Comedy · 2000s
The 2000s account for 118 of the 654 comedy shows here, and 120 opening sequences.
ABC carries the most, with eleven.
Two of them rebuilt their titles mid-run.
118 shows120 sequences
1 sequenceThe Big Bang Theory
Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMalcolm in the Middle
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
1 sequenceThe Office
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
1 sequenceScrubs
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
1 sequenceIt's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
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
1 sequenceModern Family
Fourteen seconds of family photographs sliding into place, and a card. Nothing else.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Middle
An Indiana family with no money and no prospects, nine seasons long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTwo and a Half Men
Twelve seasons on a Malibu beach house, opened by four sung syllables.
- Season 6
1 sequenceCurb Your Enthusiasm
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
1 sequenceHow I Met Your Mother
Fourteen seconds of photographs and a ukulele — a nine-year story introduced by a handful of snapshots.
- Season 1
1 sequenceParks and Recreation
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
1 sequenceArrested Development
A ukulele, a narrator, and a family photograph that gets less flattering the longer you look at it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCommunity
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
1 sequenceNurse Jackie
Hospital corridors and pills, filmed with the brightness of a pharmaceutical advertisement.
- Season 1
1 sequence30 Rock
Nineteen seconds of Art Deco signage and a brass sting, moving at roughly the speed the show's dialogue does.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGlee
An Ohio show choir, and the series that briefly made network television a singles chart.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEntourage
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
1 sequencePeep Show
Nineteen seconds and a card, for a comedy shot almost entirely from inside its characters' heads.
- Season 4
1 sequenceDoc Martin
A London surgeon with a blood phobia relocated to a Cornish village that will not leave him alone.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEverybody Hates Chris
Chris Rock narrating his own Bed-Stuy adolescence, opened by the family on the stoop.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBoston Legal
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
1 sequenceThe IT Crowd
Eight-bit pixel art and a chiptune, for a basement full of people nobody upstairs wants to think about.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNed's Declassified School Survival Guide
A middle-school survival manual delivered to camera, one tip per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWeeds
'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
1 sequenceUgly Betty
Fashion-magazine collage and a poncho, in twelve seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Suite Life of Zack & Cody
Twins living in a Boston hotel their mother sings in.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCalifornication
Los Angeles from a convertible, with a writer who has not written anything in some years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChuck
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
1 sequenceDrake & Josh
Two stepbrothers in San Diego, from the All That writers' room.
- Season 4
1 sequenceiCarly
A web show made in a Seattle flat, five years before that was an ordinary thing for a teenager to do.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBalamory
A Scottish island village painted in primary colours, with a theme that asks what the story is in it.
- Season 1
1 sequencePushing Daisies
Storybook illustration and saturated colour, pitched exactly between a fairy tale and a mortuary — which is the show.
- Season 1
1 sequenceZoey 101
A Californian boarding school, with a theme sung by Jamie Lynn Spears.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThat's So Raven
A girl who sees the future and misreads it every week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMock the Week
A topical panel show whose titles cut the week's news into a strobing collage before anyone speaks.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDrop Dead Diva
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
1 sequenceThe League
A fantasy football league and the friendships it slowly destroys.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead Like Me
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
1 sequenceStill Game
Two Glasgow pensioners and the Craiglang high-rises, with titles built entirely from the scheme itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEven Stevens
Shia LaBeouf as the youngest of three in a Sacramento family.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBig Time Rush
A manufactured boy band playing a manufactured boy band, which then toured as one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceIn the Night Garden...
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
1 sequenceGarth Marenghi's Darkplace
A title sequence pretending to be a lost 1980s horror series, complete with the production faults the conceit requires.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMiranda
Miranda Hart addressing the camera in a joke shop, in eleven seconds of open.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChappelle's Show
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
1 sequenceLittle Britain
A radio series moved to television, narrated as though it were a documentary about a country nobody has heard of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHung
Detroit in decline, filmed with more sympathy than the premise would lead you to expect.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlack Books
A bookshop run by a man who does not want customers, from Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHorrible Histories
Sketch comedy about history for children that adults watched anyway, with the titles redrawn between series.
- Season 5
1 sequenceUnited States of Tara
Diablo Cody's series about a woman with dissociative identity disorder, whose titles introduce every alter.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFlight of the Conchords
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
1 sequenceRoyal Pains
A concierge doctor in the Hamptons, in the middle of USA's blue-sky decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDa Ali G Show
Sacha Baron Cohen's three characters interviewing people who did not know.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTwo Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps
Six friends in a Runcorn pub, and the sitcom BBC Three ran for nine series while the critics ignored it.
- Season 9
1 sequenceOutnumbered
Two parents and three children, with the children's dialogue largely improvised.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Colbert Report
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
1 sequenceGrounded for Life
A young Staten Island family, told out of order within each episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCoupling
Six friends in a bar, structured as farce rather than warmth — the British sitcom most often, and most unfairly, compared to Friends.
- Season 1
1 sequenceUndeclared
Judd Apatow's college follow-up to Freaks and Geeks, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGreen Wing
A hospital comedy shot with speed-ramped transitions between every scene, which the titles establish first.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGokusen
A yakuza heir teaching maths at a school for delinquents.
- Season 1
1 sequencePunk'd
Ashton Kutcher's hidden-camera show, and Candid Camera restaged for people with publicists.
- Season 4
1 sequenceTim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!
Public-access video aesthetics reproduced exactly and then broken — twenty-two seconds that set the terms for a decade of internet comedy.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChildrens Hospital
A hospital soap parody that changed its own premise whenever it got bored, Rob Corddry's first series.
