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How We Got Here / Live-Action TV

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Examples of How We Got Here in Live-Action TV

  • The 4400: "Lockdown" opens with a scene showing Diana, a very ill Maia, Nina Jarvis (who has been shot) and several other women who have barricaded themselves in the NTAC gymnasium. Someone is pounding at the gym doors, desperately trying to get in. Diana raises her gun in order to defend herself and everyone else. The doors open and it turns out to be Tom. He and Diana then point their guns at each other. The storyline then flashes back ten hours and it is revealed that a 4400 named T.J. Kim released a Hate Plague which caused all of the men to become insanely angry.
  • Accused: The form of every episode's plot. Often what the case is about isn't even revealed until late in.
  • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. has done this multiple times, including the second half of the third season, which opens with sequence labeled as taking place in three months time, which turns out to be the climax of the season finale.
  • Alias frequently begins with this device, starting with showing Sydney Bristow in peril, then moving "XX Hours Earlier" to narrate how she got there. The series pilot does this effectively, as does the "reboot" post-Super Bowl episode.
  • Alta Mar: Both seasons 2 and 3 start in the midst of chaos, with the majority of the following episodes explaining how the characters reached that point.
  • Altered Carbon has several flashbacks hinting at the protagonist's Dark and Troubled Past, so it's not strange when "Man With My Face" opens with a brief shot of Kovacs hooded and manacled, before cutting to Kovacs racing a wounded Detective Ortega to the hospital. However Kovacs later gets captured, whereupon it's revealed that everything we saw was a How We Got Here.
  • Angel's penultimate episode, "Power Play", begins with Angel killing Drogyn in the teaser; after the credits, the episode begins with the subtitle "19 hours earlier." Also seen in "The Shroud of Rahmon".
  • The first episode of Apple Tree Yard opens with Yvonne being transported to court for a trial, with episodes one and two explaining why she's there and what she's being charged with.
  • The B-plot of Arrow explains how Oliver got the skills to become a vigilante.
  • The season four finale of Babylon 5 featured scenes from far in the series' future, one of which showed a clip of Garibaldi being held hostage and apparently being shot. Almost the entire first half of season five was devoted to showing what happened to cause that scene.
  • Band of Brothers: Episode 5 is a strange example. The show begins with a flash forward to the assault on the SS company. The actual assault takes place in the middle of the episode, and later there is a flashback to it.
  • The Australian miniseries Bastard Boys opens on the morning of April 8th 1998, the day Patrick Stevedores sacked its entire workforce to replace them with non-union workers. It then cuts back to November 1997, when John Coombs received an anonymous tip that Patrick and the Federal Government were planning this.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003):
    • About a third of the second season episodes begin with a main character either about to do something evil, or in major peril, and then say "A bit before".
    • "Act of Contrition" opens with Starbuck trapped in a viper.
    • "Resurrection Ship part 1" opens with Apollo adrift in space.
    • "Black Market" had one shoved in, thanks to Ron Moore thinking the episode didn't work at all, and needed to start with something to grab the audience's attention.
    • The final episode has some flashbacks of many of the main characters prior to the Apocalypse How that starts the series.
  • The Bones episode "Aliens in a Spaceship" opens with Bones and Hodgins trapped in a buried car, and then backs up to show how they got there.
  • Breaking Bad:
    • The series opens on a man driving an RV recklessly through badlands dressed only in a gas mask and underpants. He glances behind him: a flash of what looks like two dead bodies sliding around on the floor. Beside him is an unconscious man, also in a gasmask. The episode then cuts to three weeks ago to show how we got there.
    • The second episode of Season 2 begins showing Jesse's car riddled with bullets out in the middle of the desert, with a dead body lying on the sand, barely visible behind it. The rest of the episode shows us what happened to get to that point.
    • Several other episodes begin with a bizarre scene shot in close-up so you can just get the barest idea of what's going on. Then the last scene shows you the whole thing. And of course, the king of them all is the burned, one-eyed teddy bear in the pool, which takes the entire second season to explain.
    • One episode of Season 4 starts off with a scene showing Walt's glasses on a wooden floor with one lens popped out, several drops of blood falling on the ground, and a shot of Walt's moccasins and hand as picks the glasses off the ground, the knuckles notably tinged red. The very next shot after the intro, set a few days prior, shows Walt's moccasins again just to make it clear something bad is about to happen to him.
    • Two episodes of the last season begin with a bearded, gaunt Walter after his 52nd birthday, now sporting a full head of hair once more. The first showing him using an unfamiliar name purchasing a machine gun, and the second showing him going into his now abandoned and dilapidated house to find the hidden vial of ricin. The pieces don't all come together until the very last episode.
  • The Brittas Empire: The first episode of series 3 employs this trope, showing Gordon Brittas in court being tried for murder. The episode then goes through a series of flashbacks to show just how seven gangsters wound up dead in his leisure centre.
