Utopia Contrasting colors

This “let’s skip to the good stuff” attitude is why Sons of Anarchy leapt ahead 14 months to jump over the time the crew spent in prison. We’d much rather see SAMCRO out causing havoc on the road than ruling the roost behind bars. The real question with this brand of time jump, though, is whether these short cuts feel earned. This is the “have your cake and eat it too” approach to storytelling. Leslie Knope should have a family, Carrie Mathison needs an unbreakable connection to Brody, the outlaws of Charming, California, ought to have their misdeeds catch up to them at some point. All that happens without any of the narrative downsides of slowing our characters down from doing what they do best. But is that honest storytelling? Skipping the rough stuff?

THE HAIL MARY

For some shows the time jump serves as a narrative Hail Mary to inject life into a worn-out, non-functional plot. This was the case with Desperate Housewives, One Tree Hill, and True Blood, all of which managed to buy a little more time to spin their soapy yarns. In fact, in leaping straight from high school to post-college (a “skipping the rough stuff” of sorts), One Tree Hill bought itself several more seasons. But more often than not this feels like the most disingenuous kind of jump. The life changes here feel completely unearned. A 22 year-old kid is now a highly successful novelist on One Tree Hill? Sam became the mayor on True Blood? Everyone on Desperate Housewives played a game of shuffle-the spouse? This kind of jump is a free pass for the writers to do whatever they want without ever having to satisfactorily explain how and why these characters got here.

On a soap, where character consistency and accountability is never the order of the day, those dots are harder to connect. But there is one example where this risky move paid off. That would be Battlestar Galactica, which skipped right out of the dreary colonization plot and right into an exciting Cylon invasion plot one year later. Sure, this move was not without its gimmicks. We all remember fat Lee Adama, don’t we?