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Drama

Openings that take their ninety seconds seriously.

579 shows · 620 sequences

The ones that kept changing

All 35 in Drama · every genre →
3 sequences

Homeland

2011–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jazz, archive news audio and a child in a lion mask — a fever dream assembled from half a century of American foreign policy, recut every season with that year's crisis in it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
  • Season 8
3 sequences

House of the Dragon

2022–HBODrama

The parent show mapped a continent; this one traces a bloodline. Where Game of Thrones built cities, these titles follow blood running through stone channels and a tapestry recording who killed whom.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Leftovers

2014–2017HBODrama

The rare show that threw out a perfectly good title sequence and replaced it with its opposite. One season of grief painted as a Renaissance ceiling, then a complete reversal into snapshots and a country song.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

Succession

2018–2023HBODrama

Home video of rich children, degraded and half-legible, cut against helicopter shots of towers they will inherit. Nicholas Britell's piano stumbles deliberately, like something played badly on purpose.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The White Lotus

2021–HBODrama

Colonial wallpaper that will not behave — painted paradise curdling into something predatory while the resort's guests are nowhere in it. Rebuilt from scratch for each new location, with a new theme every time.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
3 sequences

The Witcher

2019–NetflixDrama

Monsters, coins and continents cut into a woodblock-print style, with the medallion turning at the centre of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3

2020s

2 sequences

Bridgerton

2020–NetflixDrama

Engraved invitations, wax seals and bees, assembled like a society page being typeset — the gossip sheet that drives the plot, doing the credits.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
3 sequences

House of the Dragon

2022–HBODrama

The parent show mapped a continent; this one traces a bloodline. Where Game of Thrones built cities, these titles follow blood running through stone channels and a tapestry recording who killed whom.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Slow Horses

2022–Apple TV+Drama

London surveillance imagery over a theme Mick Jagger wrote for the show — a spy series whose titles are as shabby and unglamorous as its office.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Adolescence

2025NetflixDrama

A quiet card over domestic detail, for a series shot in single unbroken takes — the only cut in some episodes arrives in the titles.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Beef

2023–NetflixDrama

A different David Choe painting behind the title card of every episode, so the opening is a gallery hung one canvas at a time across the season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Industry

2020–HBODrama

Twenty-two seconds of type and glass. A trading-floor show whose opening is over before you have settled, which is roughly how the job is depicted.

  • Season 1
3 sequences

The White Lotus

2021–HBODrama

Colonial wallpaper that will not behave — painted paradise curdling into something predatory while the resort's guests are nowhere in it. Rebuilt from scratch for each new location, with a new theme every time.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Your Friends & Neighbors

2025–Apple TV+Drama

Suburban wealth catalogued object by object — watches, cars and kitchens shot like an inventory, which is what the series turns them into.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Gilded Age

2022–HBODrama

Gold leaf, marble and needlework assembling into Fifth Avenue interiors — new money buying its way into an old frame, told entirely through surfaces.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Night Agent

2023–NetflixDrama

Surveillance geometry and a ringing phone, built out of the one object the whole premise hangs on.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Boroughs

2026NetflixDrama

A 2026 Netflix series — and the reason an earlier attempt at Suburra was rejected, since this is what that search kept returning.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Last of Us

2023–HBODrama

Cordyceps growing across a map — mould spreading through a continent in time-lapse until the shapes it leaves behind resolve into two figures. Gustavo Santaolalla's guitar, carried over from the game.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Death by Lightning

2025NetflixDrama

Garfield's presidency and Guiteau's pursuit of it, told as the collision it was.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Day of the Jackal

2024–Sky Atlantic / PeacockDrama

Celeste singing over a European manhunt — a series that opens like a Bond film and then declines to behave like one.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chief of War

2025–Apple TV+Drama

Hawaiian carving, cloth and volcanic landscape, filmed as artefacts of a nation rather than scenery.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Squid Game

2021–2025NetflixDrama

Childhood playground shapes — circle, triangle, square — turned into a brand so completely that the symbols now read as threat before they read as games.

  • Season 3
1 sequence

Shōgun

2024–FXDrama

Ink and weather. Landscapes, ships and figures resolve out of washes of black and grey as though the frame is being painted while you watch, then dissolve before any of it settles.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hijack

2023–Apple TV+Drama

Flight paths, cabin geometry and a clock — a series told in real time, saying so before it starts.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Tehran

2020–Apple TV+Drama

Surveillance imagery and city geometry, cut so that watching and being watched look like the same activity.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Citadel

2023–Prime VideoDrama

The Russo brothers' spy franchise, built to spawn local-language series in several countries at once.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Queen's Gambit

2020NetflixDrama

Pieces, pills and ceiling tiles falling through one another — the board and the addiction rendered as the same descending motion.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Normal People

2020BBC Three / HuluDrama

Twenty-four seconds and a card, for an adaptation that treats silence as its main instrument.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Masters of the Air

2024Apple TV+Drama

Bomber nose art, contrails and flak, in the tradition of Band of Brothers — and at over two and a half minutes, one of the longest openings on this site.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Agency

2024–Paramount+ with ShowtimeDrama

The American adaptation of The Bureau, which this catalogue could not find footage of in its original French.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Baby Reindeer

2024NetflixDrama

Eighteen seconds and almost nothing in them, which for a series this claustrophobic is the correct amount of air.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Fire Country

2022–CBSDrama

A convict on a Northern California firefighting crew, working off his sentence.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Wheel of Time

2021–Prime VideoDrama

A tapestry weaving itself, unpicking, and starting again — the series' cosmology of cycles, stated as a loom.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hunters

2020–2023Prime VideoDrama

Seventies exploitation-poster design applied to Nazi hunting in 1977 New York, with all the tastelessness that implies deliberately left in.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Daisy Jones & The Six

2023Prime VideoDrama

A fictional 1970s band told as a rockumentary, with the songs written for it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

2023NetflixDrama

The Bridgerton prequel, opened by an animated sequence in the manner of an illuminated manuscript.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Idol

2023HBODrama

Studio lighting, mirrors and pop-star iconography, presented without irony.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Glory

2022–2023NetflixDrama

A go board, scar tissue and winter light — the revenge plot laid out as a game with pieces already placed.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Zero Day

2025NetflixDrama

Robert De Niro as a former president investigating a cyberattack, in his first television series.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Weak Hero Class

2022–2025Wavve / NetflixDrama

A top student fighting his way through school violence, from the webtoon.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Serpent Queen

2022–2024StarzDrama

Catherine de' Medici narrating her own rise directly to camera.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lessons in Chemistry

2023Apple TV+Drama

Laboratory glassware and 1950s kitchen surfaces filmed identically, so the science and the domesticity become the same set of tools.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pachinko

2022–Apple TV+Drama

The entire cast dancing in a pachinko parlour, grinning, in period costume — a sequence with no relationship to the show's tone and all the better for it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Alchemy of Souls

2022–2023tvNDrama

Souls swapped between bodies in a fictional kingdom, from the Hong sisters.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Nine Perfect Strangers

2021–HuluDrama

Wellness-retreat imagery filmed until it turns sinister — smoothies, mountains and breathing exercises, all slightly too still.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Vikings: Valhalla

2022–2024NetflixDrama

The Vikings sequel, set a century later, and made for a different service than the one that cancelled the parent.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

2024–Prime VideoDrama

The film remade as a series about the marriage rather than the shooting, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Shadow and Bone

2021–2023NetflixDrama

A sequence that changes with the episode — the imagery inside the letterforms is recut each week to match what is about to happen.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

Queen of Tears

2024tvNDrama

A married couple at the top of a retail conglomerate, three years in and barely speaking.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Empress

2022–NetflixDrama

Habsburg portraiture and court embroidery, arranged so the jewellery reads as restraint rather than wealth.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Offer

2022Paramount+Drama

The making of The Godfather, opened in the visual language of the film it is about.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

WeCrashed

2022Apple TV+Drama

Startup iconography inflating and bursting — open-plan glass, beanbags and valuation charts, treated as one continuous bubble.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Extraordinary Attorney Woo

2022ENADrama

An autistic lawyer at a Seoul firm, and the biggest word-of-mouth hit Korean television had that year.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lovely Runner

2024tvNDrama

A fan travelling back fifteen years to stop her favourite singer's death.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Inventing Anna

2022NetflixDrama

Fashion-magazine layout and Manhattan gloss, assembled with the confidence of something that cannot afford itself.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Marry My Husband

2024tvNDrama

A woman murdered by her husband, sent back ten years to arrange a different outcome.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Dropout

2022HuluDrama

Silicon Valley branding assembled and then quietly taken apart, for a company that was never anything but branding.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Winning Time

2022–2023HBODrama

Grainy 16mm, video tape and film stock shuffled together so the show looks like footage of the era rather than a reconstruction of it, over a disco horn line.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mary & George

2024Sky Atlantic / StarzDrama

A mother steering her son into James I's bed and the court that followed.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Twenty-Five Twenty-One

2022tvNDrama

A fencer and a reporter across the 1997 financial crisis and after.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hospital Playlist

2020–2021tvNDrama

Five doctors who have been friends since medical school, and a band they will not stop forming.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The English

2022BBC Two / Prime VideoDrama

Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer crossing 1890 Wyoming, and — for this catalogue — the single most disruptive title in the whole project.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The New Pope

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Nuns dancing in front of a neon crucifix to a house track, for two and a half minutes, entirely straight-faced. Paolo Sorrentino's sequel keeps the sequence that made the first series notorious and makes it longer.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

P-Valley

2020–StarzDrama

Katori Hall's Mississippi Delta strip club, opened by a sequence shot with the same neon grammar as the club itself.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Unorthodox

2020NetflixDrama

A young woman leaving a Satmar community in Williamsburg for Berlin.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Franklin

2024Apple TV+Drama

Eighteenth-century Paris in ink and gold leaf, assembling the diplomacy the series is about out of correspondence.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Étoile

2025Prime VideoDrama

Two ballet companies swapping their best dancers across the Atlantic, from the Gilmore Girls writers.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Little America

2020–2022Apple TV+Drama

Half-hour films about immigrants to the United States, each based on a real person.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

A Gentleman in Moscow

2024Showtime / Paramount+Drama

A count sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for thirty years, from the Amor Towles novel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Itaewon Class

2020JTBCDrama

An ex-convict opening a bar in Itaewon to ruin the company that ruined his father.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Dispatches from Elsewhere

2020AMCDrama

Jason Segel's series about an alternate-reality game that may not be a game, opened in eleven seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Time Traveler's Wife

2022HBODrama

Steven Moffat's adaptation of the Niffenegger novel, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The First Lady

2022ShowtimeDrama

Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama told in parallel across one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Shantaram

2022Apple TV+Drama

Nine seconds and a card. One of the shortest openings in the catalogue, for one of its longest-gestating adaptations.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

2022Apple TV+Drama

Samuel L. Jackson given a drug that returns his memory for thirty days.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Julia

2022–2023HBO MaxDrama

Butter, copper pans and a test kitchen — cooking shot the way the era's own television shot it, with none of the modern gloss.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Barbarians

2020–2022NetflixDrama

Fifteen seconds of iron and forest — a card rather than a sequence, for a series about an ambush.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

D.P.