  • The first season finale of Brooklyn Nine-Nine opens with Jake drunk off his ass, buying an entire bar a round of drinks and celebrating being fired from the NYPD. We then jump back a week to see Jake being asked to drop a drug-dealing case about a local politician. Eventually, it turns out that Holt and the FBI deliberately 'fired' Jake so he could go on an undercover mission to infiltrate the drug dealers.
  • Capadocia:
    • In the first episode of the first series, the opening scenes show the aftermath of a prison riot and the search for the inmate who started it.
    • In the second series, a bride is seen running through a field, escaping from police helicopters. She's Monserrat, wife of a powerful drug lord. Later in the episode it's revealed she was escaping a massacre started by a Federal Police raid during the wedding reception.
  • Castle:
    • A Deadly Affair opens with Castle and Beckett apparently aiming guns at each other, and then skips back to three days earlier.
    • "Set-Up" begins with Castle being half-led, half-dragged by two guys in hazmat suits who refuse to answer his questions about "how serious it is". He's left with a silent, stricken-looking Beckett, and then the episode goes back thirty-six hours.
    • "Always" starts with Beckett hanging off the roof of a building by her fingertips before going back three days.
  • Chernobyl begins with Valery Legasov, alone in his apartment, recording his final memoir about Chernobyl shortly before hanging himself at precisely 1:23:45 in the morning. Then we jump back two years earlier at 1:23:45 in Pripyat and the explosion of the power plant in the distance, and Legasov appears at the end of the episode being called in to advise on what Soviet officials have been assured is a very minor accident.
  • China Beach's "Holly's Choice" tells the story in reverse beginning with Holly flying away in a helicopter and weeping. Throughout the story, the caption "Earlier..." appears between scenes as it's discovered that Holly chose to abort the child she was carrying after a dalliance with a soldier who was killed; the episode ends with their lying down to have sex.
  • Used very creatively the Charmed (1998) episode "Forget Me... Not". Instead of simply reversing back to the beginning, the sisters' memories were erased and they used a spell to relive the same day to discover what happened and how they lost baby Wyatt.
  • Both Chuck and My Own Worst Enemy use this trope regularly, which seems to be a spy-story staple.
  • Every episode of Cold Case is like this, with the teaser showing the moment of the episode's murder and the events immediately preceding it, then gradually showing what happened to lead up to said murder, all in flashbacks.
  • The Confessions of Frannie Langton: The series starts with Frannie being arrested for supposedly murdering her mistress and her mistress' husband, then via flashbacks it's revealed what led to that point.
  • Control Z: Episode seven shows the events which led up to the mass hack.
  • Season 4 of Covert Affairs opens with Annie clearly about to go on a suicide mission. Shots are fired. Cut to "10 weeks earlier". It takes 10 episodes into the season to catch up. (She planned the whole thing, faking her death so her target wouldn't see her coming.)
  • Criminal Minds:
    • The episode "Minimal Loss" starts with a news coverage of an explosion and then rewinds three days to find out how it happened.
    • "100" began with the aftermath of a scene and then the rest of the episode is the team justifying their actions to Section Chief Erin Strauss.
    • Similar to "100", the season seven premiere "It Takes A Village" has the team once again justifying their actions except this time it was to the US Senate Committee.
  • Cruel Summer jumps back and forth between 1993, 1994, and 1995, exploring how Jeannette Turner and Kate Wallis turned from casual acquaintences to mortal enemies.
  • The Crowded Room: The series opens with Danny and Ariana shooting at a man in broad daylight, injuring him along with two bystanders. Afterward, a psychiatrist talks with him in jail, hearing along with viewers what led them there.
  • CSI: The first part of the sixth season finale begins with a hostage crisis developing; the rest of the episode shows events leading up to it.
  • CSI: Miami managed to encapsulate an example of this trope into The Teaser of an episode, showing a suspect's recent experiences in flashbacks as he's running to escape the series leads.
  • CSI: NY's eighth season premier cold opens with a prescription drug capsule falling slo-mo into a blood pool. The camera very slowly pans out to show us three men lying on the floor of a pharmacy. The third victim is Det. Mac Taylor. Cut to opening credits, after which we are taken 12 hours back in time, brought back to the opening and carried forward, all the while interspersed/tied together with what's going on in Mac's subconscious mind.
  • It's the series format of Damages. The first season's first scene shows us a delirious Ellen running around NYC bloody and scared, and her boyfriend is found dead in the bathtub. The whole season jumps between past and present, telling us How We Got Here. For the second season, we see Ellen apparently shooting someone with a gun twice. While on the third, we see that same girl's boss getting hit by a car.
  • Daredevil (2015):
    • Season 2 episode 8, "Guilty as Sin," ends with Frank Castle throwing his trial so he can meet with Wilson Fisk, who sent him a message, with the last shot being Frank encountering Fisk lifting weights. The next episode, "Seven Minutes in Heaven", jumps back in time to Fisk's arrival at prison. We are shown how Fisk is passing his time as he plots the demise of a rival kingpin within the prison and (as later revealed in season 3) waits for his long-term manipulation of Ray Nadeem to pay off, buys the loyalty of a few inmates, and arranges for his messasge to passed on to Frank. This nine minute prologue ends with the last shot of the previous episode, and establishes that Fisk seeks to use Frank to get rid of Dutton.
