Drama · 2020s
The 2020s account for 125 of the 575 drama shows here, and 130 opening sequences.
Netflix carries the most, with 30.
Three of them rebuilt their titles mid-run.
125 shows130 sequences
2 sequences
Bridgerton
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
1 sequence
Landman
West Texas oil patch, filmed with the same proprietorial eye Yellowstone brings to Montana.
- Season 1
3 sequences
House of the Dragon
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
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
Beef
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
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
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
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
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
Surveillance geometry and a ringing phone, built out of the one object the whole premise hangs on.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Boroughs
An analog test pattern that turns to sand — the credits are glowing particles that gather into each name and blow away again, until they settle into the title in a flowing script.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Last of Us
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
Garfield's presidency and Guiteau's pursuit of it, told as the collision it was.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Day of the Jackal
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
Hawaiian carving, cloth and volcanic landscape, filmed as artefacts of a nation rather than scenery.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSquid Game
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
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 sequenceHijack
Flight paths, cabin geometry and a clock — a series told in real time, saying so before it starts.
- Season 2
1 sequenceTehran
Surveillance imagery and city geometry, cut so that watching and being watched look like the same activity.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCitadel
The Russo brothers' spy franchise, built to spawn local-language series in several countries at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Queen's Gambit
Pieces, pills and ceiling tiles falling through one another — the board and the addiction rendered as the same descending motion.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNormal People
Twenty-four seconds and a card, for an adaptation that treats silence as its main instrument.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMasters of the Air
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 sequenceThe Agency
The American adaptation of The Bureau, which this catalogue could not find footage of in its original French.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBaby Reindeer
Eighteen seconds and almost nothing in them, which for a series this claustrophobic is the correct amount of air.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFire Country
A convict on a Northern California firefighting crew, working off his sentence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wheel of Time
A tapestry weaving itself, unpicking, and starting again — the series' cosmology of cycles, stated as a loom.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHunters
Seventies exploitation-poster design applied to Nazi hunting in 1977 New York, with all the tastelessness that implies deliberately left in.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaisy Jones & The Six
A fictional 1970s band told as a rockumentary, with the songs written for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceQueen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story
The Bridgerton prequel, opened by an animated sequence in the manner of an illuminated manuscript.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Idol
Studio lighting, mirrors and pop-star iconography, presented without irony.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Glory
A go board, scar tissue and winter light — the revenge plot laid out as a game with pieces already placed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceZero Day
Robert De Niro as a former president investigating a cyberattack, in his first television series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWeak Hero Class
A top student fighting his way through school violence, from the webtoon.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Serpent Queen
Catherine de' Medici narrating her own rise directly to camera.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLessons in Chemistry
Laboratory glassware and 1950s kitchen surfaces filmed identically, so the science and the domesticity become the same set of tools.
- Season 1
1 sequencePachinko
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 sequenceAlchemy of Souls
Souls swapped between bodies in a fictional kingdom, from the Hong sisters.
- Season 1
1 sequenceNine Perfect Strangers
Wellness-retreat imagery filmed until it turns sinister — smoothies, mountains and breathing exercises, all slightly too still.
- Season 1
1 sequenceVikings: Valhalla
The Vikings sequel, set a century later, and made for a different service than the one that cancelled the parent.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMr. & Mrs. Smith
The film remade as a series about the marriage rather than the shooting, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShadow and Bone
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 sequenceQueen of Tears
A married couple at the top of a retail conglomerate, three years in and barely speaking.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Empress
Habsburg portraiture and court embroidery, arranged so the jewellery reads as restraint rather than wealth.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Offer
The making of The Godfather, opened in the visual language of the film it is about.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWeCrashed
Startup iconography inflating and bursting — open-plan glass, beanbags and valuation charts, treated as one continuous bubble.
- Season 1
1 sequenceExtraordinary Attorney Woo
An autistic lawyer at a Seoul firm, and the biggest word-of-mouth hit Korean television had that year.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLovely Runner
A fan travelling back fifteen years to stop her favourite singer's death.
