Comedy

Openings that get out of the way, and occasionally refuse to.

651 shows · 694 sequences

The ones that kept changing

All 33 in Comedy · every genre →

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

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

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

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

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

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

2020s

Ted Lasso

2020–Apple TV+Comedy

Twenty-three seconds of illustrated football club iconography and a brass hook — brisk, warm, and gone before it can outstay itself.

Season 1

Shrinking

2023–Apple TV+Comedy

Hand-drawn scribbles over domestic footage, in the register of a therapist's notebook margin.

Season 1

Peacemaker

2022–HBO MaxComedy

The entire cast dancing in formation, in costume, completely deadpan, to Wig Wam's 'Do Ya Wanna Taste It'. No plot content whatsoever, and the best argument on this site for titles as a bit.

Season 1

Only Murders in the Building

2021–HuluComedy

The Arconia drawn as a cutaway illustration with the residents inside it, redrawn each season as the building's secrets change.

Season 1

The Chair Company

2025HBOComedy

Tim Robinson on a man who will not let a collapsing office chair go.

Season 1

Betty

2020–2021HBOComedy

A group of women skateboarding in New York, expanded from the film Skate Kitchen.

Season 1

Abbott Elementary

2021–ABCComedy

A Philadelphia public school shot as a documentary, and the first network comedy in years to become a hit on its own terms.

Season 1

Emily in Paris

2020–NetflixComedy

Paris as a postcard rack — every landmark in order, photographed exactly as the show's protagonist would photograph them.

Season 1

A Man on the Inside

2024–NetflixComedy

A retired professor sent undercover into a care home, from the creator of The Good Place.

Season 1

Hacks

2021–MaxComedy

Las Vegas residency glamour, played straight enough to sting — a comedian's brand doing the work of a title sequence.

Season 1

Palm Royale

2024–Apple TV+Comedy

Late-sixties Palm Beach as a resort brochure — pastels, poolside and social climbing, all rendered with a completely straight face.

Season 1

Platonic

2023–Apple TV+Comedy

Hand-lettered titles over Los Angeles in the afternoon, keeping the show's register exactly: pleasant, and slightly off.

Season 1

Never Have I Ever

2020–2023NetflixComedy

Mindy Kaling's high-school series, narrated by John McEnroe for reasons the titles do not explain.

Season 1

Somebody Somewhere

2022–2024HBOComedy

Kansas roads and grain elevators, filmed without a trace of irony — a small show that declines to make its setting a joke.

Season 1

Bad Sisters

2022–Apple TV+Comedy

Five sisters and the man they intend to kill, arranged like a family portrait that keeps rearranging itself.

Season 1

The Rehearsal

2022–HBOComedy

Constructed sets and blueprints presented with total sincerity, which is the only register the show ever uses.

Season 2

Panchayat

2020–Prime VideoComedy

An engineering graduate taking a village secretary's job in Uttar Pradesh because nothing better came.

Season 1

Schmigadoon!

2021–2023Apple TV+Comedy

A couple trapped inside a Golden Age musical that will not let them leave until they find true love.

Season 1

Adults

2025FXComedy

Five friends sharing a Queens house and failing at adulthood.

Season 1

Loot

2022–Apple TV+Comedy

Extreme wealth drawn as a cheerful animated inventory — yachts, jets and foundations, arranged like a toy catalogue.

Season 1

Business Proposal

2022SBSComedy

A blind date under a false identity that turns out to be with the company's chief executive.

Season 1

How I Met Your Father

2022–2023HuluComedy

The How I Met Your Mother format restaged, with the same framing device and fifteen seconds of titles.

Season 1

The Curse

2023Showtime / A24Comedy

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's series about a house-flipping couple, whose opening credits are different in every single episode.

Season 1

Mythic Quest

2020–2025Apple TV+Comedy

Twelve seconds of game-engine fantasy, presented with the seriousness of a launch trailer for a product nobody in the show can finish.

Season 1

Avenue 5

2020–2022HBOComedy

A cruise-line logo in space, thirteen seconds long, with all the confidence of a company about to be sued.

Season 2

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

2022Disney+Comedy

A lawyer who is also a Hulk, in the one Marvel series that opens like a network sitcom and means it.

Season 1

Mr. Queen

2020–2021tvNComedy

A modern chef's soul trapped in a Joseon queen's body, from the Chinese web series Go Princess Go.

Season 1

Cunk on Earth

2022BBC TwoComedy

Philomena Cunk presenting human civilisation, opened by a ten-second parody of every documentary open ever made.

Season 1

The Afterparty

2022–2023Apple TV+Comedy

A different genre pastiche for every episode's narrator, which makes the titles the most honest summary the show could give of itself.

Season 1

Big Boys

2022–2025Channel 4Comedy

Jack Rooke's university comedy, which uses short animated stings rather than one fixed opening.

Season 1

Colin From Accounts

2022–Binge / Paramount+Comedy

An Australian comedy that begins with a hit dog and is named after him.

Season 1

Time Bandits

2024Apple TV+Comedy

The Gilliam film as a series, made by the Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows writers.

Season 1

Run

2020HBO / Sky ComedyComedy

Two people who agreed years ago that either could send one word and the other would drop everything.

Season 1

Girls5eva

2021–2024Peacock / NetflixComedy

A one-hit girl group reassembling in their forties, opened by their own hit.

Season 1

White House Plumbers

2023HBOComedy

Eleven seconds of period government typography, played as though the men behind it were competent.

Season 1

The Franchise

2024HBOComedy

The crew of a failing superhero film, from Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes.

Season 1

Doogie Kameāloha, M.D.

2021–2023Disney+Comedy

The Doogie premise moved to Oʻahu, with a title sequence built as a scrapbook rather than a montage.

Seasons 1–2

The Baby-Sitters Club

2020–2021NetflixComedy

The Ann M. Martin books adapted with a hand-lettered, sticker-book title sequence.

Season 1

Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

2022–2024Apple TV+Comedy

The Henson revival, which rebuilds the 1983 theme shot for shot with new puppets.

Season 1

Moonbase 8

2020ShowtimeComedy

Three astronauts in an Arizona simulator, none of whom will ever go to the moon.

Season 1

Amandaland

2025–BBC OneComedy

The Motherland spin-off, following the one character everybody else in it could not stand.

Season 1

Animal Control

2023–FoxComedy

Municipal animal control officers, in the only workplace sitcom where the supporting cast bites.

Season 1

Chad Powers

2025–HuluComedy

A disgraced quarterback who returns to college football in prosthetics under an assumed name.

Season 1

The Great

2020–2023HuluComedy

Catherine's rise told as farce, and billed on screen as an occasionally true story.

Season 1

My Roommate Is a Gumiho

2021tvNComedy

A nine-tailed fox nine hundred years from becoming human, sharing a flat with the student who swallowed his bead.

Season 1

The Paper

2025–PeacockComedy

The Office's documentary crew turning up at a dying Ohio newspaper, twelve years after they left Scranton.

Season 1

The Sex Lives of College Girls

2021–2022HBO MaxComedy

Four roommates at a Vermont university, from Mindy Kaling, who has made this arrangement work before.

Season 1

St. Denis Medical

2024–NBCComedy

A short-staffed Oregon hospital, filmed as though a documentary crew had turned up and stayed.

Season 1

Stick

2025–Apple TV+Comedy

A washed-up golfer coaching a teenager, and one of the few 2025 series whose service posted its own titles.

Season 1

Ted

2024–2026PeacockComedy

The talking bear from the films as a 1990s teen sitcom, with everyone recast younger.

Season 1

Wizards Beyond Waverly Place

2024–2026Disney ChannelComedy

Wizards of Waverly Place continued a generation on, with the original lead handing the family over.

Season 1

2010s

Taskmaster

2015–Dave / Channel 4Comedy

A bust of the host's head and a fanfare, in the register of a much grander programme than the one that follows.

Season 1

Shameless

2011–2021ShowtimeComedy

A bathroom door opening on each member of the family in turn — an entire household characterised through one room.

Season 1

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

Schitt's Creek

2015–2020CBCComedy

A motel sign and a town crest, in the register of a place that has never once considered how its name reads.

Season 1

The Righteous Gemstones

2019–2025HBOComedy

Eleven seconds of gold-plated megachurch branding, delivered with exactly the sincerity the family would want.

Season 1

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

2017–2023Prime VideoComedy

Fifties Manhattan as a fashion plate — silhouettes, hemlines and neon, moving at the speed the dialogue does.

Season 1

What We Do in the Shadows

2019–2024FXComedy

Gothic engraving and Norma Tanega's 'You're Dead' — a vampire mockumentary whose titles are the only part of it played completely straight.

Season 1

Sex Education

2019–2023NetflixComedy

Twenty seconds of hand-drawn scrawl and pop, pitched exactly at the notebook margins the show is set among.

Season 2

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

The Good Place

2016–2020NBCComedy

Pastel clouds, cartoon signage and a chime — an afterlife rendered as municipal branding, which is the joke the whole series is built on.

Season 1

The Big C

2010–2013ShowtimeComedy

Laura Linney given a terminal diagnosis and deciding to stop being polite about anything.

Season 1

Fleabag

2016–2019BBC Three / Prime VideoComedy

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's series, which opens by looking directly at you and skips the formality of a title sequence entirely.

Season 1

Letterkenny

2016–2023CraveComedy

A cold open, a card, and back out — a rural Ontario comedy that spends as little time on formalities as its characters would.

Season 1

Barry

2018–2023HBOComedy

A plain card and a held shot, gone in under half a minute. The show's whole comic method — refusing to signal what kind of scene you are in — starts with its titles refusing to signal anything at all.

Season 2

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

Critical Role

2015–Twitch / YouTubeComedy

A tabletop campaign broadcast live, which by its second campaign had a fully animated title sequence of its own.

Season 2

New Girl

2011–2018FoxComedy

Zooey Deschanel and three flatmates, with a theme the cast sings themselves.

Season 1

Superstore

2015–2021NBCComedy

Big-box retail signage and shelving, shot with the flatness of the fluorescent light the whole show is lit by.

Season 1

Key & Peele

2012–2015Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-six seconds and two names, from a sketch show that spent its budget on the sketches.

Season 1

Victorious

2010–2013NickelodeonComedy

A performing-arts high school, and the series that made Ariana Grande's name.

Season 1

Impractical Jokers

2011–truTVComedy

Four friends daring each other in public, with a hidden-camera open that ran unchanged for nine seasons.

Seasons 1–9

Veep

2012–2019HBOComedy

Fourteen seconds of seal, fanfare and a card. The brevity is the joke — an office with all the pomp of the presidency and none of the power.

Seasons 1–7

Girl Meets World

2014–2017Disney ChannelComedy

The Boy Meets World sequel, following the next generation of the same family.

Season 1

The Goldbergs

2013–2023ABCComedy

Adam Goldberg's own 1980s home videos turned into a sitcom about making them.

Season 1

Inside No. 9

2014–2024BBC TwoComedy

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's anthology, every episode set somewhere numbered nine, opened in seventeen seconds by a brass hare.

Season 1

Atlanta

2016–2022FXComedy

Donald Glover's series, opened with the same refusal to signal genre that the episodes run on — you are never told what kind of half-hour this is.

Season 1

After Life

2019–2022NetflixComedy

Ricky Gervais on grief, in the smallest register he has ever worked in.

Season 1

A Series of Unfortunate Events

2017–2019NetflixComedy

Lemony Snicket adapted with a title sequence whose lyrics are rewritten for every book — the song spends every verse telling you to stop watching.

