Let's do the time warp again.

Blame it on writers having too much time walking the picket lines, and wanting to be years away from their troubles, but this fall you'll see a lot of time jumping on both new and returning shows.

Viewers got a shock last spring when Desperate Housewives ended the season showing everyone living five years in the future with a frumpy Gaby and Susan sporting a new boyfriend.

Producer Marc Cherry says he was inspired by Lost producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse, who used the flash-forward in their previous season finale, which set up an exciting short season that gets fleshed out when the series returns next year.

"I felt that the soap had really started to build up, and I kind of wanted to pare down to where everyone's problems were small but very relatable," Cherry says. "And I thought how am I going to do that? And I thought, 'Oh. Let's just go forward in time. Let me change everyone's lives completely.' "

His original plan was to do an eight-year jump, until someone explained to him how the actresses would react to the idea that they were eight years older.

"I thought, maybe five. Maybe I could get away with five," Cherry says.

Actress ego aside, the time-shift ploy has worked well for Battlestar Galactica and other sci-fi shows. While Battlestar jumped forward, the new spin-off series Caprica, which airs on the Sci Fi Channel, is a prequel set 51 years earlier and follows two rival families, the Graystones and the Adamas, and follows the path that leads to creation of the Cylons.

"The idea is to say all this -- all of this, this world that you're about to visit, is doomed," says Ronald D. Moore. "You know how World War II turns out. You know the Nazis are going to lose, but that doesn't mean that you can't tell compelling stories."

Fox's Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles needs a flow chart to keep up with all the time-line scooting that takes place, which may make it hard for those coming in at the series' reboot this fall. First, Sarah and her son, future freedom leader John Connor, were jumped from 1999 to 2007. Then people from the future keep coming back to the past to fix things which just gets everything screwed up again. The most confusing part last season was when future John sends his uncle back to help past John and his mom Sarah to survive.

"The franchise has always had this idea that a new fate can be created by time travel," says producer James Middleton.

Wiping the slate clean is the main reason why so many series producers love the time-jump ploy for their returning shows. But even new shows like shifting time zones.

This season, ABC's new series Life on Mars centers on a contemporary cop who gets in a car accident and discovers he's now a detective living in 1973. The series is based on a BBC series that ended with viewers realizing that the cop had just been in a coma and dreaming it all. The ABC producers say there's a possibility that Sam really did time travel ... or maybe something even bigger is going on, in their remake.

"It certainly plays into the character of Sam Tyler going back in time and trying to figure out why he is there and what is going on," says producer Andre Nemec. "So it will be an ongoing mystery."

While it's one thing to have a sci-fi show skipping around, having dramas time jump seems relatively new. In AMC's current season of Mad Men, the series jumped from just before the Christmas holidays to Valentine's Day 14 months later.

The reason why, says producer/creator Matthew Weiner, is that he wanted a fresh way of looking at what was happening in this 1960's world he had created.

"I thought, why don't we just go ahead, and I can start the story fresh, and at the same time there will be all these events that happened in between that will provide an additional storytelling energy," Weiner says.

It's a ploy that has worked with Fox's gritty hyper-reality series 24 . While 24 always uses the time jump each new season, this year there will be a prequel movie airing this fall that sets the stage for the new season coming in January.

This fall, 24: Exile, offers a two-hour real-time movie on Nov. 23 on Fox. Shot in Africa, Jack (Kiefer Sutherland) and his mentor Carl Benton (Robert Carlyle) battle an international crisis; while in the United States, the nation prepares for a new president on inauguration day. This drama takes place just months before Day 7 -- 24's new season starts in January, when Season Seven opens four years after Season Six with CTU dismantled and Jack on trial.

Yep, that means a previously pregnant Chloe now has a 4-year-old child.

But the real reason for the 24 prequel goes back to the writers' strike. After last season was jettisoned, producers decided to use that idea and turn it into this movie.

"We couldn't make it work (as a full season) because we wanted to have something different after the writers' strike and going into a new season," Sutherland says. "Doing [the prequel] was a great way to incorporate an idea that could set up season seven."

In other words, a clean slate.

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