Crime

Cities at night, shot as though the crime already happened.

338 shows · 356 sequences

The ones that kept changing

All 12 in Crime · every genre →

The Wire

2002–2008HBOCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 2 more

True Detective

2014–HBOCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

The Bill

1983–2010ITVCrime

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

Season 1
Season 4
Season 5

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

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

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

Law & Order

1990–NBCCrime

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

Season 1
Season 20

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

1999–NBCCrime

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

Season 1
Season 15

2020s

Dexter: Resurrection

2025ShowtimeCrime

The continuation that throws away the two-minute breakfast ritual the original was famous for and replaces it with a six-second card.

Season 1

Daredevil: Born Again

2025–Disney+Crime

The revival, which rebuilds the Netflix series' red-liquid city rather than replacing it.

Season 1

Dark Winds

2022–AMCCrime

Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police novels, opened across the same high desert the cases cross.

Season 1

Dept. Q

2025NetflixCrime

Edinburgh stone and basement strip-lighting — a cold-case unit introduced by the room it was exiled to.

Season 1

Reacher

2022–Prime VideoCrime

Lee Child's drifter, adapted at the scale the books describe rather than the one previous adaptations settled for.

Season 1

Mare of Easttown

2021HBOCrime

Delaware County in winter — vinyl siding, chain-link, a quarry — over Lucius's 'Drunk'. Thirty-four seconds that refuse to make the place look like anything but itself.

Season 1

Cross

2024–Prime VideoCrime

James Patterson's Alex Cross novels, with a second-season sequence rebuilt from scratch.

Season 2

The Penguin

2024HBOCrime

A flooded, ruined Gotham shot like a crime photograph — standing water, wet brick, no heroics anywhere in it.

Season 1

Elsbeth

2024–CBSCrime

The Good Wife's oddest lawyer given a Columbo format of her own, and nine seconds to introduce it.

Season 1

The Residence

2025NetflixCrime

The White House drawn as a cutaway doll's house, every room a suspect — a whodunnit that hands you the floor plan first.

Season 1

The Last Thing He Told Me

2023Apple TV+Crime

A houseboat, a marina and water — a disappearance introduced by the place the missing man left behind.

Season 1

Black Bird

2022Apple TV+Crime

Prison corridors and Midwestern fields intercut, so the confinement and the killing ground read as one landscape.

Season 1

Poker Face

2023–PeacockCrime

Seventies title design executed exactly, for a case-of-the-week mystery deliberately built on the Columbo model.

Season 1

Task

2025HBOCrime

An FBI task force in the Philadelphia suburbs, from the writer of Mare of Easttown.

Season 1

Love & Death

2023HBO MaxCrime

Suburban Texas in the early eighties — lawns, church halls and kitchen counters filmed with the flatness of a case file.

Season 1

Dexter: Original Sin

2024–Paramount+ with ShowtimeCrime

The prequel, which restages the breakfast routine of the original's titles for a younger version of the same man.

Season 1

Presumed Innocent

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Evidence photographs and courtroom stone, shot cold enough that guilt and innocence look identical.

Season 1

Sugar

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Classic Hollywood noir imagery cut against modern Los Angeles — a detective series that keeps quoting the films it is standing inside.

Season 1

The Staircase

2022HBO MaxCrime

The dramatisation of the Michael Peterson case, made about the documentary crew as much as the trial.

Season 1

NCIS: Origins

2024–CBSCrime

Gibbs in 1991, twenty-one years before the parent series began.

Season 1

Taxi Driver

2021–2023SBSCrime

A taxi company that takes revenge on behalf of crime victims, from the webtoon.

Season 1

Fool Me Once

2024NetflixCrime

A widow who sees her dead husband on a nanny camera, from the Harlan Coben deal.

Season 1

Smoke

2025Apple TV+Crime

Fire filmed close enough to lose its shape — an arson series whose titles are almost entirely texture.

Season 1

The Perfect Couple

2024NetflixCrime

The cast dancing on a Nantucket lawn in wedding clothes, entirely straight-faced — a tonal misdirection the series never repeats.

Season 1

Gangs of London

2020–Sky Atlantic / AMC+Crime

A London crime empire after its head is killed, directed with the fight choreography of a feature.

Season 1

NCIS: Sydney

2023–Paramount+ / Network 10Crime

The first NCIS made outside America, with an Australian and American team sharing a desk.

Season 1

Law & Order: Organized Crime

2021–NBC / PeacockCrime

Stabler brought back a decade after leaving Special Victims Unit, into a serialised format the franchise had never used.

Season 1

Farzi

2023–Prime VideoCrime

A struggling artist forging banknotes well enough to destabilise the currency.

Season 1

Hightown

2020–2024StarzCrime

A fisheries agent in Provincetown pulled into an overdose investigation she should not be near.

Season 1

Berlin

2023–NetflixCrime

The Money Heist prequel, giving the character who died in the second season a heist of his own.

Season 1

FBI: Most Wanted

2020–2025CBSCrime

The first FBI spin-off, following the fugitive task force, in nine seconds of title card.

Season 1

We Own This City

2022HBOCrime

Baltimore again, from the makers of The Wire, but shot as surveillance and body-camera footage rather than drama.

Season 1

Bad Monkey

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Florida Keys sunshine playing over things that should not be in it — a comic crime series that keeps its tone in the titles.

Season 1

Tokyo Vice

2022–2024HBO MaxCrime

Neon reflected in wet Shinjuku streets, shot from a car — a foreign correspondent's view of a city he does not yet read.

Seasons 1–2

The Continental: From the World of John Wick

2023PeacockCrime

The hotel's origin in 1970s New York, three episodes long.

Season 1

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

2022NetflixCrime

Domestic surfaces filmed too closely — carpet, wallpaper, a fish tank — so ordinary rooms read as evidence before anything has happened in them.

Season 1

Bodies

2023NetflixCrime

One corpse in one Whitechapel alley, found by four detectives in four different centuries.

Season 1

The Flight Attendant

2020–2022HBO MaxCrime

Saul Bass by way of an in-flight safety card — flat colour, cut paper and a woman falling through all of it.

