- The Irish novelist, Colm Toibin, once said that Jane Austen was a great wri because she never needed to rely on the clumsiness of the flashback.

"You can't read any book now," h "without suddenly, on chapter tw [the writer] taking you back to where everybody was 20 years How their parents met, how their grandparents met."

If flashbacks have ruined novels for this guy, I hope he doesn't watch streamer because modern TV shows bounce a more than Bill and Ted in a broken phone booth.

Sci-fi series like "Fallout," thrillers like "Mr.

Robot," dramas like "Orange is the New B even comedies like "Only Murders in the Building" all rely heavily on nonlinear st for exposition, characte development, and worldbuilding.

There's a bit of a debate online about whether flashbacks are a c or a legitimate storytelling tec I'm gonna admit, I can understand why Toibin finds them frustrating.

There you are, feeling the momen excited to know what's gonna hap and suddenly you're going the wr (car clangs) getting further from your destin But flashbacks have a long literary legacy, with some famous examples by revered writers, so what's the difference?

Why are some flashback effective and others annoying, and why do we seem so obsessed with them right now?

(dramatic music) (paper rustles) (static hisses) (computer mouse clicks) Even if you haven't read "The Od you're probably familiar with some of the most famous mom Odysseus stabbing the cyclops in Circe turning his men into pigs, the ship sailing past the sirens but did you know that all of tho take place in flashback?

The epic poem begins with Odysseus missing in action after the Trojan War and his family wondering where in the Hades he is.

We find out that he's prisoner of the nymph, Calypso, and after an eventful escape, he winds up in the land of the P Grateful for their hospitality, he tells them a long tale of all the adventures he's had since the war ended.

A lot of his most fantastic esca come from his own mouth, leading us to wonder whether it all really happened or whether he's doing a bit of embellishing, and it makes us, the readers, feel like we're part of th audience listening to his story.

"After he finished, all were silent, spellbound, sitting inside the shadowy hall.

This structure is also an example of in medias res, which is Latin for "in the middle of things."

We're dropped right into th thick of Odysseus' adventures, which grabs the audience's atten and makes them curious about how we got there.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein uses a similar framing device.

The novel begins with the letters of a sea captain whose ship is traveling through the Arctic.

One morning, the crew discovers a bedraggled man floating on an and takes him aboard.

"His limbs were nearly frozen and his body dreadfully emaciate by fatigue and suffering.

I never saw a man in so wretched a condition."

The wretched man turns out to be Victor Frankenstein, who's nursed back to health and recounts his whole life story to the captain as essentially a flashback.

It's a much more exciting way to start a book than with Victor's kinda boring So, this combination of in medias res and flashback has been with us for a long time but when it comes to modern TV, it really took off in th early 2000s with ABC's "Lost."

I don't know if it gets much more in medias res than a plane crash.

While the survivors navigated th and mysteries of the island, we learned all about their pasts and futures through a series of flashbacks, flash-forwards, and even flash-s The success of "Lost" may have inspired Vince Gilligan to begin his show, "Breaking Bad in medias res as well.

The first time we see Walter Whi he's fleeing the cops through the desert in an old RV, wearing nothing but a gas mask and his tighty whities.

Shortly thereafter, we learn that just three weeks a he was a respected high school teacher with a loving family.

The pattern was repeated, which is a good fit for the prem because the whole show is about transformation.

We know what Walter White will b The fun is finding out how he ge By the late 2010s, this structure was so commonplace that it felt mandatory, as if writers were so afraid of audiences getting bored that they had to assure them right at the top that something exciting was going to happen.

"White Lotus" creator, Mike Whit said of his previous show.

- [Mike] Had I only known if I'd put a dead body at the beginning of "Enlightened," maybe people would've watched "Enlightened."

I don't know.

- The literary critic, Gerard Ge was fascinated with how the orde in which the events of a story a can be different from the order in which they actually happen.

He popularized the term analepsi for when the reader learns things that happen before the current point in the what we'd call flashbacks, and prolepsis for things that happen in the future, what we might cal flash-forwards or in medias res.

For instance, a Sherlock Holmes book might end with the famous detective descri how the killer pulled off his cr but technically, that event took place at the beginning, so analepsis.

Genette was also interested in how these events are relayed to the audience.

Victor Frankenstein is a character in the story that he is telling, making him an intradiegetic narr The same goes for the primary na of "Wuthering Heights," a housekeeper named Nelly Dean, who tells her new boss the whole melodramatic history of the house.

- It began 40 years ago.

- In one of the most haunting sc from Ernest Hemingway's "For Whom the Bell Tolls," the guerrilla leader, Pilar, describes her part in the brutal execution of fascist sympathizers near the beginning of the Spanish Civil War.

