15
Pique Our Interest with a Potent Teaser

Ateaser is the opening segment of a television episode. Most shows open with the teaser, then cut to the main title sequence. On the page, the teaser is approximately five pages long, but can run longer (the pilot teaser for The Good Wife was sixteen pages). A good teaser does exactly what it suggests: it “teases” viewers with a compelling opening that leaves them wanting to find out what happens next so they don’t change the channel. Pilot teasers often have to work harder because viewers are experiencing the show cold, whereas teasers for established shows don’t have the burden of introducing dynamic characters, or grounding the audience in an unfamiliar world.

The hook. Effective teasers will hook the audience immediately. In The X-Files pilot, the episode begins with superimposed text over black: “The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts.” The first image is of a young woman in a nightgown frantically running through the woods at night. Suddenly a blinding white light emanates from the distance, and a shadowy figure approaches the woman as the wind swirls. The screen fades to white. In the next scene, the woman is found dead in the forest with no obvious cause of death, only two odd marks on her back. One of the crime scene analysts says, “It’s happening again, isn’t it?” The teaser not only poses a paranormal mystery, but it also hooks the audience with the suggestion that it could have actually happened.

Orient the audience. Good teasers also establish the world and tone of the show, and often give defining actions for the main character. In the pilot for House of Cards, the show opens with the sound of a car accident over black. A dog is critically wounded by a hit-and-run perpetrator. Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), the show’s main character, puts the dog out of its misery by choking it to death and says to the audience, “I have no patience for useless things.” By the end of the teaser, the audience learns Frank is the House Majority Whip, and he expects a reward for being instrumental in the President-elect’s victory. The teaser establishes how the show deals with the seedy underbelly of D.C. politics, the Machiavellian code of the main character, and the recurring narrative device of breaking the fourth wall.

In the pilot for Lost, the show begins with an eyeball in extreme close-up. And then the camera pulls back revealing a man, Jack (Matthew Fox) lying on the ground in a tropical forest, staring up at the sky, disoriented. It starts with his eyeball because he’s our POV, our way into the series. Jack wanders onto the beach and sees the chaotic aftermath of a catastrophic plane crash. This may look like paradise, but it’s a form of hell. Jack’s adrenaline kicks in and he races from injured passenger to passenger, giving them aid, establishing himself as a doctor and natural leader. (This indelible shot of Jack’s eyeball was also the final image of the series when it ended its run.)

The crux of the show. Teasers can also establish the central conflict of the show. In the pilot for The Shield, the teaser intercuts a scene of Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his morally gray Strike Team chasing down a drug suspect along with a scene of newly minted, straight-arrow police Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) giving a press conference about how he’s going to clean up the streets of Los Angeles. Aceveda’s crusade to destroy Vic and his law-breaking team runs through all seven seasons of the show.

In Doogie Howser, M.D., the pilot opens with sixteen-year-old Doogie (Neil Patrick Harris) taking his driver’s test with his mother in the backseat. The driving instructor tells Doogie to turn around because there’s an accident up ahead, but Doogie speeds toward the scene. The boy genius springs from the car and offers medical assistance, winning over skeptical police officers in the process. The core of the show deals with Doogie balancing adolescence with his medical career as well as his struggle to garner respect from adults.

The bookend. Other teasers can hook the audience by playing with the chronology of the episode. Breaking Bad frequently places its characters in a precarious situation, and then shows how they got there throughout the course of the episode. In the pilot, Walter White (Bryan Cranston) careens through the New Mexico desert in an RV with dead bodies rolling around on the floor. He steps out of the RV in a rumpled green dress shirt and underwear, records a tearful goodbye to his family on a camcorder, and then wields a gun as the wail of sirens grows louder. The episode comes full circle and shows the aftermath of what transpired in the teaser. But the genius of this teaser is that its payoffis not as we had anticipated: turns out the sirens were not the police but the fire department—who then zoom past Walt to go put out a brush fire. He’s in the clear—and ready to bury the camcorder confession to begin his new secret life as a meth cooker and drug dealer. This setup and pay offstyle of teaser and epilogue is what’s referred to as bookend s.