    • "No Good Deed" plays with it: we open with Fisk showering in his penthouse at the Presidential Hotel, under FBI guard, and then jumps back in time about 20 minutes to show Fisk being escorted into the penthouse by Ray Nadeem and Benjamin "Dex" Poindexter following the Albanians' attack on the FBI motorcade transporting Fisk to the hotel and Dex killing the attackers. When it catches up to the present, Fisk is snapped out of his musings by Arinori (one of the bribed agents on his payroll) barging in with a towel and telling him to get dressed so his lawyers can speak to him.
  • Dark Hole starts after the smoke has turned people into zombies. Then it goes back a few days to when the smoke first appeared.
  • Dear White People: The first episode opens with the Blackface party and then shows how it came to this point.
  • The aptly named Dharma & Greg episode "How This Happened" begins with a swarm of police wrestling Larry into a cop car and Dharma saying "How did this HAPPEN?"
  • Doctor Who:
    • "The Girl in the Fireplace" begins with Versailles under attack and Reinette calling for the Doctor through the titular fireplace, and then the title sequence. We don't learn the full context until the climax.
    • "Love & Monsters" lampshades the trope: Elton begins his tale by recounting an encounter with the Doctor that he put at the beginning because it's a "great opening", in which he encounters the TARDIS by some warehouses in Woolwich. He wanders into the building, is cornered by a Hoix, and then watches as the Doctor and Rose subdue the creature. When the story reaches that point again, Elton fast-forwards through it, reminding the viewer not to get too excited as that's where they came in.
    • "Under the Lake" ends with the Doctor deciding to go 150 years back in time to view the events that led to the situation he's found himself in, leading to the next episode, "Before the Flood".
  • Dollhouse:
    • The episode "A Spy In The House Of Love" started by showing someone about to be wiped, and a gunshot. It then went back 18 hours.
    • The episode "Belonging" starts with a blurry shot of a bloody Topher saying, "I was just trying to help her...I was just trying to help her..." It then goes back and tells the stories of how Priya came to the Dollhouse and how Topher ended up covered in blood and repeating that mantra.
    • The season one finale "Epitaph One" is set ten years ahead in a Bad Future where wiping has become weaponized and commonplace, all of civilization has ended, half the world has been programmed into being mindless killing machines, and oh, Topher's gone completely and heartbreakingly insane because it's all his fault. Season two slowly sets the stage up for this to become a reality, with the series finale fully filling in the picture "Epitah One" sketched out.
  • Escape at Dannemora: The series opens with a scene in which Tilly is being interviewed by the state inspector general. Most of the series is a flashback leading up to this point. At the end of the final episode, we see the first part of this scene again from a different camera angle.
  • Several episodes of ER started out with an end-point prologue while the bulk of the episode explained how things got to this point.
  • The final episode of Fargo begins with the camera panning over a mountainous area (previously unseen in the series), followed by a wrecked snowmobile and a frozen lake with a hole in the ice. This foreshadows the fate of a main character.
  • The infamous Farscape episode "Scratch 'n' Sniff" follows a variation of this trope in which it's revealed that the bulk of the episode is a recounting of events by John Crichton to a disbelieving Pilot, and is presented in such a way that the actual accuracy of the account is left ambiguous.
  • Firefly:
    • "Trash" opens with Captain Mal sitting naked on a rock in the middle of a desert, then we go back to see how it happened.
      Mal: Yep... yep, that went well.
    • "Out of Gas" opens with a nearly deserted Serenity, followed by a double How We Got Here. The episode cuts between current events, one set of flashbacks showing how the crew got in this mess and another set showing how the crew first came together.
  • This happens about Once an Episode in the cop show Flashpoint. They started to limit their use of it in Season 3, but in Season 4 they were back to using it almost every time just as they had been.
  • The pilot episode of the 2000 version of The Fugitive begins with Kimble escaping from the wrecked prison van. As he runs through the woods, pursued by Gerard, flashbacks reveal his ideal life (Happily Married to a beautiful wife), his wife's murder, his wrongful arrest and conviction, and the very crash of the prison van.
  • General Hospital:
    • The show broke with the conventional soap opera conventions of storytelling during its February sweeps 2007 hostage crisis storyline by showing the end result first (an explosion caused by a bomb) in the pre-opening credits teaser and then going back to where things had left off during the previous episode to show the events that set it in motion after the opening credits. In fact, the explosion depicted at the beginning of the episode did not happen for another 15 episodes after the first in which it was depicted. Each of those episodes opened with the explosion, albeit from a differing perspective.
    • They then tried to create the same tension two years later with the much-maligned "Toxic Balls" storyline. This one took 10 episodes for the "flashback" to get to the beginning of that storyline. Each of those episodes opened with Patrick being interrogated by Agent Rayner, followed by Agent Winifred Leeds giving a report on people still in the hospital.