Intradiegetic analepsis can feel more immediate and pers You don't just hear about past e but also how characters feel abo As Pilar says, "It was a thing one is sorry to have seen," but they also raise questions about how reliable the informati In the 1995 crime film, "The Usual Suspects," most of the action occurs in fla during a police interview with the sole survivor of a heist gone wrong.

It's only at the very end that we learn, spoiler alert, virtually everything we've seen was an elaborate lie.

But analepses don't have to be literally told from one character to another.

Memories can also be a kind of intradiegetic flashback.

"The Lord of the Rings" films use very few flashbacks, but almost all of them are presented as memories that characters are reliving at that moment.

- Gandalf, what is it?

- Nothing, Frodo.

- Sometimes, memory flashbacks are triggered by an event or sensation.

In Marcel Proust's "In Search of Lost Time," the taste of madeleine cake dipp mentally propels the narrator back to the town he spent time in as a child.

"Immediately, the old gray house upon the street rose up like the scenery of a th It's a famous passage that might have inspired the scene in "Ratatouille," when the dour food critic, Anton is whisked to his own childhood by Remy's cooking.

(air whooshes) Memory flashbacks don't always have to reveal new information.

They might just remind us that the character is haunted by something from the past, like Robby's frequent flashbacks to the COVID-19 pandemic in HBO's "The Pitt."

Some novels take this even furth by fracturing the sense of time completely.

Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse- and Toni Morrison's "Beloved" both employ chaotic, jumbled tim to show how trauma constantly in and interrupts the present.

As Faulkner said, "The past is n It's not even past."

But most TV shows don't bother with any kind of intradiegetic justifications.

Flashbacks aren't usuall framed as memories or stories.

They just kind of happen, and as they've become longer and more common, we've come up with a new term fo multiple timelines.

Shows like "Yellowjackets," "Station Eleven," "Once Upon a Time," "Westworld," and "This Is Us" don't even have a main storyline They are constantly alternating between one or more time periods HBO's "The Staircase" used four separate timelines to tell one true crime story, and in Netflix's "The Haunting of Hill House," very few consecutive scenes take place in chronological orde It seems like this would be a nightmare to write, and it can be confusing for audi who have to keep track of what happened when, so why do it?

Well, maybe it has to do with the nature of the format it In the 20th century, TV shows were pretty static.

The networks assumed that audien wanted comfort and familiarity.

Of course, there were shows where big changes happened regul like soap operas and their prime time cousins, but for the most part, at the end of every episode, characters were pretty much back to where they started.

Today's TV is more focused on long-form storytelling, but it's under the same pressure to be familiar.

Audiences learn to like a certain cast of characters with certain relationships, and as a brand, you don't wanna mess with a winning formula.

On top of that, a lot of current is inspired by classic film genr the Western, the gangster flick, the '80s Spielbergian sci-fi adv Many are even direct adaptations They take premises that wer designed for a two-hour runtime and stretch them over multiple 10-hour seasons.

So, TV writers have a tough job.

How do you keep things as static as possible, but make the audience fee like they're getting somewhere?

Flashbacks allow writers t create the perception of change.

The setting is new.

The characters look different.

We might learn surprising details or solve mysteries, but the core conflicts and relat haven't shifted that much.

But there are some shows bucking this trend.

The creator of "The Pitt" said they would not use flashbacks in the second season, preferring to keep all the action in a tight little box.

In Netflix's "Adolescence," each episode consists of one long, unbroken shot, making flashbacks basically impo In a particularly riveting scene 13-year-old Jamie describes to a psychologist the events that led him to murder a classmate.

If this had been shown as a flas we would've missed out on the te of him having to tell the story and her having to listen to it.

These restrictions on space and force writers to reveal backstor through dialogue and performance much the way it's been done on stage for hundreds of years.

When the ghost of Hamlet's fathe describes his own murder to his we're witnessing two events at o the murder and Hamlet's reaction and we can sympathize with his d "This spirit may be the devil and perhaps abuses me to damn me Another haunted analepsis occurs in Charles Dickens' "A Christmas when the Ghost of Christmas Past literally takes Scrooge back in to observe key moments of his li It's a sort of magical metaphor for the power of memory, and I think a perfect example of what makes a good flashback, because we're not just watching of Scrooge's youth; we're watching him watch the events of his youth.

Good flashbacks don't just exist in the past.

They are the effect of the past on the present.

As Scrooge says after his transf "I will live in the past, the present, and the future."

So, I think I actually disagree with Colm Toibin about Jane Austen.

I think she actually did use fla When Elizabeth Bennet reads Mr.

Darcy's letter about his history with Mr.

Wickh we are learning about events of that completely transform our understanding of the present.

But Darcy's decision to write th is an event of the present, as is Elizabeth's emotional reaction to it.

Unlike the clumsiness of so many TV flashbacks, there's no cut to black in between timelines.

They exist together, intertwined the way we experience the past in real life: through story, through memory, through trauma.

Jane Austen's flashbacks are so elegant and organic, you don't even notice they're th