TV's 10 greatest time-jump sequences

Time skipped: One year

A good time-jump sequence doesn’t need to be flashy to be effective—and if you need that proven, look no further than the one that anchors the eighth episode of the first season of Noah Hawley’s FX series Fargo. It starts on a phone call, as hapless cop Gus Grimly (Colin Hanks) embarks in earnest on his love story with Allison Tolman’s incomparable Deputy Molly Solverson—the kind of woman who wouldn’t let “he accidentally shot me while pursuing a suspect” get in the way of a budding romance with a sweet guy like Gus. As Gus and Molly get down to the business of falling in love while jabbering away about fair food, the camera pans away from his patrol car, drifting across the Minnesota snowscape while Carter Burwell’s Fargo theme kicks into high gear. After a few seconds of solitude, a vehicle pushes into the frame from the right, and it’s Gus again—only this time he’s a year older (and happier), driving a mail truck, having ditched a job he was patently unsuited for something a little closer to his dream. The first season of Fargo has a lot of horrific nastiness to it, but even a decade later, the gentleness of that transition highlights its open heart: good people getting on with their lives, even as rats and snakes like Lester Nygaard and Lorne Malvo are still out there, lurking in the tall grass. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: “Almost two years”

At first glance, there’s nothing especially notable about the lapse of consciousness that Jennifer Garner’s Sydney Bristow suffers in the penultimate scene of Alias’ second-season finale. (Sure, she’d just gotten into a deadly gunfight with an international assassin who was perfectly duplicating her beloved roommate Francie, but that’s nothing all that weird for Alias.) But then, as Syd wakes back up, new details filter in for the viewer: She’s dressed differently, all of a sudden. She has an unexpected new scar. Oh, and she’s in Hong Kong. Written and directed by J.J. Abrams, who disguises the jump with a simple fade cut, “The Telling” takes its time in revealing the truth: Sydney has been out of it for nearly two years—i.e., long enough for her CIA handler/love interest Vaughn (Michael Vartan) to give up all hope of seeing her again and marry someone else. The look on Garner’s face says it all, likely mimicking the expressions of fans of the show, who suddenly had to wait until season three to get some context for this sudden shock. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: Eight months

Better Call Saul deserves a gold medal in time jumping, frequently marking its seasonal shifts with a surprise temporal one. Season four’s midpoint, “Something Stupid,” might be the most poignant. A split-screen montage set over months shows Jimmy and Kim putting in the work at their careers/schemes as Lola Marsh’s gentle rendition of “Something Stupid” tiptoes on the soundtrack. Their detachment is the star of the five-minute cold open as they eat, sleep, work, and live together but never communicate, ending with Kim’s side fading to black before cutting to the title screen. We return in the first person, a POV we assume belongs to Kim, with Jimmy guiding a tour of his new office. The audience has all the necessary information when the camera reveals regular henchman Huell, not Jimmy’s hoped-for partner, on the other end of the conversation. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Time skipped: Eight months

Amazingly enough, the big time jump in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s third season doesn’t come in the form of an elaborate musical number, with Aline Brosh McKenna and her team opting for something far more subtle: Vella Lovell’s freshly pregnant Heather walks into a back room at resident watering hole Home Base and emerges just five seconds later, now eight months pregnant. As noted in an L.A. Times piece talking about the decision, Ex-Girlfriend uses the jump to knock some of its characters out of their ruts—or underline how clearly they’re still stuck in them, with Rachel Bloom’s Rebecca still having a secretive, emotionally stunted affair with Scott Michael Foster’s Nathaniel. (At least White Josh has apparently moved on from his recent break-up—even if he’s now saddled with his new pooch carrying the unfortunate nickname Dog Josh.) [William Hughes]

Time skipped: One minute—and a lifetime

There’s a trope that happens on TV sometimes, where the characters experience years’ worth of time in one episode only to revert back to their original ages. Sometimes this is purely speculative (Grey’s Anatomy’s “Do You Know?”, when Cristina imagines her possible futures Sliding Doors-style) and sometimes it’s timey-wimey magic (The Magicians’ “A Life In The Day,” when Quentin and Eliot spend their entire lives on one quest only to be brought back to the present by a loophole). Riverdale saw this trope and, as with most things Riverdale ever did, said “Hold my beer.” In the sixth-season finale, with a magical comet hurtling towards the town, Tabitha Tate (Erinn Westbrook) uses her chrono-kinetic powers to have one final date with Jughead (Cole Sprouse). The date is one minute long, but also an entire lifetime: as lights flash and emotional music soars, Jughead and Tabitha grow up, have kids, and get old together all from the comfort of their favorite booth at Pop’s Chock’lit Shoppe. It all happens in one brief sequence in an otherwise totally bananas finale—and before the entire town gets sent back into the 1950s for the final season, which is a whole other epic and ambitious time jump in its own right. [Mary Kate Carr]

