Crime · 1990s
29 shows32 sequences
2 sequencesLaw & 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
2 sequencesLaw & 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
1 sequenceMidsomer 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
2 sequencesOz
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
1 sequenceSilent 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
1 sequenceWalker, Texas Ranger
1993–2001CBSCrime
Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.
- Season 3
1 sequenceNYPD 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
1 sequenceDiagnosis: Murder
1993–2001CBSCrime
Dick Van Dyke as a doctor who solves murders, spun off from Jake and the Fatman.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNash Bridges
1996–2001CBSCrime
Don Johnson in San Francisco with a yellow Barracuda, after Miami Vice.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Touch of Frost
1992–2010ITVCrime
David Jason as a Denton detective who is right and insubordinate in roughly equal measure.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBeck
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
1 sequenceBlue Heelers
1994–2006Seven NetworkCrime
A country police station in the fictional town of Mount Thomas, twelve seasons long.
- Season 4
1 sequenceCracker
1993–2006ITVCrime
Nineteen seconds, and no attempt to make its criminal psychologist look like someone you would want to meet.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilk Stalkings
1991–1999CBS / USA NetworkCrime
Palm Beach sex-crimes detectives, and the show that effectively invented USA Network's original programming.
- Season 1
1 sequenceProfiler
1996–2000NBCCrime
Crime-scene imagery rendered as a mind reconstructing it — the visual grammar every profiler series has used since.
- Season 1
1 sequencePacific Blue
1996–2000USA NetworkCrime
Bicycle police in Santa Monica, pitched by its own network as Baywatch on bikes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMurder 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
1 sequenceDa Vinci's Inquest
1998–2005CBCCrime
A Vancouver coroner written from the real one, who later became the city's mayor.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEZ 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
1 sequenceThe Commish
1991–1996ABCCrime
A police commissioner who solves things by talking, in a series built against the action shows around it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDue South
1994–1999CTVCrime
A Mountie seconded to Chicago, playing the politeness entirely straight against the city around him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHetty Wainthropp Investigates
1996–1998BBC OneCrime
A Lancashire pensioner who opens a detective agency because nobody will give her a job.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMartial Law
1998–2000CBSCrime
Sammo Hung as a Chinese detective in Los Angeles, doing his own stunts at forty-six.
- Season 1
1 sequencePie in the Sky
1994–1997BBC OneCrime
A detective who would rather run his restaurant, and is not allowed to retire from either.
- Season 1
1 sequencePrime Suspect
1991–2006ITVCrime
Stephen Warbeck's theme over London at night — spare, cold, and entirely without the reassurance the genre usually offers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRenegade
1992–1997Syndication / USA NetworkCrime
A framed policeman on a motorcycle, made for syndication by the people who made The A-Team.
- Season 1
1 sequenceV.I.P.
1998–2002SyndicationCrime
Pamela Anderson fronting a celebrity protection agency she is unqualified to run, played for the joke.
- Season 1
1 sequenceViper
1994–1999NBC / SyndicationCrime
A car that converts into an armoured attack vehicle, cancelled by NBC and revived for syndication.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWycliffe
1993–1998ITVCrime
A detective superintendent working Cornwall, filmed largely on the coast it is set on.
- Season 1