The (seemingly) innocuous teaser. This kind of teaser presents us with a detail that seems random and innocuous at the outset, but by the end of the episode, we actively discover its real meaning. And it turns out to be a crucial plot point or game changer for one or more of the characters. Take for example the season 5 episode of Breaking Bad entitled “Dead Freight.” The episode opens with a kid riding his motorcycle in an isolated stretch of desert, then stopping, catching a tarantula and trapping it in a Mason jar. As the kid examines the captive spider, we get a bit of foreshadowing: a train whistle in the distance. That’s all. But this out-of-context setup will lead to a tragic payoff. The audience learns at the end of the episode that the kid was a witness to what Walt and his cohorts had assumed was a successful train robbery (they stole mega amounts of methylamine from the freight train). But now they’ve got a loose thread to contend with: the kid on the dirt bike. Before they can formulate a plan, one of Walt’s underlings shoots the kid point blank and kills him. The kid drops the jar and the camera lingers on the spider trapped inside, an apt metaphor for Walt, Jesse, and Mike’s predicament. An innocent child was gunned down, making them all accomplices, and pushing their criminal operation into uncharted, more dangerous territory. The stakes of the series have been exponentially ratcheted up, and it all stemmed from the spider in the teaser.

The case. Crime procedurals like Law & Order or CSI almost invariably open with the crime, and then end the teaser with a wisecrack or one-liner from one of the lead characters. These shows are built on the promise of an unusual crime in the opening that will be solved by the end of the episode. This also extends to medical procedurals such as House, M.D. Dr. Gregory House (Huge Laurie) will be presented with an intriguing medical case that one of his colleagues or he will solve at the eleventh hour.

No teaser. Cable shows like Game of Thrones, The Sopranos, Homeland, and Mad Men simply open the show with their credit sequences and jump into act 1. These shows are heavily serialized, serving almost as mini-movies each week. It’s not as common in network television to see a show without a teaser. However, Castle is an example of a show that begins with act 1. The structure of the show is six acts with no teaser. The show’s title sequence is displayed at the end of act one. Different networks have different structure preferences. It’s not unusual for ABC shows to have six acts with no teaser.

The cold open. Comedy teasers are called “cold openings.” They function the same, although they always end with a punch line or a gag. In addition to being funny, good cold opens introduce the main issue and thematic through-line of the episode. In the season 4 episode of Modern Family titled “Fulgencio,” the cold open deals with Jay Pritchett’s (Ed O’Neill) mother-in-law wanting to name his newborn son Fulgencio, much to his chagrin, but he doesn’t have the nerve to stand up to her. Despite Jay’s best efforts, he can’t get his mother-in-law to like him, which he soon realizes mirrors the relationship he has with his son-in-law Phil (Ty Burrell). By the end of the episode, Jay finally tells offhis mother-in-law, and they reach an understanding. He agrees to name his son Fulgencio Joseph Pritchett.

Direct pickup. Some serialized shows pick up exactly where they left off in the previous episode. A direct pickup is referred to in the TV biz with the abbreviation DPU. At the end of the True Blood pilot, waitress Sookie Stack-house (Anna Paquin) is being brutally attacked in the parking lot by a pair of sinister restaurant patrons late at night. The second episode teaser begins in the same spot with Sookie being beaten. Suddenly, the attackers are whisked away into the darkness, and vampire Bill Compton (Stephen Moyer) helps Sookie to her feet. The direct pickup model gives episodes a cliffhanger feel and also shows how compressed time is in the universe of the program. See also Weeds. (FYI: In daytime soap operas, DPUs are used at the start of each new episode. Given that daytime soaps tend to move, by design, at a snail’s pace, many daytime soaps also utilize “frozen time” between storylines, so that when we cut away from a scene and then cut back to the same scene, it’s as if those characters were frozen in their exact same positions. Frozen time is to be avoided in primetime. When we cut away from and later return to the same scene, best to show some movement or progress in the scene or else there is an artificial stasis in the storytelling.)

The wildcard. Some shows employ teasers that don’t always fit into an established pattern of the series. In season 1 of the anthology show, American Horror Story, some of the teasers consist of past grisly murders that took place in the creepy house that serves as the main setting of the show, while other teasers give backstory on key characters.

In The Walking Dead, many teasers deal with the survival horror aspect of the show, while others touch on poignant character moments. In the season 1 episode “Vatos,” the teaser opens with sisters Andrea (Laurie Holden) and Amy (Emma Bell) reminiscing about their father while fishing on a serene lake, and ends with another character, Jim (Andrew Rothenberg), curiously digging ditches. This is in stark contrast to the gory, suspenseful teasers that routinely place the characters in dangerous situations.

See interview with Dawn Prestwich and Nicole Yorkin on the companion website: http://www.focalpress.com/cw/landau