Drama · 1990s
The 1990s account for 58 of the 575 drama shows here, and 63 opening sequences.
CBS and NBC carry nine each.
Five of them rebuilt their titles mid-run.
58 shows63 sequences
1 sequence
The Sopranos
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
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
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
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
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
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 sequenceXena: Warrior Princess
A narrated mythological premise and a war cry, from the spinoff that comprehensively outgrew Hercules.
- Season 1
1 sequence7th Heaven
A minister, his wife and seven children, in the longest-running family drama in American television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJAG
Navy lawyers across ten seasons, and the series NCIS was spun out of.
- Season 9
1 sequenceHeartbreak High
A Sydney comprehensive, revived by Netflix thirty years later.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFelicity
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 sequenceHeartbeat
A Yorkshire village policeman in the 1960s, opened by the Buddy Holly song the series is named for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMy So-Called Life
Snapshots and handwriting, in the register of a teenager's own notebook rather than a network's idea of one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHollyoaks
A Chester soap aimed at an audience twenty years younger than any other British serial's.
- Season 14
1 sequenceTouched by an Angel
Angels sent to intervene in ordinary American lives, nine seasons long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
A Boston doctor practising in 1860s Colorado Springs.
- Seasons 2–3
1 sequenceHercules: The Legendary Journeys
A narrated mythological premise delivered with total conviction over New Zealand hillsides.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWishbone
A Jack Russell terrier imagining himself into classic literature, one novel per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceQueer as Folk (UK)
Russell T Davies on Manchester's Canal Street, remade later in America and never bettered.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThird Watch
Police, paramedics and firefighters on the same New York shift, from the ER producers.
- Season 5
1 sequencePicket Fences
Small-town Wisconsin filmed as pastoral before every episode demonstrates it is anything but.
- Season 2
1 sequenceJudging Amy
A family court judge and her social worker mother, built from the creator's own mother's career.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChicago Hope
The medical drama that premiered the same week as ER and spent six years being the other one.
- Season 5
1 sequenceLa Femme Nikita
Cold blue corridors and electronic music, for a series that treated its agency as an antagonist from the first frame.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHolby City
The Casualty spin-off that moved upstairs to the surgical wards and outlasted most of what was around it.
- Season 12
1 sequenceShortland Street
New Zealand's nightly hospital serial, running since 1992 and re-cut its titles roughly once a decade.
- Seasons 10–13
1 sequenceEarly Edition
A man who receives tomorrow's newspaper today, delivered by a cat.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGhostwriter
A ghost that communicates only in written words, and a group of Brooklyn children who solve cases with it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRelic Hunter
Tia Carrere as a professor recovering antiquities, in the syndication boom that followed Xena.
- Season 1
1 sequenceProvidence
A plastic surgeon returning to Rhode Island, advised by her dead mother.
- Season 1
1 sequencePort Charles
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 sequenceBeastMaster
The 1982 film continued as a series, made in Australia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceParty of Five
Five siblings and a house, over BoDeans — an opening that establishes an absence rather than a cast.
- Season 1
1 sequencePassions
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 sequenceAlex Haley's Queen
Haley's last book filmed as three nights on CBS, following his own paternal grandmother.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAll Saints
An emergency ward in Sydney, running twelve years and outlasting most of its cast.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAny Day Now
Two friends in Birmingham, told in the present and in 1963 at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBad Girls
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
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 sequenceThe Bradys
The Brady children as adults, played as an hour-long drama, which lasted six weeks.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFamily Affairs
The soap Channel 5 launched with, and the one that had to build an audience from nothing five nights a week.
- Season 3
1 sequenceFrom the Earth to the Moon
Tom Hanks's twelve-part Apollo history, opened by archive footage cut to Michael Kamen's march.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHornblower
Forester's naval officer, made not as a series but as eight television films spread over five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMelrose Place
The same freeze-frame grammar as its parent show, moved to an apartment complex and given a considerably nastier theme.
- Season 1
1 sequencePopular
A high school seen from both sides of its social order, from the man who later made Glee.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Practice
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 sequenceThe Pretender
A man raised in a laboratory who can become any professional he reads about, running from the people who made him.
- Season 1
1 sequencePride and Prejudice
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
Montgomery's Prince Edward Island stories, made by the CBC with Disney paying half the bill.
- Season 1
- Season 5
1 sequenceSharpe
A rifleman commissioned out of the ranks in the Peninsular War, filmed for its first runs in Crimea.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSisters
Four sisters in Illinois, in a network drama that let all four of them be difficult.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSoldier Soldier
A fictional infantry regiment and the families attached to it, which made two of its cast into pop stars.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSunset Beach
Aaron Spelling's daytime serial, which NBC ran for three years and then replaced with Passions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSweet Valley High
The paperback series about twin sisters, adapted for television with real twins.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThis Life
Five law graduates sharing a house in Southwark, shot handheld and stopped after two series while it was still growing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Tribe
A virus kills every adult and the children left over form tribes, made in New Zealand for a British channel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere the Heart Is
District nurses in a Yorkshire town, which ran nine years on almost no incident.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Young Indiana Jones Chronicles
Indiana Jones tutored by the twentieth century itself, each episode setting him down beside somebody who was really there.
- Season 1