2021–2023NetflixDrama

Military police chasing deserters, and the conscription system that produces them.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Manhunt

2024Apple TV+Drama

Period engraving and telegraph type, assembling the pursuit of Lincoln's killer out of the era's own printed matter.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Underground Railroad

2021Prime VideoDrama

Barry Jenkins's miniseries, opened with portraiture that holds on faces long enough to become uncomfortable.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The 8 Show

2024NetflixDrama

Eight contestants paid by the second in a building where the higher floors earn more.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Super Pumped

2022ShowtimeDrama

The Uber story as the first season of an intended anthology about companies.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Regime

2024HBODrama

Palace portraiture and state iconography assembled into propaganda for a country that does not exist.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The New Look

2024Apple TV+Drama

Couture construction shown as engineering — pattern, thread and seam assembling a silhouette, by Imaginary Forces.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Rocket Boys

2022–2023SonyLIVDrama

Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai building India's nuclear and space programmes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Rabbit Hole

2023Paramount+Drama

Kiefer Sutherland as a corporate spy framed for murder, opened in sixteen seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Devil Judge

2021tvNDrama

A televised trial system in a near-future Korea, run by a judge with his own plan for it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Fatal Attraction

2023Paramount+Drama

The 1987 film reworked as a series that takes the other side of the story seriously.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

We Are Who We Are

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Luca Guadagnino's only television series, on an American army base in Veneto, opened in ten seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

George & Tammy

2022ShowtimeDrama

George Jones and Tammy Wynette, with both leads singing their own recordings.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Smother

2021–2023RTÉ One / BBCDrama

A death on a Clare beach and the family who all have a reason to have wanted it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies

2023Paramount+Drama

The Pink Ladies four years before the film, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Blood & Water

2020–2023NetflixDrama

A Cape Town teenager who believes a swimming champion at her new school is the sister abducted at birth.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Caliphate

2020SVT1Drama

A Stockholm schoolgirl recruited online, and the officer who cannot get anyone to listen. Swedish title Kalifat.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Too Close

2021ITVDrama

A forensic psychiatrist and the patient who will not stay on her side of the table.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Control Z

2020–2022NetflixDrama

A Mexican school where a hacker exposes every student's secrets, opened in nine seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

It's Okay to Not Be Okay

2020tvNDrama

A psychiatric carer and a children's author, told through illustrated fairy tales between episodes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cigarette Girl

2023NetflixDrama

The Indonesian kretek industry in the 1960s, and a woman who is not allowed near the part of it she is best at. Original title Gadis Kretek.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Oktoberfest 1900

2020ARDDrama

A Nuremberg brewer trying to force his way into Munich's festival, and the family he spends to do it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

9-1-1: Nashville

2025–ABCDrama

The third 9-1-1, moving the format to Tennessee, with the franchise's siren-and-dispatch open rebuilt in country.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

All Creatures Great & Small

2020–Channel 5 / PBSDrama

The Yorkshire vet stories remade, with a title sequence that is largely just the Dales.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Artful Dodger

2023–Disney+Drama

Dickens's pickpocket grown up into a surgeon in colonial Australia, and still stealing on the side.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Behind Her Eyes

2021NetflixDrama

A secretary having an affair with her employer and befriending his wife, in a thriller with an ending people argued about for weeks.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Boots

2025NetflixDrama

A closeted teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1990, from Greg Cope White's memoir.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Couple Next Door

2023–Channel 4 / StarzDrama

Two couples in a Leeds cul-de-sac, and what starts once one of them looks over the fence.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Crowded Room

2023Apple TV+Drama

Tom Holland in a 1979 case built on the Billy Milligan story.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cruel Summer

2021–2023FreeformDrama

Two girls, three summers and one accusation, told from both sides at once and cut between them.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Five Days at Memorial

2022Apple TV+Drama

A New Orleans hospital across the five days after Katrina, and the decisions taken inside it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Ginny & Georgia

2021–NetflixDrama

A mother of thirty and a daughter of fifteen, and the fifteen years between them nobody will explain.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

The Good Lord Bird

2020ShowtimeDrama

John Brown's raid told by a boy he mistakes for a girl, opened in the idiom of a nineteenth-century woodcut.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Heated Rivalry

2025–CraveDrama

Two rival ice hockey players who spend a decade hiding what is between them, from Rachel Reid's novel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Hunting Wives

2025–NetflixDrama

A Massachusetts family relocated to east Texas, and the shooting club the wife falls in with.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Irma Vep

2022HBODrama

Olivier Assayas remaking his own film as a series about remaking a film, with silent-era titles to match.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Kamikaze

2021HBO MaxDrama

A Danish teenager who survives the plane crash that kills her family and spends her inheritance trying not to feel it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Little Fires Everywhere

2020HuluDrama

Two mothers in a planned Ohio suburb, and the house that is already burning down in the first scene.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

2022–Prime VideoDrama

Sand and iron filings moving into Chladni patterns under sound — a title sequence built by playing music at a physical surface rather than animating it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Maestra: Strings of Truth

2023–2024tvNDrama

A conductor holding an orchestra together while the deaths around it accumulate.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mrs. America

2020FX on HuluDrama

The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, opened by period graphic design doing the arguing.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

My Liberation Notes

2022JTBCDrama

Three siblings commuting out of the suburbs, in a series largely about wanting to be somewhere else.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

One Piece (2023)

2023–NetflixDrama

The live-action adaptation builds its opening from the crew's own belongings — maps, hats, weapons — rather than restaging the anime's.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Pitt

2025–HBO MaxDrama

A deliberate homage to ER's titles — the same rhythm, the same institutional blue — for a series that runs one shift in real time.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Plot Against America

2020HBODrama

David Simon's Roth adaptation, opened by American stamps and postmarks turning quietly wrong.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Record of Youth

2020tvNDrama

A model trying to become an actor before his military service, against everyone's advice.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Red River

2021–2023OPENDrama

A Greek period drama on the Asia Minor catastrophe and the generation displaced by it. Original title Το κόκκινο ποτάμι.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Sandman

2022–2025NetflixDrama

Seventeen seconds of sand and a card. For a series adapted from a comic famous for its lettering, the titles are almost aggressively plain.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

Sullivan's Crossing

2023–CTVDrama

A neurosurgeon who goes back to her father's campground in Nova Scotia and stays.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sweet Magnolias

2020–NetflixDrama

Three friends in a small South Carolina town, adapted from Sherryl Woods's novels.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

The Sympathizer

2024HBODrama

Propaganda poster art, film leader and Saigon footage cut together so that the two sides' imagery becomes one reel — which is the narrator's problem exactly.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Terminal List

2022–Amazon Prime VideoDrama

A Navy SEAL who comes home to work out that the ambush was arranged, from Jack Carr's novel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Twinkling Watermelon

2023tvNDrama

The hearing son of deaf parents sent back to 1995, where he meets his father at nineteen.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Walker

2021–2024The CWDrama

Walker, Texas Ranger remade for the CW with the ranger's family moved into the foreground.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

We Were Liars

2025–Amazon Prime VideoDrama

A summer on a private island off Massachusetts, and the accident nobody in the family will describe.

  • Season 1

2010s

2 sequences

Euphoria

2019–HBODrama

Bodies, water and neon shot at the point where a party stops being fun, over Labrinth. Beautiful in a way that is deliberately hard to enjoy.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Boys

2019–Prime VideoDrama

Superhero iconography rendered as corporate branding and then defaced — the show's whole argument, done in graphics.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Night Manager

2016–2025BBC One / AMCDrama

Le Carré's arms dealer and the hotelier sent in after him, opened by weapons assembling out of luxury.

  • Season 2
2 sequences

Game of Thrones

2011–2019HBODrama

A map that rebuilds itself each week. The clockwork cities shown change with the locations the episode visits, which makes it the rare title sequence carrying actual information.

  • Season 1
  • Season 8
1 sequence

Yellowstone

2018–2024Paramount NetworkDrama

Montana filmed as a land claim — cattle, mountains and fence line, with the ranch's brand doing the title card.

  • Season 1
3 sequences

The Witcher

2019–NetflixDrama

Monsters, coins and continents cut into a woodblock-print style, with the medallion turning at the centre of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
1 sequence

The Handmaid's Tale

2017–2025HuluDrama

Red cloaks and white wings shot from above, arranged into the geometry of a system rather than a group of people.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

Outlander

2014–StarzDrama

'The Skye Boat Song' rewritten for a woman instead of a prince, over standing stones and Highland weather — and re-recorded in a new style each season to match wherever the story has been dragged.

  • Season 1
3 sequences

Homeland

2011–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jazz, archive news audio and a child in a lion mask — a fever dream assembled from half a century of American foreign policy, recut every season with that year's crisis in it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
  • Season 8
1 sequence

Downton Abbey

2010–2015ITVDrama

A dog's back, a bell board and a house — thirty-one seconds establishing an entire social order without showing a single face.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The Morning Show

2019–Apple TV+Drama

Broadcast graphics assembling and collapsing — the machinery of a network morning programme, shown as the thing that eats the people in front of it.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
1 sequence

The Family Man

2019–Prime VideoDrama

A middle-class Mumbai father who is also a National Investigation Agency officer, and cannot tell his family either job is real.

