What the deal with time jumps?

[Christopher]

The West Wing also played fast and loose with the timing of the electoral process. There was an episode set around New Year's Day 2000, where the characters had the argument about whether it was the millennium that year or next, and it was sometime late in Bartlet's first year, I think. Which would mean he would've had to be elected in November '98 and inaugurated in January '99, two years out of sync with real presidential elections.

 

[Robert Maxwell]

I agree with some of the other posts in this thread. Unexpected time jumps are done when the writers (or studio execs) are not happy with the current direction or status quo, so they jump into a future in which all those annoying facets of the show no longer matter. The West Wing example seems apt here.

Some shows are no doubt planned to have time jumps in them, like 24. In that case, the reasoning is the same, but it isn't done as a desperation move to save the show.

The new Battlestar Galactica had several time jumps, it's just that the biggest one covered a year, so nobody remembers the ones that jumped six weeks or a few months (which I think happened a few times.) The New Caprica "One Year Later" was done specifically to service the outcome of the New Caprica storyline, which was itself done in an attempt to revitalize the show (and it worked, as far as I'm concerned.)

 

[RoJoHen]

The new Battlestar Galactica had several time jumps, it's just that the biggest one covered a year, so nobody remembers the ones that jumped six weeks or a few months (which I think happened a few times.) The New Caprica "One Year Later" was done specifically to service the outcome of the New Caprica storyline, which was itself done in an attempt to revitalize the show (and it worked, as far as I'm concerned.)

I really enjoyed the "One Year Later" jump in BSG, but the subsequent jumps in Season 3 got kind of annoying because I had a hard time following them. They were never made very clear.

 

[Kirkman1987]

This thread reminds me that one of the ideas that might have been used in Twin Peaks in a potential third season was to use a 10 year time jump, where Cooper would have been a pharmacist who solved mysteries or something. It was a weird and desperate Idea, but had some goofy charm to it.

 

[bigdaddy]

The West Wing also played fast and loose with the timing of the electoral process. There was an episode set around New Year's Day 2000, where the characters had the argument about whether it was the millennium that year or next, and it was sometime late in Bartlet's first year, I think. Which would mean he would've had to be elected in November '98 and inaugurated in January '99, two years out of sync with real presidential elections.

That's because the show started in 99 so they had to have Barlet elected in 98. That's no big deal, but going in season 5 "The mid terms are in a few weeks" and then THE NEXT EPISODE in season 6 go "The presidential election starts in 8 weeks" when it's THE NEXT DAY, doesn't make any sense. No one cared because most of season 6 and seven were good.

 

[bigdaddy]

If VERONICA MARS had been renewed for a fourth season, I believe the plan was to skip over her undergraduate years and jump straight to her starting training at FBI Academy . . . .

That was a last ditch effect to save the show, he didn't really want to do that. If there was ever a movie it would have ignored that.

 

[Checkmate]

Father Time likes to work out on occasion.

 

[Christopher]

The West Wing also played fast and loose with the timing of the electoral process. There was an episode set around New Year's Day 2000, where the characters had the argument about whether it was the millennium that year or next, and it was sometime late in Bartlet's first year, I think. Which would mean he would've had to be elected in November '98 and inaugurated in January '99, two years out of sync with real presidential elections.

That's because the show started in 99 so they had to have Barlet elected in 98.

Yes, thank you, I know when the show started. But they didn't "have to" have the show set in the present. They could've set it 2 years in the future.

 

[bigdaddy]

The West Wing was a 90s show, it needed to start when it did. It was never really a big deal because at least they stuck with it throughout the show. Making May 31th take place in 2004 and the next day June 1st 2005 is a joke!

 

[Theodore Jay Miller]

The Britcom "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" had a two-year time jump in the middle of an episode.

 

[wamdue]

The Britcom "The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin" had a two-year time jump in the middle of an episode.

The Last Sontaran Part 2 (Sarah Jane Adventures) featured a 6 week time jump in the episode, it is speculated that the events of the Doctor Who episodes The Stolen Earth/Journey's End (featuring 4 characters from The Sarah Jane Adventures) took place in that time jump.

