These shows started with a bang! Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we’re looking at the most unnerving, unexpected and boldly engaging scenes to start an entire TV series.
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00:00I'm having word from the FBI. Do you understand the situation?
00:04Cody's got some people in there.
00:06Welcome to WatchMojo, and today we're looking at the most unnerving, unexpected, and boldly engaging scenes to start an entire TV series.
00:14The new Millennium Edition Crown Royal Funeral Coach.
00:18Because your loved one deserves the very best in style and comfort.
00:25Number 10, Fallout.
00:26Let's just focus on the party, okay?
00:34Amazon's take on the Fallout franchise finds the ideal first scene in the fourth game.
00:38Fallout 4 finally dramatizes the outbreak of nuclear war in a suburban setting.
00:42The episode, The End, recreates that from the perspective of Cooper Howard, a washed-up movie cowboy working a birthday party with his daughter.
00:49If they ever drop a really big bomb, tell them to hold up your thumb just like this.
00:54And if the cloud is smaller than your thumb, now you run for the hills.
00:59Just after he explains how his signature thumbs-up is used to measure the distance of a nuclear blast, atomic bombs rain down on L.A.
01:06The Howards ride off on horseback as pandemonium ensues.
01:09This natural kickoff establishes the post-apocalypse drama's unique balance of spectacle and characterization.
01:14When Cooper is next seen as a mutant gunslinger two centuries later, even fans of the game are emotionally invested in the original character.
01:21Well, well, well.
01:24Well, this is an Amish production of the town of Monte Cristo.
01:27Number 9, Game of Thrones.
01:38HBO's Game of Thrones would become a triumph of medieval-style drama and high fantasy.
01:42How best could you set up an epic this sophisticated?
01:45With zombies, of course.
01:46Winter is Coming fades in on three rangers of the Night's Watch scouting a frozen forest.
01:51After discovering a formation of corpses, they're gruesomely attacked by undead horrors known as White Walkers.
01:56We should head back to the wall.
02:00Do the dead frighten you?
02:02As the show proceeds to be mostly political, it was wise to demonstrate its fantasy elements straight away.
02:07Doing so like this, however, asserts that even that genre will be steeped in grit and gore.
02:11With no place for whimsy in Westeros, Game of Thrones' terrifying hook promises a new, gripping breed of fantasy epic.
02:25Number 8, The Leftovers.
02:31The drama in HBO's The Leftovers is built around a crisis of absence.
02:34The pilot episode immediately conveys the horror of the departure with minor characters.
02:38A woman is running stressful errands with her baby when his crying suddenly stops.
02:42The mother breaks into a panic as she realizes that her child and several people around her have vanished.
02:47The screen then cuts to black and a cacophony of 911 reports of people going missing.
03:01This sequence nails how quickly everyday burdens become meaningless amidst a tragedy, especially a large-scale one.
03:07As the story picks up three years later, audiences are eager to learn how society has been affected by 2% of the world's population inexplicably disappearing.
03:16Number 7, The Newsroom.
03:23Aaron Sorkin's tight writing deftly introduced a whole presidential cabinet to launch the West Wing.
03:28HBO's The Newsroom is established with just one lead, but We Just Decided To makes an impression.
03:33Moderate conservative news anchor Will McAvoy is visibly unsettled by nationalist sentiments during a journalism school panel.
03:40When asked what makes the United States the greatest country in the world, he rants about figures suggesting the decline of American culture.
03:46We're 7th in literacy, 27th in math, 22nd in science, 49th in life expectancy, 178th in infant mortality, 3rd in median household income, number 4 in labor force and number 4 in exports.
03:58A sweeping speech about the country's former and potential greatness rounds out this explosive showcase of Sorkin's masterful scripting and political aptitude.
04:06The monologue that would restructure McAvoy's network may not be what people want to hear, but it asserts The Newsroom is the patriotic journalism they need.
04:14The first step in solving any problem is recognizing there is one.
04:19America is not the greatest country in the world anymore.
04:28Enough?
04:34Paramount Network's Yellowstone is so gritty that even animal lovers are hit from the very first scene.
04:39Daybreak opens on the lush Montana sky and a bloodied John Dutton comforting a horse.
04:43It's then revealed that the poor creature was mutilated in a carrier collision with a semi-truck transporting construction equipment.
04:49John shoots the horse, then survives the scene to find the truck driver dead.
04:52This disturbing hook sets the tone for a western that's frank about the grace and the horror of the cowboy lifestyle.
04:58It may even symbolize Yellowstone's central drama of the Duttons clashing with modern industrialists.
05:03If the Old West is doomed by progress, there's sure to be carnage on both sides.
05:07The things we lose to keep you fed.
05:18Netflix's Mindhunter is a mostly cerebral psychological thriller.
05:21As talky as it tends to be, FBI agent Holden Ford is introduced witnessing the tragedy of improper procedure.
05:28The hostage negotiator struggles to reach a deranged bank robber who has taken a hostage at shotgun point.
05:33When bringing in the man's wife fails, he turns the gun on himself.
05:36Maybe I can help.
05:40I don't think so.
05:43The extremely graphic visual tells audiences that there will be no punches pulled in Mindhunter's dramatization of real-life killers.
