The Best TV Time Jumps of the Past 20 Years

The critically acclaimed, low-rated 1980s ABC drama China Beach is fondly remembered for its moving and gritty stories, set mostly in a U.S. Army hospital during the Vietnam War. It’s also remembered for its boldest storytelling twist. The Season 4 premiere suddenly jumps to 1985, where many of the series’s character s— including nurse Colleen McMurphy (Dana Delaney) — are coping with the war’s lingering trauma. For the rest of the season, episodes move around in time, adding resonance to what Colleen and company are going through in Vietnam.

China Beach’s great leap forward didn’t draw enough TV viewers to save the series from cancellation; but it had a huge influence on TV creators. The surprise time jump has been a power move ever since: sometimes used in conjunction with flashbacks (as in Lost, which blew up its own flashback structure by suddenly flash-forwarding) and sometimes used to get past the tedious aftermath of a dramatic moment and set up a new plotline (as in Desperate Housewives, which wrapped up one story and started another in the same season finale).

Listed below are 10 of the best time jumps of the past 20 years — a heyday for the tactic. Some are well-known; some less so. All are examples of how toying with a show’s chronology can reinvigorate it.

Battlestar Galactica (four seasons, 2004-09)

Time jump: 380 days at the end of the “Lay Down Your Burdens” (Season 2 finale), followed by four months at the start of the “Occupation” (Season 3 premiere)

The first two seasons of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica are primarily concerned with two questions: 1. Can the galaxy’s last remaining humans outrun the killer robot armies determined to exterminate them? 2. Can the bickering humans even agree on a future for themselves? Halfway through the series’s run, showrunner Ronald D. Moore makes both questions more urgent, introducing a storyline where: 1. The sleazy politician Gaius Baltar (James Callis) becomes president by promising to settle a newly discovered planet. 2. The enemy Cylons invade that planet and subjugate humanity. In addition to allowing Moore and his team the chance to construct an Iraq War analogy with the “hero” and “villain” roles reversed, this jaw-dropping plot twist showed TV writers everywhere that it’s okay — fruitful even! — to push a story straight to its crisis point rather than delaying the inevitable.

Fringe (five seasons, 2008-13)

Time jump: 24 years at the start of “Transilience Thought Unifier Model-11” (Season 5 premiere), following a teaser of the time jump in “Letters of Transit” (Season 4’s 19th episode).

Spending nearly all of its final season in a dystopian 2036 isn’t even the craziest maneuver in Fringe’s wild run. This is a show that introduces an alternate universe in its Season 1 finale, then spends Season 4 in a different timeline, populated by characters not quite like the ones viewers knew before. The abbreviated Season 5 uses its time jump as a way to bring some resolution to all of Fringe’s parallel worlds and their shadow-wars against invaders from the future. It also puts the show’s core team of heroes through one more harrowing adventure together, giving fans reason to root for some kind of a happy ending — with a Fringe-y twist, of course.

Parks and Recreation (seven seasons, 2009-15)

Time jump: Three years at the end of “Moving Up” (Season 6 finale) and then decades into the future in “One Last Ride” (Season 7 finale).

Parks and Rec fans are drawn to the show because it balances the realism of modern politics — where it takes forever to get anything done, in part because the citizens themselves resist change — with the optimism of dedicated civil servants willing to keep trying. The final season gives those fans a bit of a break, by showing the happy bureaucrat Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) and her friends deep into the next, more successful phase of their lives. They still face challenges — including a temporary, mysterious falling-out between Leslie and her mentor Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) — but the arc of Season 7, all the way to its gentle epilogue, bends toward justice for all of these good people who have been doing their best.

Hannibal (three seasons, 2013-15)

Time jump: Three years at the start of “The Great Red Dragon” (Season 3’s 8th episode).

Hannibal creator Bryan Fuller didn’t know his show’s third season would be its last when he chose to spend the last six episodes telling a story set three years further along in the lives of serial killer Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen) and FBI profiler Will Graham (Hugh Dancy). Nevertheless, that choice brings the whole franchise full circle. The final episodes loosely adapt Thomas Harris’ novel Red Dragon, the novel that first introduced Lecter and Graham (and was adapted into movies twice before). Hannibal is effectively a Red Dragon prequel through its first two-and-a-half seasons. As it ends, it jumps ahead to show how Fuller’s versions of Harris’ characters would play out that story.

The Americans (six seasons, 2013-18)

Time jump: Three years at the start of “Dead Hand” (Season 6 premiere).