Season 1

FBI: International

2021–2025CBSCrime

The franchise's Budapest-based Fly Team, covering American interests across Europe.

Season 1

The Undoing

2020HBOCrime

A child's drawing of a family, animated and slowly disassembled, over Nicole Kidman singing 'Dream a Little Dream of Me'.

Season 1

Bodkin

2024NetflixCrime

An Irish coastal town shot as podcast artwork — the true-crime aesthetic the series is making fun of, deployed without a wink.

Season 1

Vincenzo

2021tvNCrime

An Italian-Korean consigliere returning to Seoul, opened in the grammar of a mafia film.

Season 1

Vigil

2021–2023BBC OneCrime

A death aboard a Trident submarine, investigated by a detective who cannot leave the boat.

Season 1

Hotel Cocaine

2024MGM+Crime

The Mutiny Hotel in late-seventies Miami, and everyone who passed through its lobby.

Season 1

The Westies

2025MGM+Crime

The Hell's Kitchen Irish mob, opened by Digital Kitchen in the grain of 1970s New York.

Season 1

Dahaad

2023Prime VideoCrime

A Rajasthan sub-inspector connecting a series of deaths nobody has treated as murders.

Season 1

CSI: Vegas

2021–2024CBSCrime

The franchise returned to the city it started in, with two of the original cast and the same Who song.

Season 1

BMF

2021–StarzCrime

The Black Mafia Family out of 1980s Detroit, produced by 50 Cent.

Season 1

Mouse

2021tvNCrime

A patrol officer hunting a psychopath, in a series that spends its first quarter setting up a reversal.

Season 1

Dope Thief

2025Apple TV+Crime

Philadelphia rowhouses and police insignia, degraded until the badge and the disguise become hard to tell apart.

Season 1

NCIS: Hawai'i

2021–2024CBSCrime

The first NCIS led by a woman, and eleven seconds of titles to say so.

Season 1

Guns & Gulaabs

2023NetflixCrime

A 1990s opium town played as comedy, from the Gunjan Saxena directors.

Season 1

Lady in the Lake

2024Apple TV+Crime

Two women in 1960s Baltimore, one investigating and one already dead.

Season 1

Flower of Evil

2020tvNCrime

A detective investigating a case that leads to her own husband's past.

Season 1

Mask Girl

2023NetflixCrime

One woman played by three actors across three decades, from the webtoon.

Season 1

Beyond Evil

2021JTBCCrime

Two detectives in a small town, each convinced the other is the killer.

Season 1

Death and Other Details

2024HuluCrime

A murder on an ocean liner, opened in the manner of a Saul Bass film title.

Season 1

ZeroZeroZero

2020Sky Atlantic / AmazonCrime

One cocaine shipment followed from Monterrey to Calabria, scored throughout by Mogwai.

Season 1

Who Killed Sara?

2021–2022NetflixCrime

Photographs, parachute rigging and water — the single incident the whole series circles, restaged in the titles every season.

Seasons 1–3

Young Wallander

2020–2022Netflix (Sweden)Crime

Kurt Wallander as a rookie in present-day Malmö, made in English rather than Swedish.

Season 1

The Woods

2020NetflixCrime

Harlan Coben adapted into Polish, with a prosecutor reopening the summer camp his sister vanished from.

Season 1

City on Fire

2023Apple TV+Crime

New York in the year of the blackout, burning at the edges of the frame — another Imaginary Forces main title, and a much colder one.

Season 1

Snabba Cash

2021–2022NetflixCrime

The Stockholm crime films continued as a series, following the money rather than the men.

Season 2

Bom Dia, Verônica

2020–2024NetflixCrime

A São Paulo police clerk who starts investigating a case nobody assigned her.

Season 1

Bergerac (2025)

2025–U&DramaCrime

Jersey's detective revived forty-four years after the BBC original, with the island doing the same work it always did.

Season 1

Beyond Paradise

2023–BBC One / BritBoxCrime

Death in Paradise's detective moved to Devon, where the weather is the joke.

Season 1

Bloodhounds

2023–2026NetflixCrime

Two young boxers working off a debt for a Seoul loan shark, and trying to stop.

Season 1

Boston Blue

2025–CBSCrime

The Blue Bloods spin-off, moving a Reagan to Boston and a different police family's dinner table.

Season 1

The Cleaning Lady

2022–2025FoxCrime

A Filipino doctor in Las Vegas cleaning for organised crime to pay for her son's treatment.

Season 1

Defending Jacob

2020Apple TV+Crime

New England woods and suburban windows, filmed at the distance a parent stands from a child they no longer recognise.

Season 1

Down Cemetery Road

2025–Apple TV+Crime

Mick Herron before Slough House: a missing girl and an accountant who will not stop looking for her.

Season 1

Extracurricular

2020NetflixCrime

A model student funding his own tuition by running a criminal enterprise after school.

Season 1

Full Circle

2023HBO MaxCrime

New York cut into overlapping fragments, so that separate lives keep occupying the same frame before the plot connects them.

Season 1

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

2024–BBC iPlayerCrime

A sixth-former who reopens a closed murder case as her school project and will not put it down.

Season 1

High Potential

2024–ABCCrime

A cleaner with an exceptional mind who starts solving the cases in the files she is dusting.

Season 1

The Lincoln Lawyer

2022–NetflixCrime

Connelly's defence attorney working out of the back seat of a car, brought to television a decade after the film.

Season 1

Miss Scarlet and The Duke

2020–Alibi / PBSCrime

A woman who inherits her father's detective agency in Victorian London and declines to sell it.

Season 1

Perry Mason

2020–2023HBOCrime

Depression-era Los Angeles rendered in ink and light leaks, over in twenty-one seconds — a deliberately curt opening for a show about a very slow investigation.

Season 1

Power Book III: Raising Kanan

2021–2026StarzCrime

The Power universe wound back to 1991 Queens, following the character the first series had already killed.

Season 1

Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story

2020SonyLIVCrime

The Bombay securities scandal, and one of the most imitated Indian title sequences of the streaming era.

Season 1

Under the Banner of Heaven

2022FX on HuluCrime

A Utah detective losing his own faith while investigating a killing committed inside it.

