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TVTitles

The ones that changed

136 of 2629 shows here rebuilt their titles at least once, between them accounting for 354 sequences. The other 3051 opened the same way every week for their whole run.

Ordered by how many times each one started over. American Horror Story leads with 11.

11 sequences

American Horror Story

2011–FXHorror

An anthology, so there is no returning sequence to protect: Kyle Cooper builds a new one from scratch every season and the only thing carried across is the lettering. The sixth season is absent below because it went further still and threw the titles out altogether.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 8 more
10 sequences

Doctor Who

1963–1989BBC OneSci-Fi

Rebuilt for almost every Doctor, and each rebuild invented its own technique — a camera filming its own monitor, light photographed through moving slots, and finally the first computer-generated titles on British television.

  • Seasons 1–3
  • Seasons 4–6
  • Seasons 7–10
  • and 7 more
8 sequences

Charmed

1998–2006The WBHorror

Love Spit Love's cover of 'How Soon Is Now?' over the Book of Shadows and three sisters, re-cut every season. It goes further than that, though: the credits were rebuilt whenever the cast of an episode changed, so a season carries several versions rather than one — eight of them in the second year alone.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 5 more
8 sequences

Doctor Who (2005)

2005–BBC OneSci-Fi

The revival kept the tunnel and the logo and threw out everything else, then carried on rebuilding — clouds, fire, clockwork — with a new arrangement of the same 1963 melody every few years.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–4
  • Seasons 5–6
  • and 5 more
7 sequences

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997–2003The WB / UPNHorror

An organ sting, a shot of the moon, and then Nerf Herder's surf-punk theme over black-and-white monster-movie footage that bursts into colour. The design never changed in seven years; the fifty seconds behind it were re-cut every one of them.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 4 more
5 sequences

Angel

1999–2004The WBHorror

The spinoff takes the parent show's structure and drops the jokes: Darling Violetta's 'Sanctuary' instead of surf-punk, city at night instead of monster movies. Like Buffy, the design holds for five years while the names in front of it keep moving.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 2 more
5 sequences

Babylon 5

1993–1998Syndication / TNTSci-Fi

Five seasons, five openings, and each one changes who is allowed to speak. The monologue passes from the station's first commander to his successor to his second-in-command, then splinters across the whole cast, then stops being a monologue at all.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 2 more
5 sequences

Silicon Valley

2014–2019HBOComedy

An animated Bay Area skyline of tech-company headquarters, rebuilt every season to match who was winning that year. The joke only works because it kept being updated — logos appear, get acquired, and vanish between seasons.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
  • Season 4
  • and 2 more
5 sequences

The Wire

2002–2008HBOCrime

The same song recorded five different ways. Every season re-cuts the images and hands 'Way Down in the Hole' to a new artist, matching the institution that season is about.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 2 more
5 sequences

The X-Files

1993–2002, 2016–2018FoxSci-Fi

One sequence held untouched for seven years, then rebuilt twice as the cast turned over. The card at the end is the real trick: it reads 'The Truth Is Out There' most weeks, and something else entirely more than twenty times.

  • Seasons 1–7
  • Season 8
  • Season 9
  • and 2 more
4 sequences

Blackadder

1983–1989BBC OneComedy

Four series, four centuries, and a theme re-orchestrated each time to suit the period — lute, harpsichord, military band.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

2015–2019The CWComedy

A musical comedy that threw away its theme song every year and wrote a new one, each arguing with the last about whether the word in the title is fair.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Farscape

1999–2003Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

A Henson creature workshop pointed at space opera, and an opening that halves in ambition halfway through the run — the narrated version explaining the premise gives way to one that assumes you already know it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Stargate Atlantis

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The same franchise moved to another galaxy, and the titles say so — a city rather than a gate, rising out of water instead of standing in a mountain.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–3
  • Season 4
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Stargate SG-1

1997–2007Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The gate opening, every week, for ten years — David Arnold's film theme rearranged for television and a sequence that never stopped being about one piece of hardware.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
  • Season 9
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

True Detective

2014–HBOCrime

Double-exposure portraits where the landscape is projected onto the people. Every season is reshot from scratch, so the titles change as completely as the cast does.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Westworld

2016–2022HBOSci-Fi

Things being manufactured, filmed as though it were tender: a horse and rider printed strand by strand, hands assembled out of white thread, a player piano working the theme out by itself. Rebuilt every season as the show's idea of what is being made changes.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • and 1 more
4 sequences