This show about undercover KGB agents embedded in Reagan’s America moved steadily through the 1980s for most of its run, tracking married couple and Soviet spies Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Philip Jennings (Matthew Rhys) as their commitment to the cause waxes and wanes the longer they enjoy America’s middle class suburban comforts. The jump ahead to 1987 for the final season isn’t just a way to move the Jennings more quickly to the end of their story; it’s also thematically crucial, because that’s the year that the Iron Curtain started to fall and the Reagan years were in their twilight, causing so many old Cold Warriors to question how they’d been spending their lives.

Halt and Catch Fire (four seasons, 2014-17)

Time jump: Four years in “NIM” (Season 3’s 9th episode), three more years at the start of “So It Goes” (Season 4 premiere).

Like The Americans, the drama Halt and Catch Fire — a sprawling saga set against the rise of computer-centered technology industries in the ’80s and ’90s — maintains a steady march through time in its early seasons, rarely leaping ahead more than a few months in the lives of its main characters. But just as the pace of change accelerated in the tech sector at the turn of the decade, so this show zooms forward in its final dozen episodes. The series’s protagonists were perpetually a few steps too late or a few degrees off the mark when it came to revolutionizing the way people would use personal computers; so in the homestretch we see them come up just short on one idea after another, from the Internet itself to search engines.

Better Call Saul (six seasons, 2015-22)

Time jump: Six years in “Nippy” (Season 6’s 10th episode).

It’d be inapt to call the time jump towards the end of Better Call Saul a “surprise,” given that the whole series actually begins in 2010, with the shady drug lawyer Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) managing a Cinnabon in Omaha, Nebraska under the name Gene Takavic. But while the show periodically offers brief vignettes of Omaha Gene in earlier seasons, not until there were four episodes remaining does the story shift fully to 2010, to reveal how Saul — or more accurately Jimmy McGill, his real name — reckons with the crimes he’d committed in both this show and its parent series Breaking Bad. Some fans had hoped that Better Call Saul would cover those Breaking Bad years, but instead the creators skip past them, choosing to make this show both a prequel and epilogue: the story of a man learning crime costs more than it pays.

Brockmire (four seasons, 2017-20)

Time jump: 10 years in “Favorable Matchup” (Season 4 premiere).

Probably TV’s unlikeliest candidate for a radical time jump, this foul-mouthed cult comedy spends three seasons following a jagged redemption arc for Jim Brockmire (Hank Azaria), a disgraced, debauched baseball announcer trying to rebuild his career and his personal life — and causing more damage along the way. The final season takes a wild swing, jumping to the year 2030, as a relatively stable Brockmire becomes the Commissioner of Major League Baseball and tries to figure out how to make the game popular again at a time when daily global crises and the rise of AI are making America’s national pastime seem less important. Rowdy, imaginative, and ultimately optimistic, Season 4 ventures into the unknown to distill what Brockmire was always really about: the idea that none of us run out of second chances so long as we’re still alive.

For All Mankind (four seasons, 2019-present)

Time jump: Roughly 10 years between each season.

This global space race alt-history imagines a universe where the Soviet Union lands on the Moon first — with a woman cosmonaut! — and thus makes outer space exploration more of a priority than it has ever been in our real world. Season by season, For All Mankind tracks the changes wrought through the years by this one inflection point, with big jumps between decades happening at the end of each season. (Next season will cover the 2010s; the plan is to catch up with our decade in the sixth and final season.) The series’s fans now anticipate these leaps, which don’t just reset the show but also reimagine reality.

House of the Dragon (one season, 2022-present)

Time jump: Three years in “Second of His Name” (Season 1’s 3rd episode), 10 more years in “The Princess and the Queen” (Season 1’s 6th episode), and six more years in “The Lord of the Tides” (Season 1’s 8th episode).

As this list proves, it’s not that strange anymore for a show to spring a time jump, as a transition between seasons or even as a mid-season switcheroo. House of the Dragon, though, tried something unusual in its first season, leaping across the years from episode to episode all season long. Set centuries before the events of Game of Thrones (a series criticized in its later seasons for compressing the distance between major events without any overt time jumps), House of the Dragon depicts the decline of an empire, but to get to the epic civil war at the heart of George R.R. Martin’s book Fire & Blood, the adaptation first covers decades of bad choices by the royally messed-up Targaryen family. Rather than spending multiple seasons of setup, the show moves ruthlessly through the timeline, sometimes abruptly swapping out younger cast members for older ones. It’s all in the true spirit of the time-jump gambit. After all: Why wait?

Noel Murray is a freelance pop culture critic and reporter living in central Arkansas.