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TVTitles

1980s TV opening titles

The 1980s account for 248 of the 2,618 shows here, and 272 opening title sequences.

Comedy leads the decade with 86, then drama with 46.

ABC carries more of them than anyone else, with 50.

19 rebuilt their titles mid-run, Blackadder most of all with four sequences.

Filed by first broadcast. A show that ran for thirty years appears once, under the decade it started in.

Most looked up

Pick a genre above for all 248

Still from the opening titles of The Simpsons2 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
Still from the opening titles of The Golden Girls1 sequence

The Golden Girls

1985–1992NBCComedy

'Thank You for Being a Friend' over four women and a Miami kitchen — a theme so tied to the show that the original songwriter's version is now the obscure one.

  • Season 7
Still from the opening titles of Seinfeld1 sequence

Seinfeld

1989–1998NBCComedy

A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Star Trek: The Next Generation3 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
Still from the opening titles of Cheers1 sequence

Cheers

1982–1993NBCComedy

A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.

  • Seasons 1–11
Still from the opening titles of EastEnders2 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
Still from the opening titles of Married... with Children1 sequence

Married... with Children

1987–1997FoxComedy

Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Baywatch1 sequence

Baywatch

1989–2001NBC / SyndicationDrama

Los Angeles County lifeguards, and at its peak the most-watched television programme on Earth.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Miami Vice1 sequence

Miami Vice

1984–1990NBCCrime

Flamingos, jai alai and pastel architecture over Jan Hammer — a title sequence that sold an entire aesthetic and arguably a city.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Murder, She Wrote1 sequence

Murder, She Wrote

1984–1996CBSCrime

A typewriter, a bicycle and Cabot Cove — twelve seasons of the most reassuring opening ever attached to a programme about repeated homicide.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Lonesome Dove1 sequence

Lonesome Dove

1989CBSDrama

Basil Poledouris scoring a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — the miniseries that proved the western was not finished after all.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Only Fools and Horses1 sequence

Only Fools and Horses

1981–2003BBC OneComedy

A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Roseanne2 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
Still from the opening titles of Blackadder4 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
Still from the opening titles of Agatha Christie's Poirot1 sequence

Agatha Christie's Poirot

1989–2013ITVCrime

Art Deco geometry and Christopher Gunning's theme — a title sequence that establishes the period, the register and the fastidiousness of the detective in one gesture.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Neighbours2 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
Still from the opening titles of Magnum, P.I.1 sequence

Magnum, P.I.

1980–1988CBSCrime

Hawaii, a Ferrari and a moustache, over a theme so brash it dates the decade to within about eighteen months.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of The Bold and the Beautiful2 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
Still from the opening titles of The Cosby Show1 sequence

The Cosby Show

1984–1992NBCComedy

A family dancing to a new arrangement of the same theme every season — jazz, big band, calypso — which makes it one of the earliest American sitcoms to treat its opening as something to redo annually.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Tales from the Crypt1 sequence

Tales from the Crypt

1989–1996HBOHorror

A crawl through a derelict house towards a coffin, which opens — Danny Elfman's theme, and a host who was a puppet.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Matlock1 sequence

Matlock

1986–1995NBC / ABCCrime

Andy Griffith as a defence attorney in a grey suit, nine seasons long.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Mystery Science Theater 30001 sequence

Mystery Science Theater 3000

1988–1999, 2017–2018Comedy Central / Sci-Fi Channel / NetflixComedy

A man and two robots heckling films, whose theme song exists to explain the premise and then says so out loud.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of In the Heat of the Night1 sequence

In the Heat of the Night

1988–1995NBC / CBSCrime

The 1967 film continued as a series, with Carroll O'Connor as the chief.

  • Season 1
Still from the opening titles of Pingu1 sequence

Pingu

1986–2006SF DRSAnimation

A Swiss claymation penguin speaking an invented language, so it needed no dubbing to sell anywhere.

  • Season 1