Young Sheldon

2017–2024CBSComedy

The Big Bang Theory prequel, narrated by the adult Sheldon it never shows. Its titles are one family portrait in the West Texas hills, reshot every couple of seasons as the children outgrow the last version of it.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Seasons 3–4
  • Seasons 5–6
  • and 1 more
3 sequences

Battlestar Galactica

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The only title sequence on this site that reports the plot. Under the Gayatri Mantra and the Cylon text, the American version ends on a count of the surviving human population — a figure recalculated for each episode, so the titles get worse as the show goes on.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
  • Season 4
3 sequences

Beast Wars: Transformers

1996–1999Syndication / YTVAnimation

Transformers rebuilt in computer graphics on a fraction of the budget, which is why everybody is an animal.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Bill

1983–2010ITVCrime

A London police station shot at ground level, under a rule the programme kept for twenty-seven years: no scene an officer is not present for.

  • Season 1
  • Season 4
  • Season 5
3 sequences

Dark

2017–2020NetflixSci-Fi

Faces split and mirrored against themselves, reflected into a second image that is never quite the same person — a show about the same people at four ages, saying so before a word is spoken.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

Earth: Final Conflict

1997–2002SyndicationSci-Fi

Developed from Gene Roddenberry's notes after his death, and it shows in the titles: benign-looking aliens, civic architecture and a great deal of blue, all arranged to look like a press release rather than an invasion.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
  • Season 5
3 sequences

The Facts of Life

1979–1988NBCComedy

A girls' boarding school in Peekskill, spun off from Diff'rent Strokes and running three years longer than it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 7
  • Season 8
3 sequences

Fringe

2008–2013FoxSci-Fi

Pseudo-scientific terms floating in coloured fog — and the colour is the plot: the palette changes to tell you which universe or era the episode is set in.

  • Season 1
  • Season 4
  • Season 5
3 sequences

Homeland

2011–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jazz, archive news audio and a child in a lion mask — a fever dream assembled from half a century of American foreign policy, recut every season with that year's crisis in it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
  • Season 8
3 sequences

House of the Dragon

2022–HBODrama

The parent show mapped a continent; this one traces a bloodline. Where Game of Thrones built cities, these titles follow blood running through stone channels and a tapestry recording who killed whom.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Leftovers

2014–2017HBODrama

The rare show that threw out a perfectly good title sequence and replaced it with its opposite. One season of grief painted as a Renaissance ceiling, then a complete reversal into snapshots and a country song.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

Lexx

1997–2002Citytv / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

A living insect-shaped ship the size of a planet, introduced with the seriousness of an opera and the budget of a regional theatre. Rebuilt every season, and stranger each time.

  • Season 2
  • Season 3
  • Season 4
3 sequences

Robotech

1985SyndicationAnimation

Three unrelated Japanese series cut together into one American saga, and the opening is where the seam shows: the same theme and the same establishing pan every week, then a different logo card and a different war.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

Star Trek: The Next Generation

1987–1994SyndicationSci-Fi

The Enterprise-D passing the camera at warp while Patrick Stewart reads the mission statement. Stately, slow and completely confident — it takes almost a minute and a half before anything happens, and it never once feels the need to hurry.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Seasons 3–7
3 sequences

Succession

2018–2023HBODrama

Home video of rich children, degraded and half-legible, cut against helicopter shots of towers they will inherit. Nicholas Britell's piano stumbles deliberately, like something played badly on purpose.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Twilight Zone

1959–1964CBSSci-Fi

Three different openings in five seasons, and the one everybody can hum arrived third. Rod Serling narrates the audience into another dimension over abstractions that were, for 1959, genuinely strange television.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Seasons 3–5
3 sequences

The White Lotus

2021–HBODrama

Colonial wallpaper that will not behave — painted paradise curdling into something predatory while the resort's guests are nowhere in it. Rebuilt from scratch for each new location, with a new theme every time.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Witcher

2019–NetflixDrama

Monsters, coins and continents cut into a woodblock-print style, with the medallion turning at the centre of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

ALF

1986–1990NBCComedy

A sitcom built around a puppet the cast could not see, worked from a trench cut into the set floor.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

All My Children

1970–2011ABCDrama

Pine Valley, Agnes Nixon's serial, and the first American soap to put issue storylines in daytime.

  • Season 23
  • Season 41
2 sequences

Andromeda

2000–2005SyndicationSci-Fi

Another posthumous Roddenberry premise, opened with a ship, a collapsed republic and a great deal of lens flare.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

As the World Turns

1956–2010CBSDrama

The turning globe that gave American daytime its most-copied image, over fifty-four years.