  • Ghosts (UK): The last episode of series 4 opens with the ghosts looking at what appears to be the burning remains of Button House. The episode then flashes back to 8 hours earlier, and there are various points where it looks like a fire is about to start, only to be prevented. It turns out that it wasn't Button House that burned down, but the Gatehouse after being struck by lightning.
  • Goodbye My Princess: The opening scene shows Xiao Feng and Cheng Yin jumping into the River of Forgetfulness. The next few episodes show what led to this.
  • This is the main framing device on The Good Guys. An episode will begin with Dan and Jack in some very dangerous situation and then we jump back to how the case began and how the heroes got into that predicament. Throughout the episode you will get shorter flashbacks that explain why certain weird things happened and what some of the characters' reasons and motivations are. eg one flashback shows how a pimp decided to become a pimp because of something his father said twenty years before.
  • Hanna: Season 3 begins as Hanna and Abbas are fleeing while chased by Pioneer commandos. Over the next six episodes it's shown just how they ended up in that situation.
  • The second season of Hannibal opens with Jack walking into Hannibal's apartment and wordlessly drawing his gun, having somehow discovered the truth. After Hannibal disarms Jack and they spend two minutes beating the hell out of each other, we jump back twelve weeks...to the two of them having dinner together. The timeline catches up to the fight in the season finale.
  • Horatio Hornblower: The second installment of this miniseries has two parts "Mutiny" and "Retribution". "Mutiny" starts with Commodore Sir Edward Pellew visiting Lieutenant Hornblower in prison, telling him and the audience that he's going to be tried for his life. The whole episode is told in one long Flash Back, though not entirely from Hornblower's point of view specifically. The episode ends in prison when Pellew and Hornblower finish their conversation. The next part, "Retribution", resumes the story where it was left, but this time it's more like In Medias Res with telling scenes of badly injured Lieutenants Bush and Kennedy who are treated in the prison infirmary. The lieutenants face a trial and they continue to give a full account of what happened during the rest of their mission. It's being constantly interrupted with court testimonies and the judges' private discussion happening in the present. "Retribution" thus mixes In Medias Res with Anachronic Order.
  • Due to its general flashbackyness, How I Met Your Mother does this a lot. In the first 2½ seasons there have been five How We Got Here episodes. And it's also the premise of the entire show. It's right there in its title. However, when the first eight seasons of so were over, the audience knew next to nothing about said mother.
  • How to Get Away with Murder: uses this constantly, flashing forwards to the aftermath of a brutal murder, then back to show how it eventually happened, with the events syncing up in the middle of the first season. Season two appears to be doing the same thing.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, "Execution" begins with Stabler and Huang interrogating the prisoner. The Teaser ends as the prisoner attacks Huang. The bulk of the episode shows how and why they came to be interviewing the prisoner.
    • Another episode, based on the Natalee Holloway case, pairs this with In Medias Res. It starts at the typical midpoint of the episode, with the suspects in question having been arrested and arraigned on murder charges. Although there are never any flashbacks, the dialogue serves to fill in the investigation that usually happens in the first half of the episode.
  • Lessons in Chemistry opens on a taping of Supper at Six and establishes Elizabeth as a poised and respected celebrity. It then jumps back seven years to show the events that led up to it, beginning with her time as an overlooked lab technician.
  • Several episodes of Leverage begin with a snippet from a climactic moment from later in the episode and then jump back in time to show all of the events leading up to that moment. This most often takes the form of showing Nate in some kind of dangerous or apparently hopeless situation.
    • Season one's "The Second David Job" opens with Nate held at gunpoint by the mark and asking if he's going to kill him
    • Season three's "The San Lorenzo Job" begins with Nate being dragged before a corrupt European dictator and the season's Big Bad and admitting that "we didn't have a chance in hell."
    • "The First David Job" opens with Nate pulling a gun on the mark and apparently in the midst of a breakdown, which turns out to happen very early on as part of the con. In the opening of "The Grave Danger Job," it's Hardison who's in trouble and the scene happens about halfway through the episode, after which point the rest of the episode follows the team's efforts to rescue him.
    • The series finale is an interesting example. It appears to be a straight version mixed with most of the cast dying. However it actually turns out to be The Rashomon in which Nate was lying so that they could manipulate Interpol into allowing them access to hidden files.
  • The pilot episode of Limitless begins with Brian already fleeing his friend's murder scene while being chased by FBI agents, and follows his pursuit into the subway. It stops just before the train (almost) hits him.
  • Lost:
    • The episode "The Brig" differs from the usual flashback structure by having the episode begin with Locke speaking to an unseen prisoner in the brig, then showing the events leading to that moment instead of pre-crash, off-island flashbacks. Another episode in which flashbacks are used this way is "Exposé".
    • "Catch-22" opens with one of Desmond's prophetic visions (in this case, Charlie getting shot in the throat with an arrow), and most of the episode leads up to this.
