Breaking Bad At 10: 8 Ways It Changed TV For Good

5. Cold Opens

Cold opens, those segments that run anywhere from 30 seconds to 10 minutes before the credits roll, were done before Breaking Bad. But never were they used so effectively, with the show turning them into one of the deadliest weapons in its arsenal.

Rather than simply using the cold opens to establish that week's episode, Vince Gilligan turned them into something far more experimental and daring. They were short films, they were foreshadowing events that wouldn't play out until weeks later, they expanded the world and its characters, and they were fun musical numbers. They tied nicely into the serialised nature mentioned earlier, but went beyond that too and redefined what a cold open could or should be.

Since Breaking Bad we've seen a number of other TV shows utilise this: The Walking Dead, another AMC series, frequently deploys cold opens of a similar vein, so too does Preacher, while Better Call Saul kicks off each season with the monochrome life of Gene post-Breaking Bad, but it's also evident on network shows like This Is Us.