TV's most audacious season-two openings

For my money, Lost’s second season opener remains one of the most jaw-dropping twists in TV history (and one delivered masterfully by director Jack Bender). “What the hell is under the goddamn hatch door?” is a question plaguing the back half of season one. And the audacious answer comes in the form of Desmond Hume (Henry Ian Cusick). Lost introduces one of its greatest characters with the opening of “Man Of Science, Man Of Faith.” Except we don’t know whose routine we’re following as the episode begins. All we see is a man’s morning schedule: wake up, work out, do laundry, make a smoothie, casually take a vaccine shot, etc. It could be any of the survivors in flashback. But observe closely and the suspense sets in with the items across the “house” ranging from the ’60s to present-day, including a retro computer. Who has this antiquated equipment? Only someone who has literally been living under a rock.

The sudden realization we’re seeing what’s under the hatch on a remote island is a record-scratch moment. Someone has been here all along while the crashed Oceanic Flight 815 survivors have been finding ways to escape? The scene raises the stakes, aided by the switch from Mama Cass Elliott’s “Make Your Own Kind Of Music” to composer Michael Giacchino’s trademark tense score. A blast from up above disrupts Desmond’s activity and he uses a telescope mirror to find out what caused it. The camera then pans up to reveal Jack (Matthew Fox) and Locke’s (Terry O’Quinn) confused faces—and we’re right where we left them, except now we know exactly what they’re about to find. The decision to immediately reveal this huge mystery has a thrilling payoff, and every directing, acting, camera, and music choice coalesces here. They just don’t make em’ like Lost anymore, huh? [Saloni Gajjar]

Since Breaking Bad had one of the best series openings of all time, it makes sense it’d have a brilliant and eerie introduction to season two. But if Walt in his tighty-whities immediately signaled that this was a show to be reckoned with, that eyeless pink bear a year later was a warning that things were about to get a lot more interesting—and a lot darker—than anyone could have guessed. The mysterious teddy, always set against the black-and-white backdrop of the White family’s pool, becomes a jarring refrain throughout a season full of devastation. [Emma Keates]

While Parks And Recreation did provide some real laughs in its season-one finale (capping off a so-so run of episodes), the show came back audaciously and hilariously in “Pawnee Zoo.” When Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman) walks into the Parks office offering “Okay, here’s the situation,” Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) immediately takes over, rapping a full verse of Will Smith’s “Parents Just Don’t Understand” while strutting around the office. Ron patiently waits for her to finish before expanding on what the “situation” is: Someone is on fire in Ramset Park, and Leslie needs to attend to it ASAP. While perhaps not the funniest moment of Parks And Rec, it was an assured reset for a series that had been dogged by The Office comparisons throughout its freshman season. And with this quick, goofy cold open, the series demonstrated that there was indeed a future for Pawnee. [Drew Gillis]

Glee’s first season ended on a relatively subdued note. The New Directions had just lost regionals, but at the last minute they were granted one more year to try to succeed. We ended with a montage, accompanied by Will Schuster (Matthew Morrison) singing Israel Kamakawiwoʻole’s cover of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow.” The opening of season two is a complete 180, a rapid fire barrage of jokes courtesy of Jacob Ben Israel’s (Josh Sussman) video segment, “Glee’s Big Gay Summer.” No one is safe from Jacob’s TMZ-style questions. Will has to defend that his song selections sound like they come from “a drag queen’s iPod.” Quinn Fabray is “a lot less hormonal” after the birth of her “bastard child.” Santana Lopez’s (the late Naya Rivera) boob job is alluded to, while Brittany Pierce (Heather Morris) explains that she spent the summer lost in the sewers. The segment signaled that in its second season Glee would be just as willing to go there as before, but with an energy that comes with being the hottest new show on television. [Drew Gillis]

Game Of Thrones’ season-two opener had one job: to display that Joffrey Baratheon (Jack Gleeson) is going to be a vile, ruthless young king who loves to torture. Job ... well done. “The North Remembers” opens with Joffrey, his bride-to-be Sansa (Sophie Turner), his mother Cersei (Lena Headey), and others watching knights fighting each other. Joffrey isn’t amused enough, and gets ready to humiliate Ser Dontos Hollard (Tony Way) for being drunk. When Sansa—whose father he just had slaughtered in public, by the way—tries to interfere, of course he revels in being more cruel. While the opener establishes the obvious about Joffrey, it’s also a sneakily impressive (and surprising) showcase for Sansa. She smartly helps Ser Dontos by turning him into the court jester as “punishment” when it actually saves his life. It’s a telltale sign of how she’s quick to adapt and learn from her miserable surroundings. No wonder she survived the horrors to become Queen of the North. [Saloni Gajjar]