  • Season 3
3 sequences

Succession

2018–2023HBODrama

Home video of rich children, degraded and half-legible, cut against helicopter shots of towers they will inherit. Nicholas Britell's piano stumbles deliberately, like something played badly on purpose.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Suits

2011–2019USA NetworkDrama

Tailoring, cufflinks and Manhattan glass over Ima Robot's 'Greenback Boogie' — a law firm sold entirely on wardrobe.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chernobyl

2019HBODrama

No montage and no metaphor — the camera simply moves through the plant's corridors and control rooms while Hildur Guðnadóttir's score, built from recordings made inside a power station, does the rest.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Good Doctor

2017–2024ABCDrama

An autistic surgical resident, adapted from the Korean series of the same name.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Crown

2016–2023NetflixDrama

Molten gold pouring, cooling and assembling itself into a crown, over Hans Zimmer. No faces and no footage — the object outlasts everyone who wears it, which is the show's entire argument.

  • Seasons 1–6
1 sequence

Jack Ryan

2018–2023Prime VideoDrama

Satellite imagery, intercepted signals and maps — an analyst's view of the world rather than a field agent's.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Americans

2013–2018FXDrama

Soviet and American iconography intercut until they mirror each other exactly — the show's entire thesis in twenty-six seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Spartacus

2010–2013StarzDrama

Starz's gladiator series, and one of the last major shows to use blood as a graphic element in its titles.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chicago Fire

2012–NBCDrama

The first of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the other two were built out from.

  • Season 1
3 sequences

The Leftovers

2014–2017HBODrama

The rare show that threw out a perfectly good title sequence and replaced it with its opposite. One season of grief painted as a Renaissance ceiling, then a complete reversal into snapshots and a country song.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Call the Midwife

2012–BBC OneDrama

Poplar's district nurses through the fifties and sixties, opened the same way for well over a decade.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Big Little Lies

2017–2019HBODrama

The school run, filmed like a threat. Mothers driving the coast road to Monterey with children in the back seat, over Michael Kiwanuka's 'Cold Little Heart'.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lucifer

2016–2021Fox / NetflixDrama

Eleven seconds and a card, from a procedural that would rather get to the case.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

This Is Us

2016–2022NBCDrama

A family photograph and a card, over in nine seconds — restraint from a show that is otherwise not remotely restrained.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Once Upon a Time

2011–2018ABCDrama

A card hidden inside the episode's own imagery — the title appears somewhere in the opening scene rather than over a sequence, in a different place every week.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Last Kingdom

2015–2022BBC America / NetflixDrama

Earth, ash and iron assembling into a map of a divided England, with the borders shifting as the seasons go on.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Vikings

2013–2020HistoryDrama

Bodies sinking through water over Fever Ray's 'If I Had a Heart' — a history-channel drama with a title sequence better than its remit.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Scandal

2012–2018ABCDrama

Shonda Rhimes's Washington fixer series, and the show that made the phrase 'it's handled' a network brand.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mr. Robot

2015–2019USA NetworkDrama

There is no title sequence. There is a card, and the card is the whole design — which makes this the rare show whose opening is defined by what it refuses to do.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Cobra Kai

2018–2025YouTube Red / NetflixDrama

The Karate Kid continued forty years on, with a title card that has been restaged in several different styles across the run.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

House of Cards

2013–2018NetflixDrama

Washington in time-lapse, shot at dusk and left to run — monuments, traffic and cloud moving over a city where nothing visibly happens. Jeff Beal's theme does the menace.

  • Seasons 1–6
1 sequence

Orange Is the New Black

2013–2019NetflixDrama

Extreme close-ups of real formerly incarcerated women's faces — eyes, mouths, tattoos — cut to Regina Spektor. Not one of them is a cast member, which is the point.

  • Seasons 1–7
1 sequence

Billions

2016–2023ShowtimeDrama

Manhattan money photographed like weather — glass, helicopters and trading floors, with no people in any of it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Affair

2014–2019ShowtimeDrama

Fiona Apple's 'Container' over water and doubled imagery — two accounts of the same events, said in pictures before the show says it in structure.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Why Women Kill

2019–2021CBS All Access / Paramount+Drama

Marc Cherry's anthology, three eras in the same house in the first season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Goliath

2016–2021Prime VideoDrama

Billy Bob Thornton as a lawyer working out of a Santa Monica bar.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chicago Med

2015–NBCDrama

The third Chicago series, sharing a city and a crossover schedule with the other two.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Victoria

2016–2019ITVDrama

The young queen's first years, opened by a jewelled monogram assembling itself.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Riverdale

2017–2023The CWDrama

Archie comics restaged as neon-lit noir, with the town's diner shot like a crime scene.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Last Ship

2014–2018TNTDrama

A destroyer at sea when a pandemic takes the rest of the world.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Crash Landing on You

2019–2020tvNDrama

A South Korean heiress paraglides into North Korea, and the opening treats the border as scenery rather than politics.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Arrow

2012–2020The CWDrama

A narrated premise delivered every week in the first person, which the entire subsequent CW superhero slate copied verbatim.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Pacific

2010HBODrama

The companion piece to Band of Brothers, with charcoal drawings taking the place of the pencil sketches and Hans Zimmer taking the place of Michael Kamen.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Watchmen

2019HBODrama

Damon Lindelof's sequel to the comic, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the hardest entry in this catalogue to find footage of.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Good Fight

2017–2022CBS All Access / Paramount+Drama

Office furniture, law books and televisions exploding in slow motion, one after another, to an orchestral swell — a legal drama blowing up its own set every week.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

American Gods

2017–2021StarzDrama

A totem pole of clashing worship — neon crosses, satellite dishes, astronauts and idols stacked into one object, which is the novel's argument compressed into ninety seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Newsroom

2012–2014HBODrama

Broadcast news history as a procession of anchors, presses and control rooms, scored by Thomas Newman with more reverence than the show it introduces ever quite earns.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Titans

2018–2023DC Universe / HBO MaxDrama

Thirteen seconds and a card, in the register of a comic that would prefer you did not call it a comic.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Revenge

2011–2015ABCDrama

The Count of Monte Cristo relocated to the Hamptons.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Black Sails

2014–2017StarzDrama

Carved wood and bone — ships, skulls and rigging rendered as scrimshaw, animated as though the carving were happening as you watch.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Chi

2018–ShowtimeDrama

Lena Waithe's South Side, following several lives that keep intersecting.

  • Seasons 1–3
1 sequence

Pose

2018–2021FXDrama

Ballroom culture rendered in gold and satin, with the house names given the billing a network usually reserves for stars.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Modern Love

2019–2021Prime VideoDrama

The New York Times column adapted an essay per episode.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

When Calls the Heart

2014–Hallmark ChannelDrama

A city teacher posted to a frontier coal town, and the longest-running scripted series Hallmark has made.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Young Pope

2016HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Paolo Sorrentino's American pope, opened by a walk past papal portraits that come apart as he passes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Son

2017–2019AMCDrama

Pierce Brosnan across two Texas timelines, from the Philipp Meyer novel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Turn: Washington's Spies

2014–2017AMCDrama

Invisible ink, cipher keys and folded letters — a spy series introduced entirely through its tradecraft.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Fauda

2015–Yes / NetflixDrama

An Israeli undercover unit and the Palestinian militants it pursues, played from both sides.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Masters of Sex

2013–2016ShowtimeDrama

Masters and Johnson's research, opened by a sequence of double meanings built out of 1950s stock footage.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Warrior

2019–2023Cinemax / HBO MaxDrama

Ink-brush figures fighting across parchment, for a series built from a Bruce Lee treatment that took fifty years to reach air.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Borgias

2011–2013ShowtimeDrama

Neil Jordan's Renaissance papacy, opened in gilt and shadow.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Deuce

2017–2019HBODrama

Forty-second Street as a marquee — neon, peep-show signage and the traffic of a block being monetised, assembled from the era's own advertising.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

New Amsterdam

2018–2023NBCDrama

A public hospital run by a director who keeps asking how he can help.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

All American

2018–2025The CWDrama

A South Los Angeles footballer recruited to a Beverly Hills school, from Spencer Paysinger's life.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The White Queen

2013Starz / BBC OneDrama

Roses, water and heraldry — the Wars of the Roses introduced through the emblems both sides died for.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Elite

2018–2024NetflixDrama

Eleven seconds of school crest and bass drop. The shortest opening on this site that still manages to be about class.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Reply 1988

2015–2016tvNDrama

Five families in one Seoul alley in 1988, and the most loved of the Reply series.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Halt and Catch Fire

2014–2017AMCDrama

Elastic's red glitch: a screen tearing itself apart while the cast names surface out of the wreckage, over a Paul Haslinger synth line. Thirty seconds, and almost nothing in it is legible for more than a frame.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Hell on Wheels

2011–2016AMCDrama

Iron, sleepers and surveyor's tools — the transcontinental railroad introduced as labour rather than achievement.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Iron Fist

2017–2018NetflixDrama

The last of the four Defenders series, and the one that completes the set here.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Godless

2017NetflixDrama

The frontier shot as landscape photography and left to sit — no montage, no faces, just weather crossing New Mexico for over a minute.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pennyworth

2019–2022Epix / HBO MaxDrama

Alfred as a young SAS veteran in an alternative 1960s London, which is a stranger idea than the Batman it leads to.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Preacher

2016–2019AMCDrama

The Ennis and Dillon comic adapted with its worst instincts intact.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Spanish Princess

2019–2020StarzDrama

Catherine of Aragon's arrival in England, third in the same Philippa Gregory sequence.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Carnival Row

2019–2023Prime VideoDrama

Victorian illustration of wings, horns and hooves, catalogued like a natural history plate of a population being policed.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Made in Heaven

2019–2023Prime VideoDrama

Two Delhi wedding planners, and everything the families hire them to conceal.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Russian Doll

2019–2022NetflixDrama

Twenty-eight seconds, which is all a show about the same night repeating needs. The joke is that you will see it many more times than the episode count suggests.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Descendants of the Sun

2016KBS2Drama

A special forces captain and a surgeon in a fictional war zone, and the series that started the Hallyu streaming wave.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Years and Years

2019BBC One / HBODrama

Russell T Davies following one Manchester family fifteen years into a future that arrives faster than they do.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Reign

2013–2017The CWDrama

Mary, Queen of Scots at the French court, with a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Magnificent Century

2011–2014Show TV / Star TVDrama

Suleiman the Magnificent's court, and the series that made Turkish dizi a global export.

