Why do otherwise serious TV series always have a silly episode every season?

They run out of ideas & are just filling in the time!!! The one that upsets me are the really popular shows that have run their course & there is NO new way to go & they start having silly shows every week to get viewers to quit watching so they can replace it with NO viewer squawking!!! I say just kill the show & let us squawk…we’ll get past it…just DON’T waste our time!!!

Watch British TV. Six episodes a season is the normal. Little filler. Just top-notch drama. And it is very common for their shows to just have a season or two. Since once the story is told they just stop instead of milking it.

Britbox isn’t great but it can probably cover you in enough really good tv to last you a lifetime.

Like musical episodes from out of nowhere? Those are bananas.

So the people making it can have some fun.

What @ragingloli said. It also gives the audience a break and refreshes them for the next round of serious. It’s like working on a serious project for weeks, then one meeting is devoted to jokes and silliness. It’s the “going out for a walk” between courses of a holiday dinner thing.

It is like the beach and hot-springs episodes in Anime.

I think the musical episodes are for the actors to get a chance to show their other talents. I think over the top Halloween shows, or other holidays, is a way for the actors to have some fun, or because the actors or writers love that holiday themselves. Roseanne used to have outlandish Halloween shows, and flashback to the 50’s and 60’s shows, and she would have guest actors on who I guess she loved as a child growing up. Just a guess.

Sometimes the “silly” episodes (and yeah, it can be a bit relative, depending on the series) can be the most dramatic. I’m thinking of the Breaking Bad episode ‘Fly’ and the ‘Pine Barrens’ episode of The Sopranos.