Season 1

2010s

Peaky Blinders

2013–2022BBC Two / BBC OneCrime

Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' over Birmingham furnaces and a man walking away from a fire — a period drama scored entirely out of period.

Season 1

The Rookie

2018–ABCCrime

Los Angeles patrol work, opened with the network-procedural confidence the format has run on since Hill Street Blues.

Season 1

Better Call Saul

2015–2022AMCCrime

A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.

Seasons 1–6

Fargo

2014–FXCrime

Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.

Season 1

True Detective

2014–HBOCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

The Blacklist

2013–2023NBCCrime

Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.

Season 1

Animal Kingdom

2016–2022TNTCrime

The Australian film remade in Southern California, following the same criminal family.

Season 1

Ozark

2017–2022NetflixCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2

Mindhunter

2017–2019NetflixCrime

Reel-to-reel tape, evidence photographs and audio equipment intercut so tightly that the interview and the crime become one process. Clinical, and much nastier for it.

Season 1

Mr Inbetween

2018–2021FXCrime

An Australian hitman's domestic life, opened in twelve seconds because the series has no interest in ceremony.

Season 1

Death in Paradise

2011–BBC OneCrime

Caribbean colour and a calypso theme, for a murder series that has never once let its setting look threatening.

Season 1

Shetland

2013–BBC OneCrime

North Atlantic weather over islands where everyone already knows everyone, which is the constraint the series runs on.

Season 1

Banshee

2013–2016CinemaxCrime

Amish country and violence intercut at the same speed, from the network's short-lived attempt at prestige action.

Season 1

Money Heist

2017–2021NetflixCrime

Red jumpsuits, Dalí masks and the Royal Mint rendered as a heist diagram, with 'Bella Ciao' turned from a partisan song into a brand.

Seasons 3–5

Sherlock

2010–2017BBC OneCrime

London shot as data — maps, magnification and chemical traces, cut to a violin figure that never quite settles.

Season 1

Broadchurch

2013–2017ITVCrime

Dorset cliffs and a beach, filmed as beautifully as a tourist board would want and used for the opposite purpose.

Season 1

Bosch

2014–2021Prime VideoCrime

Los Angeles at night from a helicopter, over Caught A Ghost's 'Can't Let Go' — a city filmed the way the detective sees it, from above and at a distance.

Season 1

Daredevil

2015–2018NetflixCrime

Blood-red liquid pouring upward into the shapes of New York — the courthouse, the church, the skyline — then the scales of justice and a man who cannot see any of it.

Seasons 1–3

The Punisher

2017–2019NetflixCrime

A skull assembling out of gun smoke and muzzle flash, with the ordnance doing the drawing. Blunter than its siblings, deliberately.

Seasons 1–2

Chicago P.D.

2014–NBCCrime

The second of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the crossovers usually run through.

Season 1

Blue Bloods

2010–2024CBSCrime

Three generations of one New York police family, fourteen seasons long.

Seasons 10–12

Killing Eve

2018–2022BBC America / BBC OneCrime

Hand-drawn ink over a chase across Europe, in the register of a fashion illustration rather than a thriller.

Season 1

Delhi Crime

2019–NetflixCrime

Delhi at night from a moving vehicle, with none of the stylisation the subject would normally attract.

Season 1

S.W.A.T. (2017)

2017–2025CBSCrime

The reboot, which ran eight seasons to the original's two and rebuilt the theme rather than dropping it.

Season 1

Justified

2010–2015FXCrime

Kentucky hills and hip-hop — Gangstagrass over holler country, which should not work and entirely does.

Season 6

The Sinner

2017–2021USA NetworkCrime

An anthology that begins with the crime and spends the season on why.

Season 2

Power

2014–2020StarzCrime

A New York club owner running a drug network behind it, and the franchise Starz built out of him.

Season 1

Narcos

2015–2017NetflixCrime

Archive photographs, surveillance stills and evidence shots of the real Medellín cartel, cut to Rodrigo Amarante's 'Tuyo' — a bolero written to sound like something Escobar's father would have played.

Seasons 1–3

Hawaii Five-0 (2010)

2010–2020CBSCrime

The reboot, which keeps the 1968 theme almost note for note and rebuilds the wave and the zoom around it in high definition.

Season 1

Line of Duty

2012–2021BBC Two / BBC OneCrime

Redaction as a design language — evidence bags, case files and blocks of black covering the parts you are not cleared for.

Season 1

Rizzoli & Isles

2010–2016TNTCrime

A Boston detective and a medical examiner, from the Tess Gerritsen novels.

Season 1

Blindspot

2015–2020NBCCrime

A woman found in Times Square covered in tattoos that are each a case.

Season 1

Elementary

2012–2019CBSCrime

Holmes and a female Watson in New York, opened by a Rube Goldberg machine assembling itself.

Season 1

Gotham

2014–2019FoxCrime

The city before the character — architecture, rain and corruption, with the costume kept firmly off screen.

Season 1

How to Get Away with Murder

2014–2020ABCCrime

Law-school iconography cut against evidence photographs, so the lecture and the crime scene share a visual language.

Season 1

Narcos: Mexico

2018–2021NetflixCrime

The parent show's archive-and-evidence method moved north — Guadalajara and Sinaloa in period photography, with the same documentary flatness.

Seasons 1–3

Mirzapur

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A carpet-trading family running the guns and opium of an eastern Uttar Pradesh town.

Season 1

Happy Valley

2014–2023BBC OneCrime

Sally Wainwright's Calder Valley series, which opens with almost nothing and is all the bleaker for it.

Season 1

The Night Of

2016HBOCrime

New York at night from inside a cab, the city sliding past in sodium light, cut so that nothing quite resolves — which is the state of the evidence for the entire series.

Season 1

Jessica Jones

2015–2019NetflixCrime

Purple watercolour bleeding across Hell's Kitchen while a noir trumpet plays — the colour of the villain seeping into every frame before he is named.

Seasons 1–3

The Fall

2013–2016BBC TwoCrime

Belfast, and a series that shows you the killer in the first episode and spends three series on the pursuit anyway.