- Season 3
1 sequenceBored to Death
A pulp-paperback cover come to life — Brooklyn drawn as a detective magazine by Dean Haspiel, panel by panel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne on One
A Baltimore sports broadcaster whose teenage daughter moves in with him, and the spine of UPN's comedy block for five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Mighty Boosh
A stage show that became a radio series that became a television series, and kept the crimping in all three.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutrageous Fortune
A West Auckland crime family whose matriarch decides, when her husband goes to prison, that the rest of them will go straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHalf & Half
Two half-sisters who grew up apart, living in the same San Francisco building as adults.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSummer Heights High
Chris Lilley playing three pupils and staff at the same school, shot as a documentary.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThat Mitchell and Webb Look
The sketch show out of the radio series That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and the home of Numberwang.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAll of Us
A blended family sitcom produced by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, out of their own circumstances.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTitus
Christopher Titus narrating his own childhood from a white void between scenes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Inbetweeners
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
1 sequenceWonderfalls
Souvenir figurines that talk, in a Niagara Falls gift shop — Bryan Fuller's first series and a direct ancestor of Pushing Daisies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTeachers
A Bristol comprehensive from the staff room's side, with Andrew Lincoln before The Walking Dead.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpicks and Specks
A music quiz named after a Bee Gees single, and one of the ABC's most watched programmes for a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEve
The rapper Eve as a Miami fashion designer, in one of the run of sitcoms UPN built its Monday nights on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLittle Mosque on the Prairie
A Muslim congregation renting a prairie church hall, in a sitcom that became Canada's most exported comedy.
- Season 4
1 sequenceSon of the Beach
A Baywatch parody produced by Howard Stern, and one of FX's first originals.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSlings and Arrows
A Canadian series about a Shakespearean festival, with a different theatrical opening for each of its three seasons.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Chris Isaak Show
The musician playing himself and his band playing themselves, in a series about their own touring.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Basil Brush Show
The fox puppet given a sitcom of his own, forty years after he first turned up on somebody else's.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceThe Mitchell and Webb Situation
David Mitchell and Robert Webb's first sketch series, five years before the one everyone remembers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Can Be Heroes
Chris Lilley playing all six finalists for Australian of the Year, in his first series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOs Normais
A Rio couple narrating their own relationship to camera, in the sitcom that reset Brazilian television comedy.
- Season 1
1 sequence8 Out of 10 Cats
A panel show about opinion polls, which spawned a Countdown crossover more popular than either parent.
- Season 1
1 sequence8 Simple Rules
A father guarding his daughters, and the sitcom that had to keep going after John Ritter died during its second season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAccording to Jim
Eight seasons of a Chicago family sitcom that critics ignored and audiences kept renewing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBenidorm
An all-inclusive Spanish resort and the same British families returning to it for ten series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Bernie Mac Show
A comedian raising his sister's three children and turning to camera to explain himself about it.
- Seasons 3–5
1 sequenceThe Big Fat Quiz of the Year
An annual quiz about the year just gone, running long past midnight and rebuilt from scratch each December.
- Season 10
1 sequenceCory in the House
That's So Raven's brother moved into the White House as the chef's son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Ellen DeGeneres Show
Nineteen years of daytime, opening on a host dancing her way in through the audience.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceGeorge Lopez
A Los Angeles factory manager and the family around him, and the longest-running American sitcom led by a Latino cast.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGreek
Fraternity and sorority life at a fictional Ohio university, taken seriously enough to run four seasons.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJimmy Kimmel Live!
ABC's late-night hour, opening on a Hollywood Boulevard that the show films on the pavement outside.
- Season 23
1 sequenceJoey
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
1 sequenceKath & Kim
A mother and daughter in outer-suburban Melbourne, and the most quoted Australian comedy of its decade.
- Season 2
1 sequenceMXC
Takeshi's Castle redubbed into something considerably ruder, with the original footage left exactly as it was.
- Season 1
2 sequencesMy Family
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
1 sequenceMy Name Is Earl
A petty criminal working through a written list of everything he has done wrong, one item an episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMy Wife and Kids
Damon Wayans running a household on a theory of parenting he makes up as he goes.
- Season 4
1 sequenceThe Naked Brothers Band
A mockumentary about a children's rock band, played by two brothers who really were one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe New Adventures of Old Christine
A divorced mother whose former husband's new girlfriend is also called Christine, which is where the title comes from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNot Going Out
Lee Mack's flat-share sitcom, written joke-first and the longest-running British studio comedy still in production.
- Season 1
1 sequenceQI
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
1 sequenceReba
Reba McEntire as a Houston mother holding a divorce together, with a theme she sings herself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRules of Engagement
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
1 sequenceThe Suite Life on Deck
The Suite Life moved onto a cruise ship that is also a school.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThat '80s Show
The follow-up to That '70s Show with none of the same characters, gone in thirteen episodes.
- Season 1
2 sequencesTyler Perry's House of Payne
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
1 sequenceViva La Bam
Bam Margera staging elaborate stunts against his own parents, in the Jackass spin-off MTV built around a single house in Pennsylvania.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhat I Like About You
Two sisters sharing a New York flat, named for the Romantics single it opens on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Whitest Kids U' Know
A New York sketch troupe who filmed their own pilot and sold it, opening on a theme they perform themselves.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWild 'n Out
Improvised comedy played as a team sport, and the longest-running programme MTV has.
- Season 16
1 sequenceWould I Lie to You?
A panel show built on whether a story about a guest is true, which turns out to be an unusually durable format.
- Season 4
1 sequenceYes, Dear
Two couples raising children in the same Los Angeles house, one of them anxious about it and one not.
- Season 1