  • Season 3
1 sequence

The Little Drummer Girl

2018BBC One / AMCDrama

Park Chan-wook directing le Carré, in the most controlled colour palette on television that year.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Bureau

2015–2020Canal+Drama

French intelligence procedure filmed with the patience of the job, and widely held to be the best spy series ever made for television.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Girlfriend Experience

2016–2021StarzDrama

Steven Soderbergh's anthology, each season a different woman and a different arrangement.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Devious Maids

2013–2016LifetimeDrama

Beverly Hills housekeepers investigating a murder in one of the houses, from the Desperate Housewives creator.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Into the Badlands

2015–2019AMCDrama

Ink-wash landscapes and weaponry, drawn in the style of the wuxia films the series is built from.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Wentworth

2013–2021SoHo / Fox ShowcaseDrama

An Australian prison drama with a thirty-second opening that gets colder as the series goes on.

  • Season 8
1 sequence

Camelot

2011StarzDrama

The Arthur legend with Eva Green as Morgan, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Patriot

2015–2018Prime VideoDrama

An intelligence officer who processes his work by performing it as folk music, and an opening that treats that as unremarkable.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Quantico

2015–2018ABCDrama

FBI recruits and a bombing, told across two timelines.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Gentleman Jack

2019–2022BBC One / HBODrama

Anne Lister's coded diaries dramatised by Sally Wainwright, with Suranne Jones addressing the camera directly.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Nikita

2010–2013The CWDrama

The third screen version of the Besson film, after the 1997 series this catalogue holds as La Femme Nikita.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Treme

2010–2013HBODrama

Water stains, peeling paint and brass — post-Katrina New Orleans read off its own damaged walls, over John Boutté's title song.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Transparent

2014–2019AmazonDrama

Joey Soloway's family series, opened by home-movie footage of the Pfeffermans that turns out to be the whole thesis.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Good Witch

2015–2021Hallmark ChannelDrama

A film series turned into a returning one, about a woman whose neighbours are never quite sure about her.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Olive Kitteridge

2014HBODrama

Coastal Maine in muted colour, at the pace of a woman who has decided not to be pleased about anything.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chesapeake Shores

2016–2022Hallmark ChannelDrama

A daughter called home to a Maryland inn, in the series that showed Hallmark could run a returning drama rather than only films.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

My Mister

2018tvNDrama

A middle-aged engineer and a young woman in debt, in one of the quietest series Korean television has made.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Marco Polo

2014–2016NetflixDrama

Ink drawings of the Silk Road bleeding across parchment — cities, armies and mountains growing out of the map as the journey extends east.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

Covert Affairs

2010–2014USA NetworkDrama

A CIA trainee promoted early for reasons she is not told.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Agent Carter

2015–2016ABCDrama

Post-war period design and a big-band arrangement, for the best-looking title sequence Marvel has put on television.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Borgen

2010–2022DR1Drama

Danish coalition politics, opened with the restraint the subject demands and none of the urgency an American network would insist on.

  • Season 4
1 sequence

The Hollow Crown

2012–2016BBC TwoDrama

The history plays filmed as features, with a title card so brief it barely qualifies as a sequence.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

My Brilliant Friend

2018–2024HBO / RAIDrama

Naples in the fifties rendered in faded photography, for an adaptation that spans fifty years of two lives.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Musketeers

2014–2016BBC OneDrama

Dumas serialised for Sunday evenings, with ink and gunpowder titles to match.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Little Women

2017BBC OneDrama

Alcott in three parts, with a title sequence made of cut paper and pressed flowers.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Andi Mack

2017–2019Disney ChannelDrama

A thirteen-year-old told that her sister is her mother, and the first Disney Channel series to give a main character a coming-out story.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories

2016–2019Netflix / MBSDrama

Two minutes of Tokyo at night before anyone speaks — a series whose opening is longer and slower than most shows' cold opens, deliberately.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Da Vinci's Demons

2013–2015StarzDrama

David Goyer's young Leonardo, opened by a sequence built entirely from his own notebook drawings.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

UnREAL

2015–2018LifetimeDrama

The production office of a dating format, written by someone who had worked in one.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

A Very English Scandal

2018BBC OneDrama

Russell T Davies and Stephen Frears on the Thorpe affair, opened in the graphic register of a 1970s political cartoon.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Kidding

2018–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jim Carrey as a children's television presenter coming apart, directed by Michel Gondry.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Alias Grace

2017NetflixDrama

Quilt patterns assembling and unpicking themselves — the needlework the narrator hides behind, used as the structure of the telling.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Tyrant

2014–2016FXDrama

The younger son of a Middle Eastern dictator dragged back from a Californian suburb.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Treadstone

2019–2020USA NetworkDrama

The Bourne programme as a series, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

Riviera

2017–2020Sky AtlanticDrama

A widow discovering what her husband's money was, retitled between seasons as the show moved away from the coast it is named for.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Rectify

2013–2016SundanceTVDrama

Rural Georgia at a pace matching the series — a man released after nineteen years, and titles that refuse to hurry him.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Vinyl

2016HBODrama

Record sleeves, needles and 1970s New York cut at the speed of the drug the show is about. One season only, so the titles outlived the series by a fortnight.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Fosse/Verdon

2019FXDrama

Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon's working marriage, opened in eleven seconds because the choreography is the show.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Deutschland 83

2015–2020RTL / AmazonDrama

Cold War East and West cut together over eighties pop, with the period's own graphic design doing the work.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Deadly Class

2019SyfyDrama

A boarding school for assassins in 1987, from the Rick Remender comic.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Trust

2018FXDrama

The Getty kidnapping told across ten hours by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Naked Director

2019–2021NetflixDrama

Toru Muranishi and the 1980s Japanese adult video industry.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Show Me a Hero

2015HBODrama

David Simon on a Yonkers housing desegregation fight, opened by one of the longest title sequences on premium television.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Boss

2011–2012StarzDrama

Kelsey Grammer as a Chicago mayor concealing a degenerative diagnosis, opened to Robert Plant.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Gran Hotel

2011–2013Antena 3Drama

A 1905 luxury hotel and the disappearance of a chambermaid, from the team who went on to make Velvet and Cable Girls.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Velvet

2014–2016Antena 3Drama

A 1950s Madrid couture house, and the seamstress and the heir who grew up in it together.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Parade's End

2012BBC Two / HBODrama

Tom Stoppard adapting Ford Madox Ford across the First World War.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Howards End

2017BBC One / StarzDrama

Kenneth Lonergan's Forster adaptation, with titles built from cut-paper Edwardian silhouettes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

On Becoming a God in Central Florida

2019ShowtimeDrama

Kirsten Dunst working her way up a pyramid scheme that destroyed her family.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Kodoku no Gurume

2012–TV TokyoDrama

A salesman eating alone in a different restaurant each week, narrating his own meal. Known abroad as Solitary Gourmet.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Magic City

2012–2013StarzDrama

A Miami Beach hotel in 1959, on the night Castro takes Havana.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cable Girls

2017–2020Netflix (Spain)Drama

Four switchboard operators in 1928 Madrid, Netflix's first Spanish original.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

I'm Dying Up Here

2017–2018ShowtimeDrama

The 1970s Los Angeles stand-up scene, produced by Jim Carrey.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Loudest Voice

2019ShowtimeDrama

Roger Ailes and the building of Fox News, one episode per significant year.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Feud

2017–2024FXDrama

Ryan Murphy's anthology of famous enmities, retitled from scratch for each pair.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Bastard Executioner

2015FXDrama

Kurt Sutter's fourteenth-century Wales, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Luck

2011–2012HBODrama

Milch and Michael Mann at a racetrack, ended after one season when horses died during production.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Strange Angel

2018–2019CBS All AccessDrama

Jack Parsons, rocket engineer and occultist, in 1930s Pasadena.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Occupied

2015–2020TV2 NorgeDrama

A Norwegian political thriller about a soft occupation, opened with the calm of a corporate annual report.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Rubicon

2010AMCDrama

An intelligence analyst finding a pattern nobody wants found, cancelled after one season.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Deutschland 86

2018Amazon Prime VideoDrama

The Deutschland 83 spy sent to Angola and South Africa three years on, in the middle chapter of the trilogy.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hormones

2013–2015GMM 25Drama

A Bangkok school series that broke Thai television's rules about what teenagers could be shown doing.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

The White Princess

2017StarzDrama

The sequel to The White Queen, following Elizabeth of York into the Tudor marriage.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Blinded

2019–2021TV4Drama

A financial journalist sleeping with the bank chief she is investigating. Swedish title Fartblinda — speed-blind.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Marseille

2016–2018NetflixDrama

The port city from the water, for Netflix's first French commission — a political drama that opens like a tourist board film and then does not behave like one.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Velvet Colección

2017–2019Movistar+Drama

The Velvet sequel, moving the fashion house from Madrid to Barcelona in 1967.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Legacy

2014–2017DR1 (Denmark)Drama

Four siblings fighting over an artist mother's estate. Arvingerne at home.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Bad Banks

2018–2020ZDF / ArteDrama

Frankfurt and London investment banking, made as a European co-production and shot in three languages.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sky Castle

2018–2019JTBCDrama

Four families in a gated Seoul compound competing over university admissions.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Young James Herriot

2011BBC OneDrama

The veterinary student years, three episodes long, from the same books All Creatures Great & Small comes from.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Catherine the Great

2019HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Helen Mirren as the empress in her last decades, in four parts.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Valkyrien

2017NRK1Drama

A doctor running an illegal clinic in a disused Oslo underground station.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

13 Reasons Why

2017–2020NetflixDrama

Thirteen tapes left behind by a girl who has died, addressed one to each person she holds responsible.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Anne with an E

2017–2019CBC / NetflixDrama

Prince Edward Island in stop-motion paper and pressed flowers, over The Tragically Hip.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Another Miss Oh

2016tvNDrama

Two women with the same name, and a man who can see a few seconds into the future.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Bloodline

2015–2017NetflixDrama

A Florida Keys family whose eldest brother comes home, told across one summer and a confession.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Chosen

2017–VidAngel / Prime VideoDrama

The crowdfunded life of Christ, with a title sequence that deliberately does not look like a Bible show.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Chuno

