Turns out my respawn needed a respawn. Trolled my own respawn. Let’s see if posting monthly is in the cards for 2026.
Some of my favorite holiday traditions come from the lore of sitcoms and romcoms. (The real ones rarely live up to the pure joy and abundance and thoughtfulness of, say, Leslie Knope on Galentine’s Day.)
So what am I thinking about today (again)? Groundhog Day. So let’s talk Groundhog Day and its media trope namesake, what happens when a protagonist is put through a closed time loop.
Often, the character is meant to reflect, learn, and apply that learning, maybe to make a different choice or to set something right before it can go wrong. One of the things that’s interesting about Groundhog Day is its light touch on this count, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
When Groundhog Day came out in 1993, time loops were not exactly new in fiction. There is, for example, a 1904 book in which a British officer and his men must live out the same tactical scenario multiple times before learning enough about how to survive it. The book is aptly named The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, published under the fabulous pseudonym Lieutenant Backsight Forethought.
The educational potency of time travel more generally is familiar to audiences: while not exactly a time loop, Dickens led Scrooge through a tour of time to help confront him with the reality of his life. I almost hesitate to even mention A Christmas Carol, lest we start confusing Bill Murray à la Scrooged—yet another retelling—just five years ahead of the release of Groundhog Day.
(Note to self: Caitie, go comb the Wikipedia entry for Caddyshack, see if there are any interesting fan theories to be made of Bill Murray’s oeuvre. What if the gopher somehow could be tied to the ghosties and other phenomena in Ghostbusters? Then Ghostbusters ghosties to Scrooged ghosties, Scrooged time travel to Groundhog Day time loop… Come on, there’s got to be something there!)
What does Bill Murray, as our antihero Phil Connors, learn from his time loop? Literally, how to play the piano, speak French, and chainsaw ice sculptures. But also how to care for others and to be less slimy and manipulative in general.
To the delight of viewers—this one included—he also has enough iterations of February 2 to discover new and satisfying ways to dispense with, say, an annoying run-in on the street. He encounters Ned Ryerson over and over, a blast from his past now ready and raring to sell him insurance.
And that’s what I love about a Groundhog Day loop: repetition breeds creativity.
Do we know what got Phil trapped in this loop? The cause is not explicit. (Yeah, yeah, his selfishness most probably, but whatever.) Do we know exactly what ended it? The cause is not explicit. (Presumably, because he “became a better person,” but it’s not like anything is black-and-white. We don’t even know how long Phil was in the loop. It had to be years—decades—but the exact length, and the weight of the wait, are beyond the point of the story.)
The idea of the iterations is the point. Q: So how long was he there? A: He was there for as long as it took. The being there, doing the things, was the whole deal. The universe plays with time to put a finer point on itself.
It’s so fruitful, no wonder the concept shows up all over. The final season of Mike Schur’s The Good Place hinges on the very concept of time in the human afterlife. Whole other movies and seasons of television use the time loop (Palm Springs and Russian Doll, respectively), and bottle episodes of many excellent and beloved series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, The Simpsons, and perhaps a few dozen others across the past 30 years.
Really, though, I think I would watch just about any character I love be put through the paces of the Groundhog Day treatment.
It’s a meta-experience for me, to watch any familiar universe iterate on the trope. I get to live it over and over, see what I learn from any given attempt.
They say you never step into the same river twice. I’m basically my own AMC channel: give me a marathon of my own favorites any day, I’ll join the stream.
What will I notice? How is it different this time? How will the character change?
How have I?
Writing prompt: See the above. 🙏
Caitie Leibman (she/her) 