“Theorising that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the quantum leap accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett goes leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time the next leap, will be the leap home.”
I know those words off by heart and typed them from memory. They were etched onto my mind before I turned 10, and for anyone who doesn’t know, they form the opening narration to the latter seasons of the brilliant US time-travel TV show Quantum Leap, and were delivered by Deborah Pratt as Ziggy, the show’s supercomputer. It is a great piece of writing; both poetic and full of exposition. It sums up not just what the show is in terms of content. but in tone. The beautiful score by Mike Post has a timeless, all-American feel, a sense of longing and nostalgia but also of hope. And Pratt’s delivery is pure romance, a sadness-tinged voice that you want to fall in love with.
Those of the Netflix generation might ask what the point of this is, as they reach swiftly for the skip credits button. Well, firstly it’s a nice way to tell new viewers what the show is all about, setting up the format so you can decide if you want to watch. But it’s so much more than that.
The familiar sounds and visuals are a way to ease the viewer into the world of the show, shutting off reality and preparing you for what’s to come. It’s a visual and audio association that helps your mind leave the real world behind and fully become fully immersed in what’s about to unfold. A television show isn’t just 45 minutes to kill; it’s a whole universe, and a perfectly crafted opening is your portal into it.
Of course, Quantum Leap wasn’t the first or only show to take this approach. The opening narration, or the ‘saga sell’ as it’s called in the industry, dates right back to the earliest days of broadcast. With no pictures, these introductions were essential on radio and television adaptations were more than happy to retain the format that worked so well.
Straight-laced police procedural Dragnet began life on the wireless in 1949 before making the leap to the (very) small screen in 1951. Each episode began as follows:
“Ladies and gentlemen: the story you are about to hear is true. Only the names have been changed to protect the innocent.”
It’s straight to the point but isn’t it intriguing? True stories, with victims who need protection and as an audience, we’re all in on it. On television, the “hear” was swapped with “see” and the rest is history. Even today, you can hear echoes of Dragnet in Dick Wolf’s Law & Order which begins:
“In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: The police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories”.
And just to show the lineage, that final line sounds a lot like the closing narration to The Naked City (1958 – 63), which ended: “There are eight million stories in the naked city. This has been one of them.”
Beyond radio, and beyond procedurals, there is the anthology. There is no better way to tie your unrelated group of stories than with a voice. The best known of these is The Twilight Zone (1959 – 1964). Creator Rod Serling made his presence felt within the show, introducing the stories in person but also providing the opening monologue as you float through space towards another dimension as a scary door opens. There were a number of versions used throughout the first three seasons, but the one used from season 4 onwards became the most iconic.
“You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You’ve just crossed over into… the Twilight Zone.”
Just like that, you’re ready for a new story. From week to week, it may change in tone, substance in setting, but for the viewer, it is part of a piece, united by a storyteller and popular culture’s most iconic combination of notes.
The Outer Limits (1963 – 65), another anthology show with a slightly harder science-fiction edge, took the opening narration to a meta level:
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling the transmission…”
Well, that’s just chilling. These are carefully chosen words. There is a reason that they stick in the mind, and because they do, they have value. There’s a reason that The Twilight Zone has been revived three times and even been a big-budget movie. The Outer Limits’ 90s revival ran for years longer than the original. But why bother reviving them when you could just create your own anthology and call it Unusual Spaces or Beyond the Edge? It’s all because these older shows set a tone, became recognisable, and by reviving the shows, you are making the audience a promise about what it’s going to be.
Some anthology shows are united by their central characters but the setting changes week to week. Often these featured a lonely man and followed his travels. The Lone Ranger (1949 – 57) (another radio adaptation) was described as “the daring and resourceful masked rider of the plains led the fight for law and order in the early west”. The Fugitive (1963 – 67) set up its protagonist as: “Dr. Richard Kimble, an innocent victim of blind justice, falsely convicted for the murder of his wife, reprieved by fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house.” And taking the lonely man into genre territory was The Incredible Hulk (1978 – 82): “And now when David Banner grows angry or outraged, a startling metamorphosis occurs.”
The best of all of these lonely men introductions is Knight Rider (1982 – 86). Yes, really. The show is described as “ a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of man who does not exist.” If you write that sentence, you can take the rest of the day off. In fact, take the whole week.
Perhaps the most famous anthology narration of all is from Star Trek (1966 – 69). These words are so good, they’ve been used on three different shows and many movies spanning from the 1960s to the 2020s. Not a word is wasted, from the first: “Space, the final frontier…” to the last “to boldly go where no man has gone before.” It’s so crucial to Star Trek’s identity that it’s given names to films and television shows. Interestingly, unlike most of the examples above which were third-person narrators, Star Trek’s was in character, with Kirk’s voice easily read as part of a captain’s log, which formed the in-universe narration of every episode. It is perhaps odd that none of the Enterprise-less spin-offs even attempted their own version of the saga sell, but even attempting it would likely result in diminishing returns.
And for some reason, even if it fell out of use across the more down-to-earth programmes, science fiction shows (perhaps because of their distance from our own world) retained this convention well into the 90s with shows like Farscape, Andromeda and Babylon 5 offering their own versions of explaining the mission, even if they never really nailed it with the same clarity of their 1960s counterpart.
It wasn’t just a US phenomenon either, with Gerry and Syliva Anderson shows emulating the style from the States with Captain Scarlet’s “voice of the Mysterons” being the most memorable. Early episodes of Red Dwarf featured a distress call from ship’s computer Holly to establish the premise. More recently, Life On Mars and its spin-off Ashes to Ashes featured the protagonist explaining why a modern police officer was living in a period setting. It was all rather nuts and bolts until the first episode of Ashes to Ashes series 3 when breaking the form when Keeley Hawes’ Alex Drake stated: “quite frankly, your guess is as good as mine.”
Other than the legacies, it seems the time of the opening narration has passed. As runtimes have decreased, broadcast TV shows have mostly foregone credits to fit in another ad break. Meanwhile, prestige broadcasters have increasingly elaborate opening sequences listing all 37 executive producers but without anyone there to hold your hand. It’s a bit of a shame really because there’s something so nice about a familiar voice. As soon as you hear it, you’re ready, so you settle down with a drink and just listen to them because they have stories that you want to hear, a world you want to revisit with people you like to spend time with. And there’s nothing better than spending time with an old friend.
A version of this article first appeared in the late, great magazine From the Sublime.