2010KBS2Drama

Slave hunters in late Joseon, shot handheld in the mountains and unusually violent for its slot.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Code Black

2015–2018CBSDrama

The busiest emergency room in America, named for the state it spends most of its time in.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Designated Survivor

2016–2018ABCDrama

The housing secretary kept away from the State of the Union, and therefore president by the end of it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Doctor Foster

2015–BBC OneDrama

A GP who works out that her husband is having an affair, and then takes it apart methodically.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Empress Ki

2013–2014MBCDrama

A Goryeo woman who becomes empress of the Yuan court, across fifty-one episodes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The End of the F***ing World

2017–2019Channel 4 / NetflixDrama

Sixties pop over two teenagers on a road trip that is going to end badly — an opening that is much sweeter than anything it introduces.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Fosters

2013–2018ABC Family / FreeformDrama

A couple raising biological, adopted and foster children together, on a channel then rebranding around exactly that audience.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Get Down

2016–2017NetflixDrama

The South Bronx in 1977, where disco is ending and hip hop has not been given a name yet.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Goblin

2016–2017tvNDrama

A nine-hundred-year-old immortal looking for the bride who can end him. Known abroad as Guardian: The Lonely and Great God.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Great Expectations

2011BBC OneDrama

The Dickens novel in three parts, with Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hart of Dixie

2011–2015The CWDrama

A New York surgeon who inherits half a general practice in Alabama and finds she cannot leave it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Healer

2014–2015KBS2Drama

A night courier who takes any job without asking what it is, and the reporter who works out who he is.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Heirs

2013SBSDrama

The children of chaebol families at the same school, arranged by inheritance rather than friendship.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hot Stove League

2019–2020SBSDrama

A baseball club's front office in the closed season, which is where the title's stove is.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

House of Anubis

2011–2013NickelodeonDrama

An English boarding school with an Egyptian secret underneath it, remade by Nickelodeon from a Dutch and Belgian original.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
1 sequence

Jericho (2016)

2016ITVDrama

A shanty town thrown up under a Victorian railway viaduct in Yorkshire, and ITV's attempt at a British western.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Last Resort

2012–2013ABCDrama

A submarine crew who refuse an order and declare an island sovereign, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Last Tango in Halifax

2012–2020BBC OneDrama

Two people who were sweethearts at school meeting again in their seventies, and the families that have accumulated since.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Legend of the Blue Sea

2016–2017SBSDrama

A mermaid and a con artist, reincarnated from a Joseon folk tale into modern Seoul.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Life Unexpected

2010–2011The CWDrama

A girl in foster care who finds both her birth parents and asks them to take her back.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Light in Your Eyes

2019JTBCDrama

A woman who can turn back time and ages a lifetime doing it, which the series does not explain until it has to.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Live

2018tvNDrama

Beat officers at a Seoul substation, from the writer of the Reply series.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Lying Game

2011–2013ABC FamilyDrama

Twins separated at birth swapping places, from the author of Pretty Little Liars.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Madam Secretary

2014–2019CBSDrama

A CIA analyst made Secretary of State, in the political drama CBS ran opposite prestige cable.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Manhattan

2014–2015WGN AmericaDrama

The scientists at Los Alamos, and the families billeted alongside them who were told nothing.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mildred Pierce

2011HBODrama

Todd Haynes's five-part Cain adaptation with Kate Winslet.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Misaeng

2014tvNDrama

A go player with no qualifications put into a trading company, and the office drama that made Korea talk about its own working hours.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Misty

2018JTBCDrama

A news anchor accused of murder, and the husband defending her without knowing.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Moon Embracing the Sun

2012MBCDrama

A king and the shaman he was betrothed to as a boy, in the year's most-watched Korean drama.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mr Selfridge

2013–2016ITVDrama

The American who opened a department store on Oxford Street and spent everything keeping it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mr. Sunshine

2018tvNDrama

A Korean boy sold into slavery who returns as an American marine, set in the last years before annexation.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Next Step

2013–2025Family ChannelDrama

A dance studio filmed as a documentary about itself, which ran for twelve years.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Our Girl

2013–2020BBC OneDrama

An army medic on tour, in a drama that recast its lead and kept going.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pan Am

2011–2012ABCDrama

Mad Men at altitude, cancelled after one season of very expensive period detail.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Pillars of the Earth

2010StarzDrama

Ken Follett's cathedral built across eight hours of twelfth-century England.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pinocchio

2014–2015SBSDrama

A reporter who hiccups when she lies, in a drama about what television news does to the people in it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Poldark (2015)

2015–2019BBC OneDrama

Winston Graham's Cornish captain home from the American war to find his father dead and his fiancée engaged to his cousin.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pretty Little Liars

2010–2017FreeformDrama

Four girls shushing the camera over a coffin — twenty-two seconds that state the entire premise and the entire threat.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Red Road

2014–2015SundanceTVDrama

A New Jersey policeman and a Ramapough man held together by what each knows about the other.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Reply 1994

2013tvNDrama

A Seoul boarding house of students up from the provinces, and the second of the three Reply series.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Reply 1997

2012tvNDrama

Busan schoolfriends and first-generation fandom, told from a reunion looking back.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Restaurant

2017–2021SVT (Sweden)Drama

A Stockholm restaurant family from 1945 onwards. Vår tid är nu at home — "our time is now".

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Ringer

2011–2012The CWDrama

A woman who takes over her twin sister's identity and finds it is worse than the one she left.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Royals

2015–2018E!Drama

An invented British royal family behaving badly, on a channel that had spent a decade filming real ones.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

School 2017

2017KBS2Drama

The seventh entry in a school series running since 1999, each with a new cast and year in the title.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Scorpion

2014–2018CBSDrama

A team of geniuses contracted by Homeland Security, very loosely based on a real consultant's account of himself.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Secret Garden

2010–2011SBSDrama

A department store heir and a stuntwoman who wake up in each other's bodies.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Strike Back

2010–2020Sky1 / CinemaxDrama

A British special-forces unit shot like an action franchise, in one of Sky's first co-productions with an American premium channel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Switched at Birth

2011–2017ABC Family / FreeformDrama

Two teenagers swapped as babies, in a family drama that plays whole scenes in sign language.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Tales of the City

2019NetflixDrama

Armistead Maupin's Barbary Lane, returned to thirty years after the first adaptation.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Virgin River

2019–NetflixDrama

A nurse practitioner who answers an advertisement for a job in a Californian mountain town.

  • Season 1

2000s

1 sequence

Breaking Bad

2008–2013AMCDrama

Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.

  • Seasons 1–5
1 sequence

Grey's Anatomy

2005–ABCDrama

Twenty-seven seconds of surgical instruments and a guitar figure, from a series that has now outlived most of the shows that copied it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mad Men

2007–2015AMCDrama

A silhouetted adman falls past skyscrapers built out of his own advertising — smiling wives, stockinged legs, a hand holding a drink — and then, at the bottom, is sitting comfortably with a cigarette. Nobody lands. That is the joke and the thesis.

  • Seasons 1–7
1 sequence

Gilmore Girls

2000–2007The WB / The CWDrama

Carole King's 'Where You Lead' rewritten as a mother-and-daughter duet, over a small Connecticut town in every season at once.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

House

2004–2012FoxDrama

Anatomical illustration and MRI imagery over Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' — a diagnostic show that opens by looking inside a body rather than at one.

  • Season 8
  • Season 1
1 sequence

Desperate Housewives

2004–2012ABCDrama

Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lost

2004–2010ABCDrama

One word, drifting slowly out of the dark towards the camera, over a low tone that is barely a piece of music. Fifteen seconds, no cast, no footage — the cheapest main title of any network drama of its size, and the most imitated.

  • Seasons 1–6
1 sequence

One Tree Hill

2003–2012The WB / The CWDrama

Gavin DeGraw's 'I Don't Want to Be' over a small North Carolina town, re-cut every season until the show dropped the sequence entirely.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Prison Break

2005–2017FoxDrama

Blueprints and tattoo ink treated as the same document — which, for this show's premise, they are.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Everwood

2002–2006The WBDrama

A New York surgeon moving his family to a Colorado mountain town after his wife's death.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Six Feet Under

2001–2005HBODrama

Digital Kitchen's procession of small deaths: hands letting go, a crow on a wire, a hearse, feet on a mortuary table. It won the Emmy and set the template most prestige-drama openings still follow.

  • Seasons 1–5
1 sequence

24

2001–2010FoxDrama

A ticking clock and a card, and nothing else. For a series whose entire conceit is that time is passing, spending a minute on titles would have been the one unforgivable thing.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The O.C.

2003–2007FoxDrama

Phantom Planet's 'California' over Newport Beach, in thirty-two seconds that sold an entire idea of southern California to a generation.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Deadwood

2004–2006HBODrama

A horse, mud, and a camp being built out of both. The sequence is almost entirely animals and construction — the town assembling itself while nobody is watching.

  • Seasons 1–3
1 sequence

Skins

2007–2013E4Drama

A new cast every two series, and a new title sequence with them — the show rebuilt itself from scratch twice and the openings track it.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

Friday Night Lights

2006–2011NBCDrama

Explosions in the Sky over Texas fields and floodlights — a football show whose titles are almost entirely landscape and weather.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Tudors

2007–2010ShowtimeDrama

Henry VIII played young and handsome for four seasons, opened by a montage of everything the reign would cost.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Rome

2005–2007HBODrama

Graffiti coming alive on Roman walls — painted figures fighting, coupling and marching across plaster while the camera tracks past. The city's own scrawl doing the work a montage usually does.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

Heartland

2007–CBCDrama

A family ranch in Alberta, and the longest-running one-hour drama in Canadian television.

  • Seasons 1–3
1 sequence

Big Love

2006–2011HBODrama

A family skating on ice that ends, over 'God Only Knows' — a marriage held up by something visibly about to give way.

  • Seasons 1–3
1 sequence

Degrassi: The Next Generation

2001–2015CTV / MuchMusicDrama

A cast montage rebuilt every season across fourteen years, tracking a school through several complete changes of pupil.

  • Season 14
1 sequence

Merlin

2008–2012BBC OneDrama

Camelot rendered in gold and firelight, with a narration establishing a prophecy in about the time it takes to say one.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Alias

2001–2006ABCDrama

Rapid-cut disguises and wigs, rebuilt every season as the show's premise was torn up and restarted — which happened more often than most series manage in a decade.