  • Season 41
  • Season 52
2 sequences

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

1983–1986ITVComedy

Seven British builders sharing a hut on a Düsseldorf site, written as a comedy about not being able to find work at home.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Ballykissangel

1996–2001BBC OneDrama

An English priest posted to a village in Wicklow, and the BBC's most watched Sunday drama of the late nineties.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
2 sequences

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

Cartoon versions of the cast run at the camera and fight their way through the rogues' gallery, because the budget for that in live action did not exist and the animation is funnier anyway. Neal Hefti's twelve-bar riff has an eight-voice chorus whose entire lyric is the word Batman.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Big Bad Beetleborgs

1996–1998Fox KidsSci-Fi

Three children granted the powers of their favourite comic by a phasm they let out of a haunted house.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Big Brother (UK)

2000–Channel 4 / ITVDocumentary

The eye, and a theme built out of the sound of the house — the format that made surveillance into a light entertainment brand.

  • Season 1
  • Season 8
2 sequences

Birds of a Feather

1989–2020BBC One / ITVComedy

Two sisters in Chigwell whose husbands are both in prison.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
2 sequences

Blue Peter

1958–BBC OneDocumentary

The world's longest-running children's programme, opening on a ship in full sail and a hornpipe.

  • Season 45
  • Season 64
2 sequences

The Bold and the Beautiful

1987–CBSDrama

Los Angeles fashion houses, and the most widely watched daytime serial in the world.

  • Season 1
  • Season 38
2 sequences

Bridgerton

2020–NetflixDrama

Engraved invitations, wax seals and bees, assembled like a society page being typeset — the gossip sheet that drives the plot, doing the credits.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

2013–2021Fox / NBCComedy

Precinct signage and a horn line in twenty-one seconds — a cop show opening with no sirens in it.

  • Seasons 1–5
  • Seasons 6–8
2 sequences

California Dreams

1992–1996NBCComedy

A Californian high school band, made by the Saved by the Bell producers for the same Saturday morning block.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 3–5
2 sequences

Caroline in the City

1995–1999NBCComedy

A Manhattan cartoonist drawing a strip about her own life, and the colourist who is in love with her.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

ChuckleVision

1987–2009BBC OneComedy

Two brothers and a slapstick format that ran for twenty-one series on the strength of one exchange.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 17–20
2 sequences

Clueless

1996–1999ABC / UPNComedy

The film continued at Bronson Alcott High, with most of the cast replaced and Dionne kept.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

The Conners

2018–2025ABCComedy

Roseanne continued without her, after the network cancelled the revival it had just recommissioned.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
2 sequences

Coronation Street

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

  • Season 1
  • Season 31
2 sequences

The Dick Van Dyke Show

1961–1966CBSComedy

A man walking into his own living room and either tripping over the ottoman or stepping neatly around it — two versions shot, and the network alternated them.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

EastEnders

1985–BBC OneDrama

An aerial pull-back over the Thames and the drum that answers it — thirty-two seconds that have barely changed in forty years.

  • Season 1
  • Season 41
2 sequences

Emmerdale

1972–ITVDrama

A Yorkshire Dales farming serial that dropped Farm from its name in 1989 and kept the landscape.

  • Season 27
  • Season 49
2 sequences

ER

1994–2009NBCDrama

James Newton Howard's theme over sliding doors, gurneys and light — the template every medical drama since has either copied or deliberately avoided.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
2 sequences

Euphoria

2019–HBODrama

Bodies, water and neon shot at the point where a party stops being fun, over Labrinth. Beautiful in a way that is deliberately hard to enjoy.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Family Feud

1976–ABC / SyndicationDocumentary

Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.

  • Season 1
  • Season 35
2 sequences

Family Guy

1999–FoxAnimation

A musical number performed by the family about how television used to have values — a sitcom opening from the 1970s, done straight and then undercut.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
2 sequences

Futurama

1999–Fox / Comedy Central / HuluAnimation

Like The Simpsons, an opening built to differ every week — a new caption under the logo and a different scrap of old cartoon on the screen the ship flies past — wrapped around Christopher Tyng's theme and a crash into a billboard.

  • Seasons 1–4
  • Seasons 6–7
2 sequences

Game of Thrones

2011–2019HBODrama

A map that rebuilds itself each week. The clockwork cities shown change with the locations the episode visits, which makes it the rare title sequence carrying actual information.