    • The episode "316" is a more traditional example, with a cold opening followed by a single episode-long flashback (as opposed to several flashback intercut with the main plot as traditionally used) revealing the events leading up to it. That makes one of the only three episodes of the show not to feature a secondary storyline.
    • There are arguably elements of How We Got Here to the series as a whole, what with its non-linear time structure. Aside from the general format of showing why the characters boarded the doomed plane, other episodes have revealed the origin stories of other characters who found their way to the island. "Live Together, Die Alone" introduces Desmond's backstory and the sailing race that led to his marooning on the island. "The Man Behind the Curtain" shows how Ben Linus, leader of the Others, came to the island as a child with the DHARMA Initiative. "Some Like it Hoth" and "The Variable" reveal why Miles and Daniel, respectively, boarded the freighter bound for the island. Finally, "Ab Aeterno" reveals the powerful backstory of Richard Alpert, the immortal advisor of the Others and his arrival to the island on the Black Rock slave ship.
    • "The Other 48 Days" shows us how the tailies got where they are and "Not in Portland" and "One of Us" as a set show how Juliet came to be on the island.
  • The L Word: Season 6 opens with the reveal that Jenny's dead. Over the rest of the season it's shown what led up to this, starting three months before.
  • Many of the original Maverick episodes start with a teaser of a dramatic moment that will occur ~30 minutes in.
  • Episode 27 of Mimpi Metropolitan starts with Bambang and Alan bruised and cornered by a woman interrogating them. The episode goes back to two days prior to show how the ending of the previous episode leads to that.
  • Murdoch Mysteries:
    • "Anything You Can Do..." opens with Murdoch, his father and a Mountie in an abandoned building being shot at by several people (the exact number is the subject of some debate among the characters). Then the action shifts to some days earlier when Murdoch is called to a suspicious death on his home turf and meets the Mountie, Sgt. Jasper Linney. From there, the story goes back and forth between events in Toronto and the situation in that abandoned town, which proves to be in Linney's jurisdiction.
    • "The Murdoch Trap" opens with Murdoch lying unconscious on the floor of what proves to be a cage. After he comes to, he finds a hanging mannequin that looks like Julia with a recording of her voice playing and is greeted by his captor James Gillies. The story goes back to events a week earlier and then alternates between that backstory and Murdoch's present predicament.
    • "D.O.A.", the Noir Episode, opens with a blurry Shaky P.O.V. Cam of someone staggering into the morgue and trying to strangle Miss Hart while snarling "You did this to me!" Following the reveal that it's Murdoch himself, clearly not in his right mind, we go back twelve hours to how it all began.
  • At least one episode of MythBusters shows the group as they're about to launch into the final, full-scale experiment, then has one of them say they can't start at the end. Most of the rest of the episode then shows how they got to that stage, with the payoff at the very end.
  • NCIS:
    • The episode "Cloak" uses How We Got Here to fit the usual progression of the agents starting the episode at a crime scene, investigating. The action reaches a cliffhanger and freezes. Flashbacks then explain how it all came to be before wrapping back around to where the opening left two of Our Heroes in danger.
    • The Cold Open for the episode "Requiem" had Tony DiNozzo in a suit, running full-tilt through a warehouse, taking out two gunmen without missing a beat and diving over a pier to rescue Gibbs and a civilian after the car they were in was forced off the pier. The rest of the episode reveals who the civilian was and how Gibbs got involved.
  • The episode "Revenge" for Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide starts with Cookie being chased by Evelyn, a mystery girl being pelted with volleyballs, and Ned hanging upside-down. The rest of the episode shows how that all happened.
  • The pilot forThe New Normal shows how the household came together.
  • NUMB3RS: "Blowback" begins with a montage of scenes from late in the episode, then skips back to the beginning of the case.
  • Once and Again's season one finale "A Door, About To Open" begins with Lily and Rick's families finally about to meet, and then flashes back to the day before.
  • 100 Deeds for Eddie McDowd pilot episode has Eddie, after being taken to a dog pound, retracing his steps off how he became a dog.
  • The Other Two: An episode opens with Brooke and Carey in Times Square discussing Chase's VMA performance and how their lives are now ruined, before flashing back to the events that lead up to the scene.
  • The Poirot adaptation of Sad Cypress begins with Elinor Carlisle standing in the dock about to hear the verdict of her murder trial, bitterly reflecting in voice-over on how quickly her life completely fell apart. We then go back to a point just before her life completely fell apart to see exactly what happened.
  • Power Rangers RPM did this several times. The series starts with the city of Corinth being sealed off against attack, and Scott, Summer, and Flynn zooming in at the last minute. The series skips to a year later, when they're already established as Rangers, and introduces Dr K, Dillon, and Ziggy. Each of them (except for Dillon, but he has amnesia) has an episode titled after them, which shows a normal episode interspaced with flashbacks showing what kind of people they are, and how they got into Corinth, leading directly into the first episode again.
  • The Pretender did this in the second and third episodes involving Argyle. Both episodes start with Jarod and Argyle in some predicament, then go back and show how they wound up there.
