the fight) is declared the loser after getting sucked into the Chest of Demons.
  • Most of the "irregular" episodes of Happy Tree Friends qualify, such as:
    • "Ski Patrol": A parody of an old instructional video, about ski safety.
    • "Dino-Sore Days": A parody of an early Disney short, starring Cro-Marmot.
    • "Ka-Pow!": A three-episode Spin-Off starring Flippy, Splendid, and Buddhist Monkey.
    • The HTF Breaks, a series of one-minute episodes.
    • Love Bites, a series of short Valentine's day skits.
    • Kringles: short Christmas episodes.
    • Smoochies: Animations with three options, all three of which result in the character dying.
  • Homestar Runner: Instead of their usual Halloween cartoon, for 2021 the Brothers Chaps developed a short point-and-click Adventure Game, Halloween Hide & Seek, where Homestar had to track down the other characters so he could continue his annual tradition of humorously misidentifying their costumes. Appropriately enough, all the characters' costumes are from adventure games (including Homestar himself as the Hero from Quest for Glory, Marzipan as Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl from Scranton from Sam & Max Hit the Road , and Strong Bad as Sludge Vohaul from Space Quest II: Vohaul's Revenge).
  • Strong Bad Email tends to play around with the standard formula a fair bit. Some of the biggest examples:
  • Meet the BLU Team: While all the other videos in the series demonstrate each class's incompetence compared to their RED counterparts, Meet the BLU Pyro actually makes the Pyro deadly, and instead of having their vision distorted by Pyrovision, they see everything in black and white and know what they were murdering. The fact they cannot see color though didn't end well for the rest of the BLU Team either.
  • The OMORIBOY Chronicles: MESSENGER!!! follows up on the previous video's Gecko Ending, and then becomes an announcement that the acapella for "Redditor Too" is being released in the description. No comic posts are dubbed.
  • Episode 7 of Puyo Puyo Happy!! is a solo episode for the Puyos. It is the first not to feature Arin or Ralph as charactersnote this does not count the screen asking you to subscribe to the channel, and does not feature Suketoudara either, being focused on guessing what sports the Puyos are playing. The only other character is the narrator.
  • SCP Animated - Tales from the Foundation: The (Now taken down) episode that focused on Sirenhead.
  • SNARLED: As opposed to the macabre and gruesome stories of horror, "What happens to Life after Death" is a strangely lighter story about a girl who second-hand experiences the moment before death with her new-found friend.
  • A World Without...: Most episodes are structured as a series of short skits. "A World Without... End" is not. Instead, it consists almost entirely of one character's unending walk through an unending world of unending events, set in one continuous 7-minute shot. The sequence loops through the same locations several times, each time with slight alterations. The end of the episode shows a character with a long white beard (possibly God) writing a story about a presumably infinite journey.
    Webcomics 
  • The Fan has the Sheyleron Saga side story, that is not only completely unrelated the main storyline, it takes place in a completely different universe, yet the author insists on sticking an installment to the end of every single episode, and sometimes, right in the middle of one.
  • The delightfully campy Fans! has featured, among other things: A musical arc (with pictures of characters singing and links to the sound files underneath), a story told from the perspective of an FIB agent experimenting with mind control techniques told via his blog, and a story done entirely in chat logs.
  • The comic Forever16 does this with the short story "My Super-Soaked Sweet Sixteen", following a girl who is a model for her mother's professional underwater photography. Starts here;👁 Image
  • Gunnerkrigg Court: Chapter 10 - "Dr. Disaster Versus the Creepy Space Aliens from Outer Space". The main Urban Fantasy plot took a break for a comedic Raygun Gothic interlude—though not without some character development.
    • There are also some unusual interludes following the end of each print volume. The first was followed by Guest Strips and letters between the characters; the second was followed by City Face, a short and bizarre story about talking pigeons, which was so popular it got a sequel in the next volume. Though not part of the comic proper, Tom has said that most of these materials are Canon. Somehow.
