How to write a cold open

A cold open is the scene before the title card. It does three jobs at once — promise a tone, plant a question, and earn the next twenty minutes of attention. If it does all three in under three pages, it's working. If it does two of three, it's usable. If it's doing only one, you have an opening, not a cold open.

This post takes apart what those three jobs are and how three well-known openings — Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Whiplash — do them. The first two are TV cold opens, the last is a film teaser. The mechanics are the same.

What is a cold open?

A cold open (sometimes called a teaser, sometimes a pre- title sequence) is a self-contained scene that runs before the title card. The audience hasn't been told the show yet — that's the "cold" part. They walk into the scene without context, and your job is to hook them before the title hits.

For TV, the cold open is structurally a unit — see Screenplay vs teleplay format for how it sits inside the script. For film, the equivalent is the teaser — the first three to seven minutes before FADE IN to the main title.

The three jobs

1. Promise a tone

The opening tells the audience what kind of show this is. Not via dialogue (no one's explaining the show); through pacing, imagery, sound. Whiplash opens on a single snare drum in an empty hallway, getting faster. The shot lasts almost a minute. By the time we cut to Andrew Neiman's face, you know what film you're in: a film about obsession with rhythm. That's the entire movie's tonal contract, set in 90 seconds.

2. Plant a question

The audience needs a reason to keep watching past the title card. The cold open plants a specific, urgent question. Breaking Bad's pilot opens with a man in his underwear, crashing an RV in the desert, recording a goodbye message into a camcorder. Within ninety seconds we have a dozen questions, all variants of what is happening? The rest of the pilot answers them.

The question should be specific enough that the audience can hold it in their head, and unanswered enough that they need to keep watching to resolve it.

3. Earn the next twenty minutes

Whatever the cold open promises — tone, premise, character — the rest of the episode has to deliver on. The West Wing's pilot teaser walks us through the night-shift White House lobby, intercutting between the senior staff at bars, in cabs, at home, all answering pagers reading POTUS. We're hooked because Aaron Sorkin promises us the world we're entering: the grown-ups in charge, sleep-deprived, witty, being woken up at 4 a.m. The pilot delivers exactly that.

Structural shapes

The in-medias-res

Open mid-event. The reader is dropped into a moment with no setup. Breaking Bad does this — we're inside Walter White's panic before we know who he is. The shape works because the strangeness of the action generates the question for free.

The flash-forward

A scene from later in the episode (or season), shown first as a tease. The format is usually a hard cut to 72 HOURS EARLIER on the title card. Used by How to Get Away with Murder, This Is Us. The risk: if the flash-forward is more interesting than the rest, the episode loses energy on the way back to it.

The standalone vignette

A scene only loosely connected to the main story. Often used by anthology and prestige drama. The Sopranos rarely opened cold; The Wire did sometimes (the pilot opens with a homicide detective interviewing a witness about a man named Snot Boogie). The vignette is thematic — it tells you what the episode is about, without telling you the plot.

The act of violence

A specific subset of the in-medias-res. Used by procedurals — Law & Order, NCIS, Bones — almost every week. A crime, often unseen perpetrator, no main characters yet. The shape works for procedurals because it generates the question (what happened?) and the answer is the rest of the episode.

Format on the page

Same screenplay grammar as any other scene. The only differences are the labels.

COLD OPEN

FADE IN:

INT. RV — DRIVING — DAY

A MAN in his underwear records a video.
The RV is swerving. He's panicking.

                    MAN

          To my wife. To my son. There are things
          I want you to know.

He's crying. Distantly: SIRENS.

                                          END OF COLD OPEN

MAIN TITLES

Note: COLD OPEN sits at the top of the page, same indent as ACT ONE would. END OF COLD OPEN right-aligns at the bottom of whatever page the open ends on. MAIN TITLES on its own line tells the reader the title card runs there.

How long should a cold open be?

Half-hour TV: 1–2 pages. Hour TV: 3–6 pages. Feature teaser: 5–8 pages. Going longer than the upper bound burns the audience's patience for the title card; going much shorter risks under-hooking. Both are correctable in rewrites.

Common mistakes

• Explaining the show.If a character turns to camera and says "I'm Walter White, a chemistry teacher with cancer", you're writing exposition, not a cold open. Trust the audience to read context.
• Opening on a dream.The dream sequence opener has been cliché since 2008. Don't do it unless you're going to subvert it specifically and early.
• Opening on the protagonist asleep. Adjacent cliché. The first time we meet the lead, they should be doing something. Asleep, hungover, waking up to an alarm — these are tired and readers see them ten times a week.
• Cold open with no question.A pretty montage that doesn't leave a question doesn't earn the title card. Even a tonal vignette like The Sopranos' opening leaves a question — who is this man, why is he in therapy?

Most-asked questions

What's the difference between a cold open and a teaser?

Strictly: a cold open precedes the title card; a teaser plays before or alongside the title sequence. Most writers use the words interchangeably and so do most rooms.

Do features have cold opens?

Films don't have title cards mid-action, but they do have teasers — opening sequences that establish tone before the studio logo or title roll. The Whiplash example above is a teaser. So is the bowling alley scene at the start of The Big Lebowski.

Should I write a cold open in a spec pilot?

If the show on screen has cold opens, write one. If it doesn't, don't. Match the format the show actually uses. For original pilots, decide what the show is and commit — opening cold or warm is a tonal choice.