Drama · 1960s
The 1960s account for 19 of the 575 drama shows here, and 22 opening sequences.
NBC carries the most, with six.
Three of them rebuilt their titles mid-run.
19 shows22 sequences
2 sequences
Coronation Street
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
"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wild Wild West
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 sequenceThe Virginian
The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.
- Season 1
2 sequences
One Life to Live
Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.
- Season 21
- Season 44
1 sequenceAnother World
The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.
- Season 26
1 sequenceThe Big Valley
Barbara Stanwyck running a Stockton ranch, in the western that gave a woman the top billing.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceThe High Chaparral
An Arizona cattle ranch and the Mexican family it marries into, from the producer of Bonanza.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCrossroads
A Midlands motel, taped so fast that the sets famously wobbled, and watched by fifteen million people anyway.
- Season 7
1 sequenceDanger Man
Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, the series he left to make The Prisoner.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMarcus Welby, M.D.
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 sequenceMission: Impossible
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 sequenceI Spy
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 sequenceDepartment S
An Interpol unit for cases nobody else can explain, which gave Jason King his own spin-off.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJackanory
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 sequenceThe Defenders
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
American daytime's longest-running scripted programme still in production.
- Season 16
- Season 43
1 sequencePeyton Place
The primetime serial that proved American networks could run a soap after dark, twice a week.
- Season 1