Season 1

The Killing (US)

2011–2014AMC / NetflixCrime

The American remake of Forbrydelsen, moving the rain from Copenhagen to Seattle and keeping everything else.

Season 1

Endeavour

2012–2023ITVCrime

The Morse prequel, which quotes Pheloung's Morse-code motif in its own theme without repeating it.

Season 1

Ray Donovan

2013–2020ShowtimeCrime

Los Angeles at street level — a fixer's city, shot from the driver's seat rather than the hills.

Season 4

Sneaky Pete

2015–2019Prime VideoCrime

A con man hiding inside his cellmate's identity, from Bryan Cranston and David Shore.

Season 1

Luther

2010–2019BBC OneCrime

Massive Attack's 'Paradise Circus' over a city at night, with a detective who is already losing before the episode starts.

Season 1

Top Boy

2011–2023Channel 4 / NetflixCrime

A Hackney estate shot from within rather than above, over Brian Eno's score — which is not the collaboration anyone predicted.

Season 1

Vera

2011–ITVCrime

Northumberland coast and moorland in twenty seconds, with no detective visible in any of it.

Season 1

Babylon Berlin

2017–Sky 1 / Das ErsteCrime

Weimar Berlin as a cabaret poster — Bauhaus type, jazz and a city that already knows how this ends.

Season 1

I Am the Night

2019TNTCrime

Patty Jenkins directing a story that runs alongside the Black Dahlia case without being it.

Season 1

The Missing

2014–2016BBC OneCrime

A child vanishing in France and the two timelines that follow it, eight years apart.

Season 1

Mayans M.C.

2018–2023FXCrime

The Sons of Anarchy spin-off, on the other side of the California border.

Season 1

Major Crimes

2012–2018TNTCrime

The Closer continued around Mary McDonnell's captain rather than Kyra Sedgwick's chief.

Season 1

NCIS: New Orleans

2014–2021CBSCrime

The franchise moved to a city with a soundtrack, which the titles spend all twenty-one seconds on.

Season 1

Mystery Road

2018–ABCCrime

The Australian outback shot as landscape rather than backdrop, for a detective series about who the land belongs to.

Season 2

Gomorrah

2014–2021Sky Atlantic ItaliaCrime

Naples and the Camorra, shot in concrete and sodium light with no romance permitted anywhere in it.

Season 1

Criminal Justice

2019–Disney+ HotstarCrime

The BBC series remade in India, running longer than the original did.

Season 1

Luke Cage

2016–2018NetflixCrime

Harlem projected onto a man's skin — brownstones, crowds and streets mapped across a body that cannot be marked. The one Marvel Netflix opening that is about a place rather than a mood.

Seasons 1–2

Mayday

2013BBC OneCrime

A May Queen vanishing on the morning of the procession, and a village that suspects itself.

Season 1

Signal

2016tvNCrime

A walkie-talkie connecting a present-day profiler to a detective in 1989.

Season 1

The Alienist

2018–2020TNTCrime

An 1896 New York murder investigation using methods the police do not yet have a word for.

Season 1

Lilyhammer

2012–2014NRK1 / NetflixCrime

Netflix's first original commission, and an opening that plays a New Jersey mobster in rural Norway entirely straight.

Season 1

Top of the Lake

2013–2017BBC Two / SundanceTVCrime

Jane Campion's missing-girl series, opened across the South Island lake it is named for.

Season 1

McMafia

2018BBC One / AMCCrime

A banker pulled back into his family's Russian organised-crime money.

Season 1

The Bridge

2011–2018SVT / DR1Crime

The Øresund Bridge at night, and Choir of Young Believers — a border filmed as a character, which is what the show is about.

Season 3

Stranger

2017–2020tvNCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2

Nancy Drew

2019–2023The CWCrime

The teenage detective relocated to a haunted Maine town.

Season 1

And Then There Were None

2015BBC OneCrime

Christie's island novel adapted straight, with a title sequence that counts the cast down as the story does.

Season 1

City on a Hill

2019–2022ShowtimeCrime

Boston in the early nineties, a corrupt FBI agent and the prosecutor trying to use him.

Season 1

La Reina del Sur

2011–2023TelemundoCrime

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Sinaloan trafficker, remade in English by USA Network as Queen of the South.

Season 1

Chicago Justice

2017NBCCrime

The fourth Chicago series, cancelled after thirteen episodes — the only one Dick Wolf could not make stick.

Season 1

Truth Be Told

2019–2023Apple TV+Crime

Recording equipment and case material, for a series about a true-crime podcast reopening its own mistake.

Season 1

Good Behavior

2016–2017TNTCrime

A thief on parole and the hitman she decides not to turn in.

Season 1

Fortitude

2015–2018Sky AtlanticCrime

An Arctic settlement where nothing decays and a killing therefore cannot be buried.

Season 1

El Señor de los Cielos

2013–TelemundoCrime

A narco drama loosely built on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Telemundo's longest-running original.

Season 2

CSI: Cyber

2015–2016CBSCrime

The last CSI, moving the forensics from bodies to hard drives, and the one the franchise ended on.

Season 2

No Offence

2015–2018Channel 4Crime

Paul Abbott's Manchester police series, opened in eighteen seconds by Peter Anderson Studio.

Season 1

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

2016–2017CBSCrime

The spin-off that moved the profiling unit to crimes against Americans abroad.

Season 1

Trapped

2015–2022RÚVCrime

Icelandic weather as an antagonist — ice, sea and a town nobody can leave, which is both the plot and the title.

Season 1

Claws

2017–2022TNTCrime

A Florida nail salon laundering money for a pill mill, staged in saturated colour throughout.

Season 1

Graceland

2013–2015USA NetworkCrime

Undercover agents from three agencies sharing a confiscated beach house.

Season 2

Tin Star

2017–2020Sky AtlanticCrime

A British policeman running a small Alberta force, and the refinery that follows him there.

Season 1

Deadwind

2018–2023Yle (Finland)Crime

A Helsinki homicide detective returning to work after her husband's death. Known at home as Karppi.

