Sure shots: The 20 best TV oners of all time

Length: 5 minutes, 39 secondsSteven Conrad’s criminally underappreciated show has so much going for it: the deadpan sad-sack-ness and stylistic lilt of Rushmore-era Wes Anderson, a knotty plot, international intrigue, cat-and-mouse games, lots of left-field humor, and some damn fine music. Fellow Chicagoan Jeff Tweedy covered Bill Fay’s “Be Not So Fearful” for the series, and there are some great originals throughout it, too, like the Bill Callahan-esque cut sung by the show’s depressed aspiring folk musician/undercover spy John (a fantastic Michael Dorman) that soundtracks his way from the Métro to a grocery store (complete with a fatal shootout) to the streets of Paris and then back underground. That the song narrates John’s thoughts as the mission approaches, plays out, and comes to a close makes the Steadicam sequence just that much more impressive. [Tim Lowery]

Length: 12 minutes, 40 secondsThe central sequence of Succession’s fourth-season episode “Connor’s Wedding”—arguably the central sequence of Succession, as a whole—isn’t a “oner” in the traditional sense. (It couldn’t be, really, given that half of it takes place on a plane, and with multiple cameras running.) But the sequence, in which the Roy siblings learn that their complex monster of a father, Logan, has abruptly died while on a business trip, takes on the intimate, ugly energy of one. That’s thanks largely to director Mark Mylod, shooting the scenes in close-to real-time, one long, horrifying nightmare of a take that was later cut and edited down in ways that only amplify the misery of it all, catching each moment of twisted anguish on the Roys’ faces as the world slips away beneath their feet. The oner is often seen as a hallmark of craft and technical skill, more than acting talent, but Sarah Snook, Jeremy Strong, and Kieran Culkin fill out their award reels pretty much for life in these claustrophobic 12 minutes, each finding ways to collapse in different, awful ways beneath the camera’s unflinching eye. [William Hughes]

Length: 4 minutes, 25 secondsBetter Call Saul’s “” long take is an excellent example of what people typically look for in an oner. This sprawling shot employs numerous techniques, devices, and digital wizardry while maneuvering around a bustling U.S./Mexico border, a line of semi-trucks, drug-sniffing dogs, and an infectious beat. True to form, the shows off the process-oriented, highly detailed action and suspense Better Call Saul made its bread and butter over six seasons. Episode director Larysa Kondracki gives an entire overview of hiding and finding contraband that would be a prime mover of the drugs not only on BCS but its sequel series Breaking Bad, which also smuggled drugs through refrigerated cargo trucks. The shot exemplifies what made Better Call Saul such an extraordinary show. What could’ve been a simple line of dialogue (“They smuggled the goods in through ice cream”) becomes a masterful bit of stagecraft that envelopes the viewer in a thorough table setting that deepens the entire show. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Length: 2 minutes, 4 secondsBand Of Brothers is never a particularly easy show to watch, but there’s something especially haunting about “Why We Fight.” In the series’ penultimate episode, Easy Company finally enters Germany as World War II is winding down. The cruelty and devastation they find there is beyond comprehension; , a writer on the series who conducted the interviews with the real members of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment that play before every episode, reported that even 55 years later, they couldn’t speak about what they witnessed when they found the Landsberg concentration camp. Not wouldn’t—couldn’t. But all that comes later in the episode; it opens with a man playing a violin. As the camera pulls out, we see he’s part of a string quartet. They’re playing Beethoven, standing in the middle of a devastated town as the villagers sort through what’s left. The camera weaves through this scene for nearly two minutes before it pans up to Easy Company, who are supervising the cleanup from the second floor of a wrecked building. We don’t yet have context for what’s going on—the opening and closing scene is a bookend, while the bulk of the episode is a flashback to what happened in the month leading up to that moment—but it sets an appropriately devastating tone for the episode. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 53 minutes, 38 secondsThe sixth episode of The Haunting Of Hill House is comprised of five shots expertly stitched together to make it look like one long take. Series creator broke down the whole thing on Twitter, including the length of each segment and where the cuts are. It’s especially impressive given that “Two Storms” takes place in two different timelines. In the present, the siblings are dealing with the death of their sister, Nell (Victoria Pedretti). In the past, the family is panicking after Nell disappears during a massive storm. The whole thing is monumentally impressive, especially because the whole set was built and planned around this one episode. The sets for the funeral home and the interior of the mansion were built right next to each other with a hallway connecting them to accommodate the camera movements and staging. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 2 minutes, 30 secondsDavid Lynch and Mark Frost’s third season of Twin Peaks wasn’t easy to watch. Its discursive structure and inexplicable character motivations left viewers confused but entertained, even when little appeared to be happening. Few can do what Lynch does, and after six episodes of breathing the toxic air of a post-recession , “” starts teasing a payoff as pages from Laura’s diary and Cooper’s hotel key reemerge. The trees are shaking, the electricity is crackling, and the first of mystery start smoking. Is it happening again? Every day, the show’s cycles of abuse and violence continue unabated, swept into a neat pile and tossed into the bin at the Roadhouse, literally. Lynch literalizes this with a two-and-a-half minute unbroken shot of a man sweeping the bar floor as “Green Onions” plays over the soundtrack. What breaks the tension? As usual, Jean-Michel Renault operating the sex trafficking ring that got Laura killed 25 years prior. Yes, it is happening again. The most famous oners involve unbroken takes that move through a scene, requiring orchestration from production. Lynch does something more impressive: . Much of Twin Peaks’ ominous whooshing is designed to create an atmosphere that carries over scenes. The sweep carries between episodes, leading to the atomic-age masterpiece “Part 8.” “Part 8” might have blown up Twin Peaks, but the sweeping oner lit the fuse. [Matt Schimkowitz]

