There’s also this thing where the cold opening is unrelated to the rest of the episode. If there isn’t a term for that, there ought to be. It was common on Full House, for example, where they were often filmed ahead of the regular episodes, whenever they had extra time with the youngest child actors.
Cheers! did that all the time. Here are some of my favorites:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OngCQ32QRHQI always felt that was a bit of a cheat by giving a segment that could easily be edited out leaving more room for commercials in syndication, the way comics will often have the first panel be a throwaway to accomodate newspapers that compress the Sunday funny pages.
[quote=“terentii, post:22, topic:684043”]
Cheers! did that all the time. Here are some of my favorites:
[/QUOTE] How is it that I just knew that one of these (the first one actually!) was going to be T*he Blubber-Butts*! Funniest. Bit. Ever.Castle still does.
So does Person of Interest
And Agents of SHIELD. And Mad Men, although they were notorious for making them not just meaningless but actively misleading, Matt Wiener’s way of getting back at AMC executives who demanded them.
I think lots of shows do them.
Yeah, I see those on almost all of the shows I watch currently. Not sure where anyone would get the idea that they don’t do them anymore. I’m hard pressed to think of a single show I watch that doesn’t have a preview for next week at the end.
Me either. ABC, CBS, the CW, Syfy, FOX, almost all their scripted shows have them every week.
Even TAR and Survivor do them.
Oh yeah, those are scripted shows… 
n/m
Arrested Development would always have fake teasers for next week’s show. They’d tease a snippet of a really wacky scene, but the rest of that scene or storyline would not appear next week. Or ever, usually.
It would seem there are at least three kinds of “teasers” or “cold openings”:
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The “straight into the story” type that was used in Star Trek.
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The “preview of what’s going to happen in this episode” type that was used in The Untouchables.
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The “stand alone” type that was used in Cheers!
There are four if you count the “Next week on…” previews, though they’d be “advance teasers” for a show that hasn’t even aired yet.
I’d like to suggest a fifth type: the “expository” teaser that gives first-time viewers an idea of what the show is about. It can either precede, immediately follow, or be an integral part of the theme and titles sequence:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A8xT2tW6-RkJust thought of a sixth: the “Previously, on…” recap that’s used regularly on prime-time soap operas and on other shows with story arcs:
http://www.free-tv-video-online.me/player/divxden.php?id=nd5yhyw8kyq7
Two more “expository” teasers, filmed for the same series:
Two more “expositories” for the same series. The first was used when the show debuted in the United States. It preceded the theme music:
The second, "minimalist" version was filmed after the series switched to color in 1966:
I saw one of those once on MacGyver that was ten minutes long (Mac escaping from some third-world country by using a stolen map in about a dozen different ways). In the credits for the episode, they had “Opening gambit directed by…”, so I guess those things are called “opening gambits”.
…I think an “opening gambit” is a bit bigger than what BigT was talking about. An opening gambit is “making a statement”, an extremely rare thing on television with pretty big production values: that opening scene of MacGyver that you were talking about could have been fleshed out to take up an entire episode. I would say the pre-credits sequence of a Bond movie would be an “opening gambit.”
[quote=“terentii, post:22, topic:684043”]
Cheers! did that all the time. Here are some of my favorites:
[/QUOTE]…and my personal favourite:
… which was ripped off by Friends:
