1990s TV opening titles
The 1990s account for 409 of the 2,618 shows here, and 476 opening title sequences.
Comedy leads the decade with 142, then animation with 94.
NBC carries more of them than anyone else, with 49.
40 rebuilt their titles mid-run, Charmed most of all with eight 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 409
1 sequence
The Sopranos
Ninety seconds of a man driving home from the Lincoln Tunnel to North Caldwell. No cast montage, no highlights — just the commute, which turns out to be the whole show.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequence
One Piece
The longest-running opening rotation in television — more than twenty distinct sequences over a quarter of a century, each announcing a new arc.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Twin Peaks
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
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
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
South Park
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
1 sequence
Friends
A fountain, an umbrella and six people who are not, on any reading of the physics, getting less wet.
- Season 6
1 sequence
SpongeBob SquarePants
A sea shanty led by a painted pirate head, in call and response with children — one of the most universally known pieces of television music written this century.
- Season 1
2 sequences
ER
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
5 sequences
The X-Files
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
1 sequence
Sex and the City
A tutu, a bus and a splash of dirty water — an opening whose entire joke is that New York does not care who you think you are.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Family Guy
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
King of the Hill
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
7 sequences
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
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
2 sequences
Law & Order
The original, and the source of the two-note sting that half of American television has been quoting ever since.
- Season 1
- Season 20
1 sequence
Mr. Bean
A man dropped from the sky in a spotlight while a choir sings about him in Latin, every week, for a character who never explains himself.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dawson's Creek
Paula Cole over a Massachusetts creek — a theme so tied to the show that its absence from the streaming release became a story in itself.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Neon Genesis Evangelion
Ninety seconds cut faster than the eye resolves, with whole frames of text and diagram flashed for one frame each. Yoko Takahashi's theme is bright, major-key J-pop laid over imagery that is doing nothing of the kind, and the mismatch is the point rather than an accident.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The West Wing
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
1 sequence
Everybody Loves Raymond
A brass sting and a family photograph, in forty-eight seconds that promise nothing more complicated than what you are about to get.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Midsomer Murders
A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Futurama
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
Pokémon
The longest-running video-game adaptation on television, and a theme song that outlasted every cast change.
- Season 1
- Season 5
1 sequence
Teletubbies
A baby's face in the sun, four aerials and a narrator counting them in — over two minutes of titles for a programme aimed at people under three.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Stargate SG-1
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