If that was not confusing enough for you, the episode is a sequel to the Doctor Who episodes "The Sontaran Experiment/The Poison Sky"

 

[StarshipDefiant]

Dollhouse did time jumps a few times, actually mostly i think to retcon the shows dating (I'm convinced the first few episodes were meant to take place in Summer/Fall, 2008), but the real jumps, "Epitaph One" and "Epitaph Two: Return" notwithstanding, would be a few months between "Omega" and "Vows", the season one finale and season two premier with the time period used to explain away Echo's long term engagement (and I do mean engagement), another one happened about midway through the second season, the episode was..."Meet Jane Doe" I believe it was, wherein three months pass during the episode (one scene to the next, actually) which probably works for story purposes anyway (as not much apparently happens in those three months).

I think there were a few others here and there, but mostly in between episode time passing which obviously isn't to uncommon, a few seemed to somewhat be inconstancy, either from the actual (as opposed to intended or originally planned) airdate to catchup dates (Like I said, I am convinced for some odd reason I just cannot explain that season one is meant to be in circa Summer, 2008 the start at least, to being April, 2009 in the finale. The odd thing? Dialogue hints it's only been a few months). Season two, as I said, has that jump, and has references that counting the Jump, since "Vows" to..."A Love Supreme" has been about six months. when "Vows" was, I have no idea (arguments are of three to five months after "Omega")

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles seems to have done it as well, Season one takes place about September-November 2007 (Interestingly enough, that never clicked with me until I all out read about it), with season two for some reason, indicating (onscreen references) that it's gone from November, 2007-mid-2009 which is odd pacing if you ask me, the first three episodes take place within hours or days of each other.

It's my understanding that Heroes does it as well, but I am not sure if it's mostly between seasonal jumps, or if there's jumps during the seasons.

A recent episode of Stargate: Universe has had a time jump of about a month, albeit the episode actually took place during this month, but it is a month (or a month's worth of time at least) later at the end of the episode then it was at the beginning of the episode.

These probably are nothing significant per se, but it is time jumps, as the topic mentions...

 

[Sci]

The West Wing also played fast and loose with the timing of the electoral process. There was an episode set around New Year's Day 2000, where the characters had the argument about whether it was the millennium that year or next, and it was sometime late in Bartlet's first year, I think. Which would mean he would've had to be elected in November '98 and inaugurated in January '99, two years out of sync with real presidential elections.

That was just West Wing's fundamental conceit, though -- that presidential elections in its world happened during the midterm elections in our world.

Once you accept that conceit, the show held up pretty well for its first four seasons, timeline-wise. Barlet was elected in November '98 and took office in January '99; the first season began in late August or early September '99 after he'd been in office about nine months and was suffering popularity setbacks, the season one finale took place in the summer of 2000, the first two episodes of Season Two took place immediately afterwards, and then episode 2.3, "The Midterms," took place over the course of about three months leading up to the November 2000 elections, which were midterms in the WWverse, and then the next election didn't happen until early Season Four, the 2002 presidential election where Bartlet defeated Florida Governor Richie for re-election to the presidency.

 

[bigdaddy]

Golden Girls has a 3 month jump in the last episode.

 

[Christopher]

The West Wing was a 90s show, it needed to start when it did.

Again, why did it "need to?" It was set in an alternate reality with a different president, it wasn't based on real current events (except for the out-of-continuity 9/11 special), so it didn't have to pretend to take place in the present day. It could've easily pretended to be set two years in the future. Plenty of shows are not set in the same year they air. Many shows are set decades or centuries in the past or future. Lost's first four seasons were all set within a period of a few months in 2004, so by the fourth season the show was at least 3 years in the past of its airdates. The "present-day" episodes of the new Doctor Who have usually been set one year in the future, and the UNIT stories of the original series were assumed at the time to be set about a decade in the future, though that was later forgotten.

 

[Sci]

The West Wing was a 90s show, it needed to start when it did.