  • Season 1
  • Season 8
2 sequences

General Hospital

1963–ABCDrama

American daytime's longest-running scripted programme still in production.

  • Season 16
  • Season 43
2 sequences

Good Omens

2019–2026Amazon Prime Video / BBC TwoComedy

An angel and a demon who have both grown too fond of England to let it end, from Pratchett and Gaiman.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Grandstand

1958–2007BBC OneDocumentary

Five hours of live sport on a Saturday afternoon, held together by a man at a desk and the teleprinter behind him.

  • Season 23
  • Season 33
2 sequences

Grange Hill

1978–2008BBC OneDrama

A London comprehensive school taken seriously, opening on a comic strip and a sausage on a fork.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 13–16
2 sequences

The Guardian

2001–2004CBSDrama

A corporate lawyer sentenced to community service in child advocacy, which turns out to be the real job.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–3
2 sequences

Guiding Light

1952–2009CBSDrama

Seventy-two years on radio and television between them — the longest-running story ever told in any medium.

  • Season 44
  • Season 51
2 sequences

Hangin' with Mr. Cooper

1992–1997ABCComedy

A retired basketball player teaching gym in Oakland and sharing a house with two women he went to school with.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 4–5
2 sequences

Home and Away

1988–Seven NetworkDrama

Summer Bay, still running after nearly forty years, with the opening remade every few seasons.

  • Season 1
  • Season 38
2 sequences

Hope & Gloria

1995–1996NBCComedy

A talk show producer and a hairdresser sharing a Pittsburgh apartment building.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

House

2004–2012FoxDrama

Anatomical illustration and MRI imagery over Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' — a diagnostic show that opens by looking inside a body rather than at one.

  • Season 8
  • Season 1
2 sequences

House of Anubis

2011–2013NickelodeonDrama

An English boarding school with an Egyptian secret underneath it, remade by Nickelodeon from a Dutch and Belgian original.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Ink Master

2012–2018SpikeDocumentary

Tattoo artists competing on other people's skin, which raises the stakes over most craft contests.

  • Season 2
  • Season 5
2 sequences

It's a Living

1980–1989ABC / SyndicationComedy

Waitresses at a restaurant on the thirteenth floor, cancelled by ABC and revived in syndication.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Just Shoot Me!

1997–2003NBCComedy

A fashion magazine staffed by people who should not be near one. The titles start as a full sequence and end as a logo.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 3–5
2 sequences

King of the Hill

1997–FoxAnimation

Four men drinking beer in an alley, and a guitar riff. Thirty-one seconds that tell you the show has no interest in going anywhere.

  • Season 1
  • Season 14
2 sequences

Law & Order

1990–NBCCrime

The original, and the source of the two-note sting that half of American television has been quoting ever since.

  • Season 1
  • Season 20
2 sequences

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

1999–NBCCrime

The franchise's chung-chung and a narrated premise, held for a quarter of a century — the longest-running opening in this catalogue by some distance.

  • Season 1
  • Season 15
2 sequences

Match of the Day

1964–BBC OneDocumentary

Barry Stoller's theme, unchanged since 1970, over whatever graphics the decade happens to allow.

  • Season 7
  • Season 62
2 sequences

McLeod's Daughters

2001–2009Nine NetworkDrama

Two half-sisters who inherit a South Australian cattle station and run it with an all-female crew.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
2 sequences

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

2006–2009Tokyo MXAnimation

A schoolgirl who can rewrite reality and has not been told, in an adaptation that first broadcast its episodes deliberately out of order.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Mike & Molly

2010–2016CBSComedy

Two people who meet at an overeaters group on the north side of Chicago.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 4–6
2 sequences

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

2015–TF1Animation

Two Parisian teenagers who transform into superheroes and spend six seasons not working out who the other one is.

  • Season 5
  • Season 6
2 sequences

The Morning Show

2019–Apple TV+Drama

Broadcast graphics assembling and collapsing — the machinery of a network morning programme, shown as the thing that eats the people in front of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Mr. Mercedes

2017–2019AudienceCrime

King's retired detective and the man who drove a car into a queue of people looking for work.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

My Family

2000–2011BBC OneComedy

A Chiswick dentist and the relatives he cannot get out of the house, written by a rotating room on the American model.

  • Season 3
  • Season 6
2 sequences

NCIS

2003–CBSCrime

Naval insignia, photographs and a snare roll, refreshed periodically as a cast that has now turned over almost completely came and went.