05:49More importantly, it affirms the delicate process of managing a dangerous person in a psychologically sensitive state.
05:55The incident motivates Ford to refine the FBI's criminal profiling methods and the audience to recognize the urgency of his mission.
06:02He's clearly having an episode. We need to keep him calm and wear him down.
06:05Definitely get rid of those reporters.
06:15It's Christmas time at Fisher and Sons' funeral home, and Nathaniel Fisher is taking the new hearse out for a spin.
06:20Six Feet Under's pilot episode wastes no time in establishing the morbid family dynamic that will drive its humor.
06:26Then comes a hint at its uncompromising drama.
06:28While Nathaniel reaches down for his cigarette, a bus smashes into the hearse.
06:32Hey, his wife did say smoking would be the death of him.
06:34HBO's Six Feet Under suggests a protagonist and then kills him off within a few minutes,
06:39affirming the randomness of life and death that will become a key theme across five seasons.
06:43Granted, family tragedy is a natural device to have the visiting Nate Jr. take over the family business.
06:59Before HBO's Watchmen picks up where the original comic left off, the miniseries opens in Tulsa in 1921.
07:05A black child is enjoying a silent film about U.S. Marshal Bass Reeves.
07:09When his father storms in to retrieve him, the family's on the run from the Black Wall Street Massacre,
07:14one of the most violent race riots in American history.
07:17By 2019, both this incident and Reeves were relatively obscure pieces of that history.
07:22It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice didn't just immediately showcase Watchmen's awesome production values
07:27while motivating the racial tension at the drama's core.
07:29It boldly provided a mainstream platform for a national tragedy.
07:33Who says superhero movies aren't good enough?
07:35Watchmen is the first film in the franchise to feature a black male protagonist,
07:39and it's the first film in the franchise to feature a black male protagonist.
07:42It boldly provided a mainstream platform for a national tragedy.
07:45Who says superhero properties aren't culturally valuable?
08:03There's much to explain regarding how a high school chemistry teacher became a master meth manufacturer.
08:07Instead, the pilot episode of AMC's Breaking Bad begins in total disaster after Walter White's first drug deal.
08:13He's introduced wearing his underwear and a gas mask, plowing an RV through the New Mexico desert.
08:18After crashing, he puts on a shirt, records a video testimonial for his family,
08:22and awaits police with an unconscious man's gun.
08:25It's surely a more interesting way to open the show than Walt having a mid-life crisis three weeks earlier.
08:29Ambiguous, intense flash-forwards would be a hallmark of Breaking Bad's cold episode openings,
08:34but as particularly disorienting as the first one is, it grippingly foreshadows Walt's self-destructive criminal arc.
08:40I just want you to know that no matter how far you go,
08:45you're never going to be alone.
08:47Before we unveil our top pick, here are a few honorable mentions.
08:50House of Cards.
08:51Ambitious politician Frank Underwood's brutal pragmatism is established.
08:55There are two kinds of pain.
08:57The sort of pain that makes you strong, or useless pain.
09:01The sort of pain that's only suffering.
09:03The pain that's only hurting you.
09:05The pain that's only hurting you.
09:07The pain that's only hurting you.
09:09The pain that's only hurting you.
09:11The pain that's only hurting you.
09:13Or useless pain.
09:15The sort of pain that's only suffering.
09:18I have no patience for useless things.
09:22Fringe.
09:23A stormy plane flight gets more turbulent when a toxin deforms a passenger's flesh.
09:27My friend, it is just an electrical storm.
09:30I understand.
09:32Here, gum?
09:34The Resident.
09:35Dr. Bell pulls his surgical team into a cover-up after hand tremors cost a patient his life.
09:40You left a blade in the field.
09:42You nicked the artery.
09:43You never should have located him for surgery in the first place.
09:45His INR was abnormal.
09:46The upper range of normal.
09:47Under the Dome.
09:48It's a quiet day in Chester's Mill between a burial in the woods and an invisible dome crashing.
10:10Orphan Black.
10:11Sarah Manning's metaphysical crisis begins with her doppelganger and a train.
10:42Number 1. Lost.
10:44All of the psychological drama and supernatural twists of ABC's Lost go back to one very real horror.
10:49A scuffed-up Jack Shepard wakes up in a beautiful field, confused by his whereabouts and distant sounds.
10:54The quietness is suddenly broken by him running to a beach where a medium shot follows him and other traumatized passengers stumbling around the wreckage of Oceanic Flight 815.
11:11Stay away from the gas! Stay there!
11:15Audiences go into Lost at least knowing the character's initial situation, but its prompt presentation shows a mastery of suspense rarely seen on broadcast TV.
11:23Flashbacks will later explain the first and most obvious mystery of the series.
11:27Still, the aftermath of Flight 815's crash remains one of the most immediately gripping hooks in TV history.
11:32Hey! What's your name?
11:35Jack!
11:37Which TV shows hooked you from the very first scene?
11:39Make an impression in the comments.
11:41You don't look satisfied.
11:44One's a set of laws and the other's a declaration of war. I want a human moment from you.
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12:09Thanks for watching!