How Firefly Lane Followed This Is Us to a #1 Rating

This One Trick Time-hopping Showrunners Don’t Want You To Know!

Firefly Lane, like This Is Us before it, is a runaway, time-hopping hit.

“#1 In The US” on Netflix (as of this writing) since its release on February 3rd, FireFly Lane follows the intertwined lives of two BFFs: famous television journalist Tully Heart (played by Katherine Heigl) and Kate Mularkey (played by Sarah “Never Going To Not Be Elliott from Scrubs To Me” Chalke), a former journalist looking to break back into the news business after years away raising a family.

While the main story line on Firefly Lane takes place in the early 2000’s, the show jumps around through time, showing us the twists and turns of a lifelong friendship: from Tully and Kate’s first meeting, to their years coming up in the same newsroom, to their “current” lives, in their early 40s, trying to figure out divorced, and still-single, life.

We’ve seen this technique before, perhaps most recently on NBC’s This Is Us, a show that takes time-hopping to a new level, spanning generations upon generations, opening itself up to almost limitless possibilities.

We’ve come along way since the days of ER and The Practice (remember The Practice?) where TV’s best dramas largely told their stories straight-forwardly, each episode raising a new conflict which, more or less, by the end of the episode, would find itself resolved.

Evolution of television aside, why does this time-hopping story technique prove so effective as to produce 2 #1 dramas (This Is Us was the highest non-Football, non-Police, non-Firefighter show of the 2019-2020 primetime season) in the last couple years?

1 reason.

With time-hopping as a narrative tool the storyteller can, at any moment, jump to a life-changing event.

Most television shows follow a linear story line: things happen in real time, one event followed by another.

The problems this otherwise simple story structure pose, are uniquely American, uniquely Western: on a television show, you often have to keep raising the stakes in order to continuously entertain and surprise your audience. (How interesting that art consumption in an ultra-capitalistic society habituates itself in patterns similar to a quarterly corporate gains report).

With a linear approach, a writer will eventually stop being able to realistically raise the stakes, over and over, without jumping the shark. You can only have so many dramatic things happen to a character (dad dies, couples break up, triplets fight, a woman dies but then comes back to life only to go to jail and never find her newborn son again) before your audience starts losing interest, be it out of boredom or lack of believability.

With a non-linear time-hopping scheme, one big reveal can come right after another, within totally different timelines leading to brand new story lines, that, while a viewer may not see them coming, still don’t feel totally out of the blue, or unearned.

When spread out across generations like This Is Us, that’s 1600 human-years worth of life-defining moments to choose from. 

Think I’m exaggerating? 

Think of how This Is Us would flashback to Randall’s biological (and adoptive for that matter) father growing up as a child. That must be 70-80 years in the past.

Now think about how they had that one episode end with like, Kevin with gray hair and Randall looks old, and Randall’s wife is getting done teaching a dance class and they all need to meet at a hospital or something? That scene was like 30-40 years in the future. 

So, 15-20 main characters (let’s say 20), and 80 years per character (American’s life expectancy in 2018 was 78.54 years) comes to (checks Google calculator) 1600 years.

And since This Is Us has gone this far in their multi-generational time-hopping story, there’s nothing stopping them from expanding further. Wasn’t there already a scene where we see Kevin’s twins grown up and moving out of the house? This Is Us could be the TV drama equivalent of the Marvel Universe, spanning movies and spin-offs indefinitely.

This time-hopping storytelling is working effectively, on a smaller scale, on Netflix’s Firefly Lane which mixes just enough 80s-early 2000s nostalgia to keep all us millenials interested (think spanx references, or Lord of the Rings references pre-Peter Jackson’s trilogy, so a 90s-based character doesn’t get it but we the audience do – “lol” we mentally reply).

An additional advantage of the time-hop method is that it if the writers can’t thinking of an episode ending, they can close it out with a jump-forward scene. They can just mic-drop some big reveal we don’t totally understand yet (maybe they don’t either), out of nowhere, and then not have to address that for like, an entire season.

However cheap you may find a formula, it’s working for This Is Us, also called “cry time” in my house, and it appears to be working for Firefly Lane, which has kept us binging all weekend while the polar vortex has circled our city, keeping us cozied up on the couch.

I’ve been sick this week, so this is a lighter article. Next week it’s back to the heavy identity stuff with insight into why that guy on the bus stop sings out loud to music no one else can hear (headphones, not auditory hallucinations) from someone (me) who was once one of those people who sang out loud in public.