Length: 10 minutes, 43 secondsDaredevil set the precedent for oners on the show in just the second episode of season one with an . That was impressive on its own, but each successive season upped the ante with longer, more complex one-take fight scenes. It’s almost a good thing that the series ended after its third outing, because it’s hard to imagine how they could have topped the prison fight in “Blindsided.” In this episode, Wilson Fisk (Vincent D’Onofrio) finally unmasks Daredevil, a.k.a. Matt Murdock (Charlie Cox), and traps him inside a prison full of violent criminals paid by Fisk to take him out. On a technical level, the scene is stunning: the hallways and cells of the prison are cramped, leaving little room for the camera to maneuver and the stunt performers to move around. The fight drags out into several different rooms and spaces as well, which means it covers a lot of ground. It was a fitting and impressive final oner for the show; I have no idea how Daredevil: Born Again, the upcoming continuation series from Disney+, is going to top it. Maybe they shouldn’t even try. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 51 secondsOne of the most impressive things about this oner is how seamlessly it slides into the episode. It’s just one moment amid the much larger, nearly 50-minute battle that takes up most of the runtime of “Battle Of The Bastards.” But in less than a minute, director Miguel Sapochnik and cinematographer Fabian Wagner capture the absolute bloody chaos as Jon Snow’s (Kit Harington) forces clash with Ramsay Bolton’s (Iwan Rheon). Even though the battle takes place in a large, open field outside of Winterfell, the long take makes it feel claustrophobic, a tangle of men and horses and shields and swords. When the camera gets on the ground with Jon as he fights his way through enemy soldiers, it becomes viscerally clear that he’s fighting for his life—and barely surviving. [Jen Lennon]

Length: 17 minutes, 41 secondsAside from its first two-ish minutes of Chicago clips and quick shots of characters starting their day, this whole dang episode is a oner. And man, do things get heated in that kitchen. It starts with smaller gripes, but throw in a massive preorder snafu, Marcus’s ill-timed quest to perfect and present his special new donut, and Syd’s ever-heightening bickering with Richie, and things get straight up explosive. (As Fak announces cheerily, “Carmy is very mad.”) As the incoming orders print away in the background and everyone hustles with a “55 burgers, 55 fries” energy to keep up, our chef smacks Marcus’s masterpiece out of his hand and Syd accidentally stabs Richie in the ass—even quits. And the camera puts us right there in the mix the whole time, hovering like a fly around some au jus, as the overlapping guitars of Wilco’s “Spiders (Kidsmoke)“ wail. And as the version of the song that plays is from the band’s live album Kicking Television, so it ends, fittingly, with applause—well-earned after a performance like this. [Meredith Hobbs Coons]