Seasons 1–3

Raising Hope

2010–2014FoxComedy

A young father raising a baby with his own parents' help, from the My Name Is Earl creator.

Season 1

Anger Management

2012–2014FXComedy

Charlie Sheen's return to television after Two and a Half Men, opened in twelve seconds.

Season 1

Sam & Cat

2013–2014NickelodeonComedy

A crossover spin-off pairing characters from iCarly and Victorious.

Season 1

Good Luck Charlie

2010–2014Disney ChannelComedy

A teenager filming video diaries for her baby sister, which is the framing device and the title.

Season 1

Kim's Convenience

2016–2021CBCComedy

A Korean-Canadian family running a Toronto corner shop, adapted from the play by the man who wrote it.

Season 1

Search Party

2016–2022TBS / HBO MaxComedy

A missing-person search taken up by four Brooklynites who mostly want something to be part of.

Season 1

Better Things

2016–2022FXComedy

Twenty-nine seconds of domestic clutter, filmed with the affection of someone who lives in it.

Season 1

Vice Principals

2016–2017HBOComedy

A school crest and a sting, over in twelve seconds — the institutional dignity the two leads spend the series destroying.

Season 2

GLOW

2017–2019NetflixComedy

A 1980s syndication opening played completely straight — chrome type, freeze-frames and spandex, as though the show inside it were the wrestling programme rather than a series about making one.

Seasons 1–3

Friday Night Dinner

2011–2020Channel 4Comedy

The same family, the same meal, every week, for six series.

Season 1

Portlandia

2011–2018IFCComedy

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein on a city that is mostly an attitude, with a theme they wrote and perform themselves.

Season 1

Atypical

2017–2021NetflixComedy

Twenty-five seconds of hand-drawn Antarctic imagery, taken from the interests of the character it is about.

Season 1

Broad City

2014–2019Comedy CentralComedy

Abbi and Ilana's New York, opened in ten seconds of hand-drawn scribble.

Season 1

PEN15

2019–2021HuluComedy

Two adult women playing themselves at thirteen among actual thirteen-year-olds, opened in the register of a middle-school video project.

Season 1

Norsemen

2016–2020NRK1 / NetflixComedy

Viking iconography played with total sincerity by a comedy shot twice, in Norwegian and English, on the same sets.

Season 1

Shake It Up

2010–2013Disney ChannelComedy

Two Chicago dancers on a local television show, with Zendaya in her first series.

Season 1

Ballers

2015–2019HBOComedy

Miami, money and slow motion, cut to Big K.R.I.T. — an opening entirely comfortable with what the show is selling.

Season 1

Dickinson

2019–2021Apple TV+Comedy

Nineteenth-century Amherst scored with modern pop, and a title card restaged for each episode's poem.

Season 1

Insecure

2016–2021HBOComedy

Twenty-one seconds of South Los Angeles and a beat, changing its track from season to season while the shape of the thing stays identical.

Season 1

Detroiters

2017–2018Comedy CentralComedy

Two advertising men making local commercials in Detroit, played by two friends who grew up there.

Season 1

Liv and Maddie

2013–2017Disney ChannelComedy

Dove Cameron playing identical twins with opposite lives.

Season 1

The Mindy Project

2012–2017Fox / HuluComedy

Mindy Kaling as an obstetrician with a romantic-comedy view of her own life.

Season 1

Episodes

2011–2017Showtime / BBC TwoComedy

Two British writers watching their sitcom be remade badly in Los Angeles, with Matt LeBlanc as himself.

Season 1

Nathan For You

2013–2017Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-seven seconds of business-advice-show graphics, delivered with the flatness that makes everything after it land.

Season 1

The Eric André Show

2012–Adult SwimComedy

A talk-show set destroyed by its own host before the first guest arrives — an opening that is demolished and rebuilt every episode.

Season 1

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

Angie Tribeca

2016–2018TBSComedy

A police procedural played entirely as Airplane!, produced by Steve Carell and shot at that density of joke.

Season 1

Fresh Meat

2011–2016Channel 4Comedy

Six students sharing a Manchester house, from the Peep Show writers.

Season 1

Austin & Ally

2011–2016Disney ChannelComedy

A songwriter with stage fright and the performer who takes her songs.

Season 1

Workaholics

2011–2017Comedy CentralComedy

Three telemarketers who share a house and a job and never leave either, in thirteen seconds.

Season 1

Gullak

2019–SonyLIVComedy

A lower-middle-class family in a small north Indian town, narrated by their piggy bank.

Season 4

Toast of London

2012–2015Channel 4Comedy

Matt Berry as a voiceover actor with an unshakeable opinion of himself.

Season 1

Ramy

2019–2022HuluComedy

Ramy Youssef's series about a first-generation Egyptian American trying to be a good Muslim, opened in nine seconds flat.

Season 1

Crashing

2017–2019HBOComedy

Pete Holmes sleeping on other comedians' sofas after his marriage ends, opened in eighteen seconds.

Season 1

Call My Agent!

2015–2020France 2Comedy

Paris and a jazz figure, in the register of a film the agency's clients would be too grand to appear in.

Season 1

Upstart Crow

2016–2020BBC TwoComedy

Ben Elton's Shakespeare sitcom, written in the shape of the plays it mocks.

Season 1

How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)

2019–2022NetflixComedy

A teenager who builds Europe's largest online drug market from his bedroom to win back a girlfriend, and eleven seconds to say so.

Season 1

One Day at a Time

2017–2020Netflix / PopComedy

The Norman Lear sitcom remade around a Cuban American family, with the 1975 theme rerecorded by Gloria Estefan.

Season 1

Conan

2010–2021TBSComedy

The show Conan O'Brien built after losing The Tonight Show, opening on a cartoon of himself.

Season 1

Cuckoo

2012–2019BBC ThreeComedy

A daughter returning from a gap year married to an American with no discernible occupation.

Season 1

Stath Lets Flats

2018–2021Channel 4Comedy

Jamie Demetriou as a lettings agent with no aptitude for letting flats.

Season 1

You're the Worst

2014–2019FX / FXXComedy

Two people who should not be together, opened in twenty-two seconds of exactly that.

Season 1

Chewing Gum

2015–2017E4Comedy

Michaela Coel's Tower Hamlets comedy, made three years before I May Destroy You.

Season 1

Bad Education

2012–BBC ThreeComedy

Jack Whitehall as a teacher less mature than his pupils.

Season 1

Awkward

2011–2016MTVComedy

A high-school accident mistaken for a suicide attempt, and the reputation that follows.

Season 1

Servant of the People

2015–20191+1Comedy

A history teacher accidentally elected president of Ukraine, played by a comedian who was then elected president of Ukraine.

Season 1

Louie

2010–2015FXComedy

A man walking to a comedy club and eating a slice of pizza, singing his own theme — fifty-two seconds with no jokes in them.

Season 1

Mozart in the Jungle

2014–2018Prime VideoComedy

A New York orchestra and the conductor who takes it apart, opened in thirteen seconds.

Season 1

Black Jesus

2014–2019Adult SwimComedy

Aaron McGruder's live-action series, with Jesus living in Compton.

Season 2

High Maintenance

2016–2020HBOComedy

A weed delivery cyclist as the only connection between otherwise unrelated New York stories.

Season 1

The Detour

2016–2019TBSComedy

A family road trip that goes wrong in a different way every season, written by a married couple about themselves.

Season 4

SMILF

2017–2019ShowtimeComedy

A single mother in South Boston, cancelled after two seasons.

Season 1

Man Down

2013–2017Channel 4Comedy

Greg Davies as a teacher whose life is a sustained emergency, with Rik Mayall as his father.

Season 1

How to Make It in America

2010–2011HBOComedy

New York street fashion and hustle, cut to Aloe Blacc — the East Coast answer to Entourage, and a better title sequence than the show got credit for.

Season 1

Rake

2010–2018ABCComedy

Sydney and a barrister who is his own worst client, opened with rather more restraint than he ever manages.

Season 1

Enlightened

2011–2013HBOComedy

Nature footage of the sort used in wellness videos, played entirely straight — which becomes the joke the moment the show starts.

Season 1

A Black Lady Sketch Show

2019–2023HBOComedy

Robin Thede's sketch series, opened by a title sequence with more production value than most of the sketches.

Season 1

NTSF:SD:SUV::

2011–2013Adult SwimComedy

A procedural parody whose title is an acronym joke that never resolves, opened in fourteen seconds.

Season 1

Inside Amy Schumer

2013–2022Comedy CentralComedy

A sketch show with stand-up and street interviews between, and eleven seconds to get into it.

Season 1

Wilfred

2011–2014FX / FXXComedy

A man who sees his neighbour's dog as an Australian in a dog suit, which the series never explains.

Season 1

Lodge 49

2018–2019AMCComedy

A Long Beach fraternal lodge and a man who joins it looking for something he cannot name.

Season 1

Please Like Me

2013–2016ABC2Comedy

An Australian comedy that rewrites its opening for every episode — a different song, a different set of images, in a show otherwise built on stillness.

Season 1

La Casa de las Flores

2018–2020NetflixComedy

A Mexico City florist family and the second family the father has been keeping.

Season 1

Los Espookys

2019–2022HBOComedy

Handmade horror props filmed lovingly and badly on purpose — fake blood, rubber and fog, exactly the standard the characters work to.

Season 1

Faking It

2014–2016MTVComedy

Two friends mistaken for a couple who decide not to correct anyone.

Season 1

Lady Dynamite

2016–2017NetflixComedy

Maria Bamford's series about Maria Bamford, structured across three timelines and opened in fifteen seconds.

Season 1

At Home with Amy Sedaris

2017–2020truTVComedy

A homemaking show that is not one, opened in the idiom of 1970s daytime television.

Season 1

Count Arthur Strong

2013–2017BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Steve Delaney's radio character given a sitcom around him, co-written by Graham Linehan.

Season 1

Bluestone 42

2013–2015BBC ThreeComedy

A bomb disposal detachment in Helmand, played as a workplace comedy without pretending the work is safe.

Season 1

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

2015–2016FXComedy

Denis Leary as a failed rock singer reforming his band around his own daughter.

Season 1

Club de Cuervos

2015–2019NetflixComedy

Netflix's first Spanish-language original, about two siblings inheriting a football club.

Season 1

Baroness von Sketch Show

2016–2021CBCComedy

Four women writing and performing every sketch, with no host, no studio audience and no linking material.

Season 1

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee

2016–2022TBSComedy

A weekly satire whose opening graphics were redesigned more often than most dramas change a season.

Season 1

Blunt Talk

2015–2016StarzComedy

Patrick Stewart as a British cable news anchor in Los Angeles, from Jonathan Ames.

Season 1

Angry Boys

2011ABC (Australia)Comedy

The follow-up to Summer Heights High, co-produced with HBO and the BBC and shot on three continents.

Season 1

Rita

2012–2020TV 2Comedy

A Danish schoolteacher who is very good at her job and bad at everything else.

Season 1

Web Therapy

2011–2015ShowtimeComedy

Lisa Kudrow's improvised therapist, conducting three-minute sessions by video call.

Season 1

A to Z

2014NBCComedy

A romantic comedy that told you in the pilot exactly how many months it would last, and lasted thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Cubicles

2019–SonyLIV / TVFComedy

A first job in an Indian IT firm, from the studio that made Panchayat and Kota Factory.

Season 1

2 Broke Girls

2011–2017CBSComedy

Two waitresses in Williamsburg saving towards a cupcake business, with the running total printed on screen at the end of every episode.

Season 1

A.N.T. Farm

2011–2014Disney ChannelComedy

Gifted children fast-tracked into a high school that does not want them there.

Season 1

American Housewife

2016–2021ABCComedy

A woman who reckons herself the second-fattest in Westport, Connecticut, and says so at length.

Season 1

Another Period

2015–2018Comedy CentralComedy

Newport in 1902 shot as a reality series, with the confessional interviews and everything.

Season 2

Blue Mountain State

2010–2011SpikeComedy

A football scholarship treated as a licence rather than a job, in Spike's fraternity comedy.

Season 1

Bunheads

2012–2013ABC FamilyComedy

Amy Sherman-Palladino's dance-school series, one season long and talked about since.

Season 1

The Conners

2018–2025ABCComedy

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

Season 1
Season 5

Dead to Me

2019–2022NetflixComedy

A widow and the woman she meets at grief counselling, who knows rather more about the death than she says.

Season 1

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

2016–2017BBC AmericaComedy

Douglas Adams's holistic detective remade in Seattle, still working on the principle that everything is connected.

Season 1

Dog with a Blog

2012–2015Disney ChannelComedy

A stepfamily's dog who can talk, and keeps a blog about them that none of them know exists.

Season 1

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23

2012–2013ABCComedy

A Midwesterner sharing a New York flat with the worst possible person, and James Van Der Beek playing himself.

Season 1

Drunk History

2013–2019Comedy CentralComedy

History retold by someone too drunk to tell it, lip-synced straight-faced by actors in costume.

Season 1

Fresh Off the Boat

2015–2020ABCComedy

A Taiwanese-American family moving to Orlando in 1995, from Eddie Huang's memoir.

Season 1

Ghosts

2019–2023BBC OneComedy

The Horrible Histories troupe as the dead of one country house, opened by all of them at once.

Season 1

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life

2016NetflixComedy

Four ninety-minute films returning to Stars Hollow nine years on, one for each season of the year.

Season 1

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

Grace and Frankie

2015–2022NetflixComedy

Two women whose husbands leave them for each other, and who then have to live together.

Season 1

Happy Endings

2011–2013ABCComedy

Six friends in Chicago talking over one another at a speed most sitcoms do not attempt.

Season 1

Her Private Life

2019tvNComedy

A gallery curator running a fan site for an idol, and the director who finds out.

Season 1

Hot in Cleveland

2010–2015TV LandComedy

Three Los Angeles women whose plane diverts, and who find that in Ohio they are considered striking.

Season 1

Jane the Virgin

2014–2019The CWComedy

A telenovela about a woman inside a telenovela, opened in the form it is parodying and loving at once.

Season 1

Kickin' It

2011–2015Disney XDComedy

A martial arts dojo in a shopping centre, and the longest-running live-action comedy Disney XD made.

Season 3

The Last Man on Earth

2015–2018FoxComedy

The last man alive, who turns out not to be, and who is not much of a loss to anybody either way.

Season 1

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

2014–HBOComedy

A weekly half-hour whose animated globe-and-newsprint open has run essentially unchanged for a decade.

Season 1

Life in Pieces

2015–2019CBSComedy

One family across four short stories an episode, told out of order and cut together at the end.

Season 1

Melissa & Joey

2010–2015ABC Family / FreeformComedy

A local politician and the man who becomes her nanny, in the longest-running sitcom ABC Family made.

Season 1

Mike & Molly

2010–2016CBSComedy

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

Season 1
Seasons 4–6

Miracle Workers

2019–2023TBSComedy

An anthology that keeps its cast and changes everything else — heaven, the Dark Ages, the Oregon Trail, the apocalypse.

Season 2

Mom

2013–2021CBSComedy

A newly sober mother and her newly sober mother, in a Chuck Lorre sitcom that got steadily less comfortable on purpose.

Season 8

Mrs. Brown's Boys

2011–BBC One / RTÉ OneComedy

A Dublin matriarch played by the man who writes her, taped with the crew, the corpsing and the fluffed lines all left in.

Season 1

The Muppets (2015)

2015–2016ABCComedy

The Muppets as a workplace mockumentary, which lasted one season and a mid-season change of format.

Season 1

My Sassy Girl

2017SBSComedy

The film remade as a Joseon romance, with a princess in place of the original's student.

Season 1

The Neighborhood

2018–2026CBSComedy

A relentlessly friendly Midwestern family moving into a Black neighbourhood in Pasadena, and the man next door who would rather they had not.

Season 8

Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn

2014–2018NickelodeonComedy

Quadruplets who share everything including the title, and want to share less of it.

Season 1

Odd Squad

2014–PBS KidsComedy

Child agents investigating mathematical strangeness, played entirely deadpan.

Season 1

Pair of Kings

2010–2013Disney XDComedy

Two brothers from Chicago who inherit an island kingdom neither of them had heard of.

Seasons 1–3

Plebs

2013–2022ITV2Comedy

Ancient Rome played as a flatshare, with the empire happening somewhere off to one side.

Season 1

Prison Playbook

2017–2018tvNComedy

A baseball pitcher jailed weeks before signing for the major leagues, and the wing he ends up in.

Season 1

Suburgatory

2011–2014ABCComedy

A Manhattan teenager relocated to the suburbs by a father who found a box of condoms in her drawer.

Season 1

The Tick

2016–2019AmazonComedy

The live-action Tick, whose main title is a full superhero sequence played entirely straight.

Season 1

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

2015–2019NetflixComedy

A woman released after fifteen years in a bunker, who moves to New York on the strength of it.

Season 1

Vicious

2013–2016ITVComedy

Two actors who have lived together for fifty years, insulting each other in front of a studio audience.

Season 1

2000s

The Big Bang Theory

2007–2019CBSComedy

Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.

Season 1

Malcolm in the Middle

2000–2006FoxComedy

They Might Be Giants' 'Boss of Me' over archive film of chaos — falling, crashing and general misadventure, cut faster than a network comedy usually dares.

Season 1

The Office

2005–2013NBCComedy

Scranton, a car park and a filing cabinet, shot like stock footage for a regional business — twenty-two seconds that promise nothing will happen.

Season 1

Scrubs

2001–2010NBC / ABCComedy

Twelve seconds, an X-ray and a guitar — a medical comedy that spends less time on titles than most shows spend on a network ident.

Season 1

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

2005–FX / FXXComedy

Photographs of Philadelphia over a jaunty public-domain waltz, with the episode's absurd title card dropped into the middle of it.

Seasons 2–4

Modern Family

2009–2020ABCComedy

Fourteen seconds of family photographs sliding into place, and a card. Nothing else.

Season 1

The Middle

2009–2018ABCComedy

An Indiana family with no money and no prospects, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Two and a Half Men

2003–2015CBSComedy

Twelve seasons on a Malibu beach house, opened by four sung syllables.

Season 6

Curb Your Enthusiasm

2000–2024HBOComedy

A tuba, a circus march, and nothing else. Twenty-four years and twelve seasons on a piece of production-library music picked because it sounded like a man walking into trouble.

Seasons 1–12

How I Met Your Mother

2005–2014CBSComedy

Fourteen seconds of photographs and a ukulele — a nine-year story introduced by a handful of snapshots.

Season 1

Parks and Recreation

2009–2020NBCComedy

Pawnee's municipal signage and a brass fanfare, pitched at exactly the level of civic pride the show's protagonist has for a mid-sized Indiana town.

Seasons 1–7

Arrested Development

2003–2019Fox / NetflixComedy

A ukulele, a narrator, and a family photograph that gets less flattering the longer you look at it.

Season 1

Community

2009–2015NBC / YahooComedy

Study-group detritus on a table, in a show that spent six seasons abandoning its own format for whatever genre it fancied that week.

Season 1

Nurse Jackie

2009–2015ShowtimeComedy

Hospital corridors and pills, filmed with the brightness of a pharmaceutical advertisement.

Season 1

30 Rock

2006–2013NBCComedy

Nineteen seconds of Art Deco signage and a brass sting, moving at roughly the speed the show's dialogue does.

Season 1

Glee

2009–2015FoxComedy

An Ohio show choir, and the series that briefly made network television a singles chart.

Season 1

Entourage

2004–2011HBOComedy

Los Angeles from a moving car, and Jane's Addiction — an opening that is essentially an advertisement for the lifestyle the show is about.

Season 1

Peep Show

2003–2015Channel 4Comedy

Nineteen seconds and a card, for a comedy shot almost entirely from inside its characters' heads.

Season 4

Doc Martin

2004–2022ITVComedy

A London surgeon with a blood phobia relocated to a Cornish village that will not leave him alone.

Season 1

Everybody Hates Chris

2005–2009UPN / The CWComedy

Chris Rock narrating his own Bed-Stuy adolescence, opened by the family on the stoop.

Season 1

Boston Legal

2004–2008ABCComedy

Legal-drama iconography played as farce, from the same producer as Ally McBeal and with the same refusal to take the profession seriously.

Season 1

The IT Crowd

2006–2013Channel 4Comedy

Eight-bit pixel art and a chiptune, for a basement full of people nobody upstairs wants to think about.

Season 1

Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide

2004–2007NickelodeonComedy

A middle-school survival manual delivered to camera, one tip per episode.

Season 1

Weeds

2005–2012ShowtimeComedy

'Little Boxes' over identical suburban houses — and from the third season the song is re-recorded by a different artist every episode, which makes this one of the most varied openings in television.

Season 2

Ugly Betty

2006–2010ABCComedy

Fashion-magazine collage and a poncho, in twelve seconds.

Season 1

The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

2005–2008Disney ChannelComedy

Twins living in a Boston hotel their mother sings in.

Season 1

Californication

2007–2014ShowtimeComedy

Los Angeles from a convertible, with a writer who has not written anything in some years.

Season 1

Chuck

2007–2012NBCComedy

Consumer electronics and spy hardware cut together at the same speed, for a show that could never decide which it was about — correctly.

Season 1

Drake & Josh

2004–2007NickelodeonComedy

Two stepbrothers in San Diego, from the All That writers' room.

Season 4

iCarly

2007–2012NickelodeonComedy

A web show made in a Seattle flat, five years before that was an ordinary thing for a teenager to do.

Season 1

Balamory

2002–2005CBeebiesComedy

A Scottish island village painted in primary colours, with a theme that asks what the story is in it.

Season 1

Pushing Daisies

2007–2009ABCComedy

Storybook illustration and saturated colour, pitched exactly between a fairy tale and a mortuary — which is the show.

Season 1

Zoey 101

2005–2008NickelodeonComedy

A Californian boarding school, with a theme sung by Jamie Lynn Spears.

Season 2

That's So Raven

2003–2007Disney ChannelComedy

A girl who sees the future and misreads it every week.

Season 1

Mock the Week

2005–2022BBC TwoComedy

A topical panel show whose titles cut the week's news into a strobing collage before anyone speaks.

Season 1

Drop Dead Diva

2009–2014LifetimeComedy

A model who dies and wakes up in the body of a lawyer, which is a body-swap comedy and a legal procedural at once.

Season 1

The League

2009–2015FX / FXXComedy

A fantasy football league and the friendships it slowly destroys.

Season 1

Dead Like Me

2003–2004ShowtimeComedy

Reapers, toast and small municipal death — an opening that treats the afterlife as clerical work, which is the joke the series runs on.

Season 1

Still Game

2002–2019BBC Scotland / BBC OneComedy

Two Glasgow pensioners and the Craiglang high-rises, with titles built entirely from the scheme itself.

Season 1

Even Stevens

2000–2003Disney ChannelComedy

Shia LaBeouf as the youngest of three in a Sacramento family.

Season 1

Big Time Rush

2009–2013NickelodeonComedy

A manufactured boy band playing a manufactured boy band, which then toured as one.

Season 1

In the Night Garden...

2007–2009CBeebiesComedy

Two minutes of a boat, a sleeping child and a narrator naming everything in the garden, before a programme designed to send that child to sleep.

Season 1

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

2004Channel 4Comedy

A title sequence pretending to be a lost 1980s horror series, complete with the production faults the conceit requires.

Season 1

Miranda

2009–2015BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Miranda Hart addressing the camera in a joke shop, in eleven seconds of open.

Season 1

Chappelle's Show

2003–2006Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-two seconds of animation and a beat, for the sketch show that defined a decade of American comedy in two and a half seasons.

Season 1

Little Britain

2003–2006BBC Three / BBC OneComedy

A radio series moved to television, narrated as though it were a documentary about a country nobody has heard of.

Season 1

Hung

2009–2011HBOComedy

Detroit in decline, filmed with more sympathy than the premise would lead you to expect.

Season 1

Black Books

2000–2004Channel 4Comedy

A bookshop run by a man who does not want customers, from Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan.

Season 1

Horrible Histories

2009–CBBCComedy

Sketch comedy about history for children that adults watched anyway, with the titles redrawn between series.

Season 5

United States of Tara

2009–2011ShowtimeComedy

Diablo Cody's series about a woman with dissociative identity disorder, whose titles introduce every alter.

Season 1

Flight of the Conchords

2007–2009HBOComedy

Cut-paper animation of two New Zealanders failing to make it in New York, assembled with the same handmade cheapness as the band it is about.

Seasons 1–2

Royal Pains

2009–2016USA NetworkComedy

A concierge doctor in the Hamptons, in the middle of USA's blue-sky decade.

Season 1

Da Ali G Show

2000–2004Channel 4 / HBOComedy

Sacha Baron Cohen's three characters interviewing people who did not know.

Season 1

Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps

2001–2011BBC ThreeComedy

Six friends in a Runcorn pub, and the sitcom BBC Three ran for nine series while the critics ignored it.

Season 9

Outnumbered

2007–2016BBC OneComedy

Two parents and three children, with the children's dialogue largely improvised.

Season 1

The Colbert Report

2005–2014Comedy CentralComedy

An eagle, a flag and a barrage of adjectives flying at the camera — a parody of cable-news branding so precise that cable news started copying it back.

Season 1

Grounded for Life

2001–2005Fox / The WBComedy

A young Staten Island family, told out of order within each episode.

Season 1

Coupling

2000–2004BBC TwoComedy

Six friends in a bar, structured as farce rather than warmth — the British sitcom most often, and most unfairly, compared to Friends.

Season 1

Undeclared

2001–2002FoxComedy

Judd Apatow's college follow-up to Freaks and Geeks, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Green Wing

2004–2007Channel 4Comedy

A hospital comedy shot with speed-ramped transitions between every scene, which the titles establish first.

Season 1

Gokusen

2002–2008NTVComedy

A yakuza heir teaching maths at a school for delinquents.

Season 1

Punk'd

2003–2015MTVComedy

Ashton Kutcher's hidden-camera show, and Candid Camera restaged for people with publicists.

Season 4

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

2007–2010Adult SwimComedy

Public-access video aesthetics reproduced exactly and then broken — twenty-two seconds that set the terms for a decade of internet comedy.

Season 1

Childrens Hospital

2008–2016Adult SwimComedy

A hospital soap parody that changed its own premise whenever it got bored, Rob Corddry's first series.

Season 3

Bored to Death

2009–2011HBOComedy

A pulp-paperback cover come to life — Brooklyn drawn as a detective magazine by Dean Haspiel, panel by panel.

Season 1

One on One

2001–2006UPNComedy

A Baltimore sports broadcaster whose teenage daughter moves in with him, and the spine of UPN's comedy block for five years.

Season 1

The Mighty Boosh

2004–2007BBC ThreeComedy

A stage show that became a radio series that became a television series, and kept the crimping in all three.

Season 1

Outrageous Fortune

2005–2010TV3Comedy

A West Auckland crime family whose matriarch decides, when her husband goes to prison, that the rest of them will go straight.

Season 1

Half & Half

2002–2006UPNComedy

Two half-sisters who grew up apart, living in the same San Francisco building as adults.

Season 1

Summer Heights High

2007ABC (Australia)Comedy

Chris Lilley playing three pupils and staff at the same school, shot as a documentary.

Season 1

That Mitchell and Webb Look

2006–2010BBC TwoComedy

The sketch show out of the radio series That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and the home of Numberwang.

Season 1

All of Us

2003–2007UPN / The CWComedy

A blended family sitcom produced by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, out of their own circumstances.

Season 1

Titus

2000–2002FoxComedy

Christopher Titus narrating his own childhood from a white void between scenes.

Season 1

The Inbetweeners

2008–2010E4Comedy

Twenty-one seconds of school corridor, with no attempt to make any of the four look like someone you would want to be.

Season 1

Wonderfalls

2004FoxComedy

Souvenir figurines that talk, in a Niagara Falls gift shop — Bryan Fuller's first series and a direct ancestor of Pushing Daisies.

Season 1

Teachers

2001–2004Channel 4Comedy

A Bristol comprehensive from the staff room's side, with Andrew Lincoln before The Walking Dead.

Season 1

Spicks and Specks

2005–ABC (Australia)Comedy

A music quiz named after a Bee Gees single, and one of the ABC's most watched programmes for a decade.

Season 1

Eve

2003–2006UPNComedy

The rapper Eve as a Miami fashion designer, in one of the run of sitcoms UPN built its Monday nights on.

Season 1

Little Mosque on the Prairie

2007–2012CBCComedy

A Muslim congregation renting a prairie church hall, in a sitcom that became Canada's most exported comedy.

Season 4

Son of the Beach

2000–2002FXComedy

A Baywatch parody produced by Howard Stern, and one of FX's first originals.

Season 1

Slings and Arrows

2003–2006The Movie NetworkComedy

A Canadian series about a Shakespearean festival, with a different theatrical opening for each of its three seasons.

Season 2

The Chris Isaak Show

2001–2004ShowtimeComedy

The musician playing himself and his band playing themselves, in a series about their own touring.

Season 1

The Basil Brush Show

2002–2007CBBCComedy

The fox puppet given a sitcom of his own, forty years after he first turned up on somebody else's.

Seasons 1–4

The Mitchell and Webb Situation

2001Play UKComedy

David Mitchell and Robert Webb's first sketch series, five years before the one everyone remembers.

Season 1

We Can Be Heroes

2005ABC (Australia)Comedy

Chris Lilley playing all six finalists for Australian of the Year, in his first series.

Season 1

Os Normais

2001–2003TV GloboComedy

A Rio couple narrating their own relationship to camera, in the sitcom that reset Brazilian television comedy.

Season 1

8 Out of 10 Cats

2005–Channel 4Comedy

A panel show about opinion polls, which spawned a Countdown crossover more popular than either parent.

Season 1

8 Simple Rules

2002–2005ABCComedy

A father guarding his daughters, and the sitcom that had to keep going after John Ritter died during its second season.

Season 1

According to Jim

2001–2009ABCComedy

Eight seasons of a Chicago family sitcom that critics ignored and audiences kept renewing.

Season 1

Benidorm

2007–2018ITVComedy

An all-inclusive Spanish resort and the same British families returning to it for ten series.

Season 1

The Bernie Mac Show

2001–2006FoxComedy

A comedian raising his sister's three children and turning to camera to explain himself about it.

Seasons 3–5

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year

2004–Channel 4Comedy

An annual quiz about the year just gone, running long past midnight and rebuilt from scratch each December.

Season 10

Cory in the House

2007–2008Disney ChannelComedy

That's So Raven's brother moved into the White House as the chef's son.

Season 1

The Ellen DeGeneres Show

2003–2022SyndicationComedy

Nineteen years of daytime, opening on a host dancing her way in through the audience.

Seasons 1–3

George Lopez

2002–2007ABCComedy

A Los Angeles factory manager and the family around him, and the longest-running American sitcom led by a Latino cast.

Season 1

Greek

2007–2011ABC FamilyComedy

Fraternity and sorority life at a fictional Ohio university, taken seriously enough to run four seasons.

Season 1

Jimmy Kimmel Live!

2003–ABCComedy

ABC's late-night hour, opening on a Hollywood Boulevard that the show films on the pavement outside.

Season 23

Joey

2004–2006NBCComedy

The Friends spin-off, moving one character to Los Angeles and finding out how much of the show had been the other five.

Season 1

Kath & Kim

2002–2007ABC (Australia)Comedy

A mother and daughter in outer-suburban Melbourne, and the most quoted Australian comedy of its decade.

Season 2

MXC

2003–2007SpikeComedy

Takeshi's Castle redubbed into something considerably ruder, with the original footage left exactly as it was.

Season 1

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

My Name Is Earl

2005–2009NBCComedy

A petty criminal working through a written list of everything he has done wrong, one item an episode.

Season 1

My Wife and Kids

2001–2005ABCComedy

Damon Wayans running a household on a theory of parenting he makes up as he goes.

Season 4

The Naked Brothers Band

2007–2009NickelodeonComedy

A mockumentary about a children's rock band, played by two brothers who really were one.

Season 1

The New Adventures of Old Christine

2006–2010CBSComedy

A divorced mother whose former husband's new girlfriend is also called Christine, which is where the title comes from.

Season 1

Not Going Out

2006–BBC OneComedy

Lee Mack's flat-share sitcom, written joke-first and the longest-running British studio comedy still in production.

Season 1

QI

2003–BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Sepia illustration and a music-box theme, in a panel show that has changed almost nothing about its opening in two decades and two hosts.

Season 1

Reba

2001–2007The WB / The CWComedy

Reba McEntire as a Houston mother holding a divorce together, with a theme she sings herself.

Season 1

Rules of Engagement

2007–2013CBSComedy

Two couples at opposite ends of a relationship and one man at neither, in the sitcom CBS used for years as a gap-filler.

Season 3

The Suite Life on Deck

2008–2011Disney ChannelComedy

The Suite Life moved onto a cruise ship that is also a school.

Season 1

That '80s Show

2002FoxComedy

The follow-up to That '70s Show with none of the same characters, gone in thirteen episodes.

Season 1

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

Viva La Bam

2003–2005MTVComedy

Bam Margera staging elaborate stunts against his own parents, in the Jackass spin-off MTV built around a single house in Pennsylvania.

Season 1

What I Like About You

2002–2006The WBComedy

Two sisters sharing a New York flat, named for the Romantics single it opens on.

Season 1

The Whitest Kids U' Know

2007–2011IFCComedy

A New York sketch troupe who filmed their own pilot and sold it, opening on a theme they perform themselves.

Season 1

Wild 'n Out

2005–MTVComedy

Improvised comedy played as a team sport, and the longest-running programme MTV has.

Season 16

Would I Lie to You?

2007–BBC OneComedy

A panel show built on whether a story about a guest is true, which turns out to be an unusually durable format.

Season 4

Yes, Dear

2000–2006CBSComedy

Two couples raising children in the same Los Angeles house, one of them anxious about it and one not.

Season 1

1990s

Friends

1994–2004NBCComedy

A fountain, an umbrella and six people who are not, on any reading of the physics, getting less wet.

Season 6

Sex and the City

1998–2004HBOComedy

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

Mr. Bean

1990–1995ITVComedy

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

Everybody Loves Raymond

1996–2005CBSComedy

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

Teletubbies

1997–2001BBC TwoComedy

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

That '70s Show

1998–2006FoxComedy

The cast singing 'In the Street' from the back of a Vista Cruiser, re-recorded and reshot every season — plus one-off Halloween and Christmas versions.

Seasons 1–8

The King of Queens

1998–2007CBSComedy

A delivery driver, his wife and her father in Rego Park, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Home Improvement

1991–1999ABCComedy

Power tools and a grunting brass riff, in the register of the fictional DIY programme the show is about.

Season 1

Keeping Up Appearances

1990–1995BBC OneComedy

Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced Bouquet, and the relatives she would rather nobody met.

Season 1

The Daily Show

1996–Comedy CentralComedy

A news-graphics package rebuilt for each of its four hosts, and the programme that made the fake-news desk a form.

Season 1

Boy Meets World

1993–2000ABCComedy

A cast montage rebuilt every season as its lead grew from eleven to eighteen, which few sitcoms have had to solve.

Season 1

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

1998–ABC / The CWComedy

Improv games where the points don't matter, opened by a scramble of the cast in freeze-frame.

Season 1

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

1990–1996NBCComedy

An entire origin story rapped over an animated title card — the longest opening of its era, cut down substantially after the first season.

Season 1

The Nanny

1993–1999CBSComedy

Cartoon animation narrating how a woman from Flushing ended up in a Manhattan townhouse — a premise delivered entirely in the titles.

Season 1

Will & Grace

1998–2020NBCComedy

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

Season 1
Season 9

Freaks and Geeks

1999–2000NBCComedy

School photographs taken one at a time, with each cast member visibly hating the process — Joan Jett over the least flattering portraits anyone would agree to.

Season 1

Ally McBeal

1997–2002FoxComedy

Vonda Shepard singing over a lawyer walking through Boston — a theme so tied to the show that the singer became a recurring character.

Season 1

Sabrina the Teenage Witch

1996–2003ABC / The WBComedy

The Archie Comics witch as a TGIF sitcom, seven seasons across two networks.

Season 1

Northern Exposure

1990–1995CBSComedy

A moose walking through an empty Alaskan town, which is the entire opening and remains one of television's best jokes about scale.

Season 1

Barney & Friends

1992–2010PBSComedy

A purple dinosaur who appears when children imagine him, and a closing song that became a schoolyard parody format.

Season 1

Absolutely Fabulous

1992–2012BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Twenty-one seconds of Julie Driscoll's 'This Wheel's on Fire', re-recorded for the show by its own star.

Season 1

Step by Step

1991–1998ABC / CBSComedy

Two single parents merging their families, in the middle of the TGIF block.

Season 1

Wings

1990–1997NBCComedy

A Nantucket airline run by two brothers, opened by Schubert.

Season 1

Father Ted

1995–1998Channel 4Comedy

Three priests on a rock in the Atlantic, introduced by a whistle tune and some of the flattest scenery ever put in a title sequence.

Season 1

Mad About You

1992–2019NBCComedy

A married couple in New York, over a theme that was re-recorded repeatedly and once sung by the show's own stars.

Season 1

In Living Color

1990–1994FoxComedy

Graffiti, dance and a Heavy D theme — a sketch show that opened at a volume network television had not previously permitted.

Season 1

Spin City

1996–2002ABCComedy

New York City Hall in twenty-two seconds, rebuilt partway through the run when the show changed its lead.

Season 5

3rd Rock from the Sun

1996–2001NBCComedy

Aliens observing suburban Ohio, opened with the brightness of a travel advertisement for a planet.

Season 6

Frasier

1993–2004NBCComedy

A skyline drawn in simple lines while a man sings about tossed salads and scrambled eggs, and declines to explain either.

Season 1

Have I Got News for You

1990–BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Newspaper mastheads and printing presses, rebuilt periodically across thirty-five years of British political humiliation.

Season 1

All That

1994–2005NickelodeonComedy

A sketch show for children that launched Kenan Thompson, Amanda Bynes and Nick Cannon.

Season 1

The Vicar of Dibley

1994–2020BBC OneComedy

Dawn French as the first woman priest in a village that expected a man.

Season 2

NewsRadio

1995–1999NBCComedy

Thirty seconds of a radio newsroom and a horn riff, from a workplace sitcom that never quite got the audience it deserved.

Season 1

MADtv

1995–2016FoxComedy

Mad magazine turned into a sketch show, with Alfred E. Neuman in the titles and a cast that changed almost every year.

Season 9

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

Dharma & Greg

1997–2002ABCComedy

A free spirit and a lawyer who marry on their first date.

Season 1

Space Ghost Coast to Coast

1994–2008Cartoon Network / Adult SwimComedy

A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero repurposed as a chat-show host, and the programme every Adult Swim series descends from.

Season 1

Martin

1992–1997FoxComedy

Detroit, a hip-hop bed and a lead who plays most of the supporting cast himself.

Seasons 1–2

One Foot in the Grave

1990–2000BBC OneComedy

Victor Meldrew, forcibly retired at sixty and furious about everything since.

Season 1

Living Single

1993–1998FoxComedy

Queen Latifah performing the theme over Brooklyn — a sitcom opening sung by one of its own stars.

Season 1

The Amanda Show

1999–2002NickelodeonComedy

Amanda Bynes given her own sketch show out of All That, at seventeen.

Seasons 2–3

Kenan & Kel

1996–2000NickelodeonComedy

The All That double act given their own series, and "Who loves orange soda?"

Season 1

The Adventures of Pete & Pete

1993–1996NickelodeonComedy

Two brothers with the same name in a suburb tuned slightly wrong, scored by Polaris.

Season 1

Mr. Show with Bob and David

1995–1998HBOComedy

The American sketch show that took Monty Python's structure — sketches flowing into one another rather than ending — and put it on cable.

Season 1

The Larry Sanders Show

1992–1998HBOComedy

A talk-show opening for a talk show that does not exist, performed with total conviction by a band and an announcer who are also characters.

Season 1

Moesha

1996–2001UPNComedy

Brandy Norwood as a Los Angeles teenager, and UPN's first real hit.

Season 1

The Big Comfy Couch

1992–2006YTVComedy

A clown and her doll on a couch, with a clock-stretch exercise that gave the programme its shape.

Season 1

Spaced

1999–2001Channel 4Comedy

Freeze-frames and film-reference visual gags, cut at the speed the show quotes at — which is constant.

Season 2

As Time Goes By

1992–2005BBC OneComedy

Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer meeting again thirty-eight years after they lost touch.

Season 1

Clarissa Explains It All

1991–1994NickelodeonComedy

The first Nickelodeon live-action series built around a girl, addressed straight to camera.

Season 1

Goodnight Sweetheart

1993–1999BBC OneComedy

A man who finds a London alley that leads back to 1940 and keeps a wife in each decade.

Seasons 1–6

Bottom

1991–1995BBC TwoComedy

Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in a Hammersmith flat, hitting each other.

Season 1

Strangers with Candy

1999–2000Comedy CentralComedy

An after-school special inverted: a forty-six-year-old ex-convict returning to high school as a freshman.

Season 1

The Ben Stiller Show

1992–1993FoxComedy

Thirteen episodes, cancelled, then given an Emmy — the writers' room that produced most of the next decade's American comedy.

Season 1

Dream On

1990–1996HBOComedy

A man whose inner life is old black-and-white television clips, which the titles establish before a word is said.

Season 1

I'm Alan Partridge

1997–2002BBC TwoComedy

A theme with all the brass of a chat show its subject is no longer allowed to host, over a Travel Tavern car park.

Season 1

Brum

1991–2002BBC OneComedy

A small yellow car loose in a city, told without dialogue — a preschool series that is closer to silent film than to television.

Season 1

Brass Eye

1997–2001Channel 4Comedy

The Day Today's successor, with a new themed opening built for each episode's subject — crime, drugs, science, sex.

Season 1

The Parkers

1999–2004UPNComedy

The Moesha spin-off, with a mother and daughter enrolled at the same community college.

Season 1

Salute Your Shorts

1991–1992NickelodeonComedy

Camp Anawanna, and a theme song the campers sing badly on purpose.

Season 1

Arli$$

1996–2002HBOComedy

A sports agent played by Robert Wuhl, running seven seasons on almost no critical goodwill.

Season 1

Rosie and Jim

1990–2000ITVComedy

Two rag dolls on a narrowboat who come alive when the adult is not looking.

Season 1

The Day Today

1994BBC TwoComedy

News-graphics bombast pushed just past the point of sense — a parody so accurate that actual bulletins caught up with it within a decade.

Season 1

Smack the Pony

1999–2003Channel 4Comedy

A sketch show written and performed by women, at a point when British television had decided that was a format rather than a fact.

Season 1

Goodness Gracious Me

1998–2001BBC TwoComedy

A radio sketch show that transferred to television and gave British comedy going for an English one.

Season 1

Drop the Dead Donkey

1990–1998Channel 4Comedy

A television newsroom recorded days before broadcast so that real headlines could be written in.

Season 5

The Brittas Empire

1991–1997BBC OneComedy

A leisure centre run by the least suitable manager in British comedy.

Season 1

Tots TV

1993–1998ITVComedy

Three rag dolls with a bag, one of whom only speaks French, from the studio that went on to make Teletubbies.

Season 1

Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge

1994–1995BBC TwoComedy

The radio chat show moved to television, opening on a title sequence that is itself the character's idea of a good one.

Season 1

SeaChange

1998–2019ABC (Australia)Comedy

A city lawyer moving to a coastal town, and the series that put the phrase into Australian English.

Season 1

Brooklyn Bridge

1991–1993CBSComedy

Gary David Goldberg's memory of a 1950s Jewish family in Bensonhurst.

Season 1

Men Behaving Badly

1992–1998ITV / BBC OneComedy

Two flatmates and the phrase the British press attached to a decade.

Season 1

Big Train

1998–2002BBC TwoComedy

Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' sketch show, which opens on nothing explaining itself and never does.

Season 1

Sooty & Co

1993–1998ITVComedy

The Sooty puppets moved to a shop, in the ITV series Matthew Corbett handed over at the end of.

Season 1

Royal Canadian Air Farce

1993–2008CBCComedy

A radio sketch troupe of twenty years' standing moved to television, and kept there for fifteen more.

Season 1

Bananas in Pyjamas

1992–2001ABC (Australia)Comedy

Two bananas, three teddy bears and a rat, made by the ABC and sold to eighty countries.

Season 1

Bear in the Big Blue House

1997–2006Playhouse DisneyComedy

A seven-foot bear who greets the camera by smelling it, and a moon in the window who sings the goodbye song.

Season 1

Becker

1998–2004CBSComedy

A Bronx doctor with no patience for his patients, and a diner where nobody is much happier.

Season 1

Blossom

1990–1995NBCComedy

A teenager narrating her own life to camera in a house otherwise entirely male, opening on a dance she performs herself.

Season 1

Boston Common

1996–1997NBCComedy

A Virginian who follows a woman to Boston and takes a job at the university she attends.