Season 2

Republic of Doyle

2010–2014CBCCrime

A father-and-son detective agency in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Season 1

Mob City

2013TNTCrime

Frank Darabont's post-Walking Dead series, on 1940s Los Angeles, cancelled after six episodes.

Season 1

Frankie Drake Mysteries

2017–2021CBCCrime

Toronto's only female private detective in the 1920s, from the Murdoch Mysteries producers.

Season 1

High Seas

2019–2020NetflixCrime

Two sisters on a 1940s liner to Rio, and a passenger who was never on the manifest.

Season 1

Breathe

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A father working his way up a transplant list by removing the people above his son.

Season 1

Tunnel

2017OCNCrime

A 1986 detective stepping through a tunnel into 2017, still chasing the same killer.

Season 1

Terriers

2010FXCrime

An unlicensed private investigator in Ocean Beach, cancelled after thirteen episodes and mourned ever since.

Season 1

Briarpatch

2019–2020USA NetworkCrime

A Texas border town where the zoo animals have got out, which the series treats as background.

Season 1

The Oath

2018–2019CrackleCrime

A gang made up of serving police officers, opened by Imaginary Forces.

Season 1

Low Winter Sun

2013AMCCrime

The British two-parter remade in Detroit and stretched to ten episodes, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Silver Spoon

2014–2021NTVCrime

A Russian oligarch's son forced to work as a policeman, and the most exported Russian drama of its decade. Original title Мажор.

Season 3

Good Cop

2012BBC OneCrime

A Liverpool response officer who stops waiting for the system to work.

Season 1

The Last Panthers

2015Sky AtlanticCrime

A jewel heist across Europe, opening on the title track of Blackstar — the last title music David Bowie wrote.

Season 1

De Twaalf

2019–2022VRTCrime

A Belgian trial told from the jury box rather than the bench. Remade in Australia as The Twelve.

Season 1

Rellik

2017BBC OneCrime

A murder investigation told backwards — the title is killer reversed, and so is the series.

Season 1

Dicte

2013–2016TV 2Crime

A crime reporter back in Aarhus after a divorce, from the Elsebeth Egholm novels.

Season 1

Umbre

2014–2019HBO RomaniaCrime

A Bucharest debt collector holding two lives apart, in HBO Europe's Romanian production. The title means Shadows.

Season 1

Beau Séjour

2017–2021VRTCrime

A murdered girl who can be seen by five people, investigating her own death in a Flemish hotel.

Season 1

Pustina

2016HBO CzechCrime

A girl disappears from a north Bohemian village that a mining company is trying to buy. The title means Wasteland.

Season 1

Wataha

2014–2019HBO EuropeCrime

Border guards in the Bieszczady mountains, and the first Polish drama HBO made for itself.

Season 1

Belfer

2016–2018Canal+ PolandCrime

A teacher arriving in a small Polish town where a pupil has been murdered, and finding the town would rather he did not ask.

Season 1

Aranyélet

2015–2018HBO HungaryCrime

A Budapest family whose comfortable life runs on crime, and the first Hungarian series HBO Europe made itself. Known abroad as Golden Life.

Season 1

Battle Creek

2015CBSCrime

Vince Gilligan's script from a decade earlier, finally made, and cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

The Bletchley Circle

2012–2014ITVCrime

Four women who broke codes during the war, using the same habits on a murder afterwards.

Season 1

Boardwalk Empire

2010–2014HBOCrime

One man on a beach while the tide brings him bottles. No montage, no cast — just Nucky Thompson standing still as Prohibition washes up around his shoes, to The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Seasons 1–5

Dublin Murders

2019BBC One / StarzCrime

Tana French's first two novels braided into one eight-part case.

Season 1

Father Brown

2013–BBC OneCrime

Chesterton's priest detective moved to the 1950s Cotswolds, and the most durable daytime drama the BBC has.

Season 1

The Glades

2010–2013A&ECrime

A Chicago detective exiled to Florida, working murders he keeps being told are not his.

Season 1

Godfather of Harlem

2019–2021EpixCrime

Bumpy Johnson out of prison in 1963 and finding Harlem taken, with Malcolm X across the street.

Season 4

Hinterland

2013–2016S4C / BBC OneCrime

Aberystwyth and the country behind it, shot twice over - once in Welsh as Y Gwyll, once in English.

Season 1

Hudson & Rex

2019–CitytvCrime

A St John's detective and his German shepherd, remade from an Austrian series that ran for twenty years.

Season 1

Kruk

2018–2021Canal+ PolandCrime

A Białystok detective returning to the town he grew up in, with a subtitle that translates as whispers are heard after dark.

Season 1

Mr. Mercedes

2017–2019AudienceCrime

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

Season 1
Season 3

Nielegalni

2018Canal+ PolandCrime

A Polish intelligence unit whose members do not officially exist.

Season 1

Ripper Street

2012–2016BBC One / Prime VideoCrime

Whitechapel in the years after the murders, policed by men the murders made famous.

Season 1

Rookie Blue

2010–2015Global / ABCCrime

Five recruits out of the academy in Toronto, made as a summer series for two countries at once.

Season 1

Rosewood

2015–2017FoxCrime

A private pathologist in Miami working the cases the police have already closed.

Season 1

Sacred Games

2018–2019NetflixCrime

Mumbai rendered as a mandala of crime and religion, with the city's iconography arranged into something closer to a devotional image.

Season 1

Sharp Objects

2018HBOCrime

Wind Gap seen at speed from a car window, with words hidden in the frame — the same trick the show plays for eight episodes, put in the titles from the first minute.

Season 1

Strike

2017–BBC OneCrime

Galbraith's one-legged private detective and the assistant who turns out to be better at it than he expected.

Season 1

The Team

2015–2018ZDF / DR1Crime

A Europol task force built out of three countries' police, and shot in all three languages.

Season 2

Unforgettable

2011–2016CBSCrime

A detective who remembers every day of her life except the one that matters.

Season 1

Unforgotten

2015–ITVCrime

Two detectives working cold cases old enough that the suspects have built whole lives since.

Season 1

Vlad

2019–2021Pro TVCrime

A Romanian crime series about a man returning to Bucharest to find who killed his brother.

