Bottle episodes of television get their name from the original Star Trek, where budgetary concerns would occasionally force the show to confine an episode to the Starship Enterprise: these would be called “ship-in-a-bottle” episodes. By putting characters in enclosed spaces they saved money and generally emphasized dialogue and character development instead of plot. They were also some of the most well-received Star Trek episodes ever.

Fast forward some 60 years and the working definition of “bottle episode” has expanded considerably, to the point where it’s now a catchall to describe any installment of television that can be watched sans familiarity with the show itself. These standalone chapters, narrowly conceived either thematically, geographically, or in the number of characters featured, serve as little detours and creative flourishes that let a show breathe. The recent popularity of the anthology series owes itself in part to the idea, spearheaded by the standalone, that TV episodes can function as mini-films instead of book chapters.

No single show has taken this concept and used it quite so efficiently as High Maintenance, the brilliant HBO anthology series in which a weed dealer (“The Guy”) interacts with various clientele on his odysseys through Brooklyn. The show works because there’s one strand of connective tissue from episode-to-episode: the dealer. And yet it’s as compelling and surprising as it is for the opposite reason. Each half-hour presents an opportunity to see the world through a fresh set of eyes: a Muslim teenager sneaking pot into her religious family’s walk-up apartment, or a couple who host swinging parties, or a Hasidic man pursued by a zealous Vice reporter, or two parents AirBnb-ing a Bushwick loft that hosts a boa constrictor.

Within the construct of the bottle episode, High Maintenance turns a fish-eye lens into a rich urban panorama, characterizing a diverse and well-trodden city by the individuals, and the stoners, who live in it. While it’s not the only show of its kind – Black Mirror, Room 104, Electric Dreams and Easy are all episodic anthologies – High Maintenance has managed to shape the standalone concept into the purest distillation of itself, eschewing serialization in favor of character studies, rigid plotting for dreamy languor. Like television’s best bottle episodes, every installment of High Maintenance is isolated, even as it exists unmistakably in the hyper-specific world of the show.

These are the sorts of experiments that could so easily appear gimmicky, like cheap contrivances or wish-fulfillment. And yet the bottle format has provided us with some of the best episodes of TV in recent years: The Fly (Breaking Bad), Fish Out of Water (BoJack Horseman), The Suitcase (Mad Men), A Brief History of Weird Girls (I Love Dick), International Assassin (The Leftovers), to name a few.

When it’s attempted, it tends to bring out the best in a show by centralizing a supporting character or extricating a protagonist from their safe space and airdropping them into less comfortable terrain. Shows get to briefly dispense with convention and toy with various cinematic conceits: Fish Out of Water is wordless; International Assassin takes place in purgatory; A Brief History of Weird Girls is a series of monologues. One episode of High Maintenance is even told from the perspective of a dog. Unlike film, television provides the kind of medium where such flights of fancy can be pulled off without the risk of tiring the audience.

In six seasons, Girls did roughly four bottle episodes, and each one highlighed some of the show’s finest work. In the first, season two’s One Man’s Trash, Hannah Horvath’s suspended in a Nancy Meyers’-esque dreamscape during a turbulent, weekend-long rendezvous at Patrick Wilson’s Brooklyn brownstone. In The Panic in Central Park, we follow Marnie as she spends a day with her erstwhile boyfriend, and the city sparkles like it would in a Willa Cather short story. And, in Girls’ final season, Hannah returns to another fancy apartment for a brilliant and bruising battle of wits with a wolfish, literary big-shot in American Bitch. If Girls frequently had trouble spreading the love throughout its central quartet, it reached its greatest heights in the standalones, when its storytelling was richest and most pointed thanks, mostly, to a tapered lens.

The same goes for bottle episodes of Master of None and Atlanta, which were even more formally audacious and unorthodox. In Master of None’s Mornings, set almost exclusively in an apartment, we witness a year’s worth of sunrises between Dev and Rachel from the moment they begin living together. The episode has all the charm of a rom-com, but its construction is arty and its purpose expository. Meanwhile, the seventh episode of Atlanta’s first season, BAN, shows an uninterrupted broadcast of a Charlie Rose-style talk show on the fictional Black American Network, and features only one of the main characters, Alfred. Down to the commercial advertisements for Swisher Sweets and Arizona Green Tea, the episode is committed to its experimentalism and never lets you out of the frame-within-a-frame.

The conventional wisdom is that television in the last decade has acquired such prestige because it’s begun to mimic the sprawling forms of novels or films. But a series like High Maintenance, and the bold, risk-inclined bottle episodes of non-anthology shows, argues implicitly that the real virtues of television lie in its capacity to take the form of a short story.