Season 1

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

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

Clueless

1996–1999ABC / UPNComedy

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

Season 1
Season 3

Cousin Skeeter

1998–2002NickelodeonComedy

A boy and the puppet cousin who moves in with him, which nobody in the series treats as unusual.

Season 1

Cybill

1995–1998CBSComedy

An actress whose career never quite happened, written closely around the one its star actually had.

Season 1

The Darling Buds of May

1991–1993ITVComedy

H. E. Bates's Kent farming family, and the series that made Catherine Zeta-Jones a household name inside a fortnight.

Season 1

Dave's World

1993–1997CBSComedy

Dave Barry's columns turned into a sitcom, with the household drawn rather than filmed in the titles.

Season 1

Dinosaurs

1991–1994ABCComedy

A Henson animatronic sitcom about a working family in the Mesozoic, which finished by freezing the world over.

Season 1

The Drew Carey Show

1995–2004ABCComedy

A Cleveland department-store personnel manager, opened for two seasons by a cartoon of his own face.

Seasons 1–2

Ellen

1994–1998ABCComedy

A Los Angeles bookshop owner, in the sitcom whose fourth season changed what American television would say out loud.

Season 1

The Famous Jett Jackson

1998–2001Disney ChannelComedy

A teenage action star who moves his own production to his grandmother's town in North Carolina.

Season 1

Ferris Bueller

1990–1991NBCComedy

The film adapted for television without its star, and remembered mostly for opening with a joke about that.

Season 1

Fired Up

1997–1998NBCComedy

Two women sacked from a public relations firm who start their own out of a spare room.

Season 1

Frontline

1994–1997ABC (Australia)Comedy

A current affairs programme satirised from inside its own newsroom, and the model most workplace mockumentaries since have followed.

Season 1

Game On

1995–1998BBC TwoComedy

Three flatmates and an agoraphobic landlord, recast in the middle and carried on regardless.

Season 1

Get a Life

1990–1992FoxComedy

A thirty-year-old paperboy still living at home, in a sitcom that got stranger every week.

Season 1

The Golden Palace

1992–1993CBSComedy

The Golden Girls minus one, running a Miami hotel for a single season before CBS stopped.

Season 1

Grace & Favour

1992–1993BBC OneComedy

The Are You Being Served? staff inheriting a country manor, with most of the original cast.

Season 1

Grace Under Fire

1993–1998ABCComedy

Brett Butler as a single mother working at an oil refinery, in a sitcom built on her stand-up.

Season 1

Hang Time

1995–2000NBCComedy

A girl on a boys' high school basketball team, made for the Saturday morning block.

Season 2

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

Harry Enfield & Chums

1990–1992BBC TwoComedy

Enfield's characters given a series each week, and most of British catchphrase comedy for a decade after.

Season 1

Herman's Head

1991–1994FoxComedy

A man's four personified impulses arguing inside his skull while the plot happens outside it.

Season 1

Hope & Gloria

1995–1996NBCComedy

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

Season 1
Season 2

The Hughleys

1998–2000ABCComedy

A family moving to a white suburb and the father who cannot stop noticing it.

Season 1

The Jamie Foxx Show

1996–2001The WBComedy

A hotel in Los Angeles run by relatives, and the nephew who wants to act instead.

Season 1

Jeeves and Wooster

1990–1993ITVComedy

Wodehouse played by Fry and Laurie, who had spent the previous decade writing sketches together.

Season 1

Jesse

1998–2000NBCComedy

A single mother working in her father's Buffalo bar while training as a nurse.

Season 1

The John Larroquette Show

1993–1996NBCComedy

A recovering alcoholic managing a bus terminal at night, in a sitcom NBC steadily made lighter against its writers' wishes.

Season 1

Lamb Chop's Play-Along

1992–1995PBSComedy

Shari Lewis and her puppets, and the song that does not end.

Season 1

Late Night with Conan O'Brien

1993–2009NBCComedy

An unknown writer handed the 12.30 slot, and sixteen years to grow into it.

Season 1

Late Show with David Letterman

1993–2015CBSComedy

Letterman moved to CBS and to a theatre on Broadway, which the titles put on screen every night for twenty-two years.

Season 1

Malcolm & Eddie

1996–2000UPNComedy

Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Eddie Griffin sharing a Kansas City bar, four years after The Cosby Show ended.

Season 1

Minor Adjustments

1995NBCComedy

A child psychologist who is markedly better with other people's children than with his own.

Season 1

Never Mind the Buzzcocks

1996–2015BBC TwoComedy

A music panel game whose identity parade round outlasted most of the acts standing in it.

Season 1

The New Addams Family

1998–1999YTV / Fox FamilyComedy

The 1964 scripts remade almost line for line in Vancouver, thirty-four years afterwards.

Season 1

Noel's House Party

1991–1999BBC OneComedy

Saturday night from a fictional house in Crinkley Bottom, and the programme that dropped celebrities into gunge on purpose.

Season 2

The Norm Show

1999–2001ABCComedy

Norm Macdonald as a hockey player struck off and sentenced to social work.

Season 1

Oh, Doctor Beeching!

1995–1997BBC OneComedy

A branch-line station waiting to be closed by the Beeching cuts, from the writers of Hi-de-Hi!

Season 1

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

1990–1993FoxComedy

Ferris Bueller as a weekly series, shot on wide lenses with a narrator who never once stops talking.

Season 1

The Queen's Nose

1995–2003BBC OneComedy

A fifty pence piece that grants wishes, from the Dick King-Smith book.

Season 1

The Red Green Show

1991–2006CHCH-TV / CBCComedy

A lodge of middle-aged Canadian men and the duct tape with which they solve everything.

Season 1

Roc

1991–1994FoxComedy

A Baltimore refuse collector and his family, and a season shot live to air on purpose.

Season 1

The Royal Family

1991–1992CBSComedy

Redd Foxx and Della Reese as a couple whose children move back in, and the series Foxx died making.

Season 1

Saved by the Bell: The College Years

1993–1994NBCComedy

The Bayside cast moved to a university for one season, in prime time rather than Saturday morning.

Season 1

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

The Single Guy

1995–1997NBCComedy

A novelist whose friends are all married, scheduled by NBC between Friends and Seinfeld and never forgiven for it.

Season 1

Sister, Sister

1994–1999ABC / The WBComedy

Twins separated at birth and reunited in a shopping mall, played by twins.

Season 1

Smart Guy

1997–1999The WBComedy

A ten-year-old skipped ahead to high school, and the two older siblings who have to sit next to him.

Season 1

Something So Right

1996–1997NBCComedy

A remarried couple with children from three previous marriages between them.

Season 1

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

Suddenly Susan

1996–2000NBCComedy

A columnist who leaves her fiancé at the altar and then has to write about it every week.

Season 1

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

Unhappily Ever After

1995–1999The WBComedy

Married… with Children's writers doing it again, with a talking stuffed rabbit only the father can hear.

Season 1

Union Square

1997–1998NBCComedy

A New York diner and the people in it, taken off after fifteen episodes.

Season 1

The Upper Hand

1990–1996ITVComedy

Who's the Boss? remade for ITV, and one of the few American formats that worked coming the other way.

Season 1

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

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

Weird Science

1994–1998USA NetworkComedy

The film turned into a series, with the computer-made woman staying on as a regular.

Season 1

The Wiggles

1998–ABC (Australia)Comedy

Four early-childhood teachers from Sydney who worked out that a children's band could tour like a rock one.

Season 1

Working

1997–1999NBCComedy

A graduate's first office job, narrated by him straight to camera.

Season 1

Yo soy Betty, la fea

1999–2001RCN (Colombia)Comedy

The most adapted television format in history — remade in more than twenty countries, including as Ugly Betty, which this catalogue also holds.

Season 1

1980s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Different World

1987–1993NBCComedy

A historically Black college rendered in bold graphic design, with the theme re-recorded by a different artist across the run — Aretha Franklin among them.

Season 2

Moonlighting

1985–1989ABCComedy

Al Jarreau singing a theme written for the show, over two people who spend four seasons refusing to admit anything.

Season 1

Who's the Boss?

1984–1992ABCComedy

A theme called 'Brand New Life' over a move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, which is the entire premise sung aloud.

Season 1

Designing Women

1986–1993CBSComedy

Georgia On My Mind over an Atlanta design firm, with the cast photographed like a society page.

Season 6

Perfect Strangers

1986–1993ABCComedy

'Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now' over Chicago — one of the decade's most earnest sitcom themes attached to one of its silliest premises.

Season 1

The Young Ones

1982–1984BBC TwoComedy

Four students in a condemned house, and the series that ended the British sitcom's post-war manners in one go.

Season 1

Night Court

1984–1992NBCComedy

Eighteen seconds of bass guitar and a Manhattan courthouse at night.

Season 1

Fraggle Rock

1983–1987HBOComedy

Jim Henson's series about three societies who cannot see each other properly, made to be co-produced in every country that bought it.

Season 1

Yes Minister

1980–1984BBC TwoComedy

Whitehall obstructing its own minister, opened by Gerald Scarfe caricatures drawing themselves.

Seasons 1–3

'Allo 'Allo!

1982–1992BBC OneComedy

A French café in occupied France, from the same writer as Dad's Army twenty years on.

Season 1

Doogie Howser, M.D.

1989–1993ABCComedy

A sixteen-year-old physician, and a synth theme that became shorthand for the entire decade.

Seasons 1–4

Murphy Brown

1988–2018CBSComedy

A Washington newsroom and a Motown needle-drop that changed every episode — the theme was a different soul record each week.

Season 1

Newhart

1982–1990CBSComedy

The Vermont inn sitcom, and the source of what is still widely held to be the best final scene in American television.

Season 1

Pee-wee's Playhouse

1986–1990CBSComedy

A Saturday morning show designed by artists from the New York gallery scene, with a theme sung by Cyndi Lauper under a pseudonym.

Season 1

Birds of a Feather

1989–2020BBC One / ITVComedy

Two sisters in Chigwell whose husbands are both in prison.

Season 1
Season 10

Late Night with David Letterman

1982–1993NBCComedy

New York at night shot from a moving car, over a jazz-organ theme — the opening that decided what a late-night talk show looks like.

Season 1

Round the Twist

1989–2001ABC / Seven NetworkComedy

An Australian children's series set in a lighthouse, with a theme song that asks whether strange things ever happen to you.

Season 1

Hi-de-Hi!

1980–1988BBC OneComedy

A 1950s holiday camp, the fourth David Croft series in this catalogue.

Season 1

The Wonder Years

1988–1993ABCComedy

Home-movie footage and Joe Cocker singing 'With a Little Help from My Friends' — an opening that establishes the entire retrospective frame before a word of narration.

Season 1

The Kids in the Hall

1988–1995CBC / HBOComedy

Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet playing surf rock over five men in a doorway — a sketch show whose theme became more famous than most of its sketches.

Season 1

Ever Decreasing Circles

1984–1989BBC OneComedy

Richard Briers after The Good Life, running every committee in his cul-de-sac.

Season 1

French and Saunders

1987–2007BBC TwoComedy

Twenty years of film parodies, and the double act that came out of the Comic Strip.

Season 1

It's Garry Shandling's Show

1986–1990ShowtimeComedy

A sitcom whose theme song is about being a sitcom theme song, six years before The Larry Sanders Show.

Season 1

Spitting Image

1984–1996ITVComedy

Latex puppets of everyone in public life, opening on the workshop that built them.