    • There's also the "Annie watches Kat play GTA" comic, the "Kat melodramatically plays MGS" episode, and the similar one where they all watch Princess Mononoke.
    • The current holder of the record for most Flat Whats from the readers however has to be MORT FUN TIME👁 Image
      .
    • Gunnerkrigg Court does occasionally do guest strips...the ones starting here👁 Image
      are drawn/written by the characters themselves!
  • The Intermission between the third and fourth acts of Homestuck drops the main storyline completely and shows a storyline involving alternate universe counterparts of some of our characters, who have (in this new story) formed a gang called the Midnight Crew. Their ...behavior becomes a plot point later on.
  • Monster of the Week: The complete cartoon X-Files has the author sometimes changing the formula of the comic (The X-Files: Abridged Series) when she feels that episode had much more potential or decides to explore Fridge Logic of the episode.
    • Excelsis Dei, Humbug and F.Emasculata are presented as list of tips and tricks connected with the episode.
    • D.P.O, Jersey Devil, Hell Money, Home and Small Potatoes are author's commentary only.
    • In Firewalker author has consulted fungi expert and proceeds to explain how killer fungi of that episode are scientifically inaccurate.
    • ''Jose Chung's "From Outer Space👁 Image
      " is... Well...
  • After three lengthy story-arcs, Nature of Nature's Art went on to... a gag-a-day-style strip called Wild Style. It's an "intermission arc", so to speak.
  • An intermission comic in The Order of the Stick was done as a parody of the old "Let's Go Out to the Lobby" advertisements seen at movie theaters. One group of concession stand snacks is challenged by another, and an epic D&D style battle ensues.
  • The Petri Dish:
  • Sluggy Freelance did its fifth-year anniversary in flash animation (no, no voices, just animation).
  • Hero Rehab is a comic series by The Transformistress in which transgender humans in a fantasy world, with stock "heroic" roles like knights and noblemen, are magically transformed into Cute Monster Girls. "Rehabilitation of a... VILLAIN?!" instead stars an antagonistic monster, an undead Archlich, and has them regain their humanity in the process of becoming a Cute Seraph Girl.
  • Explicitly used in this strip👁 Image
    of VG Cats.
  • John Kossler of The Word Weary does this with his non-canon comics... most especially in the Guest Strip he wrote himself and his off-the-wall 100th comic celebration.👁 Image
  • Most stories in The Wotch, put the focus on the title character and here two friends, usually including a B story that either focuses on one of the main characters, or, less frequently, a minor side character (like "Moon Over Tandy"). However, "A Girl and her Blob" took a different approach. There is a side story about Anne and her friends battling Were-creatures and a Mad Wizard, but the central story is on minor character Ming and Myrrh, a blob-like woman Ming discovers and bonds with.
  • Alienby Comics is usually about its author's life as a transgender person but it has also has featured comics involving trans versions of popular characters, as well as a comic about transfemme fashion tips👁 Image
    and one about about eosinophilic esophagitis👁 Image
    , an autoimmune condition affecting the digestive system the author has.
    Websites 
  • The Athletic did a ranking of the greatest👁 Image
    National Hockey League players since the 1967 expansion (100, but named NHL99 because it was effectively 99 players below #99 who earned a consensus first place). Shades of this trope happened in the entry for Scott Stevens, that had some readers complaining that the article only discussed Stevens' hard hits and how they're a legacy that doesn't fare well today. But then two entries downright focused on ancilliary aspects, with a Sergei Federov article about his white skates👁 Image
    and a Larry Robinson one on him being a polo enthusiast, and the comment sections are mostly people complaining that it wasn't what they wanted in a series about hockey players.