  • Pretty Little Liars uses this trope quite frequently, at least once per most seasons:
    • "The Lady Killer" opens with Hanna distraught in the aftermath of a crime scene (Caleb was shot during Nate's attack on Emily - unlike Nate, he survives).
    • "Unbridled" begins with Spencer in a forest at night in a wedding dress, pulled up short after a sharp sound which is the veil caught in a bear trap (she and the other Liars are modelling wedding dresses at an event and Spencer took off to follow someone. That someone may have put human bones in her girdle...).
    • "Taking This One To The Grave" begins at another crime scene, this one on Thanksgiving Day, with all the Liars except Spencer present. Spencer was arrested the previous day for murdering Bethany Young; Mona told the others she could prove Alison was A... and was then brutally murdered. In her own home.
    • "Over My Dead Body" begins with the girls, wearing party dresses and covered in dirt (later a common motif in many of their promo photos) sitting in an interrogation room as the police discuss the fact that they're murderers. It skips to 48 hours beforehand. Each girl was forced by A to do something to ruin their own lives because A was holding their therapist hostage. When the girls complete their tasks A gives them coordinates to where they have allegedly buried her alive, only for them to start digging and realize that they have just been framed to look like they are burying a murder weapon in the woods.
    • "Tick, Tock, Bitches" begins with Aria, Emily, and Spencer tearfully burying someone, crying that if they didn't, they would be committed for murder and that this is what Hanna would want. The episode skips back four days, to reveal that the person they are burying is Dr. Rollins. Hanna hit him with her car, and she is sitting in a state of shock while the other girls dig.
  • Psych did this with the episode with Uncle Jack where most of the episode is Shawn, Henry, and Gus explaining how they were led on a treasure hunt by Jack Spencer. Most of the telling takes place in the interrogation room after the three of them are arrested.
  • Psychopath Diary: The series starts with Dong-sik being arrested for seven murders. Then it flashes back to before he found the diary.
  • Queen for Seven Days: The series starts with Chae-gyeong/Queen Dangyeong attempting to kill Jungjong. Then it goes back seven years to show the events leading up to this.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • In "Thanks for the Memory", the characters wake up four days after the opening scene with no memories of these days, a half-finished jigsaw completed and two of the characters with broken legs.
    • Several times in "Backwards", on the planet where time runs in reverse. For example, Lister lands on the planet with a black eye and bruised ribs, and doesn't know why until the bar-room brawl (or tidy) breaks out (during which his injuries get healed).
    • "Back In The Red" opens with Lister in prison with a living Rimmer, and apart from that and one other scene, the entire three-part storyline is dedicated to how they got there.
  • The first episode of ReGenesis begins with David rushing to the lab in a panic when he's hit by a car. The rest of the episode flashes back to a seemingly unrelated story, and the season continues from there. It isn't until the second-to-last episode of the season that the story catches up to the first scene, by which point we've found out the events of the first episode and the flashforward aren't so unrelated after all.
  • Used as the opening to each successive season of Revenge, the reveal typically taking place mid-season.
    • The first starts with a man, presumably Daniel, being shot on the beach the night of Emily and his engagement party.
    • The second starts with a salvage team discovering the sunken remains of the boat "The Amanda" along with a dead body.
    • The third starts with Emily in a wedding dress being shot by an unknown assailant and falling off a yacht.
    • Done for the episodes "Duress" and "Sabotage".
  • Ringer's 19th episode starts out with the apparent death of the main character and then captions "Two days earlier..."
  • Rise of Empires: Ottoman: The series opens during the middle of the siege of Constantinople, when one of the Ottoman cannons explodes as a result of overuse with Mehmet knocked to the ground by the force. It then flashes back to his upbringing and the build-up to the siege.
  • Scorpion:
    • The episode "True Colors" starts with the team in evening wear (except Sylvester) standing next to a burning sports car while a government agent berates them, then shows how they got to that point.
    • The third season episode "It's Not The Fall That Kills You" opens with Walter falling through the air, plummeting to almost-certain death, then cuts to six hours earlier to show how he wound up there.
  • The Seinfeld "backwards" episode "The Betrayal" showed the scenes of the story in reverse order, à la Memento, with on-screen notations "three hours earlier", "20 minutes earlier", etc. Lampshaded with:
    Jerry: Bless you.
    0.4 seconds earlier
    Jerry's date: Achoo!
  • The pilot episode of Servant of the People starts with a history teacher learning he has been elected to be president of the country. While the episode itself follows him around on his first day, it is peppered with flashbacks that explain how such a situation came to be.
  • The first episode of The Silent Sea opens on the protagonists Teetering on the Edge of a chasm in a space shuttle that's crashed on the Moon. We then return to Earth before the mission started. Unlike most examples of this trope, the story catches up to this point before the first episode is over.
  • In Smallville, Lana is apparently fatally shot at the beginning of "Crisis". Kryptonite enabled a time travelling phone call. The whole thing becomes a time loop of sorts as the Kents and Chloe try to change the future, with little success. Except Clark could, due him having Awesomeness Is a Force. It is actually shown in Hereafter, an episode in the previous season, that Clark is able to Screw Destiny.