Season 1

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

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

Alas Smith and Jones

1984–1998BBC TwoComedy

Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones after Not the Nine O'Clock News, with a title that puns on a western.

Season 1

Square One TV

1987–1994PBSComedy

Mathematics taught as sketch comedy, including a police procedural parody called Mathnet.

Season 1

Metal Mickey

1980–1983ITVComedy

A robot in a suburban family sitcom, directed by Micky Dolenz of the Monkees.

Season 1

Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV

1985–1987BBC TwoComedy

Sketches, songs at a piano, and the soap parody Acorn Antiques, which outlived the programme around it.

Season 1

227

1985–1990NBCComedy

A Washington apartment block told almost entirely from its front steps, where most of the cast spends most of the programme.

Season 1

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

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

A Bit of Fry & Laurie

1987–1995BBC TwoComedy

Sketches written and performed by two people who had just left Cambridge and sounded like it.

Season 2

Bosom Buddies

1980–1982ABCComedy

Two admen who take rooms in a women-only building in drag, and the first thing Tom Hanks was known for.

Season 1

Bread

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

Carla Lane's Liverpool family, signing on and eating together, in the decade that made both political.

Season 1

Brush Strokes

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

A painter and decorator who cannot stop flirting, written by the Birds of a Feather pair.

Season 1

Charles in Charge

1984–1990CBS / SyndicationComedy

A student paying his rent by minding somebody else's children, in a sitcom CBS cancelled and syndication brought back.

Season 1

Coach

1989–1997ABCComedy

A Minnesota football program run by three men who are markedly better at the game than at the rest of their lives.

Season 1

Dear John

1986–1987BBC OneComedy

A divorced man at a support group of the similarly abandoned, written by John Sullivan.

Season 1

Empty Nest

1988–1995NBCComedy

The Golden Girls' neighbour given his own house, two grown daughters and a conspicuously large dog.

Season 1

Eureeka's Castle

1989–1991NickelodeonComedy

Puppets in a castle carried by a giant, made for the channel's pre-school block before it had one.

Season 1

Family Matters

1989–1998ABC / CBSComedy

A Chicago family and a theme about the tiny things adding up, from a spinoff that was quietly taken over by a neighbour.

Season 1

Family Ties

1982–1989NBCComedy

A family portrait being drawn and redrawn, over a duet about what would happen without you — sixties parents and a Reagan-voting son.

Season 1

Fridays

1980–1982ABCComedy

ABC's answer to Saturday Night Live, best remembered for the night Andy Kaufman refused to say his lines.

Season 1

Full House

1987–1995ABCComedy

A San Francisco picnic and a song about everywhere you look — the platonic form of the American family-sitcom opening.

Season 1

Gimme a Break!

1981–1987NBCComedy

Nell Carter keeping house for a widowed police chief, in a sitcom built entirely around her.

Season 1

Good Morning, Miss Bliss

1987–1989NBC / Disney ChannelComedy

The series Saved by the Bell was rebuilt out of, with Hayley Mills teaching in Indiana.

Season 1

Growing Pains

1985–1992ABCComedy

A Long Island psychiatrist who moved his practice into the house so his wife could go back to reporting.

Season 1

Hale and Pace

1988–1998ITVComedy

Two former schoolteachers doing sketch comedy for ITV for a decade.

Season 1

Head of the Class

1986–1991ABCComedy

A history teacher handed the gifted programme at a Manhattan school, played by a stand-up who had never taught anyone.

Season 1

Hey Dude

1989–1991NickelodeonComedy

Teenagers working a dude ranch in Arizona, in one of the first scripted series Nickelodeon made itself.

Season 1

The Hogan Family

1986–1990NBCComedy

A sitcom that changed its name twice while on the air, from Valerie to Valerie's Family to this one.

Season 1

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

Just the Ten of Us

1988–1990ABCComedy

The Growing Pains teacher spun off with eight children of his own.

Season 1

Kate & Allie

1984–1989CBSComedy

Two divorced friends sharing a Greenwich Village apartment and bringing up their children in it together.

Season 1

Kids Incorporated

1984–1994Syndication / Disney ChannelComedy

A band of children playing covers in a converted warehouse, and where Fergie and Jennifer Love Hewitt both started.

Season 1

Life with Lucy

1986ABCComedy

Lucille Ball's last series, pulled after eight episodes of a thirteen-episode order.

Season 1

Mama's Family

1983–1990NBC / SyndicationComedy

A Carol Burnett Show sketch given its own house, dropped by NBC and then run for four more years in syndication.

Season 1

Mr. Belvedere

1985–1990ABCComedy

An English butler working for a Pittsburgh family, out of a film series forty years older than the sitcom.

Season 1

My Two Dads

1987–1990NBCComedy

A girl left to two men, either of whom might be her father, by a court that declines to establish which.

Season 1

Out of This World

1987–1991SyndicationComedy

A girl with an alien father who can stop time by touching her fingertips together.

Season 1

Police Squad!

1982ABCComedy

Six episodes of the Airplane! team's deadpan, cancelled on the grounds that watching it required looking at it.

Season 1

Punky Brewster

1984–1986NBCComedy

A girl abandoned in a Chicago apartment building and raised by the man who manages it.

Season 1

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

Saved by the Bell

1989–1993NBCComedy

Freeze-frames of six teenagers over a theme about being late — Saturday morning television's most durable export.

Season 1

Shining Time Station

1989–1995PBSComedy

The American frame built around the Thomas films, with a foot-tall conductor living inside the station wall.

Season 1

Silver Spoons

1982–1986NBCComedy

A boy sent to live with the father who never grew up, and the model train he rides through the house.

Season 1

Sledge Hammer!

1986–1988ABCComedy

A detective who holds conversations with his revolver, in a parody ABC scheduled directly against the police shows it was mocking.

Season 1

Small Wonder

1985–1989SyndicationComedy

A robot girl passed off as a daughter, in a syndicated sitcom that few people quite believe existed.

Seasons 1–2

Square Pegs

1982–1983CBSComedy

Two girls trying to be popular at a Californian high school, one season long and much imitated since.

Season 1

Too Close for Comfort

1980–1987ABC / SyndicationComedy

A cartoonist whose grown daughters move into the flat downstairs, which is the entire problem.

Season 1

The Tortellis

1987NBCComedy

Carla's ex-husband and his family moved to Las Vegas, and the shortest-lived thing Cheers produced.

Season 1

The Tracey Ullman Show

1987–1990FoxComedy

The sketch show Fox launched its network with, and the one that carried the Simpsons as thirty-second interstitials before they left.

Season 1

Webster

1983–1989ABC / SyndicationComedy

A boy adopted by his late father's team-mate, in the sitcom ABC ran in Diff'rent Strokes' shadow.

Season 1

What's Happening Now!!

1985–1988SyndicationComedy

The seventies sitcom revived with the same cast grown up and running the diner.

Season 1

You Rang, M'Lord?

1988–1993BBC OneComedy

Croft and Perry's between-the-wars house, played at fifty minutes an episode rather than thirty.

Season 1

1970s

Saturday Night Live

1975–NBCComedy

A new cast montage every single season for fifty years — New York at night, the current company photographed in it, and a band playing over the top. The longest-running rotating title sequence on television.

Season 1

All in the Family

1971–1979CBSComedy

Two people at an upright piano singing about how things used to be — an opening performed live by the cast rather than scored.

Season 1

Fawlty Towers

1975–1979BBC TwoComedy

A hotel sign whose letters are rearranged into a different rude anagram every episode — the earliest running title gag in this catalogue by two decades.

Season 1

Happy Days

1974–1984ABCComedy

A fifties jukebox theme that started as a closing song and was promoted to the opening once it became a hit record.

Season 1

Three's Company

1976–1984ABCComedy

A theme that explains the premise, the address and the invitation in about forty seconds, then hands you a farce.

Season 1

The Love Boat

1977–1987ABCComedy

A cruise ship with a new guest cast every week, introduced by name in the titles.

Season 3

Taxi

1978–1983ABC / NBCComedy

A single cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge to Bob James's electric piano — no cast, no jokes, and an unusually melancholy opening for a comedy.

Season 1

Sanford and Son

1972–1977NBCComedy

Quincy Jones writing a harmonica blues for a junkyard — one of the few sitcom themes composed by someone of that stature.

Season 1

WKRP in Cincinnati

1978–1982CBSComedy

A radio-station sitcom whose theme was written to sound like a record the station would actually play.

Season 1

The Muppet Show

1976–1981ITV / SyndicationComedy

An opening that changes every week by design: Statler and Waldorf get a new heckle, Gonzo gets a new way to fail the closing note, and the arch fills with whoever is in that episode.

Season 1

The Jeffersons

1975–1985CBSComedy

'Movin' On Up' over a family arriving at a Manhattan apartment — a theme that functions as a plot summary and a thesis at once.

Season 1

Good Times

1974–1979CBSComedy

A Chicago housing project and a gospel-inflected theme whose lyrics nobody has ever fully agreed on.

Season 1

Mork & Mindy

1978–1982ABCComedy

An egg-shaped spacecraft over Boulder, Colorado, and a theme that has to establish an alien, a roommate and a sitcom simultaneously.

Season 1

Barney Miller

1975–1982ABCComedy

A bass line so good it outlived the show entirely — a police-station sitcom remembered chiefly for forty seconds of funk.

Season 3

The Good Life

1975–1978BBC OneComedy

A couple turning their Surbiton garden into a smallholding, next door to neighbours who would rather they did not.

Season 1

El Chavo del Ocho

1971–1980TelevisaComedy

A boy living in a barrel in a Mexico City tenement, and the most watched Spanish-language series ever made.

Seasons 4–6

Maude

1972–1978CBSComedy

The All in the Family spin-off, with a theme song that lists historical women and lands on Maude.

Season 1

Soap

1977–1981ABCComedy

A narrator recapping a plot that has already become unmanageable, ending every week on the same weary question about what will happen next.

Season 1

Mind Your Language

1977–1979ITV (LWT)Comedy

An adult English class of national stereotypes, opened by a blackboard that spells the title out in every student's hand.

Seasons 1–3

Minder

1979–1994ITVComedy

Arthur Daley and his minder, and a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about Dennis Waterman.

Season 1

Rising Damp

1974–1978ITVComedy

Leonard Rossiter as a boarding-house landlord, and the most successful ITV sitcom of the seventies.

Season 1

The Odd Couple

1970–1975ABCComedy

A narrated premise about two divorced men sharing an apartment, delivered in the tone of a public information film.

Season 2

To the Manor Born

1979–1981BBC OneComedy

A widow forced to sell the manor and move into the lodge at the end of its drive.

Season 1

Benson

1979–1986ABCComedy

The Soap butler promoted into his own series and eventually into the lieutenant governorship.

Season 2

Porridge

1974–1977BBC OneComedy

Ronnie Barker inside HMP Slade, opened by a judge's sentencing read over the prison gates.

Season 1

Rhoda

1974–1978CBSComedy

The first Mary Tyler Moore spin-off, following Rhoda Morgenstern back to New York.

Season 1

It Ain't Half Hot Mum

1974–1981BBC OneComedy

A Royal Artillery concert party in wartime India, and the Croft series that has aged worst.

Season 1

The Two Ronnies

1971–1987BBC OneComedy

Barker and Corbett behind a news desk, with a pair of spectacles as the logo for sixteen years.