  • Seasons 1–5
1 sequence

Nip/Tuck

2003–2010FXDrama

A mannequin being marked up for surgery, over a pop song — cosmetic work presented as retail, which is the show's position on it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Brothers & Sisters

2006–2011ABCDrama

The Walker family and the business they inherit, with Sally Field and Rachel Griffiths.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Spooks

2002–2011BBC OneDrama

Fast-cut surveillance imagery and a clock, from a series that made a habit of killing its leads without warning.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Rescue Me

2004–2011FXDrama

New York firefighters after 2001, introduced without a single heroic frame in it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The L Word

2004–2009ShowtimeDrama

A circle of women in West Hollywood, and a theme song that lists what the show is about out loud.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

John Adams

2008HBODrama

The thirteen colonies' flags and founding documents animated into a single banner, over a fife-and-drum theme.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Angels in America

2003HBODrama

Kushner's play filmed by Mike Nichols, opened by a flight across America into a Manhattan fountain.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Jericho

2006–2008CBSDrama

Thirteen seconds and a mushroom cloud on the horizon, seen from a Kansas town that has no idea what happened.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cranford

2007–2009BBC OneDrama

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cheshire town, with Judi Dench and most of the British stage.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Legend of the Seeker

2008–2010SyndicationDrama

Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels, from the Hercules and Xena producers.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Doctors

2000–2024BBC OneDrama

A Midlands surgery, twenty-four years of daytime, and one self-contained story an episode.

  • Season 7
1 sequence

American Dreams

2002–2005NBCDrama

A Philadelphia family in the mid-1960s, built around American Bandstand.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Corner

2000HBODrama

David Simon and David Mills's West Baltimore miniseries, made three years before The Wire took the same corner.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Boston Public

2000–2004FoxDrama

David E. Kelley's high school, running alongside his legal series on the same network.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Secret Diary of a Call Girl

2007–2011ITV2 / ShowtimeDrama

Billie Piper addressing the camera between clients, adapted from the Belle de Jour blog.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Joan of Arcadia

2003–2005CBSDrama

A teenager who talks to God, introduced by a Joan Osborne song that asks what if God were one of us — the rare case of a theme predating and defining the premise.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Army Wives

2007–2013LifetimeDrama

Four wives and one husband on a South Carolina army post, and the series that made Lifetime a scripted network.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Little Dorrit

2008BBC OneDrama

Dickens serialised across fourteen parts, opened by ink and engraving that assemble the Marshalsea.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Queer as Folk (US)

2000–2005ShowtimeDrama

The Russell T Davies series remade in Pittsburgh and run for five seasons — four more than the original managed.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Being Erica

2009–2011CBCDrama

A therapist sending his patient back to her own regrets, one per session.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pasión de Gavilanes

2003–2022Telemundo / CaracolDrama

Three brothers avenging their sister, and one of the most exported Colombian telenovelas.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Men of a Certain Age

2009–2011TNTDrama

Three friends at the wrong end of their forties, written by Ray Romano and Mike Royce.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Empire Falls

2005HBODrama

Richard Russo adapting his own novel about a Maine mill town that has already lost.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Dirt

2007–2008FXDrama

Courteney Cox as the editor of a celebrity tabloid, cancelled during the writers' strike.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

John from Cincinnati

2007HBODrama

David Milch's surfing series, cancelled after one season and still argued about.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Blue Water High

2005–2008ABC (Australia)Drama

A surf academy on the northern beaches, with the cast chosen partly for whether they could actually surf.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Huff

2004–2006ShowtimeDrama

A psychiatrist whose own life comes apart after a patient's suicide.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sleeper Cell

2005–2006ShowtimeDrama

An FBI agent undercover in a Los Angeles terrorist cell, two seasons long.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Casi Ángeles

2007–2010Telefe (Argentina)Drama

Cris Morena's Buenos Aires teen musical, which exported across Latin America and Israel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cidade dos Homens

2002–2005TV GloboDrama

Two boys growing up in a Rio favela, made by the City of God team either side of the film.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Occupation

2009BBC OneDrama

Three soldiers from one Manchester regiment and the years after Basra.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Good Wife

2009–2016CBSDrama

Chicago legal iconography in thirty-nine seconds, from the network drama most often argued to be the best of its era.

  • Seasons 1–2
1 sequence

In Treatment

2008–2021HBODrama

Nineteen seconds and a chair. For a show that is entirely two people talking in one room, the titles decline to leave it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

90210

2008–2013The CWDrama

Beverly Hills, 90210 restarted for a new decade, keeping the postcode and the zip-code typography.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Autumn in My Heart

2000KBS2Drama

The melodrama credited with starting the Korean wave, about two children swapped at the hospital.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Band of Brothers

2001HBODrama

Michael Kamen's theme over pencil sketches of soldiers dissolving into photographs — two and a half minutes, and among the most imitated title sequences ever made for television.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Bleak House

2005BBC OneDrama

Dickens serialised the way he was published — half-hour instalments, twice a week — with a title sequence cut to match.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The Guardian

2001–2004CBSDrama

A corporate lawyer sentenced to community service in child advocacy, which turns out to be the real job.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 2–3
1 sequence

H2O: Just Add Water

2006–2010Network TenDrama

Three Gold Coast girls who become mermaids on contact with water, and an Australian export that reached a hundred and twenty countries.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hana Yori Dango

2005–2007TBSDrama

The manga that became Boys Over Flowers in Korea and Meteor Garden in Taiwan, in its Japanese live-action form.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Higher Ground

2000Fox FamilyDrama

A wilderness school for troubled teenagers, cancelled after one season and remembered for its cast list.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Iris

2009KBS2Drama

A secret agent thriller shot across five countries, and the most expensive Korean drama made to that point.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Jewel in the Palace

2003–2004MBCDrama

A kitchen servant who rises to be the king's physician, and the drama that carried Korean television across Asia.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Jumong

2006–2007MBCDrama

The founding of Goguryeo across eighty-one episodes, and one of the largest audiences Korean television has held.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lark Rise to Candleford

2008–2011BBC OneDrama

Flora Thompson's hamlet and its market town, adapted into four years of BBC Sunday evenings.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Las Vegas

2003–2008NBCDrama

Casino surveillance as an ensemble drama, opening on the Strip at the hour it looks best.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

McLeod's Daughters

2001–2009Nine NetworkDrama

Two half-sisters who inherit a South Australian cattle station and run it with an all-female crew.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
1 sequence

Meadowlands

2007Showtime / Channel 4Drama

A family in witness protection on an estate where everyone else is hiding something too.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Midnight Diner (2009)

2009–2014MBSDrama

The original MBS run of the Shinjuku diner open from midnight to seven, seven years before Netflix continued it as Tokyo Stories.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Secret Life of the American Teenager

2008–2013ABC FamilyDrama

A teen pregnancy drama that ran five seasons on the channel that had spent the decade before avoiding the subject.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sense and Sensibility

2008BBC OneDrama

Andrew Davies adapting Austen across three parts, a decade after he did Pride and Prejudice.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Small Island

2009BBC OneDrama

Andrea Levy's Windrush novel in two parts, moving between Jamaica and a Earls Court boarding house.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Strong Medicine

2000–2006LifetimeDrama

Two doctors from opposite ends of the system sharing a women's clinic in Philadelphia.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

2006–2007NBCDrama

Sorkin backstage at a sketch show, cancelled after one season while another series took the same premise and survived.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The Unit

2006–2009CBSDrama

Delta Force at work and their wives at home on the base, developed for television by David Mamet.

  • Season 1
  • Season 3
1 sequence

Waterloo Road

2006–BBC OneDrama

A failing comprehensive in Rochdale, and the successor to Grange Hill as British television's school of record.

  • Season 1

1990s

1 sequence

The Sopranos

1999–2007HBODrama

Ninety seconds of a man driving home from the Lincoln Tunnel to North Caldwell. No cast montage, no highlights — just the commute, which turns out to be the whole show.

  • Seasons 1–6
2 sequences

Twin Peaks

1990–1991, 2017ABC / ShowtimeDrama

A bird, a sawmill blade and a waterfall, over Angelo Badalamenti at a tempo no network would approve today — ninety seconds of a town being described before anyone in it speaks.

  • Seasons 1–2
  • Season 3
2 sequences

ER

1994–2009NBCDrama

James Newton Howard's theme over sliding doors, gurneys and light — the template every medical drama since has either copied or deliberately avoided.

  • Season 1
  • Season 10
1 sequence

Dawson's Creek

1998–2003The WBDrama

Paula Cole over a Massachusetts creek — a theme so tied to the show that its absence from the streaming release became a story in itself.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The West Wing

1999–2006NBCDrama

Oil portraits, flags and W.G. Snuffy Walden's brass — an opening that treats the executive branch as a cathedral, which is the show's entire register.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
1 sequence

Beverly Hills, 90210

1990–2000FoxDrama

Freeze-frames of a cast grinning at the camera over a synth-brass hook — the template every teen drama of the decade copied.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Xena: Warrior Princess

1995–2001SyndicationDrama

A narrated mythological premise and a war cry, from the spinoff that comprehensively outgrew Hercules.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

7th Heaven

1996–2007The WBDrama

A minister, his wife and seven children, in the longest-running family drama in American television.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

JAG

1995–2005NBC / CBSDrama

Navy lawyers across ten seasons, and the series NCIS was spun out of.

  • Season 9
1 sequence

Heartbreak High

1994–1999Ten / ABC (Australia)Drama

A Sydney comprehensive, revived by Netflix thirty years later.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Felicity

1998–2002The WBDrama

J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves's college drama, opened by a montage that changed as often as its lead's haircut did.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Heartbeat

1992–2010ITVDrama

A Yorkshire village policeman in the 1960s, opened by the Buddy Holly song the series is named for.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

My So-Called Life

1994–1995ABCDrama

Snapshots and handwriting, in the register of a teenager's own notebook rather than a network's idea of one.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hollyoaks

1995–Channel 4Drama

A Chester soap aimed at an audience twenty years younger than any other British serial's.

  • Season 14
1 sequence

Touched by an Angel

1994–2003CBSDrama

Angels sent to intervene in ordinary American lives, nine seasons long.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

1993–1998CBSDrama

A Boston doctor practising in 1860s Colorado Springs.

