Sure shots: The 20 best TV oners of all time

The oner—that is, an extended, uninterrupted take—is most synonymous with film, with standouts like Goodfellas’ “Copacabana shot,” the ambush in Children Of Men, or the intro and pool-party scenes in Boogie Nights having inspired countless cinephiles to enroll in film school. But the single-shot has been experimented with—to beautiful, anxiety-inducing, frightening, or dazzling effect, depending on the series—on TV, too. So with the much-anticipated return of The Bear set for June 27—the show’s 17-plus-minute single shot in season-one episode “Review” remains such a perfectly-constructed doozy all these rewatches later—we decided to count down the very best oners to grace the small screen, from a bloody battle in Game Of Thrones to a sun-kissed homage in Pen15.

Length: 42 minutes, 49 seconds

Technically, this isn’t a oner. It’s several long takes stitched together to make the episode appear as one continuous shot. But it flows together seamlessly as we follow Elliot (Rami Malek) and Angela (Portia Doubleday) through one hellish day of work at E Corp. In “Eps3.4_runtime-error.r00,” Elliot tries to piece together the events of the past four days, which he can’t remember. The constantly hovering camera captures his panic in real time as he realizes he’s been fired from E Corp, Angela is working with the Dark Army, and she’s about to blow up E Corp’s headquarters. Here, the oner immerses the audience in Elliot’s state of mind as he tries, and fails, to prevent a massive tragedy. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 54 seconds

Yes, this is the Kate Bush episode of Stranger Things, the one in which Max levitates in the graveyard, bound for Vecna, until her trusty friends cue “Running Up That Hill” on cassette to bring her back to them. To many, this may stand out as the most memorable moment of the whole series, let alone season 4. However, fans of the oner get a real treat this episode as well. The Byers boys are all set to climb out of the window and escape the fellows entrusted to keep them from leaving the house, when suddenly shots ring out, marking the start of this continuous shot. We stay with the teens as their attempts to flee are thwarted by scary guys shattering windows and bullets spraying in all directions. The fear is palpable, we even see elder bro Johnathan Byers cling childlike to Agent Harmon’s shirt as he fires back at the intruders. Soon the tension is broken, as well as the long take, when Argyle’s bright yellow van pulls up to the house, “Pass the Dutchie” blasting from its speakers. [Meredith Hobbs Coons]

Length: 2 minutes, 58 seconds

The West Wing is known for its “walk and talks,” scenes that follow the characters as they talk to and around each other as they navigate the halls of the White House. But one of the most complex takes place just four episodes into season one, as President Bartlett (Martin Sheen) delivers a rousing speech in a hotel ballroom. The camera follows him as he walks off the stage and makes his way through the back rooms of the venue with his staff. As they pass through the kitchen, the mood changes from celebratory to panic when Josh (Bradley Whitford) informs C.J. (Allison Janney) that they’re five votes short of passing a major bill. Then, it switches back to celebratory again, as the camera pulls away from their conversation and focuses on the President, who doesn’t yet know about the problem with the votes. It beautifully illustrates just how much work the team does behind the scenes to keep the ship running without unnecessarily involving the President and causing a massive panic. This is just another day for them, even though it involves a kind of stress most of us can’t even imagine. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 2 minutes, 7 seconds

The U.K.’s notorious—and, at least early in its run, often pretty compelling—sex-drugs-and-teens show kicks off its fourth batch with a bang and, er, a lot of sex, drugs, and teens—all captured, mostly, in a single shot. “Thomas” opens with Sophia snorting molly in a dark bathroom, the beats from the club muffled and bass-heavy. The Steadicam follows her out into the stairwell, where two revelers are fucking, and up into the club itself, and we’re hit with a blast of color and music and movement. She careens through the mess, past the show’s main characters and up the dance-floor staircase, going by others hooking up along the way. The oner stops there, and the show cuts to her perched over the frivolity below, and then jumping to her death. It’s kind of like the Boogie Nights intro but way, way, way less fun. [Tim Lowery]