Season 1

Not the Nine O'Clock News

1979–1982BBC TwoComedy

The sketch show that launched Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith, opening on a parody of the bulletin it was scheduled against.

Season 1

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

1973–1978BBC OneComedy

Frank Spencer in a beret, and stunts Michael Crawford performed himself.

Season 1

Open All Hours

1976–1985BBC OneComedy

Ronnie Barker again, this time behind a corner-shop till with a faulty cash register.

Season 1

Rainbow

1972–1992ITVComedy

Zippy, George and Bungle, and a theme about a paintbox in the sky that ran for twenty years.

Season 1

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

1976–1979BBC OneComedy

A middle manager who fakes his own death by leaving his clothes on a beach, weekly.

Season 1

The Goodies

1970–1982BBC TwoComedy

Three men on a trandem who will do anything, anytime — sketch comedy shot like a silent film.

Season 1

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

1973–1974BBC OneComedy

The sequel to the 1964 series, about two friends who have grown in opposite directions.

Season 1

The Electric Company

1971–1977PBSComedy

The Children's Television Workshop's reading show for older children, with Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno in the cast.

Season 1

Zoom

1972–1978PBSComedy

A children's programme made entirely of what children sent in, down to the address they had to sing.

Season 1

Butterflies

1978–1983BBC TwoComedy

Carla Lane's series about a housewife considering an affair and never quite having one.

Season 1

Rentaghost

1976–1984BBC OneComedy

An agency staffed entirely by ghosts, which is a sitcom premise and a title sequence at the same time.

Season 1

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters

1973–1975NBCComedy

A sea monster thrown out by his family for being unable to frighten anyone, hidden in a beach clubhouse.

Season 1

King of Kensington

1975–1980CBCComedy

A Toronto corner-shop owner in the Kensington Market, and the sitcom a fifth of the country watched.

Season 2

Laverne & Shirley

1976–1983ABCComedy

A skipping chant and two women walking through Milwaukee — the Happy Days spinoff that outrated its parent.

Season 1

Archie Bunker's Place

1979–1983CBSComedy

All in the Family continued as a bar, four more years after the series that made Archie famous had finished.

Season 1

Are You Being Served?

1972–1985BBC OneComedy

The Grace Brothers department store, opened by a lift announcing each floor's stock.

Season 1

The Bob Newhart Show

1972–1978CBSComedy

A psychologist commuting through Chicago, filmed at the pace of a man who is not looking forward to his day.

Season 1

Citizen Smith

1977–1980BBC OneComedy

John Sullivan's first series, a Tooting revolutionary with no revolution, written five years before Only Fools and Horses.

Season 1

Diff'rent Strokes

1978–1985NBCComedy

Two boys from Harlem adopted by a Park Avenue widower, in the sitcom that turned a nine-year-old's disbelief into a catchphrase.

Season 1

The Dukes of Hazzard

1979–1985CBSComedy

A Georgia county run by the man who owns it, and a car that spends a good part of every hour off the ground.

Season 1

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

Going Straight

1978BBC OneComedy

Fletcher out of prison and trying to stay out, six episodes after Porridge finished.

Season 1

MAS*H

1972–1983CBSComedy

A comedy that opens every week with casualties being carried off a helicopter. Nurses and surgeons run for the landing pad while the theme plays underneath — an instrumental of a song the network would not let anyone sing, because of what its chorus says.

Seasons 1–11

Only When I Laugh

1979–1982ITVComedy

Three men in a hospital ward who are not especially ill, and the registrar who cannot discharge them.

Season 1

Robin's Nest

1977–1981ITVComedy

The second Man About the House spin-off, with Robin running a bistro in Fulham.

Season 2

The Ropers

1979–1980ABCComedy

Three's Company's landlords given their own series, from the British spin-off George and Mildred.

Season 1

SCTV

1976–1984Global / NBCComedy

A sketch show shaped as a fictional television station, which let it parody the whole schedule rather than one programme at a time.

Season 1

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

1971–1974CBSComedy

A married double act insulting each other between songs, in the variety hour that made Cher a television star.

Season 1

Terry and June

1979–1987BBC OneComedy

Suburban misunderstanding for eight years, and the programme most often used as shorthand for what alternative comedy rebelled against.

Season 1

Worzel Gummidge

1979–1981ITVComedy

A scarecrow who swaps heads for different moods, played by a former Doctor Who.

Season 1

You Can't Do That on Television

1979–1990NickelodeonComedy

The Ottawa-made sketch show that gave Nickelodeon its slime, and its house style for a decade.

Season 1

1960s

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

The Addams Family

1964–1966ABCComedy

Harpsichord, bass clarinet, and two finger snaps that half a century of television has never managed to shake off. The family assemble for a portrait while Lurch supplies the only three adjectives the song needs.

Seasons 1–2

The Brady Bunch

1969–1974ABCComedy

A three-by-three grid of faces all looking at each other — a title sequence so structurally famous that the grid alone is the reference.

Season 1

Bewitched

1964–1972ABCComedy

Animated witches and a swing arrangement — a live-action sitcom that opens as a cartoon, which was the only way to show the magic on a 1964 budget.

Season 1

Gilligan's Island

1964–1967CBSComedy

A theme song that narrates the entire premise, names every castaway, and was rewritten after the first season to stop leaving two of them out.

Season 3

The Andy Griffith Show

1960–1968CBSComedy

A father and son walking to a fishing hole while somebody whistles — twenty-three seconds, and one of the most quoted pieces of music in American television.

Season 1

The Beverly Hillbillies

1962–1971CBSComedy

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" — a bluegrass number that reached number one on the country chart while the series was running.

Season 1

The Munsters

1964–1966CBSComedy

The rival monster sitcom, launched the same year, opening with a surf-rock instrumental and a family filing out of a house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

Season 1

Hogan's Heroes

1965–1971CBSComedy

A prisoner-of-war camp run as a sabotage operation, opened by a march whistled rather than sung.

Season 1

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

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

1968–2001PBSComedy

Thirty-three years of the same arrival: the door, the cardigan, the shoes, the song.

Season 1

I Dream of Jeannie

1965–1970NBCComedy

A full animated origin story every week — the bottle, the beach, the astronaut — told in sixty seconds so the episode never has to.

Season 1

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

1962–1992NBCComedy

A curtain, a rainbow arch and an announcer saying the two words — thirty years of the same entrance.

Season 18

The Carol Burnett Show

1967–1978CBSComedy

Twenty-three seconds and a Bob Mackie gown, from the variety show that taught American television how a sketch ensemble should work.

Season 1

H.R. Pufnstuf

1969–1970NBCComedy

Sid and Marty Krofft's first series, and the reason a generation associates foam costumes with a talking flute.

Season 1

My Three Sons

1960–1972ABC / CBSComedy

Fred MacMurray raising three boys, opening on animated feet in a row that everyone remembers before the theme.

Season 1

Dad's Army

1968–1977BBC OneComedy

The Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, opened by animated arrows advancing and retreating across a map of Europe.

Season 1

Petticoat Junction

1963–1970CBSComedy

The Shady Rest Hotel, sharing a universe with Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Season 1

Monty Python's Flying Circus

1969–1974BBC OneComedy

Terry Gilliam's cut-out animation and a Sousa march — a title sequence that behaves like a sketch, because it is one.

Season 1

Green Acres

1965–1971CBSComedy

A duet in which husband and wife argue about the move the series is built on, sung directly to camera.

Season 1

Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In

1967–1973NBCComedy

Psychedelic panels opening onto one-liners, cut faster than anything else on 1960s television and directly responsible for the pacing of sketch comedy since.

Season 3

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour

1968–1970NBCComedy

Four costumed animals in a rock band, wrapped around cartoons and serials, with a theme that has outlived all of it.

Season 1

Hee Haw

1969–1993CBS / SyndicationComedy

Country music and cornfield jokes, cancelled by CBS in the rural purge and then outliving it in syndication by twenty years.

Season 1

Steptoe and Son

1962–1974BBC OneComedy

Two rag-and-bone men who cannot leave each other, and the series Sanford and Son was remade from.

Season 1

Till Death Us Do Part

1965–1975BBC OneComedy

Alf Garnett shouting at his family, and the series All in the Family was remade from.

Season 1

The Monkees

1966–1968NBCComedy

A band assembled for a television series that then became an actual band, with the titles as their first single.

Season 1

F Troop

1965–1967ABCComedy

A frontier cavalry post run badly, opened by a sung account of how badly.

Season 1

McHale's Navy

1962–1966ABCComedy

A PT boat crew running a black market in the South Pacific.

Season 1

Car 54, Where Are You?

1961–1963NBCComedy

Two Bronx patrolmen, with a theme that lists everything going wrong in New York and then asks where the car is.

Season 1

Mr. Dressup

1967–1996CBCComedy

A tickle trunk, two puppets and twenty-nine years of the same man drawing on a pad — Canada's answer to Mister Rogers, made by a man who worked on it.

Season 19

Get Smart

1965–1970NBC / CBSComedy

A man walking through a corridor of doors that each slam behind him, ending in a phone box that drops him into headquarters. The joke is the length of it.

Season 3

The Morecambe & Wise Show

1968–1983BBC Two / ThamesComedy

Bring Me Sunshine and a skip off stage, in front of the largest audience British television has ever had.

Season 2

1950s

I Love Lucy

1951–1957CBSComedy

A satin heart on a cigarette-brand backdrop — a title card that exists because the sponsor paid for it, and which outlived the sponsor by seventy years.

Season 1

The Honeymooners

1955–1956CBSComedy

A moon over Brooklyn and an orchestra — the sitcom that most American sitcoms since are a variation on, in thirty-nine episodes.

Season 1

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

1952–1966ABCComedy

A real family playing themselves for fourteen years, which is the longest-running live-action sitcom in American television.

Season 1

Father Knows Best

1954–1960CBS / NBCComedy

The Anderson family of Springfield, and the series the phrase came from.

Season 1

The Danny Thomas Show

1953–1964ABC / CBSComedy

Eleven years of a nightclub comedian's home life, and the series The Andy Griffith Show was spun out of.

Season 1

Romper Room

1953–1994SyndicationComedy

A franchised preschool programme licensed to local stations, each with its own hostess and the same magic mirror.

Season 1

The Donna Reed Show

1958–1966ABCComedy

A sitcom its star produced herself, which is why the mother in it has a job the plot takes seriously.

Season 8

The Phil Silvers Show

1955–1959CBSComedy

A military march for a sergeant running every racket on the base — the ancestor of every workplace comedy about a charming fraud.

Season 1

Our Miss Brooks

1952–1956CBSComedy

Eve Arden as a high-school English teacher, in a radio transfer that ran on both media at once.

Season 1

Hancock's Half Hour

1956–1961BBCComedy

Galton and Simpson's radio series moved to television, and the point at which British sitcom stopped being a variety turn.

Season 1

The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show

1950–1958CBSComedy

A sitcom in which the husband watches the rest of the episode on a television in his study and comments on it — thirty years before anyone called that postmodern.

Season 1

Mr Squiggle

1959–1999ABC (Australia)Comedy

A marionette from the moon with a pencil for a nose, turning children's scribbles into drawings for forty years.

Season 1

The Colgate Comedy Hour

1950–1955NBCComedy

A live variety hour with a different star each week, made to take the audience off Ed Sullivan.

Season 4

1940s

The Life of Riley

1949–1958NBCComedy

A radio sitcom moved to television twice, the second time with William Bendix finally allowed to play the part he had on radio.

Season 1