  • Done several times in Stargate SG-1, most notably in "Meridian", which begins with Daniel returning to the SGC with a lethal dose of radiation, and one of the two subplots in this episode is spent on the mystery behind it.
  • Star Trek:
    • "The Menagerie" from Star Trek: The Original Series. However, this example is more a case of incorporating an older piece of footage into an episode. It does not begin in the "middle of the story" and then flash back.
    • Star Trek: The Next Generation:
      • Played with in "Cause and Effect". The very first thing we see of the episode is the Enterprise collide with a suddenly-appearing starship and blowing up. After the title screen, we see the Enterprise intact and learn this is seemingly the trope...until the ship explodes again shortly afterward. It's only then that you realize the episode is not really How We Got Here but a "Groundhog Day" Loop.
      • "Suspicions" plays the trope straight. Guinan visits Dr. Crusher in her quarters for an elbow problem, but Crusher reveals she's about to be drummed out of her position. Most of the episode goes into the story behind it — then, when it finally catches up, we see Crusher find a way to solve the episode's problem (which would've led to her disgrace).
    • Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
      • "Whispers" opens with O'Brien alone in a runabout, making a log entry about being on the run from "them". He goes on to explain how he first became aware of "them" and how that eventually led to him fleeing the station.
      • Similarly, "In the Pale Moonlight" begins with Sisko making a log entry describing the events of the preceding few days, which is then cut back to periodically as said events are depicted.
    • Star Trek: Voyager:
  • Strangers From Hell starts with Jong-woo hiding in his room as someone walks past. Then they throw the door open, beat Jong-woo up, and drag him out. The first episode doesn't show the attacker's face, but episode ten reveals it's Moon-jo — and things didn't happen quite the way the prologue shows.
  • The first episode of Stumptown opens with two guys driving Dex's car, with Dex in the trunk, while "Sweet Caroline" by Neil Diamond plays on the stereo, then jumps back two days to show how they got there.
  • Supernatural, on occasion. We get one of the brothers doing something ridiculously out of character, and then 'Two Days Earlier' with a reasonably logical explanation for that (normally 'it was a shapeshifter, not Dean/Sam at all').
  • Sweet Home (2020): The first episode starts with Hyun-su walking out of the building and the soldiers shooting him. The rest of the series shows the events leading up to this.
  • Temps de chien: The series' first episode begins with its main character, Antoine Meilleur, on some beach and receiving a call from his cellphone before throwing it to the water. The rest of that episode and the second episode then shows what happened that led to this first scene.
  • Thunderbirds: "Move And You're Dead" starts with Alan and Grandma stranded on a bridge, with a bomb that will explode if they move. While Thunderbirds 1 and 2 are on their way to save them, Alan tells Jeff about how they ended up there.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • "The Howling Man" starts with elderly David Ellington explaining that his "is a fantastic story". Fade to forty years earlier and a young Ellington arriving at a monastery run by a very interesting group of religious men...
    • "To Serve Man" begins with the doomed protagonist telling the viewer how he came to be trapped on an alien ship and forced to eat.
    • "The Bewitchin' Pool" opens with Gil and Gloria Sharewood telling their children Sport and Jeb that they plan to divorce, which is a scene from towards the end of the episode. This was because the production was short of usable footage.
  • The The Thundermans episode "A Hero is Born" starts with Max trying to save Dr Colosso with his telekinesis, but fails. The voice over, in Dr Colosso's voice, then transitions the episode to when it all began. The scene that started the episode comes at the very end.
  • Kids sitcom Unfabulous uses this very often. Typically the show begins with the central character in trouble, in plaster, or covered in food, water, or other liquids. She then explains (in voiceover) that to understand how she got into this mess, we'll have to go back a few days.
  • Several episodes of Unnatural History begins with the characters facing imminent danger at an unknown location, then goes back showing how they got into the situation.
  • An episode of V (2009) begins with the Fifth Column heroes shooting down a V transport that was carrying humans, then flashes back to "14 hours before" and the events that led to that tragedy.
  • Veronica Mars:
    • The pilot begins this way on the DVD version, with Veronica being confronted by Weevil's biker gang before rolling back 20 hours. On the original UPN version, it begins at her school, 20 hours before the confrontation with Weevil.
    • The episode "The Girl Next Door" (with a pre-Zero Dark Thirty Jessica Chastain in the title role) tells its tale in flashback in both versions. Played with: it's made pretty clear that said 'girl next door' is the dead body Veronica wonders if she could have saved if things had gone differently... but the corpse was never actually shown. The girl is fine, it was her would-be killer who died.
  • Waco opens with the ATF about to raid Mount Carmel, before jumping back nine months to show the lead-up to the shootout.