Length: Four 11-minute takes

Back before streaming, shows had to take commercial breaks into account when editing, which means that, even if you wanted to do an episode-long oner, the immersion would still be broken whenever it cut to commercial. Mr. Robot got around that with a special uninterrupted broadcast the first time “Eps3.4_runtime-error.r00" aired, but The X-Files, 19 years earlier and airing on Fox, didn’t have that luxury. Director Chris Carter got around this by breaking the episode up into four 11-minute-long takes, one for each chunk between the ads. It works surprisingly well, as the episode plays out in two different timelines, and the breaks allow the episode to switch from Mulder’s (David Duchovny) perspective to Scully’s (Gillian Anderson). The long takes effectively capture Mulder’s panic as he realizes he’s stuck in 1939 and has no idea how to get back to 1998, and Scully’s fear as Mulder has seemingly vanished at sea. It all builds to their long-awaited first kiss in the series—it’s just too bad that it takes place in the 1939 alternate reality and the real Scully doesn’t even know it happened. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 3 minutes, 24 seconds

At the end of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel season four, Midge (Rachel Brosnahan) has fallen pretty far. She’s performing regularly at an illegal burlesque club while Lenny Bruce (Jack Kirby) is preparing for his debut at Carnegie Hall, and the two haven’t spoken since he fled her apartment without a word after she found him passed out drunk on the sidewalk. So it’s a surprise for Midge when she walks off stage to find Lenny waiting for her; he’s come to grovel, as he tells her. But their conversation is cut short when the police raid the club, and the chaos is captured by a beautiful tracking shot that follows Midge and Lenny as they run through the backstage area, open the stage curtain, witness the pandemonium in the club, and then escape out the back. It’s not as technically complex as some of the other oners on this list; all the locations in the scene are pretty linear and close together. But it perfectly captures the surprise of the environment, and the reactions from the dancers in the dressing room are hilarious. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 2 minutes, 11 seconds

This is one of the most gut-wrenching scene on this list. Oners are perfect for getting inside a character’s head and seeing things from their perspective; unfortunately, this is a moment that no one ever wants to live through. Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) comes home to find her mom collapsed on the couch, and she’s not breathing. The camera follows her as she rushes to the phone in the other room, sticks with her as she walks back to her mom, and stays on her as the 911 operator tries to keep her calm while she performs CPR and waits for the ambulance to arrive. It’s clear from Buffy’s description that her mom is dead, and we feel every tragic moment with her as she tries to will herself into believing that this undeniable fact isn’t true. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 1 minute, 19 seconds

This brilliantly funny show about the awkwardness of early-teendom recreates the greatest party-set oner of all time—that is, of course, the pool scene in Paul Thomas Anderson’s (also brilliantly funny) Boogie Nights. Only here, the show swaps lines of coke for Hi-C juice boxes, conversations about wanting to be in porn for ones on the fine art of flicking your cheek to make that drip sound, and Eric Burdon and War’s “Spill The Wine” for the ubiquitous middle-school hit “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” by Will Smith. Pen15 even ends the sequence the same, with the camera following a swimmer underwater as the music turns up (itself an homage to Mikhail Kalatozov’s 1964 film I Am Cuba). [Tim Lowery]

Length: 10 minutes, 10 seconds

It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia has pulled a lot of tricks to keep its energy from flagging across 17 seasons of TV, but few as euphoric as the ten-minutes-and-change that makes up the lion’s share of season 10 stand-out “Charlie Work.” Literally name-checking True Detective as their inspiration, series creators Charlie Day, Glenn Howerton, and Rob McElhenney (along with long-time Sunny producer and director Matt Shakman, demonstrating a bit of why he’s now “future Fantastic Four director” Matt Shakman) stage a hilariously exhausting ode to the show’s love of meticulously deployed chaos, as Day’s put-upon janitor moves mountains to keep his idiot friends from ruining their bar’s surprise health inspection. It’s not just that “Charlie Work” is extremely clever, using green screen and match cuts to hide the fact that, say, the show’s interior and exterior shots are in entirely different parts of Los Angeles; it’s also a fantastic tribute to the Charlie character, the low-key lynchpin of the entire series, capable of doing anything (except read) that he sets his beautiful, chaotic mind to. [William Hughes]

Length: 1 minute, 41 seconds

It was easy to forget that Barry was a comedy in that last season. Though always a dark comedy, Barry balanced its heaviness with a light absurdity that balanced the violence with the Coen brothers’ deftness. By its final season, all that had, more or less, gone away. Barry disassociated from reality in new, unsettling ways as characters who sought redemption were unwittingly cut down before they could atone. Barry became a very sad show in season four. But just before signing off for good, Bill Hader directed one final, full-on comedic episode of Barry, the penultimate installment, “a nice meal,” and its showpiece being one of the funniest shots ever orchestrated on television. Noho Hank’s failed attempt at launching a rocket at Fuches’ house goes wildly off course and devolves into a long take that tracks his equally disastrous escape attempt that ends with him calling Fuches as he falls off a mountain. Hader’s oner feels decidedly Chuck Jones in the best sense, offering an objective view of Noho Hank’s latest foible. Noho Hank actor Anthony Carrigan’s hilarious physical comedy, contrasted against the stillness of Hader’s camera, proves good on the long-standing cliché (often attributed to Charlie Chaplin) true: Tragedy happens in close-up, but comedy is in the long-shot. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Length: 5 minutes, 39 seconds

