Beginnings
As one of the early landmarks of complex television, Twin Peaks’ pilot provides an important template for the role of opening moments: it begins with two and a half minutes of opening credits combining languidly paced shots of a lumber mill with dreamy theme music, demanding our viewing patience and immediately setting a meditative tone. To viewers today, these credits are a striking anomaly, both in their length and placement, as most contemporary programs either forgo opening credit sequences entirely or precede shorter sequences with a teaser sequence to immerse viewers in the narrative. Twin Peaks’ pilot follows the credit sequence with an opening scene that both pays off and disrupts what preceded it: we open on Josie preparing for her day in a continuation of the initial languid tone. We then follow Pete to the shore, where he finds Laura Palmer’s dead body, iconically “wrapped in plastic,” and calls the sheriff’s office with a comedically clueless reply from receptionist Lucy. Within the episode’s first five minutes, we are taught to expect jarring juxtapositions in style, ironic undercutting of serious moments, and a dreamy tone leaving viewers unsure how to emotion- ally respond to the action—is Pete’s discovery played for laughs, melodrama, or both? These ambiguous tendencies are reinforced through- out the pilot, which also establishes more than a dozen characters, key plot points and relationships, and the intrinsic norm that each episode takes place within one day of story time. The program’s open-ended mystery and intriguing tone inspires viewers to want to keep watching, while the narrative form and style teaches us how to engage with the ongoing series.
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Alias opens with a scene of Sydney Bristow, with bright red hair, being beaten and tortured by Chinese soldiers as they all argue in unsubtitled Mandarin. The scene plays out for a minute, ending with her handcuffed to a chair and staring at a door, where seemingly her interrogator will arrive. We then cut to another door, where a stereotypically crusty professor enters into a wood-paneled classroom to collect exams from students, including a brown-haired, healthy Sydney Bristow. The story proceeds forward from this point without clear temporal, spatial, or character orientation to explain this transformation, allowing viewers to piece it together as the episode continues; we realize that Sydney is both an astoundingly proficient and stylish secret agent (who ends up imprisoned in Taiwan on a mission at the episode’s climax) and a down-to-earth graduate student. These opening moments teach us to expect disorientation (both temporal and linguistic), a strategy that the pilot script by J. J. Abrams makes clear is by design: the script describes the arrival of the professor with the action directions, “Is this a flashback? A flash-forward? All answers in time. But meanwhile . . .” This moment also instructs us to anticipate unexpected and unexplained juxtapositions between Sydney’s dual careers—from the start, such purposeful confusion is established as one of Alias’s intrinsic norms, as the program invites us to keep watching and to pay attention to try to sort it all out, a mode of engagement that becomes more essential as the plots twist and reverse throughout the pilot and subsequent episodes. This device of starting a pilot at a moment of climax and looping back to explain how we arrived at this point has become popular for many complex series, including Breaking Bad, Damages, Revenge, and Veronica Mars, as discussed more later.
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Other dramas use their opening moments to establish their own unconventional intrinsic norms. Pushing Daisies opens with a shot of an exaggeratedly lush field of bright yellow daisies, with a young boy and his dog running in slow motion. A British man’s voice-over says, “At this very moment in the town of Coeur d’Coeurs, Young Ned was 9 years, 27 weeks, 6 days, and 3 minutes old. His dog Digby was 3 years, 2 weeks, 6 days, 5 hours and 9 minutes old. . . . And not a minute older.” At that moment, Digby is hit by a truck, marking a clear tonal blend of lush stylized beauty and stark presentation of death, as framed by a storybook-style narrative voice, juxtapositions that proved to be a hallmark for the series. The narrator is a key intrinsic norm, providing an authoritative voice from outside the storyworld to allow for swift and densely packed narrative momentum, while providing specific details (such as the precise age of characters), often prefaced with the phrase, “The facts were these.” The sequence goes on to explain the precise premise for the supernatural scenario, with Ned’s gift to reanimate the dead with a touch and the rule that another touch would kill the reanimated person or animal, while portraying the emotionally scarring moments from his youth when he learned about his power. Pushing Daisies’ “Pie-lette” faces the challenge of needing to convey a very elaborate fantasy premise, to establish an unconventional storytelling mode and visual style, and to create a compelling emotional hook to a series that could otherwise be dismissed as a whimsical novelty. It succeeds in all of these tasks, while also creating a core model of weekly mysteries layered with larger character and plot arcs, as well as distinguishing itself as a truly unique program within a medium that rarely sees such distinctiveness in style. The most successful pilots announce what they are, providing a template for both the producers and viewers to move forward within the ongoing series.