  • Season 10
  • Season 1
2 sequences

Neighbours

1985–2025Seven / Ten (Australia)Drama

Ramsay Street across forty years, and a theme song that survived every cast, network and cancellation.

  • Season 1
  • Season 39
2 sequences

Oggy and the Cockroaches

1998–France 3Animation

A French cartoon with almost no dialogue in it, which is the reason it sold to nearly every country there is.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
2 sequences

One Life to Live

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

  • Season 21
  • Season 44
2 sequences

Oz

1997–2003HBOCrime

HBO's first hour-long drama, and the opening that established what the network's title sequences would be for the next twenty years — narrated, tattooed, and entirely unwilling to reassure you.

  • Season 1
  • Season 4
2 sequences

Ozark

2017–2022NetflixCrime

Five glyphs inside the letter O — a boat, a gun, a cross, a bird, a body of water — chosen for the episode they introduce. The title card is a table of contents.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

2023–Disney+Sci-Fi

The novels adapted with their author involved, and titles that run at the end of the episode rather than the start.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Pokémon

1997–TV TokyoAnimation

The longest-running video-game adaptation on television, and a theme song that outlasted every cast change.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
2 sequences

Power Rangers Megaforce

2013NickelodeonSci-Fi

The twentieth-anniversary season, built to reach back through the whole franchise.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

The Price Is Right

1972–CBSDocumentary

"Come on down" — the longest-running game show in American television, opening the same way for fifty years.

  • Season 1
  • Season 36
2 sequences

Quantum Leap

1989–1993NBCSci-Fi

Narration explaining a premise too complicated to infer, over a theme by Mike Post — the anthology format's problem solved in sixty seconds every week.

  • Season 1
  • Season 4
2 sequences

Red Dwarf

1988–BBC Two / DaveComedy

The last human alive, three million years from Earth, introduced with a mining ship the size of a city and a theme sung over the end of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
2 sequences

Riviera

2017–2020Sky AtlanticDrama

A widow discovering what her husband's money was, retitled between seasons as the show moved away from the coast it is named for.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Road to Avonlea

1990–1996CBCDrama

Montgomery's Prince Edward Island stories, made by the CBC with Disney paying half the bill.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
2 sequences

Roseanne

1988–2018ABCComedy

A family at a kitchen table, laughing at something you cannot hear, rebuilt for every season across twenty years and a thirty-year gap.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
2 sequences

Saved by the Bell: The New Class

1993–2000NBCComedy

Bayside kept and the pupils replaced, for seven seasons rather more than anyone had expected.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 6–7
2 sequences

Sesame Street

1969–PBS / HBOComedy

Children running through a New York street to a song asking how to get there — an opening that has been remade every decade for over fifty years.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 24–25
2 sequences

Severance

2022–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

A man walking through his own head, drawn as a corporate-training diagram that keeps folding back into itself. Oliver Latta's animation, and the best argument in years that a title sequence can be the thesis.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

The Simpsons

1989–FoxAnimation

The only main title in television built to be different every week: the chalkboard, the saxophone solo and the couch gag all change, so the sequence is a format rather than a film.

  • Seasons 1–20
  • Season 21
2 sequences

Sons of Anarchy

2008–2014FXCrime

Leather, chrome and a reaper patch, over a theme re-recorded by a different artist as the club's situation deteriorates.

  • Season 1
  • Season 7
2 sequences

South Park

1997–Comedy CentralAnimation

A banjo, a cut-paper Colorado town and four boys at a bus stop — re-recorded and re-animated repeatedly across nearly thirty years while staying recognisably the same twenty-nine seconds.

  • Season 1
  • Season 15
2 sequences

Space: 1999

1975–1977ITVSci-Fi

The most confident opening Gerry Anderson ever made: a burst of brass, then a rapid-fire montage of clips from the episode you are about to watch, so no two broadcasts were identical.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Star Trek

1966–1969NBCSci-Fi

The one that set the shape of every space-opera opening since: a ship crossing the frame, a captain narrating a mission statement, and a melody built to be hummed. Alexander Courage wrote it as a fanfare and a lounge tune at the same time.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–3
2 sequences

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

1993–1999SyndicationSci-Fi

A title sequence that starts still and learns to move. The station hangs motionless in the early years; by the war it is surrounded by traffic, which is the whole arc of the show in ninety seconds.

