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Best Cold Opens in Television


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Breaking Bad has some of the best cold opens of a show I've ever seen. They usually leave you scratching your head (pink bear) and come back to make so much sense in the end.



Some of the better ones I can recall are:



1.) Better Call Saul - The dialogue between Badger and the undercover cop was great.



2.) Tortuga - When Danny Trejo walks to the back room and sees the turtle... then the axes



3.) Walt's First Moment of Insanity - I think one of the last few episodes of the first season when it's just Walt walking back to his car after he blows the shit out of that building.



4.) The Pilot - Walt in underwear... enough said



5.) Spider in Jar - I was genuinely confused with this one as it didn't seem to have a connection with anything, but knew it would be tied in sooner or later.



Post your favorites!


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I really like the season 3 opener with the Salamanca cousins driving up and then stopping and joining all the people crawling up the dirt road, ending with the iconic Heisenberg drawing.

Yeah definitely one of the better ones. Also the one where they kill that sheriff with the ax is good too.

the second episode of the second season. Found in the second video of this page at the 2 minute mark.

http://blogs.indiewire.com/pressplay/sheila-omalley-breaking-bad

So eerie. Built up the whole second season and I never would've guessed what that was all about till it happened.

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Can we make this a best cold open period thread and not just Breaking Bad :leaving:

To stay on topic though I liked Half Measures cold open a lot. Maybe my favorite.

Agreed on both points. Really, aside from the weird plane crash flash forwards in season 2, I felt that BB nailed all their cold opens.

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The black and white cold opens for Season 2 that eventually made up the short Seven Thirty-Seven Down Over ABQ were incredible. Every time they showed up I was just in jaw-on-the-floor WTF happened???? mode. And then when the plane crash happened at the end of the season I actually clapped at my television screen. Pretty damn brilliant.


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I nominate "Fly". It is not the most complex example of a cold open but manages to be both esoteric and straight-forward. The episode is a two-hander and a bottle episode, set entirely in the super-lab as Walt and Jesse chase after a house fly that could contaminate their latest batch. This doesn't become immediately clear from the opening which features extreme close-ups on the fly edited together in a disorienting fashion with Skyler singing Hush Little Baby. The combination of “WTF is going on?” and the lullaby is disconcertingly effective.



Some of my other favourites include "Half Measures", "Live free or die", "Blood Money", "Dead freight" and the pilot.


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I loved Six Feet Under's openings. It was a guessing game how the person was going to die.

those weren't cold opens, however. i always dreaded the SFU openings,to be honest. Knowing the person was going to die made me a little queasy.

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Some of them were. The deaths were sometimes of people the main characters knew, and featured in the storyline of the episodes.

i thought a cold open meant a scene that occurred before the credit sequence?

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