Again, why did it "need to?" It was set in an alternate reality with a different president, it wasn't based on real current events (except for the out-of-continuity 9/11 special), so it didn't have to pretend to take place in the present day. It could've easily pretended to be set two years in the future. Plenty of shows are not set in the same year they air. Many shows are set decades or centuries in the past or future. Lost's first four seasons were all set within a period of a few months in 2004, so by the fourth season the show was at least 3 years in the past of its airdates. The "present-day" episodes of the new Doctor Who have usually been set one year in the future, and the UNIT stories of the original series were assumed at the time to be set about a decade in the future, though that was later forgotten.

I would presume that Aaron Sorkin decided to set The West Wing in roughly real time to give him the option to comment on current issues in a more natural context than trying to shoe-horn them into some future timeline. But that's just my guess.

 

[Christopher]

^Two years isn't very far in the future, especially when, as I said, the show was already in an alternate reality and didn't address current events directly, only by fictionalized analogy. (Again, the 9/11 special was not in continuity with the rest of the series.) I'd say the conceptual distance between the Bush administration and the Bartlet administration was hugely greater than that between 1998 and 2000. So keeping the show in sync with the real electoral cycle wouldn't have made any real difference to the storytelling.

 

[Sci]

^Two years isn't very far in the future, especially when, as I said, the show was already in an alternate reality and didn't address current events directly, only by fictionalized analogy. (Again, the 9/11 special was not in continuity with the rest of the series.) I'd say the conceptual distance between the Bush administration and the Bartlet administration was hugely greater than that between 1998 and 2000. So keeping the show in sync with the real electoral cycle wouldn't have made any real difference to the storytelling.

Yeah, but those decisions might not have come until after the first scripts were written and the decision to set presidential elections during real-life midterm elections was made. Sorkin may have made the decision to set the show in more-or-less real time to give him the option of commenting on contemporary issues when he started, and then later on decided to do things as you describe he did them. (Also, bear in mind that The West Wing started in 1999, two years before Bush took office, so commenting on the Bush Administration wasn't Sorkin's original intent.)

 

[Christopher]

^But that's just it. Simply by postulating a president -- mind you, a President of the United States, perhaps the single most important individual on the planet -- different from the one in the real White House, you're automatically putting yourself at a considerable remove from the real world. So a desire to incorporate actual current events into the show is inconsistent with that very premise. So it doesn't make sense that they would've felt some need to stay in sync with real time in order to reference current events. So why not make the decision right off the bat to set the show two years in the future? Or, heck, why not start the show in Bartlet's third year and say he was elected in '96? To me, either approach would more sense than changing the entire United States electoral cycle. Presidents come and go, but presidential elections have always been in years that are multiples of four.

I mean, really, aside from that episode where Toby and the others debated when the millennium begins, how often did the calendar year even come up in the show? Most of the time, there wasn't any clear indication of when it was taking place -- that's why they were able to play so fast and loose with the chronology in later seasons. So I see no reason why it "needed" to be set in the year of its broadcast.

 

[Sci]

^But that's just it. Simply by postulating a president -- mind you, a President of the United States, perhaps the single most important individual on the planet -- different from the one in the real White House, you're automatically putting yourself at a considerable remove from the real world. So a desire to incorporate actual current events into the show is inconsistent with that very premise. So it doesn't make sense that they would've felt some need to stay in sync with real time in order to reference current events. So why not make the decision right off the bat to set the show two years in the future? Or, heck, why not start the show in Bartlet's third year and say he was elected in '96? To me, either approach would more sense than changing the entire United States electoral cycle. Presidents come and go, but presidential elections have always been in years that are multiples of four.

And yet, he did have the characters explicitly identify the year Season One started in as being late 1999, and he did have them explicitly say Bartlet was elected in '98. So while the idea of keeping the show in real time to address current issues might have been a bit inconsistent with the idea of postulating an entirely different history for the U.S., that doesn't mean he didn't do it for that reason. (I'm not saying he did, either -- but it's as good a reason as any to set the show in real time and have presidents being elected during real-life midterms as any.)

I mean, really, aside from that episode where Toby and the others debated when the millennium begins, how often did the calendar year even come up in the show?

Quite often in the early seasons, actually. The most prominent example is the episode from Season One where Leo admits to the press that he had a relapse during the presidential debates, and he explicitly identifies the year 1998 as being during the campaign.