A new trailer for Fear the Walking Dead appears to have confirmed a huge fan theory: a time jump is in the works for season four, vaulting the entire show far into the future. It would appear that this decision was taken to bring Fear the Walking Dead in line with its parent show, to make way for greater crossover potential. Either that or the producers got so bored with the franchise’s unmanageable homogenous blobbiness that they just decided to skip as much story as they could to save everyone the bother of watching. Who can really say for sure?

However, by no means is Fear the Walking Dead pioneering this trick. When it comes to time jumps, everyone’s at it. Catastrophe did a time jump. Masters of Sex did a time jump. The 100 did a time jump. The Americans is about to do a time jump, as is Legion and, um, The Last Ship. A time jump is fast becoming a key peak TV signifier, right up there with a scowling anti-hero and a saggy mid-season stretch. It’s such a common trope, in fact, that when the trailer for the new Silicon Valley season opened with a fake-out four-year time jump, barely anyone batted an eyelid.



You can see why they’re so appealing. A cynic would suggest that a time jump is ultimately just a lazy narrative device – after all, why go through the trouble of working in a succession of believable character beats over a gradual transition period when you can just hoof the story all the way downfield in one fell swoop? This is more or less what Jane The Virgin did last year, pinging forwards three years after a major character death to avoid the whole series getting bogged down in uncharacteristically realistic grief.

They can also be a work of convenience. We’ll find out soon enough, but you can imagine both House of Cards and Transparent coming back with time jumps, each opening on the funeral of a main character played by a disgraced actor, simply because that’s the easiest thing to do with the toxic legacy they left.

However, despite all this, a time jump done well can be a thing of absolute beauty. Think of the time jump in Breaking Bad, an elegant montage of unstoppable wealth accumulation compacted into the duration of Crystal Blue Persuasion by Tommy James & The Shondells. Or the jump that came towards the end of the first Fargo season, casually skipping a year in the middle of an episode to show characters married, pregnant and – in the case of Billy Bob Thornton – differently-haired.

Or think of the jump that ended the penultimate season of Parks and Recreation. This was a masterstroke less of story than longevity; taking a series that was starting to wane and introducing just enough new elements to send it flying to the finish line in decent shape.

Nick Offerman and Amy Poehler in Parks and Recreation. Photograph: NBCU Photo Bank via Getty Images

What made these time jumps sing was their placement. They were on-screen jumps, often creeping up on their viewers without warning and forcing them to recalibrate their expectations of the shows on the fly. The less successful jumps tend to come between seasons – this is the case with Fear the Walking Dead – because they tend to have all the signs of a showrunner limping exhausted to the end of a run with no ideas on how to continue.

That said, on-screen time jumps are just as capable of screwing the pooch too. The Battlestar Galactica reboot miraculously managed to squander every last atom of goodwill it had earned in the space of about ten seconds towards the end of its finale, with a preposterous ‘150,000 years later’ jump that took us to current-day planet Earth and warned us in the starkest possible terms that the funny Honda robot was almost certainly a Cylon. The fact that Battlestar Galactica had built the bulk of its cachet with a one-year-later time jump in season two – a time jump so successfully executed that it arguably started the whole trend in the first place – just made it all the sadder.

So time jumps have become as common as can be, but that doesn’t mean they’re always successful. This is still a huge risk for Fear the Walking Dead. Nail the jump, and it’ll cement its reputation as one of the best shows on television. Mess it up, even a little, and it’ll be a laughing stock. Maybe such a laughing stock that it’ll be forced off air. Well, one can dream.