  • The Jolly Roger Telephone Company is a internet-based company that designs bots which are intended to waste the time of telemarketers and other unwanted callers. One of the bots, to date only featured in a single call👁 Image
    on the company's YouTube channel, is a "no-bot" which will never agree with anything that the caller says. The other bots are all designed to be agreeable, if in a somewhat vague and slightly non-committal way, in order to waste as much telemarketer time as possible. This bot, however, is seemingly running a "test-board" and repeatedly ask the caller how they got routed to him and will answer direct questions with "nope" or "mm-mmm." It was created by request of one of the customers who wanted a bot that would never agree to anything. Because of this, most telemarketers hang up on it after about a minute or less, but it's still considered a "win" because it breaks their auto-dialer, causing the call to be routed to an agent and at least wasting a bit of time.
    Other 
  • Science Fiction Theater 1,000,000,000, a series based on Mystery Science Theater 3000, did this twice: Episode 303: Attention All Heavy Hitters👁 Image
    is done in the style of Space Ghost Coast to Coast, while Episode 405: What's Q, Pussycat?👁 Image
    presents the series as if it was part of Toonami's Rising Sun block at the time it was written, which somehow affected the episode itself.
  • Speaking of Toonami, in 2012, the block on [adult swim] usually airs action-oriented animation, both Japanese and western. However, there are times, usually during special occasions such as Daylight Savings Time and Movie nights, where they decide to air something a little unorthodox. On August 31st, the night they aired Evangelion 2.22, they also aired the kickstarter-funded anime short Kick-Heart. On November 2nd, to fill out the extra hour from Daylight Savings Time, they aired King Star King and Korgoth of Barbaria along with a reairing of Kick-Heart.
  • Producer Scott Rouse sampled comedian Jeff Foxworthy's "redneck" jokes with a musical backing and released it as a single called "Redneck Stomp". After it was a commercial success, Rouse took some of Jeff's other material and gave it a musical backing, often adding an appropriately themed chorus sung by a popular country artist or session vocalists. (For instance, "Games Rednecks Play" takes snippets from that album's routine about the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta and adds a chorus sung by Alan Jackson.) Many of these "songs" were compiled into Crank It Up: The Music Album, which also included a couple regular standup routines and the "Redneck 12 Days of Christmas". Rouse also sampled Bill Engvall's work in similar fashion in later years, most notably his "Here's your sign" jokes, getting him a Top 40 hit with "Here's Your Sign (Get the Picture)" (chorus sung by Travis Tritt) and "Here's Your Sign Christmas" (chorus sung by session vocalists).
  • Bill Engvall's Cheap Drunk: An Autobiography album features Engvall talk-singing on two tracks: "I'm a Cheap Drunk" and "Rich, Fat, and Ugly".
  • Jeff Foxworthy applies in another way, as each of his albums ends with "You might be a redneck" jokes except Have Your Loved Ones Spayed or Neutered, which instead ended with a skit called "I Believe", featuring Larry the Cable Guy.
  • Brent Douglas and Phil Stone, creators of the Prank Call character Roy D. Mercer, released many of their calls on CD compilations. (The first seven were titled How Big a Boy Are Ya? vols. 1 through 7, after which they Stopped Numbering Sequels and gave subsequent albums their own names.) While most of the discs are nothing but the calls served straight-up, a few of them broke from that pattern:
    • Vol. 2 ended with a parody of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas titled "Mercer Family Christmas".
    • Vol. 3 ended with a "Jingle Bells" parody called "Jingle Fists".
    • Vol. 4 and Vol. 5 had tracks that were just topical conversations between Roy and Phil Stone set to fiddle music (five on the former, four on the latter.)
    • Vol. 6 ended with a musical track, consisting of a phone call interspersed with backing music and a chorus sung by Charlie Daniels. This was also made into a music video.
    • Vol. 7 ended with a skit where Roy competed on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with a friend of theirs taking the role of Regis Philbin. He uses all three of his Lifelines and still gets the $100 question wrong before beating up Regis.
    • On Hits the Road, several tracks feature 30-second intros, and the last track is a skit called "I Believe" set to mandolin music.
    • Red, White, and Bruised has four political messages and another track that has a call set to banjo music.
    • Vol. 6, Hits the Road, and Get Well Soon all have tracks intended to be used by listeners as answering machine messages.

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