Before theme songs became skip buttons and recaps started explaining things you absolutely already knew, TV shows had one precious chance to grab your attention. Enter the cold open—the pre-credits moment designed to hook you, delight you, or completely derail your expectations before the story even begins. Let’s journey through some of the most iconic cold opens in TV history.

American remakes of British TV have a reputation—and not always a flattering one. For every awkward cultural transplant, there’s a reinvention that somehow clicks harder, lasts longer, and embeds itself into pop culture in a way the original never quite managed. Sometimes it’s a cast change, sometimes it’s pacing, and sometimes it’s just the confidence to go bigger, louder, and messier.

TV shows ask us to invest years of our lives in fictional people. We watch them grow, fail, fall in love, make unforgivable mistakes, and sometimes become better versions of themselves. So when a character leaves before a series ends, it can feel like a breakup—one that either gives you emotional closure or leaves you staring at the screen wondering what just happened.

There’s nothing quite like seeing a character you thought was permanently gone walk back onto the screen. Whether it’s a “maybe death” turned into a cheat, a bombshell confession, or a resurrection from literal or metaphorical graveyards, those returns hit us emotionally and sometimes rewrite everything we thought we knew about a show.

Whether it’s office politics, dysfunctional families, small-town shenanigans, or vampire roommates, the mockumentary format magnifies the humor by making it feel real. Here are 20 of the best shows that nailed the style and had us laughing along like unwitting documentary extras.

You probably know Walter White, Don Draper, and the inmates of Litchfield by name. But the people who actually put words in their mouths? Those names tend to blur by in a tiny white font at the end of the episode. So let’s slow those credits down. Here are 22 writers who quietly built the worlds, characters, and episodes you still think about long after the season ended—and who deserve to have their names lodged in your brain right next to the shows you binge on repeat.