With Halloween right around the corner, TV channels are bringing back viewers’ favorite seasonal shows. According to “The Daily Beast,” “Television Without Pity: The Telefile,” “Bloody Disgusting” and “Yahoo TV,” these are the Halloween season’s top television episodes:
The Office: “Halloween”
“The Office” tells the story of the employees at the fictional Dunder Mifflin paper company. During this installment of the series, Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) tries to figure out who he has to fire. He has had all month to do so and has waited until Halloween. Meanwhile, other office employees post one of their colleague’s resumes online. The cast is dressed in Halloween costume throughout the episode rather than their formal office attire.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Halloween”
In this teen-cult series, Sarah Michelle Gellar plays a high school girl who has been chosen by the “powers that be” to kill vampires and other supernatural forces. While Halloween is usually a quiet time for vampires, it all goes haywire when Buffy’s mentor and old friend turned enemy casts a spell over the fictitious town of Sunnydale. All of the children and teenagers turn into their Halloween costumes. Buffy, who has turned into an 18th century damsel in distress who cannot remember who she is, and her friends find the perpetrator and reverse the curse.
How I Met Your Mother: “Slutty Pumpkin”
This series revolves around Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor), an architecture professor in New York City who is still looking for “the one.” Four years prior to the first season, Ted went to a Halloween party on the roof of his building and met a girl dressed as a pumpkin. He lost her number after his friend Lily (Alyson Hannigan) gave away the Kit Kat bar that the pumpkin wrote her number on. Ever since, he has returned to the rooftop for Halloween, looking for the slutty pumpkin.
Supernatural: “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Sam Winchester”
Supernatural is the story of two brothers who travel around the country to hunt supernatural creatures, particularly demons. The day before Halloween, Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles) investigated a murder where they found a witch’s hex bag at the scene of the crime. After finding another one later in the investigation, they conclude that they are facing a Halloween demon who only rises every 600 years.
The Big Bang Theory: “The Middle Earth Paradigm”
“The Big Bang Theory” is about five friends: four extremely socially awkward male scientists and their female neighbor across the hall. During this episode in the first season, Penny (Kaley Cuoco) invites her new friends to a Halloween party. At first, the four nerds all dress as Flash, the superhero. They all change their outfits and Sheldon (Jim Parsons) goes around as the Doppler Effect confusing everyone in his path while Leonard (Johnny Galecki) decides to go as Frodo, the hobbit protagonist from “The Lord of the Rings.” Leonard, who has developed feelings for Penny, tries to impress his new neighbor when her ex-boyfriend shows up at the party.
A number of students said that their favorite Halloween episodes were from the 90s. Television shows like “Rugrats,” “Scooby Doo” and “Hey Arnold.”
Khadijah Patterson, a freshman astronomy major, likes the Halloween episode of “Boy Meets World” called “And Then There Was Shawn,” where the students are locked inside the school and they find that someone has written on the chalkboard that nobody will get out of the school alive.
“It was scary yet funny,” Patterson said.
Others alluded to the 1966 “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” television special in which the infamous “Peanuts” gang goes trick-or-treating without its friend, Linus.
Pratyusha Rayavarapu, a freshman biology major, called the Charlie Brown special “a classic.”