Season 1

You

2018–Lifetime / NetflixCrime

A bookshop manager narrating his own stalking in the second person, moved to Netflix after one season.

Season 1

2000s

Dexter

2006–2013ShowtimeCrime

Breakfast filmed as though it were a murder. A mosquito swatted, a blood orange crushed, a shaving nick, a steak sliced, floss drawn tight — every shot of an ordinary morning framed exactly as the violence the show never puts on screen this early.

Seasons 1–8

The Wire

2002–2008HBOCrime

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

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 2 more

NCIS

2003–CBSCrime

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

Season 10
Season 1

The Mentalist

2008–2015CBSCrime

A red smiley face drawn in blood, which is the whole of the series' mythology compressed into one image.

Season 1

Sons of Anarchy

2008–2014FXCrime

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

Season 1
Season 7

Bones

2005–2017FoxCrime

Skeletal reconstruction rendered as clean laboratory graphics — a procedural that opens on anatomy rather than crime.

Season 2

Veronica Mars

2004–2019UPN / The CW / HuluCrime

The Dandy Warhols over surveillance photographs and a Californian beach town that is much worse than it looks.

Season 1

Castle

2009–2016ABCCrime

Typewriter keys and New York, for a series about a novelist who follows a detective around.

Season 2

Southland

2009–2013NBC / TNTCrime

Los Angeles patrol work shot like documentary, dropped by NBC and picked up by TNT.

Season 1

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

2000–2015CBSCrime

The Who over forensic macro photography, and the sequence that turned laboratory work into prime-time spectacle for a decade.

Season 1

Murdoch Mysteries

2008–Citytv / CBCCrime

A Toronto detective in the 1890s using methods the era has not invented yet, past twenty seasons.

Season 1

The Closer

2005–2012TNTCrime

Kyra Sedgwick's LAPD deputy chief, and the most-watched drama basic cable had at the time.

Season 1

White Collar

2009–2014USA NetworkCrime

Nine seconds. A fedora, a card, and straight into it.

Season 1

Psych

2006–2014USA NetworkCrime

'I Know, You Know' — a theme re-recorded in a different genre for special episodes, which makes it a rare case of a comedy varying its own titles.

Season 4

Monk

2002–2009USA NetworkCrime

Randy Newman singing about being obsessive over a detective straightening things — a theme that explains the character faster than the pilot does.

Season 1

NCIS: Los Angeles

2009–2023CBSCrime

The first NCIS spin-off, fourteen seasons of undercover work.

Season 5

The Killing

2007–2012DR1Crime

Copenhagen in the dark and the rain, over twenty-nine seconds that established the visual language of an entire decade of Nordic crime drama.

Season 1

Law & Order: Criminal Intent

2001–2011NBC / USA NetworkCrime

The franchise entry that follows the criminal rather than the case, and so has to break the format's own rule about not showing you the answer.

Season 1

Burn Notice

2007–2013USA NetworkCrime

A narrated premise about being blacklisted, delivered over Miami heat in thirty-one seconds.

Season 1

CSI: Miami

2002–2012CBSCrime

The first CSI spin-off, opened by The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

Season 1

Cold Case

2003–2010CBSCrime

Evidence boxes and faded photographs, for a procedural whose whole method is that the past is filed somewhere.

Season 1

New Tricks

2003–2015BBC OneCrime

Retired detectives reopening cold cases, with a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about the premise.

Season 1

Damages

2007–2012FX / DirecTVCrime

Legal documents, blood and Manhattan glass, cut in the same non-linear fashion the series tells its story.

Season 1

Leverage

2008–2012TNTCrime

Twenty seconds of heist iconography, in a show that opens each episode with a job already half underway.

Season 1

CSI: NY

2004–2013CBSCrime

The third CSI, opened by "Baba O'Riley".

Season 1

Without a Trace

2002–2009CBSCrime

Missing-person photographs and a clock, in thirty-two seconds that state the format precisely.

Season 1

Numb3rs

2005–2010CBSCrime

An FBI agent and his mathematician brother, with the equations drawn over the city in the titles.

Season 1

Crossing Jordan

2001–2007NBCCrime

A Boston medical examiner who investigates her own cases against instruction.

Season 1

Flashpoint

2008–2012CTV / CBSCrime

A Toronto tactical unit, and the first Canadian drama to air simultaneously on an American network.

Season 1

Medium

2005–2011NBC / CBSCrime

Patricia Arquette as a consultant to the district attorney who dreams the cases.

Season 1

Whitechapel

2009–2013ITVCrime

Modern police work in the streets the Ripper murders happened in, with each series restaging an old case.

Season 1

Hustle

2004–2012BBC OneCrime

Playing cards, sleight of hand and London — a con-artist series whose titles are themselves a piece of misdirection.

Season 1

Law & Order: UK

2009–2014ITVCrime

American scripts reshot in London with the two-part structure intact, and the chung-chung kept.

Season 6

Underbelly

2008–2013Nine NetworkCrime

Australian organised crime, a different true story each season.

Season 1

Law & Order: Trial by Jury

2005–2006NBCCrime

The shortest-lived Law & Order, cancelled after thirteen episodes, covering the half of the format the parent series skipped.

Season 1

Spiral

2005–2020Canal+Crime

Paris police, courts and lawyers in thirty-one seconds, with none of the city that appears on postcards.

Season 1

Boomtown

2002–2003NBCCrime

A Los Angeles crime series that told each case from five points of view, and opened with the device stated up front.

Season 1

Braquo

2009–2016Canal+Crime

Olivier Marchal's Paris police series, about four officers who stop pretending to follow the law.

Season 1

Wallander

2005–2016SVT / BBC OneCrime

Henning Mankell's Ystad detective, filmed twice — in Swedish with Krister Henriksson, and in English with Kenneth Branagh.

Season 1

Agatha Christie's Marple

2004–2013ITVCrime

The ITV Marple, which adapted novels Miss Marple was never in by writing her into them.

Season 1

Criminal Minds

2005–CBS / Paramount+Crime

Case files and profiler jargon in thirty-one seconds, from a procedural that has now run for two decades.