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24 is another example of an unconventional series needing to teach viewers how to watch in its opening moments. After the pilot begins with a digital-LED image of the title 24, a voice-over reads the on-screen text, “The following takes place between midnight and 1:00 a.m., on the day of the California presidential primary. Events occur in real time.” Not only does this explanation highlight the importance of temporality as a storytelling element, but the simultaneous text and voice-over makes it clear that the series will be explicit in its narrative strategies, not allowing for ambiguity or confusion. The scene cuts to an image of a cityscape, with a caption reading, “Kuala Lumpur, Local Time 4:00:27,” with the seconds ticking forward to continue the focus on temporality and explicit narration; the shot then compresses into a split-screen window juxtaposing the city with a crowded street scene along with the credits of the actors to introduce the program’s dominant stylistic norm of split screen. The sequence continues in split screen, cutting into dual medium shots of the same character, who turns his head simultaneously in the dual images; this unusual effect teaches viewers that 24 will use split screen to present multiple perspectives on the same action, both creating redundancy and maximizing viewer knowledge. In the sequence leading up to Counter Terrorism Unit (CTU) agent Rovner transmitting intelligence about a planned assassination attempt, the nearly constant split screen provides no essential new story information or perspectives but rather serves as a stylistic tutorial of how the series will visualize stories. This opening scene then spans across the globe to Los Angeles, with a caption indicating the local time as just past midnight, teaching viewers that temporality will be constantly in “real time,” while cuts between scenes will only be spatial, avoiding typical ellipses of time in lieu of space. Although not much “happens” in this opening scene in terms of character or plot, it serves an essential function to orient viewers to the program’s unique narrative style and its repertoire of graphic devices.
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[Awake’s] first 50 seconds is not particularly rich in narrative details— we learn that there was a car accident and that presumably Rex was killed in the accident—but it does provide some key clues on how to watch the series. First, the camera work and editing is established as unconventionally stylized and free roaming across time frames without explicit motivation, encouraging us to pay attention to visual style in a way that few network programs do. The dialogue sets up two poles for how to approach the story that will prove to be crucial—Dr. Lee takes an analytic tactic, as befits his profession, trying to understand how things work and to grapple with the situation’s origins. Michael wants to live in the now, downplaying that anything unusual is happening to him. These poles of engagement help structure the program’s narrative, as his two therapists (one in each reality) want to make rational sense of what is happening to Michael as he flips between reality and a presumed dream, while Michael just wants to enjoy his split lives, in which he effectively can live without permanent loss. As he says at the end of the pilot, “When it comes to letting one of them go, I have no desire to ever make progress.” Contrasting with the midstory start of Alias and other pilots, Awake’s insistence that we begin in the present tense seems to distinguish itself from other high-concept complex television series. These dual approaches mirror how we might engage with the unusual narrative scenario as well—we can try to make rational sense of it to solve a mystery (“so tell me how this works”), or we can enjoy the now by accepting the premise as it is, not as a problem to be solved. Much of complex television fosters a mode of forensic fandom in which viewers are encouraged to solve such high-concept puzzles, to ask “why?” and presume that there is an answer to be found by drilling down and analyzing, much like with therapy or academic analysis. But Awake’s pilot invites viewers to side with Michael, not only as the story’s protagonist but as a role model for accepting what we have been given without wanting to know the reasons why—as viewers, Michael asks that we do not focus on cracking the enigmas of what is “really” going on here or deduce which reality is real.
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In just under a minute and 40 seconds, [Veronica Mars's] teaser has set up a great deal of information and context for the episode and series as a whole. We have established the title character as a savvy and brave young woman, juggling life as a student and paid private investigator. The neonoir style serves to set a cynical and world-weary tone, with clever narration encouraging a more sophisticated take on conventional crime stories. The frank sexual content of adulterous motel trysts signals a level of maturity unexpected in a program that will later be shown to be based around a high school. And the cliffhanger ending suggests that suspense and action will be a prime ingredient of the dramatic action.
It is not hard to see both why Thomas might have preferred this opening for the pilot, highlighting maturity, unconventionality, and suspenseful noir, and why UPN forced the more typical opening at Neptune High to appeal to its core teenage target audience with a more familiar milieu, style, genre, and set of characters. These two openings high- light the central challenge of any pilot: demonstrating how the series is both freshly distinct and yet familiar enough to be recognizable and comfortable, striking the delicate balance between similarity and difference that structures commercial television. The UPN opening starts with the familiar and slowly complicates it with intrigue and genre mixture, while the DVD version puts us in the midst of something unconventional for television, a young female-centered noir, and then links it to the more conventional facets of teen drama. Both educate viewers on the program’s norms and inspire them to keep viewing, but clearly each approach speaks differently to various subsets of the potential viewing audience.