  • Seasons 1–3
  • Seasons 4–7
2 sequences

Star Trek: Discovery

2017–2024Paramount+Sci-Fi

A complete break from every Trek opening before it — no ship, no narration, just schematic drafting-table renderings of Starfleet hardware assembling and dissolving in empty space, with a pair of hands reaching through it all.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Seasons 3–5
2 sequences

Star Trek: Enterprise

2001–2005UPNSci-Fi

The franchise's most argued-over opening: no orchestra, no starfield, but a montage of real human exploration — sailing ships, biplanes, spacesuits — under a soft-rock ballad. Half the audience never forgave it, which is its own kind of achievement.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Seasons 3–4
2 sequences

Star Trek: Picard

2020–2023Paramount+Sci-Fi

An opening about memory rather than exploration. Fragments of a life — a vineyard, a Borg cube, a face — resolve out of swirling particles, and only at the very end does it admit it is a Star Trek show.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Star Trek: Voyager

1995–2001UPNSci-Fi

The most purely beautiful of the Trek openings — Voyager skimming a comet, threading a nebula and sliding past a gas giant while Jerry Goldsmith writes the loneliest theme in the franchise. Nothing about it is in a hurry to get home.

  • Seasons 1–3
  • Seasons 4–7
2 sequences

The Steve Harvey Show

1996–2002The WBComedy

A funk musician turned high school teacher, in the sitcom that carried The WB's Monday nights for six years.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 4–6
2 sequences

The Storyteller

1987–1988NBC / Channel 4Drama

European folk tales retold by John Hurt beside a fire, with Henson's creature shop doing the rest.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Stranger

2017–2020tvNCrime

A prosecutor without emotional affect and the detective who trusts him anyway. Known at home as 비밀의 숲, Secret Forest.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Survivor

2000–CBSDocumentary

The competition format that rebuilt American primetime, and rebuilds its titles for every location.

  • Season 1
  • Season 50
2 sequences

Todd McFarlane's Spawn

1997–1999HBOAnimation

The comic adapted as adult animation, and among the first American cartoons made explicitly for an adult slot.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

Top Gear

2002–BBC TwoDocumentary

Twenty-one seconds of engine noise and a rock riff — a motoring programme that opens like a trailer for itself.

  • Season 1
  • Season 23
2 sequences

Top of the Pops

1964–2006BBC OneDocumentary

Forty-two years of the chart, and a Phil Lynott instrumental called Yellow Pearl for a theme.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 18–20
2 sequences

Twin Peaks

1990–1991, 2017ABC / ShowtimeDrama

A bird, a sawmill blade and a waterfall, over Angelo Badalamenti at a tempo no network would approve today — ninety seconds of a town being described before anyone in it speaks.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Two Guys and a Girl

1998–2001ABCComedy

A Boston pizza place the series was named after for two seasons and then quietly dropped from the title.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 3–4
2 sequences

Tyler Perry's House of Payne

2006–SyndicationComedy

A Georgia fire chief with the rest of his family in the house, and the series that proved syndication could still start a hit.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–8
2 sequences

The Unit

2006–2009CBSDrama

Delta Force at work and their wives at home on the base, developed for television by David Mamet.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Veronica's Closet

1997–2000NBCComedy

A lingerie magnate whose marriage collapses in public, in one of NBC's Thursday night bets after Seinfeld.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Vinland Saga

2019–NHK General TVAnimation

Norse violence scored with post-hardcore, and an opening that gets quieter as the series abandons the war it started with.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

The Wayans Bros.

1995–1999The WBComedy

Two brothers running a Harlem newsstand, made by the family whose name is over the door.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
2 sequences

Wednesday

2022–NetflixHorror

Gothic paper-cut animation and a harpsichord, doing in seventy-nine seconds what the Addams Family finger-snap did in eight.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
2 sequences

The West Wing

1999–2006NBCDrama

Oil portraits, flags and W.G. Snuffy Walden's brass — an opening that treats the executive branch as a cathedral, which is the show's entire register.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
2 sequences

Will & Grace

1998–2020NBCComedy

Thirteen seconds and a piano vamp, from a sitcom confident enough not to explain itself.

  • Season 1
  • Season 9
2 sequences

Yes, Prime Minister

1986–1988, 2013BBC Two / GoldComedy

The sequel that promotes Hacker to Number Ten, and the 2013 revival that recast the whole thing.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

The Young and the Restless

1973–CBSDrama

Genoa City, and the daytime ratings leader in America for more than thirty-five consecutive years.

  • Season 16
  • Season 45

And the ones that never did

3051 shows kept one opening for their entire run. That is not a gap in the catalogue — it is the finding. A single entry covering nine seasons is a claim that nine seasons opened identically.

All 2629 shows, A–Z →