Spoilers for The Americans’ “The Magic Of David Copperfield V: The Statue of Liberty Disappears” follow.
This past Wednesday night, The Americans did something shocking. No, I don’t mean bundling poor Martha off on a plane to Moscow. It was after that, when the Jennings family—Soviet sleeper agents Philip and Elizabeth, daughter Paige, who’s recently been drafted into the family business, and their unsuspecting son, Henry—curled up on their couch to watch David Copperfield make the Statue of Liberty disappear. The Jennings, whose entire life is a different kind of illusion, gazed open-mouthed at their period-appropriate cube of a TV set as Copperfield whisked away the symbol of American freedom and then returned it to its rightful place. “Sometimes,” he explained, “we don’t realize how important something is until it’s gone.”
In the CGI era, a stunt like Copperfield’s is no longer likely to surprise us, but what happened next sure did: a cut from the televised Statue of Liberty to a mini-golf-course version of same, accompanied by the caption “Seven Months Later.” After weeks of meticulously escalating tension, The Americans suddenly leapt headlong into a future where the Jennings play hockey in their driveway, their faces, at least for a moment, unlined by worry. (Except for Paige, that is.)
While the time jump was an oddity for a show that’s moved through the early 1980s with steady deliberation, it’s become an increasingly common device on TV over the past few years. Last year, Entertainment Weekly picked out examples including Parks and Recreation’s three-year leap in Season 6 and the time Mad Men catapulted Don Draper 14 months forward after the “carousel” episode. Time jumps have become pervasive enough for Vulture to ask last year, “What’s With All the Time-Jumping on TV?” and for Vanity Fair to suggest, a year before that, that “TV’s Latest Trend Might Already Be Out of Steam.”
I come not to bury time jumps but to praise them and to explain why they seem to have become so prevalent. In the past, they were often used for shock value, or for purely pragmatic reasons: The five-year jump in the 2003 Dawson’s Creek finale gave returning creator Kevin Williamson leeway to wrap up the characters’ storylines even though he hadn’t been part of the show for several seasons and also accounted for the fact that the cast had long since grown past being able to credibly portray characters in their early 20s. But today’s jumps are not being used just to tie up loose ends—the dramatic equivalent of text captions at the end of movies telling you how everyone’s life turned out. They’re occurring midstream, as a way of pushing the story forward rather than bringing it to a close.
Lost used a canny bit of misdirection to shift from its regular flashbacks to flash-forwards, shifting the show’s central question of how its characters got to the mysterious island to what happens to them next. Breaking Bad’s glimpse of Walter White’s future in the last half-season premiere drew a tantalizing question mark over the series’ entire final episodes. We’d invested so heavily in Walter White’s bid for power that we, and he, never stopped to consider what might happen after he got it. Most famously, Battlestar Galactica used an abrupt time jump to transform the newly elected president of an embattled human colony into a weary incumbent, his rosy promises for the future turned instantly to ash. It was a gutting reminder of how quickly hope can turn to resignation, especially when fed through the machinery of politics, and its elegantly simple execution—pushing in on a character’s face, then pulling back to reveal a radically reshaped world—set a standard nearly every subsequent example has reached for.
The entertainment industry is prone to herd instinct, but it’s not just following the crowd that has made time jumps so prevalent. The time jump’s popularity coincides with the rise of cable TV series whose shorter seasons have allowed their creators an unprecedented level of focus and control and a concomitant rise in critical attention. These series may not dominate the ratings—The Americans,’ for one, are fairly dismal—but they claim a hefty slice of the cultural conversation and even the industry’s own awards. The last time a drama won an Emmy for a season longer than 13 episodes was 24 in 2006. Showing the passage of time has always been one of TV’s strengths: No other medium can foster the kind of long-term involvement that year after year of TV viewing builds, where we live our lives as the characters live theirs. But 13 consecutive weeks doesn’t instill the same kind of bond as 22-plus episodes spread out from September to May, where the season premiere seems impossibly distant. So the time jump can be a way of reclaiming some of that emotional real estate, without suffering the inevitable inconsistencies and artistic compromises necessitated by a traditional network-TV schedule. These days, network seasons can seem like lumbering dinosaurs next to the rush of a binge-watched 13 hours or less. But their very sprawl can be part of their strength, and shows with shorter seasons are still finding ways to feel big without taking up quite so much space.