  • Walker, Texas Ranger: The entirety of Season 9's "Blood Diamonds" details how Trivette is killed and Walker was critically wounded by Victor Drake and his gang of arms dealers after they had caught on to their cover. It all began with a diamond smuggler named Joseph Ileka being killed by a pimp, upon which Trivette assumes his identity to try to trick Drake into a trap. After finding out Ileka was a carrier of an extremely deadly variant of Ebola virus, Alex, Gage and Sydney luckily tested negative after they questioned a prostitute who was with him the night he was killed, and after Ileka's employer is arrested and the pimp was taken to the morgue after the virus was contained, Drake and his gang caught on to the two Rangers' cover after determining their real identities through their fingerprints. When cornered on the roof, Walker is able to spoil their victory by throwing the diamonds off the building before Drake guns him down, causing him to fall to his death. Luckily, it was All Just a Dream Alex had, but near the end, it was revealed that Walker is actually on the case from her dream, triggering a Groundhog Day moment for Alex.
  • Walking with Dinosaurs: The fourth episode begins by showing the dead body of the episode's protagonist, a male Ornithocheirus. The rest of the episode focus on this very last flight and, with it, the circumstances that lead to his death.
  • Invoked in WandaVision: the penultimate episode consists mainly of Agatha Harkness walking Wanda through a series of flashbacks in an effort to work out how she managed to create the Hex.
  • The West Wing played with this trope several times. Many episodes include flashbacks, which answer major questions relating to character motivation and history, but only a few use this trope to present the main plot's end at the start of the episode or to start the series of events bringing the viewer to the end.
    • The first season finale plays the trope straight, leading to Once More, with Clarity in the final moments.
    • Noel is another straight example: the episode begins on December 24th with Josh being asked how he injured his hand but the story presented occurs over the previous weeks.
    • When Hoynes resigns, we see an assistant carrying a letter into the Oval Office, the President talking to her, and everybody being very solemn about it, culminating in Bartlet opening the letter and the audience seeing that it is Hoynes's letter of resignation, effective 6AM that day. We then jump to 24 hours earlier after the opening credits, to see what led up to a very Wham-type of development.
    • The final season opens three years in the future with several characters meeting at the dedication of the Bartlet Presidential Library, with the new president shown as He Who Must Not Be Seen. The rest of the season shows how they got there and who won the Presidential election.
  • Wings:
    • The opening and ending of "Joe Blows" are similar to Sunset Boulevard.
    • "As Fate Would Have It" begins with the plane about to crash. The bulk of the episode explains the circumstances that put the characters in that situation.
  • The first episode of Wolf Hall begins with Thomas Cromwell helping Cardinal Wolsey prepare for his exile to the north. It then jumps back to several years beforehand when Cromwell first enters his service, not long before Henry VIII demands Wolsey get his marriage to Catherine of Aragon annulled. When the episode catches up, Cromwell goes to Henry's court in an ultimately vain effort to get Wolsey recalled from his disgrace.
  • Wonderfalls: The episode Crime Dog starts with Jaye in jail being questioned by the police, then moves backwards to explain "how exactly that woman wound up in the trunk of (her) car." Notably, they often cut back to Jaye and her family as they are explaining the story to clarify things... and also just for comedic value.
  • The X-Files:
    • The two-part Myth Arc "Colony" and "End Game" starts with Mulder in a very serious medical condition. It's resolved at the very end.
    • "Bad Blood" starts with a man pursuing a teenager and killing him with a stake. The man is revealed to be Mulder. After the teaser, Mulder and Scully meet at the office. We see two slightly different accounts of how that happened.
    • "Travelers" does a more over-arching How We Got Here, showing how Mulder found the X-Files in the first place and how he began investigating paranormal cases.
    • "Monday" opens with Skinner arriving at a bank that Mulder and Scully are inside, shortly before the bank blows up. All this happens in the teaser. After the credits and commercial break, we're in the hallway outside Mulder's apartment a few hours before the explosion as his day begins badly (we revisit this spot several times).
    • "Redrum" is an interesting version; the man accused of killing his wife is moving back in time one day each day, eventually getting to the day of his wife's murder to stop the real killer.
  • You, Me and the Apocalypse starts with the main characters in a bunker underneath Slough, Berkshire moments before an 8 mile wide comet strikes Earth, and flashes back to explain how they all got there.
  • Zero Zero Zero:
    • The first episode starts with a disoriented Edward lying on the ground in the midst of a gunfight. We then flash back to days beforehand. The end of the episode catches up to this scene.
    • At the midpoint of each subsequent episode, the plot rewinds to establish how a second storyline progressed to intersect the first storyline.
  • The Season 2 finale for Zoe Busiek: Wild Card, "Zoe's Phony Matrimony", starts with the titular Zoe at a wedding altar with Dan, the ex-con coworker she has Unresolved Sexual Tension with. Zoe then narrates a scene from three weeks earlier depicting a wedding planner being murdered, and the majority of the episode is how Zoe and Dan decided to pose as an engaged couple in order to investigate the key suspects. In the final scene of the episode, realizing she and Dan actually got married in the process, she starts to do this in-universe.

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