  • Seasons 2–3
1 sequence

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

1995–1999SyndicationDrama

A narrated mythological premise delivered with total conviction over New Zealand hillsides.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Wishbone

1995–1998PBSDrama

A Jack Russell terrier imagining himself into classic literature, one novel per episode.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Queer as Folk (UK)

1999–2000Channel 4Drama

Russell T Davies on Manchester's Canal Street, remade later in America and never bettered.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Third Watch

1999–2005NBCDrama

Police, paramedics and firefighters on the same New York shift, from the ER producers.

  • Season 5
1 sequence

Picket Fences

1992–1996CBSDrama

Small-town Wisconsin filmed as pastoral before every episode demonstrates it is anything but.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

Judging Amy

1999–2005CBSDrama

A family court judge and her social worker mother, built from the creator's own mother's career.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Chicago Hope

1994–2000CBSDrama

The medical drama that premiered the same week as ER and spent six years being the other one.

  • Season 5
1 sequence

La Femme Nikita

1997–2001USA NetworkDrama

Cold blue corridors and electronic music, for a series that treated its agency as an antagonist from the first frame.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Holby City

1999–2022BBC OneDrama

The Casualty spin-off that moved upstairs to the surgical wards and outlasted most of what was around it.

  • Season 12
1 sequence

Shortland Street

1992–TVNZ 2Drama

New Zealand's nightly hospital serial, running since 1992 and re-cut its titles roughly once a decade.

  • Seasons 10–13
1 sequence

Early Edition

1996–2000CBSDrama

A man who receives tomorrow's newspaper today, delivered by a cat.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Ghostwriter

1992–1995PBSDrama

A ghost that communicates only in written words, and a group of Brooklyn children who solve cases with it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Relic Hunter

1999–2002SyndicationDrama

Tia Carrere as a professor recovering antiquities, in the syndication boom that followed Xena.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Providence

1999–2002NBCDrama

A plastic surgeon returning to Rhode Island, advised by her dead mother.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Port Charles

1997–2003ABCDrama

The General Hospital spin-off that later restructured itself into thirteen-week arcs with an ending each — the closest American daytime came to a limited series.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

BeastMaster

1999–2002SyndicationDrama

The 1982 film continued as a series, made in Australia.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Party of Five

1994–2000FoxDrama

Five siblings and a house, over BoDeans — an opening that establishes an absence rather than a cast.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Passions

1999–2008NBCDrama

A daytime serial that ran witchcraft, a living doll and an orangutan nurse alongside the usual, and was the last new one American network daytime commissioned.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Alex Haley's Queen

1993CBSDrama

Haley's last book filmed as three nights on CBS, following his own paternal grandmother.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

All Saints

1998–2009Seven NetworkDrama

An emergency ward in Sydney, running twelve years and outlasting most of its cast.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Any Day Now

1998–2002LifetimeDrama

Two friends in Birmingham, told in the present and in 1963 at once.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Bad Girls

1999–2006ITVDrama

A women's prison wing written by two of Prisoner Cell Block H's admirers, and ITV's answer to it.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

Ballykissangel

1996–2001BBC OneDrama

An English priest posted to a village in Wicklow, and the BBC's most watched Sunday drama of the late nineties.

  • Season 1
  • Season 6
1 sequence

The Bradys

1990CBSDrama

The Brady children as adults, played as an hour-long drama, which lasted six weeks.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Family Affairs

1997–2005Channel 5Drama

The soap Channel 5 launched with, and the one that had to build an audience from nothing five nights a week.

  • Season 3
1 sequence

From the Earth to the Moon

1998HBODrama

Tom Hanks's twelve-part Apollo history, opened by archive footage cut to Michael Kamen's march.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Hornblower

1998–2003ITVDrama

Forester's naval officer, made not as a series but as eight television films spread over five years.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Melrose Place

1992–1999FoxDrama

The same freeze-frame grammar as its parent show, moved to an apartment complex and given a considerably nastier theme.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Popular

1999–2001The WBDrama

A high school seen from both sides of its social order, from the man who later made Glee.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Practice

1997–2004ABCDrama

Boston law offices in grey and brown, from the producer who would spin this off into Boston Legal and lighten it considerably.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Pretender

1996–2000NBCDrama

A man raised in a laboratory who can become any professional he reads about, running from the people who made him.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Pride and Prejudice

1995BBC OneDrama

Carl Davis's theme over needlework and a country lane — the adaptation against which every subsequent Austen has been measured.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

Road to Avonlea

1990–1996CBCDrama

Montgomery's Prince Edward Island stories, made by the CBC with Disney paying half the bill.

  • Season 1
  • Season 5
1 sequence

Sharpe

1993–2008ITVDrama

A rifleman commissioned out of the ranks in the Peninsular War, filmed for its first runs in Crimea.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sisters

1991–1996NBCDrama

Four sisters in Illinois, in a network drama that let all four of them be difficult.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Soldier Soldier

1991–1997ITVDrama

A fictional infantry regiment and the families attached to it, which made two of its cast into pop stars.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sunset Beach

1997–1999NBCDrama

Aaron Spelling's daytime serial, which NBC ran for three years and then replaced with Passions.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sweet Valley High

1994–1997Syndication / UPNDrama

The paperback series about twin sisters, adapted for television with real twins.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

This Life

1996–2007BBC TwoDrama

Five law graduates sharing a house in Southwark, shot handheld and stopped after two series while it was still growing.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Tribe

1999–2003Channel 5Drama

A virus kills every adult and the children left over form tribes, made in New Zealand for a British channel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Where the Heart Is

1997–2006ITVDrama

District nurses in a Yorkshire town, which ran nine years on almost no incident.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

1992–1996ABCDrama

Indiana Jones tutored by the twentieth century itself, each episode setting him down beside somebody who was really there.

  • Season 1

1980s

2 sequences

EastEnders

1985–BBC OneDrama

An aerial pull-back over the Thames and the drum that answers it — thirty-two seconds that have barely changed in forty years.

  • Season 1
  • Season 41
1 sequence

Baywatch

1989–2001NBC / SyndicationDrama

Los Angeles County lifeguards, and at its peak the most-watched television programme on Earth.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lonesome Dove

1989CBSDrama

Basil Poledouris scoring a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — the miniseries that proved the western was not finished after all.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

Neighbours

1985–2025Seven / Ten (Australia)Drama

Ramsay Street across forty years, and a theme song that survived every cast, network and cancellation.

  • Season 1
  • Season 39
2 sequences

The Bold and the Beautiful

1987–CBSDrama

Los Angeles fashion houses, and the most widely watched daytime serial in the world.

  • Season 1
  • Season 38
1 sequence

Knight Rider

1982–1986NBCDrama

A narrated premise, a scanning red light and a synth arpeggio — the most efficient piece of eighties television branding after the A-Team's.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Dynasty

1981–1989ABCDrama

Gold lettering, oil money and an orchestral theme played with no irony whatsoever — the decade's idea of wealth, stated in ninety seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Casualty

1986–BBC OneDrama

Holby City Hospital's emergency department, and the longest-running primetime medical drama in the world.

  • Season 27
1 sequence

St. Elsewhere

1982–1988NBCDrama

A Boston hospital and another Dave Grusin-adjacent piano theme, from the network and era that produced Hill Street Blues and shared its restraint.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Fall Guy

1981–1986ABCDrama

A Hollywood stuntman working as a bounty hunter, with a theme song about being unknown.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

thirtysomething

1987–1991ABCDrama

The series that invented the domestic-anxiety drama, and gave a generation of television writers their register.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Airwolf

1984–1987CBS / USADrama

A helicopter emerging from a desert mesa to a synth fanfare, at a level of self-seriousness the decade rewarded.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

North and South

1985–1994ABCDrama

Two West Point friends on opposite sides of the Civil War, over a Bill Conti march.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

MacGyver

1985–1992ABCDrama

Improvised solutions cut fast enough that you never see how any of them work, which is also true of the episodes.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

L.A. Law

1986–1994NBCDrama

A car boot slamming on a personalised numberplate, and Mike Post again — the legal drama that defined the form for a decade.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Brookside

1982–2003Channel 4Drama

Channel 4's launch-night serial, shot on a real close of houses the production company had bought.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Falcon Crest

1981–1990CBSDrama

Napa vineyards filmed like an estate agent's brochure, for a family who spend nine seasons trying to take it from each other.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Shōgun (1980)

1980NBCDrama

The Clavell miniseries that ran five nights and made a genre out of the Western sailor in feudal Japan.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Byker Grove

1989–2006BBC OneDrama

A Newcastle youth club, and the series Ant and Dec came out of.

  • Season 11
1 sequence

Brideshead Revisited

1981ITVDrama

Geoffrey Burgon's theme over an English country house — eleven hours of television that changed what British drama believed it could spend money on.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Degrassi Junior High

1987–1989CBCDrama

The Canadian schools series that cast actual teenagers and let them look like it, and the start of a franchise still running.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Scarecrow and Mrs. King

1983–1987CBSDrama

A divorced housewife recruited into intelligence work by accident.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Faerie Tale Theatre

1982–1987ShowtimeDrama

Shelley Duvall's anthology of fairy tales, each directed by a different film-maker and cast from Hollywood.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Singing Detective

1986BBC OneDrama

Dennis Potter's serial, in which a hospitalised writer's hallucinations arrive as 1940s dance numbers — and the titles set that up without explaining it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

A Country Practice

1981–1994Seven NetworkDrama

A rural New South Wales medical practice, and one of Australian television's defining serials.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Press Gang

1989–1993ITVDrama

A school newspaper written by Steven Moffat, which is why the dialogue is faster than the format.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

China Beach

1988–1991ABCDrama

An evacuation hospital on the Vietnamese coast, told from the women posted to it rather than the men passing through.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Chronicles of Narnia

1988–1990BBC OneDrama

Lewis adapted across four serials, with costumes and matte paintings doing what the budget could not.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Cover Up

1984–1985CBSDrama

A fashion photographer and her model working as agents, and the series remembered for how its lead died.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Degrassi High

1989–1991CBCDrama

The Degrassi cast moved up to secondary school, and the point the series stopped softening anything.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Fame

1982–1987NBC / SyndicationDrama

The film continued at the High School of Performing Arts, with a cast who did their own dancing.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

Home and Away

1988–Seven NetworkDrama

Summer Bay, still running after nearly forty years, with the opening remade every few seasons.