Season 1

The District

2000–2004CBSCrime

A police chief running Washington on statistics, loosely modelled on the man who did it in New York.

Season 1

In Plain Sight

2008–2012USA NetworkCrime

A US marshal running witness protection in Albuquerque.

Season 1

Inspector George Gently

2007–2017BBC OneCrime

A Northumberland detective in the 1960s, and a series that uses the decade for its politics rather than its clothes.

Season 2

Lie to Me

2009–2011FoxCrime

A deception expert reading faces frame by frame, built on the research of the psychologist who consulted on it.

Season 1

Life (2007)

2007–2009NBCCrime

A detective released after twelve years for a crime he did not commit, handed back his badge and a very large settlement.

Season 1

Rosemary & Thyme

2003–2007ITVCrime

Two gardeners who keep finding bodies in the borders they have been hired to replant.

Season 1

1990s

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

1999–NBCCrime

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

Season 1
Season 15

Law & Order

1990–NBCCrime

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

Season 1
Season 20

Midsomer Murders

1997–ITVCrime

A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.

Season 1

Oz

1997–2003HBOCrime

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

Season 1
Season 4

Silent Witness

1996–BBC OneCrime

Forensic pathology rendered as abstraction — a thirty-year-old series whose titles have been redesigned repeatedly while the eye at the centre of them stayed.

Season 21

Walker, Texas Ranger

1993–2001CBSCrime

Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.

Season 3

NYPD Blue

1993–2005ABCCrime

Mike Post's theme over a New York shot with the handheld looseness that got the show its reputation before anyone had seen an episode.

Season 1

Diagnosis: Murder

1993–2001CBSCrime

Dick Van Dyke as a doctor who solves murders, spun off from Jake and the Fatman.

Season 1

Nash Bridges

1996–2001CBSCrime

Don Johnson in San Francisco with a yellow Barracuda, after Miami Vice.

Season 1

A Touch of Frost

1992–2010ITVCrime

David Jason as a Denton detective who is right and insubordinate in roughly equal measure.

Season 1

Beck

1997–TV4 (Sweden)Crime

Martin Beck, adapted from the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels that invented Nordic crime fiction, and still running after thirty years.

Season 27

Blue Heelers

1994–2006Seven NetworkCrime

A country police station in the fictional town of Mount Thomas, twelve seasons long.

Season 4

Cracker

1993–2006ITVCrime

Nineteen seconds, and no attempt to make its criminal psychologist look like someone you would want to meet.

Season 1

Silk Stalkings

1991–1999CBS / USA NetworkCrime

Palm Beach sex-crimes detectives, and the show that effectively invented USA Network's original programming.

Season 1

Profiler

1996–2000NBCCrime

Crime-scene imagery rendered as a mind reconstructing it — the visual grammar every profiler series has used since.

Season 1

Pacific Blue

1996–2000USA NetworkCrime

Bicycle police in Santa Monica, pitched by its own network as Baywatch on bikes.

Season 1

Murder One

1995–1997ABCCrime

Steven Bochco's experiment in giving a single trial an entire season, and the courtroom-portrait titles that went with it.

Season 2

Da Vinci's Inquest

1998–2005CBCCrime

A Vancouver coroner written from the real one, who later became the city's mayor.

Season 1

EZ Streets

1996–1997CBSCrime

Paul Haggis's crime drama, cancelled in nine episodes and cited ever since as an ancestor of the prestige era.

Season 1

The Commish

1991–1996ABCCrime

A police commissioner who solves things by talking, in a series built against the action shows around it.

Season 1

Due South

1994–1999CTVCrime

A Mountie seconded to Chicago, playing the politeness entirely straight against the city around him.

Season 1

Hetty Wainthropp Investigates

1996–1998BBC OneCrime

A Lancashire pensioner who opens a detective agency because nobody will give her a job.

Season 1

Martial Law

1998–2000CBSCrime

Sammo Hung as a Chinese detective in Los Angeles, doing his own stunts at forty-six.

Season 1

Pie in the Sky

1994–1997BBC OneCrime

A detective who would rather run his restaurant, and is not allowed to retire from either.

Season 1

Prime Suspect

1991–2006ITVCrime

Stephen Warbeck's theme over London at night — spare, cold, and entirely without the reassurance the genre usually offers.

Season 1

Renegade

1992–1997Syndication / USA NetworkCrime

A framed policeman on a motorcycle, made for syndication by the people who made The A-Team.

Season 1

V.I.P.

1998–2002SyndicationCrime

Pamela Anderson fronting a celebrity protection agency she is unqualified to run, played for the joke.

Season 1

Viper

1994–1999NBC / SyndicationCrime

A car that converts into an armoured attack vehicle, cancelled by NBC and revived for syndication.

Season 1

Wycliffe

1993–1998ITVCrime

A detective superintendent working Cornwall, filmed largely on the coast it is set on.

Season 1

1980s

Miami Vice

1984–1990NBCCrime

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

Season 1

Murder, She Wrote

1984–1996CBSCrime

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

Season 1

Agatha Christie's Poirot

1989–2013ITVCrime

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

Season 1

Magnum, P.I.

1980–1988CBSCrime

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

Season 1

Matlock

1986–1995NBC / ABCCrime

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

Season 1

In the Heat of the Night

1988–1995NBC / CBSCrime

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

Season 1

Hill Street Blues

1981–1987NBCCrime

Mike Post's piano over squad cars pulling out into snow — the sequence that taught American drama an opening could be melancholy rather than exciting.

Season 1

Cagney & Lacey

1981–1988CBSCrime

Two detectives introduced as colleagues rather than as a novelty, which in 1981 was itself the statement.

Season 2

Remington Steele

1982–1987NBCCrime

A narrated premise about a detective agency with an invented boss, delivered by the woman who invented him.

Season 1

T. J. Hooker

1982–1986ABC / CBSCrime

William Shatner back in uniform between Star Trek films.

Season 1

Simon & Simon

1981–1989CBSCrime

Two brothers running a San Diego detective agency with opposite methods.