Time skipped: Roughly three years

Based, as it was, on the lives of real people across long periods of their actual lives, Showtime’s Masters Of Sex often had to play with its timeline a bit to keep up with reality. But it never did so more bluntly, or audaciously, than in season two’s “Asterion,” which elides past large chunks of a down period in the working relationship between William Masters and Virginia Johnson with almost confrontational flair. The most notable scene, for our purposes, is a running conversation between Caitlin FitzGerald, as Masters’ wife Libby, and Anneleigh Ashford as sex-worker-turned-receptionist Betty, which sees Ashford deliver rapid-fire patter about their new offices—even as we round a corner in a stairwell and see Libby is suddenly toting two kids, instead of just one. “Asterion” ultimately runs through three years of real-life history across its run-time, but that single half-second jump covers a decent swath of it—and underlines the ways life just sort of happens, sometimes when you’re not entirely paying attention to where the time goes. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: Eight months

Friday Night Lights was never really about football or getting that W. And the last minutes of the show’s finale, “Always,” remind us of this, as East Dillon’s quarterback Vince (Michael B. Jordan) makes a hail-Mary pass at State. The last-ditch play is caught in slo-mo, set to Explosions In The Sky’s gentle feedback, and as the crowd of Lions fans wait with bated breath, the ball flies through the night. Only, instead of witnessing that last inspiring, against-all-odds feat, the kind a sports movie would spend most of its runtime building to, the show cuts to another football mid-air, coming back to Earth to show that we’re in decidedly un-Dillion environs. And then we’re hit with the time-jump title card: “Philadelphia. Eight months later.” Coach (Kyle Chandler), at last, chose Tami’s (Connie Britton) career over his—she’s now the dean of admissions for a prestigious-looking college—to drive home that it was the everyday drama and relationships that, more than anything that happened on the field, always kept us hooked on this series. [Tim Lowery]

Time skipped: One year

It takes just minutes for freshly elected Colonial president Gaius Baltar to realize he’s completely unsuited, or equipped, for the job he’s schemed and campaigned so hard to steal in Battlestar Galactica’s status quo-smashing second-season finale—that being about how long it takes for the first crisis of his tenure to hit, in a devastating blast of nuclear fire. (It doesn’t help that Baltar, never the most subtle of lovers, gifted the nuke in question to his Cylon ex not long before cutting off ties with her. Whoops!) But the failures of the Baltar Presidency are brought into stark relief as a grief-mad and weary Gaius rests his head on his desk … only to raise it back up again a year later, austere presidential vehicle Colonial One having been converted into Baltar’s personal party yacht and humanity having sunk into the mire of in-fighting on barely livable crap-planet New Caprica. Battlestar Galactica would play with time even more as it jumped into its harrowing third season, dragging humanity into a horrifying Cylon occupation (and the equally horrifying spectacle of plot-relevant webisodes). But that “one year later” jump underlines the sense of moral decay at the heart of Baltar’s victory: Sometimes, the bastards really do win—at least, for a time. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: One month … and then three years

There’s a cute little misdirect in Parks And Rec’s sixth-season finale, as Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope skips forward a month as she prepares to take over a new gig for the National Parks department—and then almost immediately jumps forward again three whole years, i.e., long enough for the empty office to be suddenly filled with bustle, hustle, and, briefly, Jon Hamm. It’s a bit of a message that Parks And Rec wasn’t just interested in the illusion of change as it headed into its final season, as well as a broad acknowledgement that the unstoppable juggernaut the Leslie character had become couldn’t be restrained to simple small-town politicking for any longer. It’s not the most ambitious time jump in Mike Schur’s TV output—more on that one in a second—but it’s still a huge shake-up for laid-back, fun-focused sitcom. [William Hughes]

Time skipped: Unclear—Eleanor figures some of these out pretty fast—but 802 attempts probably adds up to at least a couple of years.

The Good Place exists outside of time. The Bad Place does, too, and so does the Medium Place. Whatever you want to call heaven, hell, and purgatory, it’s all forever. The Good Place spent four seasons meditating on the infinite nature of the afterlife, sometimes in ways that were funny, and sometimes in ways that were devastatingly poignant. Season two’s “Dance Dance Resolution” leans into the humorous side of things. After Eleanor (Kristen Bell), Chidi (William Jackson Harper), Tahani (Jameela Jamil), and Jason (Manny Jacinto) figure out that Michael (Ted Danson), the benevolent architect who helps them settle into the Good Place, is actually a demon and they’re all in the Bad Place, he just resets the timeline. Scrap it, start over, who cares? He has all the time in the world to perfect his pseudo-utopian psychological torture chamber pocket universe.

There’s a time-jump montage as he begins again and again, glimpses of 802 attempts to conceal his deception. But every time, his charges figure him and his scheme out. This early in season two, The Good Place isn’t ready to make broad statements about human nature, as it eventually will in its stunning series finale. But “Dance Dance Resolution” lays the groundwork for the project’s later philosophical inquiries by positing that humans—or at least these humans—will always work to improve themselves and their circumstances, even if they unknowingly have to do it 802 times in a row. [Jen Lennon]