10 TV Backstories Revealed In Opening Credits
3. Quantum Leap
Quantum Leap was one of the best science-fiction series from the eighties and early nineties that didn't follow an established IP. It wasn't Star Wars, and it wasn't Battlestar Galactica. Instead, it was something entirely new, and the best way to get its story out there was with a perfectly succinct narration at the beginning of each episode.
As the credits began to roll, a narrator explains the backstory and the basis of each episode:
"Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Doctor Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator - and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so Doctor Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong and hoping each time that his next leap... will be the leap home."
What amounts to a complicated premise is easily explained in only a few lines of dialogue. The viewer understands that Sam is trapped in other people's bodies in the past. They know he can receive guidance from Al, who appears as a hologram, and they know "he's driven by an unknown force to change history for the better."