10 4th Wall Breaking TV Show Moments Everyone Hated
3. Zack Calls "Time Out" - Saved By The Bell
Perhaps a bit of a controversial choice now, but legendary high school sitcom Saved by the Bell made rather peculiar use of fourth wall breaks to have its wily protagonist Zack Morris (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) straight-up time travel.
Though Zack often opens an episode by talking directly to the audience, on numerous occasions he would go one step further and call a "time out," causing all the surrounding action to freeze while he riffs on the subject of the scene and then says "time in," at which point the flow of time resumes.
Most infamously in the season four episode "Video Yearbook," Zack uses his unexplained ability to avoid being punched by Slater (Mario Lopez), proving the mind-boggling extent of this power.
Now, one might surmise that this is really just a rhetorical storytelling device and the show isn't genuinely implying that Zack can freeze time at will, but all the same, it feels jarringly out of place in a show that otherwise offers up a grounded(ish) portrait of the American high school experience.
According to Mark-Paul Gosselaar himself, the show cribbed the whole idea from the hit film Ferris Bueller's Day Off, which was released three years prior to Saved by the Bell's premiere.