Season 1

Riptide

1984–1986NBCCrime

Two Vietnam veterans running a detective agency from a boat, with a helicopter called the Screaming Mimi.

Season 1

21 Jump Street

1987–1990FoxCrime

Officers young enough to pass for pupils, in one of the four shows Fox launched its network with.

Season 1

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1984–1994ITV (Granada)Crime

Jeremy Brett's Holmes, and the Victorian-illustration open Granada reused across every retitled run of the series.

Seasons 1–2

The Bill

1983–2010ITVCrime

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

Season 1
Season 4
Season 5

Boon

1986–1995ITVCrime

A retired fireman on a motorcycle, in the ITV drama that ran nine years on the strength of Jim Diamond's theme.

Season 5

Dempsey and Makepeace

1985–1986ITVCrime

An American detective seconded to London and the aristocrat he is partnered with, who married in real life.

Season 1

The Equalizer (1985)

1985–1989CBSCrime

A retired intelligence officer advertising his services in the classifieds, scored by Stewart Copeland the year after the Police stopped.

Season 1

Father Dowling Mysteries

1989–1991NBC / ABCCrime

A Chicago priest and a nun solving murders, cancelled by NBC and picked up by ABC.

Season 1

Hardcastle and McCormick

1983–1986ABCCrime

A retired judge and the ex-convict he paroles into being his driver, chasing the cases he could not convict.

Season 1

Jake and the Fatman

1987–1992CBSCrime

A Hawaii prosecutor and his investigator, spun out of a single episode of Matlock.

Season 1

Matt Houston

1982–1985ABCCrime

A Texas oil heir running a detective agency in Los Angeles because he is bored.

Season 1

The Ruth Rendell Mysteries

1987–2000ITVCrime

Rendell adapted for thirteen years, mostly as Wexford and occasionally as the standalone novels.

Season 1

Sherlock Holmes (1984)

1984–1994ITVCrime

Granada's adaptation, played on a Baker Street built outdoors in Manchester and continued until Jeremy Brett could no longer work.

Season 1

Spenser: For Hire

1985–1988ABCCrime

Robert B. Parker's Boston detective, with Avery Brooks as Hawk in the part that made him.

Season 1

Wiseguy

1987–1990CBSCrime

An undercover agent left inside one organisation for a whole arc at a time, which is roughly where American television learned to serialise.

Season 1

1970s

Columbo

1971–2003NBC / ABCCrime

Twenty-four seconds, and for much of the run no sequence at all — a series confident enough to open on the murder and let the detective arrive late.

Season 1

The Rockford Files

1974–1980NBCCrime

A telephone rings, an answering machine picks up, and a stranger leaves a message that is usually bad news and occasionally a joke at Rockford's expense. Then the theme starts. The private detective is introduced by the people avoiding him.

Seasons 1–6

CHiPs

1977–1983NBCCrime

California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers, filmed almost entirely on freeways.

Season 1

Starsky & Hutch

1975–1979ABCCrime

Two Bay City detectives and a red Ford Torino with a white stripe.

Season 1

Hart to Hart

1979–1984ABCCrime

A wealthy married couple who solve murders, introduced by their own butler in voiceover.

Season 1

The Sweeney

1975–1978ITVCrime

The Flying Squad in a Ford Granada, and the series that made British police drama violent.

Season 1

S.W.A.T.

1975–1976ABCCrime

The original, cancelled after two seasons over its violence, and remembered mostly for a theme that reached number one.

Season 1

The Streets of San Francisco

1972–1977ABCCrime

Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas, shot on location throughout.

Season 1

Quincy, M.E.

1976–1983NBCCrime

A Los Angeles medical examiner who investigates, and the ancestor of every forensic procedural since.

Season 1

Barnaby Jones

1973–1980CBSCrime

Buddy Ebsen as a retired investigator who comes back to work after his son is killed.

Season 1

Baretta

1975–1978ABCCrime

An undercover detective and a cockatoo, with a Sammy Davis Jr. theme.

Season 1

McCloud

1970–1977NBCCrime

A New Mexico marshal seconded to the NYPD, part of the rotating NBC Mystery Movie wheel.

Season 1

Cannon

1971–1976CBSCrime

William Conrad as a private investigator, the first Quinn Martin series built around a heavy-set lead.

Season 1

Charlie's Angels

1976–1981ABCCrime

Three detectives working for a voice on a speakerphone, and a title sequence that explains the entire premise in narration before a scene is played.

Season 1

Kojak

1973–1978CBSCrime

New York in the seventies, a lollipop, and a brass theme that has aged considerably better than the decade around it.

Season 1

The Professionals

1977–1983ITVCrime

Two CI5 agents and the controller who points them, in the ITV action series that spent a decade being complained about.

Season 1

The Protectors

1972–1974ITV (ITC)Crime

Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter as international investigators, in half-hour episodes shot across Europe.

Season 1

1960s

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

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

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

Hawaii Five-O

1968–1980CBSCrime

The wave, the zoom onto the hotel balcony, and one of the four or five most recognisable television themes ever recorded.

Season 1

The F.B.I.

1965–1974ABCCrime

Nine seasons made with the Bureau's cooperation and its approval of every script, from the Quinn Martin production line.

Season 1

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

1969–1970ITVCrime

A private investigator and his dead partner, who only he can see, in a white suit.

Season 1

Adam-12

1968–1975NBCCrime

One patrol car, one shift, from the Dragnet producer.

Season 1

1950s

Perry Mason (1957)

1957–1966CBSCrime

'Park Avenue Beat' — a jazz chart with a walking bass, over a courtroom drama that ran for nine years on almost nothing else.

Season 1

The Untouchables

1959–1963ABCCrime

Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.

Season 1

Highway Patrol

1955–1959SyndicationCrime

Broderick Crawford saying "Ten-four" into a car radio, which entered the language from here.

Season 1

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

1955–1962CBSCrime

Nine strokes of a pen, and then the man himself walks in from the right and stands inside his own outline. A director who had spent thirty years staying behind the camera made his silhouette the most recognisable thing on American television.

Seasons 1–7

Dragnet

1951–1959, 1967–1970NBCCrime

Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.

Season 1