  • Season 1
  • Season 38
1 sequence

Howards' Way

1985–1990BBC OneDrama

Boatyards and money on the Solent, which the BBC ran opposite Dallas and Dynasty on purpose.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Life Goes On

1989–1993ABCDrama

The first American series built around a lead actor with Down syndrome, opening on the Beatles.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Midnight Caller

1988–1991NBCDrama

A former policeman taking calls on late-night radio, and one of the first American dramas to write about AIDS.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Noble House

1988NBCDrama

Four nights of Hong Kong boardroom warfare, from the James Clavell novel.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Reilly, Ace of Spies

1983ITVDrama

Sidney Reilly across twelve parts, and the serial that gave Sam Neill his first lead.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Robin of Sherwood

1984–1986ITVDrama

The Robin Hood that put a horned god behind the legend, scored throughout by Clannad.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Stig of the Dump

1981ITVDrama

Clive King's boy in a chalk pit and the person living at the bottom of it, adapted by Thames.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The Storyteller

1987–1988NBC / Channel 4Drama

European folk tales retold by John Hurt beside a fire, with Henson's creature shop doing the rest.

  • Season 1
  • Season 2
1 sequence

The Thorn Birds

1983ABCDrama

The second most-watched miniseries in American television history, after Roots.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Tour of Duty

1987–1990CBSDrama

An infantry platoon in Vietnam, and the first American drama series to be set there.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

A Very Peculiar Practice

1986–1992BBC TwoDrama

A campus medical practice used as a way of writing about what was happening to universities.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Winds of War

1983ABCDrama

Wouk's novel as eighteen hours across a single week, and the most expensive thing American television had made.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

A Woman of Substance

1985Channel 4 / SyndicationDrama

Barbara Taylor Bradford's servant girl who builds a department store empire, across three nights.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Young Riders

1989–1992ABCDrama

Pony Express riders in the years before the Civil War, with Billy the Kid among them.

  • Season 1

1970s

1 sequence

The Waltons

1972–1981CBSDrama

A Virginia mountain homestead in the Depression, introduced with a warmth the decade's other dramas had no interest in.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

The Young and the Restless

1973–CBSDrama

Genoa City, and the daytime ratings leader in America for more than thirty-five consecutive years.

  • Season 16
  • Season 45
1 sequence

Dallas

1978–1991CBSDrama

A three-panel split screen over the Dallas skyline, and the theme that defined what a primetime soap was allowed to sound like.

  • Season 10
2 sequences

Emmerdale

1972–ITVDrama

A Yorkshire Dales farming serial that dropped Farm from its name in 1989 and kept the landscape.

  • Season 27
  • Season 49
1 sequence

Emergency!

1972–1977NBCDrama

Los Angeles County paramedics, made with the fire department's cooperation and credited with popularising the profession.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Roots

1977ABCDrama

The miniseries that changed what American television believed it was allowed to broadcast, opened with Quincy Jones and a slave ship.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

All My Children

1970–2011ABCDrama

Pine Valley, Agnes Nixon's serial, and the first American soap to put issue storylines in daytime.

  • Season 23
  • Season 41
1 sequence

Eight Is Enough

1977–1981ABCDrama

A newspaper columnist with eight children, and a theme song that counts them.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Upstairs, Downstairs

1971–1975ITVDrama

The Edwardian household drama that Downton Abbey is, by its own creator's admission, a direct descendant of.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Knots Landing

1979–1993CBSDrama

A cul-de-sac shot from above, with the neighbours' houses laid out like a diagram of everyone's business.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

I, Claudius

1976BBC TwoDrama

A snake crossing a Roman mosaic — one image, held for forty-five seconds, and among the most efficient title sequences ever made.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

1979BBC TwoDrama

A Russian nesting doll opening onto a blank face, over Geoffrey Burgon's setting of the Nunc Dimittis — the most quietly devastating title sequence the BBC has made.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Trapper John, M.D.

1979–1986CBSDrama

The MASH surgeon twenty-eight years later, running a San Francisco hospital.

  • Season 6
2 sequences

Grange Hill

1978–2008BBC OneDrama

A London comprehensive school taken seriously, opening on a comic strip and a sausage on a fork.

  • Season 1
  • Seasons 13–16
1 sequence

The Persuaders!

1971–1972ITVDrama

Roger Moore and Tony Curtis as bickering millionaires, opened by John Barry's most-covered television theme.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Lou Grant

1977–1982CBSDrama

The Mary Tyler Moore Show character moved into an hour-long newspaper drama — the only American series to make that jump.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Alias Smith and Jones

1971–1973ABCDrama

Two outlaws promised an amnesty they have to stay out of trouble for twenty months to collect.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Fantasy Island

1977–1984ABCDrama

"De plane! De plane!" — an island where wishes are granted and then examined.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Ryan's Hope

1975–1989ABCDrama

An Irish-American family running a bar near a Manhattan hospital, in a serial set in a real neighbourhood rather than an invented town.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Beachcombers

1972–1990CBCDrama

Log salvage on the British Columbia coast, and the longest-running dramatic series Canadian television has made.

  • Season 14
1 sequence

Holocaust

1978NBCDrama

The miniseries that put the word into everyday use in Germany, where half the country watched it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Jesus of Nazareth

1977RAI / ITVDrama

Zeffirelli's six-hour life of Christ, cast so deeply that the titles are mostly name cards.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams

1977–1978NBCDrama

A man wrongly accused who goes to live in the mountains with a bear, and NBC's biggest surprise of 1977.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Little House on the Prairie

1974–1983NBCDrama

Three girls running down a hill, one of whom falls — a shot kept in for nine years because it was better than the take where nobody did.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Sandbaggers

1978–1980ITVDrama

British intelligence run as an office job, with the operations mostly discussed rather than shown.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Secret Army

1977–1979BBC OneDrama

An escape line moving Allied airmen out of occupied Belgium, played without any of the adventure the premise invites.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The White Shadow

1978–1981CBSDrama

A white ex-professional coaching basketball at a mostly black Los Angeles high school.

  • Season 1

1960s

2 sequences

Coronation Street

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

  • Season 1
  • Season 31
1 sequence

Days of Our Lives

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Wild Wild West

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Virginian

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

One Life to Live

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

  • Season 21
  • Season 44
1 sequence

Another World

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.

  • Season 26
1 sequence

The Big Valley

1965–1969ABCDrama

Barbara Stanwyck running a Stockton ranch, in the western that gave a woman the top billing.

  • Seasons 1–4
1 sequence

The High Chaparral

1967–1971NBCDrama

An Arizona cattle ranch and the Mexican family it marries into, from the producer of Bonanza.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Crossroads

1964–1988ATV Midlands / CentralDrama

A Midlands motel, taped so fast that the sets famously wobbled, and watched by fifteen million people anyway.

  • Season 7
1 sequence

Danger Man

1960–1968ITVDrama

Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, the series he left to make The Prisoner.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Marcus Welby, M.D.

1969–1976ABCDrama

A family doctor in Santa Monica, and the first ABC series to finish a season as the most-watched programme in America.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Mission: Impossible

1966–1973CBSDrama

A lit fuse crossing the screen while clips from the episode ahead flash past it — a title sequence recut every week from the show it introduces.

  • Season 2
1 sequence

I Spy

1965–1968NBCDrama

Two agents under cover as a tennis player and his trainer, and the first American drama to cast a Black actor as a lead.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Department S

1969–1970ITVDrama

An Interpol unit for cases nobody else can explain, which gave Jason King his own spin-off.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Jackanory

1965–1996BBC OneDrama

One actor, one chair, one book read aloud for fifteen minutes — the least televisual idea the BBC ever ran for thirty years.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Defenders

1961–1965CBSDrama

A father-and-son legal practice taking cases the era's networks were not supposed to broadcast — abortion, blacklisting, euthanasia.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

General Hospital

1963–ABCDrama

American daytime's longest-running scripted programme still in production.

  • Season 16
  • Season 43
1 sequence

Peyton Place

1964–1969ABCDrama

The primetime serial that proved American networks could run a soap after dark, twice a week.

  • Season 1

1950s

1 sequence

Bonanza

1959–1973NBCDrama

A burning map and four men riding out of it — one of the first title sequences designed to show off colour television, which is precisely why it looks like that.

  • Season 1
2 sequences

As the World Turns

1956–2010CBSDrama

The turning globe that gave American daytime its most-copied image, over fifty-four years.

  • Season 41
  • Season 52
2 sequences

Guiding Light

1952–2009CBSDrama

Seventy-two years on radio and television between them — the longest-running story ever told in any medium.

  • Season 44
  • Season 51
1 sequence

Rawhide

1959–1965CBSDrama

A cattle drive that never arrives, with Frankie Laine's theme and a young Clint Eastwood.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Rifleman

1958–1963ABCDrama

A widowed rancher and his son, opened by twelve rounds fired down a street in under ten seconds.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Wagon Train

1957–1965NBC / ABCDrama

A wagon company crossing to California, and the series Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek against.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Have Gun – Will Travel

1957–1963CBSDrama

A gunfighter who advertises in the newspaper, and one of the first westerns to open on a business card.

  • Seasons 1–6
1 sequence

Sky King

1951–1962NBC / ABCDrama

An Arizona rancher who catches criminals from a twin-engined aeroplane, out of the radio serial.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Sea Hunt

1958–1961SyndicationDrama

Lloyd Bridges as a freelance diver, and the most successful syndicated series of its decade.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Search for Tomorrow

1951–1986CBS / NBCDrama

Thirty-five years of American daytime, and the serial that was on air before most of the networks carrying it were.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

The Cisco Kid

1950–1956SyndicationDrama

The first television series filmed in colour, three years before anyone in America could receive it.

  • Season 1
1 sequence

Playhouse 90

1956–1960CBSDrama

Ninety minutes of live original drama every week, and the anthology from which Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer and most of the era's writers emerged.

  • Season 1

1940s

1 sequence

The Lone Ranger

1949–1957ABCDrama

Rossini's William Tell overture attached so firmly to a masked rider that the music has never fully got free of it.

  • Season 1