Steven Conrad’s criminally underappreciated show has so much going for it: the deadpan sad-sack-ness and stylistic lilt of Rushmore-era Wes Anderson, a knotty plot, international intrigue, cat-and-mouse games, lots of left-field humor, and some damn fine music. Fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy covered Bill Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful” for the series, and there are some great originals throughout it, too, like the Bill Callahan-esque cut sung by the show’s depressed aspiring folk musician/undercover spy John (a fantastic Michael Dorman) that soundtracks his way from the Métro to a grocery store (complete with a fatal shootout) to the streets of Paris and then back underground. That the song narrates John’s thoughts as the mission approaches, plays out, and comes to a close makes the Steadicam sequence just that much more impressive. [Tim Lowery]

Length: 12 minutes, 40 seconds

The central sequence of Succession’s fourth-season episode “Connor’s Wedding”—arguably the central sequence of Succession, as a whole—isn’t a “oner” in the traditional sense. (It couldn’t be, really, given that half of it takes place on a plane, and with multiple cameras running.) But the sequence, in which the Roy siblings learn that their complex monster of a father, Logan, has abruptly died while on a business trip, takes on the intimate, ugly energy of one. That’s thanks largely to director Mark Mylod, shooting the scenes in close-to real-time, one long, horrifying nightmare of a take that was later cut and edited down in ways that only amplify the misery of it all, catching each moment of twisted anguish on the Roys’ faces as the world slips away beneath their feet. The oner is often seen as a hallmark of craft and technical skill, more than acting talent, but Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, and Kieran Culkin fill out their award reels pretty much for life in these claustrophobic 12 minutes, each finding ways to collapse in different, awful ways beneath the camera’s unflinching eye. [William Hughes]

Length: 4 minutes, 25 seconds

Better Call Saul’s “Fifi” long take is an excellent example of what people typically look for in an oner. This sprawling shot employs numerous techniques, devices, and digital wizardry while maneuvering around a bustling U.S./Mexico border, a line of semi-trucks, drug-sniffing dogs, and an infectious beat. True to form, the “Fifi” oner shows off the process-oriented, highly detailed action and suspense Better Call Saul made its bread and butter over six seasons. Episode director Larysa Kondracki gives an entire overview of hiding and finding contraband that would be a prime mover of the drugs not only on BCS but its sequel series Breaking Bad, which also smuggled drugs through refrigerated cargo trucks. The shot exemplifies what made Better Call Saul such an extraordinary show. What could’ve been a simple line of dialogue (“They smuggled the goods in through ice cream”) becomes a masterful bit of stagecraft that envelopes the viewer in a thorough table setting that deepens the entire show. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Length: 2 minutes, 4 seconds

Band Of Brothers is never a particularly easy show to watch, but there’s something especially haunting about “Why We Fight.” In the series’ penultimate episode, Easy Company finally enters Germany as World War II is winding down. The cruelty and devastation they find there is beyond comprehension; John Orloff, a writer on the series who conducted the interviews with the real members of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment that play before every episode, reported that even 55 years later, they couldn’t speak about what they witnessed when they found the Landsberg concentration camp. Not wouldn’t—couldn’t. But all that comes later in the episode; it opens with a man playing a violin. As the camera pulls out, we see he’s part of a string quartet. They’re playing Beethoven, standing in the middle of a devastated town as the villagers sort through what’s left. The camera weaves through this scene for nearly two minutes before it pans up to Easy Company, who are supervising the cleanup from the second floor of a wrecked building. We don’t yet have context for what’s going on—the opening and closing scene is a bookend, while the bulk of the episode is a flashback to what happened in the month leading up to that moment—but it sets an appropriately devastating tone for the episode. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 53 minutes, 38 seconds