The opening moments of Peaky Blinders’ second season send up as many questions as it does answers. Yes, we immediately find out that Grace Burgess (Annabelle Wallis), the duplicitous love of Birmingham gang leader Tommy Shelby (Cillian Murphy), does, in fact, survive after getting ambushed on that train platform by a gun-toting Inspector Campbell (Sam Neill). But then we’re immediately thrust two years into the future, where we see a pair of seemingly innocent mothers in all black pushing their prams on the streets of Small Heath. That is, until said moms go running and those baby carriages shockingly explode, intentionally destroying the unofficial headquarters of the Peaky Blinders, the Garrison Pub. Talk about a booming beginning. [Christina Izzo]

The Leftovers is one of the best shows to ever grace our screens. It’s also one of the weirdest. Even if you’ve never seen the show, which investigates a grieving planet struggling to cope with the disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population, a quick summary of just how weird this opening is should make our case crystal clear. Season one, an intimate look at the effects of the aforementioned disappearance on a small, suburban town, ends with its characters on the road to rebuilding trust after a devastating, cult-induced riot. Okay, sure, that’s easy enough to follow. But this is Damon Lindelof we’re talking about—the same man responsible for that shocking Lost scene earlier on this list.

So, naturally, season two starts with a nine-minute, mostly wordless vignette following a cave woman as she loses her family to a cave-in, gives birth, and then dies. It’s jarring and destabilizing and the perfect way to reset a show that truly didn’t give a shit what anyone thought of it. But it gets even crazier: The whole thing started as a massive troll. “We all listen to the Grantland podcast. And we love it and think they’re brilliant. But they both fucking hate The Leftovers,” Lindelof said in a 2015 interview. So the joke was, “What can we do to completely and totally piss off those guys?” Ah, the power of spite (and Lindelof’s weird, wonderful brain). [Emma Keates]

You’d be forgiven for assuming that the British sitcom’s second season opens with a flashback. After all, the last time we saw Sharon (Sharon Horgan), her water was breaking mid-argument with her new groom Rob (Rob Delaney) during their honeymoon. Season two shows that things haven’t changed much with the couple: They’re still married, they’re still arguing, and they’re, oddly, still expecting, with Sharon’s baby bump protruding prominently as the duo lie in bed watching crappy reality TV. Their picture of perfect domesticity is shattered by a shitty little marital fight and a bout of make-up sex that is interrupted—by their toddler-age son. Yes, not only did Sharon and Ron indeed have that baby after the season one finale but they’re apparently well on their way to having a second one, and we have clearly and cleverly been duped into a classic time jump. [Christina Izzo]

When Fleabag’s first season wrapped in 2016, not even Phoebe Waller-Bridge thought we’d ever see the character again. Luckily for us, the creator and star decided to not only revive her iconic protagonist (and her amazing closet) for one more round in 2019, but she did it in the most chaotic way possible: with blood streaming down her face from god knows what fight, in a bougie bathroom with god knows what man. It’s the perfect in media res opening … or maybe it would be more accurate to say in media mess.

This is also our introduction to Andrew Scott’s beloved Hot Priest, if in voice only, who would go on to capture hearts and minds across multiple continents. When Fleabag utters her first direct-to-camera address of the season—a perfect and genuinely surprising “this is a love story”—it’s as much a summary of fans’ relationship with the show as it is of the episodes to come. [Emma Keates]

German-language time-travel series Dark is a show so complicated it requires something resembling a PhD to understand. (Netflix even made an entire companion site to ease the journey.) With about 30 different characters, four different time periods, and a shocking cliffhanger in the very last minutes of season one, fans may have hoped season two would ease them back into the tangled world and family tree of Winden, Germany, just a little bit. Nope. Instead, we’re dropped directly into an underground tunnel with two characters we’ve never met before in an unknown time period, minutes before one of them brutally murders the other with an ax. We don’t even know who one of the characters is for sure until a full season later. But if this is up your alley, there’s much more like it in this series. The way season two ends, for example, is somehow even more confusing than how it began. Still, we would relive the journey an infinite number of times if we could. [Emma Keates]

Not Rue or Jules or Nate or Maddy—no, we don’t catch up with any of the HBO drama’s iconic teen characters in the season-two opening. Instead, we get to hang out with someone’s grandmother: Grandma Fez (Kathrine Narducci), to be exact. And she is not your average nana, unless yours is also one to peel into seedy strip clubs guns a-blazing to shoot out the kneecaps of its owner, who just happens to be Fez’s abusive father and is currently on the receiving end of a very poorly timed blowjob from a dancer. “You’re gonna come live with grandma now,” she tells a young Fezco as they speed off in her convertible. It’s not only a killer introduction to a new character but also a clue that season two would give a much-deserved spotlight to one of the show’s fan-favorite personalities, Fez, played by the late, great Angus Cloud. [Christina Izzo]