I've been thinking about cold opens a lot this week, partly because MSN just put together a list of nine pilots that hooked you in under a minute, and partly because I fell into one of those 3 AM spirals where you rewatch first scenes of shows you've already seen just to feel that click again. You know the click. The moment your hand stops reaching for the remote.

The cold open is a strange little machine when you think about it. A minute or less. No context, no character sheet, no title sequence to hide behind. Just a bet: we're going to show you something and you're going to need to know what happens next. Most pilots fumble it. They spend their opening minutes on exposition, on a narrator clearing their throat. The good ones drop you into deep water and let you swim.

MSN's list runs the expected gamut, the pilots people still quote at each other, and what struck me going through it is how different the tricks actually are once you look closely. Some hook you with dread. Some with a joke landing perfectly on the first try. Some with a single line of dialogue that tells you exactly who you're dealing with before you know anything else about them. There's no formula, which is probably why it's so hard to pull off. If there were a formula every show would open like this and none of it would work.

What makes a great cold open, near as I can tell, is restraint. The pilot that grabs you in forty seconds isn't the one that shows you the most. It's the one that shows you the least and makes the absence unbearable. A body. A locked door. A person calmly doing something they clearly shouldn't be doing. The best ones work like the opening paragraph of a good ghost story, the kind where nothing has happened yet and you're already uneasy.

There's a darker reading too, if you want it, and I always do. The cold open is also a filter, a test the show runs on you before you've committed to anything. Sixty seconds to decide whether you trust a group of strangers with hours of your life. Speed dating with a screen. Some shows pass the test and then betray it, and there's a particular disappointment reserved for a pilot that promises something the series never delivers again. The inverse happens too, rarely: a mediocre show with an opening minute so good you keep the episode saved like an artifact.

I keep coming back to the fact that this is basically the same skill behind every story I cover in this section. The museum object with a hidden pocket, the phone calls warning a man about himself. A hook is a question posed well. The shows on this list understood that you don't answer the question in the first minute, you make sure the viewer can't leave without the answer. Answers are always a little disappointing. Questions are where it gets interesting. I've said that about black holes and wasp pantries and I'll apparently never stop saying it, because it keeps being true. Even about sitcoms.

Go read the list, then do what I did and pull up two or three of those openings on a streaming service at an hour you shouldn't be awake. Watch only the first minute. Then sit there with your hand nowhere near the remote and try to pretend you understand how they did it.