Cold Open / Teaser

A scene that starts the episode before the titles — hooking the audience before any setup.

A cold open (TV's 'teaser') drops the audience into a scene before the opening titles — a body is found, a deal goes wrong, a question is posed. Its whole job is to make switching channels feel expensive.

In pilot scripts the teaser is often the most rewritten unit: it has to sell the show's engine, tone, and world in two to five pages, cold.