The sixth episode of The Haunting Of Hill House is comprised of five shots expertly stitched together to make it look like one long take. Series creator Mike Flanagan broke down the whole thing on Twitter, including the length of each segment and where the cuts are. It’s especially impressive given that “Two Storms” takes place in two different timelines. In the present, the siblings are dealing with the death of their sister, Nell (Victoria Pedretti). In the past, the family is panicking after Nell disappears during a massive storm. The whole thing is monumentally impressive, especially because the whole set was built and planned around this one episode. The sets for the funeral home and the interior of the mansion were built right next to each other with a hallway connecting them to accommodate the camera movements and staging. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 2 minutes, 30 seconds

David Lynch and Mark Frost’s third season of Twin Peaks wasn’t easy to watch. Its discursive structure and inexplicable character motivations left viewers confused but entertained, even when little appeared to be happening. Few can do what Lynch does, and after six episodes of breathing the toxic air of a post-recession Twin Peaks, “Part 7” starts teasing a payoff as pages from Laura’s diary and Cooper’s hotel key reemerge. The trees are shaking, the electricity is crackling, and the first of mystery start smoking. Is it happening again? Every day, the show’s cycles of abuse and violence continue unabated, swept into a neat pile and tossed into the bin at the Roadhouse, literally. Lynch literalizes this with a two-and-a-half minute unbroken shot of a man sweeping the bar floor as “Green Onions” plays over the soundtrack. What breaks the tension? As usual, Jean-Michel Renault operating the sex trafficking ring that got Laura killed 25 years prior. Yes, it is happening again.

The most famous oners involve unbroken takes that move through a scene, requiring orchestration from production. Lynch does something more impressive: he asks the audience to be patient. Much of Twin Peaks’ ominous whooshing is designed to create an atmosphere that carries over scenes. The sweep carries between episodes, leading to the atomic-age masterpiece “Part 8.” “Part 8” might have blown up Twin Peaks, but the sweeping oner lit the fuse. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Length: 10 minutes, 43 seconds

Daredevil set the precedent for oners on the show in just the second episode of season one with an unbroken three-minute hallway fight. That was impressive on its own, but each successive season upped the ante with longer, more complex one-take fight scenes. It’s almost a good thing that the series ended after its third outing, because it’s hard to imagine how they could have topped the prison fight in “Blindsided.” In this episode, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) finally unmasks Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), and traps him inside a prison full of violent criminals paid by Fisk to take him out. On a technical level, the scene is stunning: the hallways and cells of the prison are cramped, leaving little room for the camera to maneuver and the stunt performers to move around. The fight drags out into several different rooms and spaces as well, which means it covers a lot of ground. It was a fitting and impressive final oner for the show; I have no idea how Daredevil: Born Again, the upcoming continuation series from Disney+, is going to top it. Maybe they shouldn’t even try. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 51 seconds

One of the most impressive things about this oner is how seamlessly it slides into the episode. It’s just one moment amid the much larger, nearly 50-minute battle that takes up most of the runtime of “Battle Of The Bastards.” But in less than a minute, director Miguel Sapochnik and cinematographer Fabian Wagner capture the absolute bloody chaos as Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) forces clash with Ramsay Bolton’s (Iwan Rheon). Even though the battle takes place in a large, open field outside of Winterfell, the long take makes it feel claustrophobic, a tangle of men and horses and shields and swords. When the camera gets on the ground with Jon as he fights his way through enemy soldiers, it becomes viscerally clear that he’s fighting for his life—and barely surviving. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 6 minutes, 8 seconds

Sometimes a No. 1 pick is the most obvious choice for all the right reasons. And this, to be sure, is one of those times. Even 10 years after its premiere on HBO, it’s tough to shake—let alone wrap your head around the logistics of—this six-plus-minute stunner pulled off by director Cary Joji Fukunaga, cinematographer Adam Arkapaw, & Co. The Steadicam sequence starts as Rust (Matthew McConaughey)—high after infiltrating a biker gang—Ginger (Joseph Sikora), and other members of the Iron Crusaders descend on a housing project to rip off drug dealers. After they bust into the apartment, it’s clear Rust’s “30 seconds in and out” mantra/instruction won’t work as the tension boils over on both sides of him and the first of many shots is inevitably fired. Without any editing manipulation—something Fukunaga claims creator-writer Nic Pizzolatto argued for in post-production—it all becomes more frightening, anxiety-inducing, and realistic, with threats brewing and blowing up in the background (heightened by some remarkable sound design) that make you feel like you’re there, in hell, and that there’s no way out. [Tim Lowery]