- Season 1
1 sequenceInventing Anna
Fashion-magazine layout and Manhattan gloss, assembled with the confidence of something that cannot afford itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMarry My Husband
A woman murdered by her husband, sent back ten years to arrange a different outcome.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dropout
Silicon Valley branding assembled and then quietly taken apart, for a company that was never anything but branding.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWinning Time
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 sequenceMary & George
A mother steering her son into James I's bed and the court that followed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTwenty-Five Twenty-One
A fencer and a reporter across the 1997 financial crisis and after.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHospital Playlist
Five doctors who have been friends since medical school, and a band they will not stop forming.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe English
Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer crossing 1890 Wyoming, and — for this catalogue — the single most disruptive title in the whole project.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe New Pope
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 sequenceP-Valley
Katori Hall's Mississippi Delta strip club, opened by a sequence shot with the same neon grammar as the club itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceUnorthodox
A young woman leaving a Satmar community in Williamsburg for Berlin.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFranklin
Eighteenth-century Paris in ink and gold leaf, assembling the diplomacy the series is about out of correspondence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceÉtoile
Two ballet companies swapping their best dancers across the Atlantic, from the Gilmore Girls writers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLittle America
Half-hour films about immigrants to the United States, each based on a real person.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Gentleman in Moscow
A count sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for thirty years, from the Amor Towles novel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceItaewon Class
An ex-convict opening a bar in Itaewon to ruin the company that ruined his father.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDispatches from Elsewhere
Jason Segel's series about an alternate-reality game that may not be a game, opened in eleven seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Time Traveler's Wife
Steven Moffat's adaptation of the Niffenegger novel, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama told in parallel across one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShantaram
Nine seconds and a card. One of the shortest openings in the catalogue, for one of its longest-gestating adaptations.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Last Days of Ptolemy Grey
Samuel L. Jackson given a drug that returns his memory for thirty days.
- Season 1
1 sequenceJulia
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 sequenceBarbarians
Fifteen seconds of iron and forest — a card rather than a sequence, for a series about an ambush.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceD.P.
Military police chasing deserters, and the conscription system that produces them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceManhunt
Period engraving and telegraph type, assembling the pursuit of Lincoln's killer out of the era's own printed matter.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Underground Railroad
Barry Jenkins's miniseries, opened with portraiture that holds on faces long enough to become uncomfortable.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe 8 Show
Eight contestants paid by the second in a building where the higher floors earn more.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuper Pumped
The Uber story as the first season of an intended anthology about companies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Regime
Palace portraiture and state iconography assembled into propaganda for a country that does not exist.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe New Look
Couture construction shown as engineering — pattern, thread and seam assembling a silhouette, by Imaginary Forces.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRocket Boys
Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai building India's nuclear and space programmes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRabbit Hole
Kiefer Sutherland as a corporate spy framed for murder, opened in sixteen seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Devil Judge
A televised trial system in a near-future Korea, run by a judge with his own plan for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFatal Attraction
The 1987 film reworked as a series that takes the other side of the story seriously.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Are Who We Are
Luca Guadagnino's only television series, on an American army base in Veneto, opened in ten seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGeorge & Tammy
George Jones and Tammy Wynette, with both leads singing their own recordings.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmother
A death on a Clare beach and the family who all have a reason to have wanted it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGrease: Rise of the Pink Ladies
The Pink Ladies four years before the film, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlood & Water
A Cape Town teenager who believes a swimming champion at her new school is the sister abducted at birth.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCaliphate
A Stockholm schoolgirl recruited online, and the officer who cannot get anyone to listen. Swedish title Kalifat.
- Season 1
1 sequenceToo Close
A forensic psychiatrist and the patient who will not stay on her side of the table.
- Season 1
1 sequenceControl Z
A Mexican school where a hacker exposes every student's secrets, opened in nine seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceIt's Okay to Not Be Okay
A psychiatric carer and a children's author, told through illustrated fairy tales between episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCigarette Girl
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 sequenceOktoberfest 1900
A Nuremberg brewer trying to force his way into Munich's festival, and the family he spends to do it.
- Season 1
1 sequence9-1-1: Nashville
The third 9-1-1, moving the format to Tennessee, with the franchise's siren-and-dispatch open rebuilt in country.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAll Creatures Great & Small
The Yorkshire vet stories remade, with a title sequence that is largely just the Dales.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Artful Dodger
Dickens's pickpocket grown up into a surgeon in colonial Australia, and still stealing on the side.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBehind Her Eyes
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 sequenceBoots
A closeted teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1990, from Greg Cope White's memoir.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Couple Next Door
Two couples in a Leeds cul-de-sac, and what starts once one of them looks over the fence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Crowded Room
Tom Holland in a 1979 case built on the Billy Milligan story.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCruel Summer
Two girls, three summers and one accusation, told from both sides at once and cut between them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFive Days at Memorial
A New Orleans hospital across the five days after Katrina, and the decisions taken inside it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGinny & Georgia
A mother of thirty and a daughter of fifteen, and the fifteen years between them nobody will explain.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Good Lord Bird
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 sequenceThe Hunting Wives
A Massachusetts family relocated to east Texas, and the shooting club the wife falls in with.
- Season 1
1 sequenceIrma Vep
Olivier Assayas remaking his own film as a series about remaking a film, with silent-era titles to match.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKamikaze
A Danish teenager who survives the plane crash that kills her family and spends her inheritance trying not to feel it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLittle Fires Everywhere
Two mothers in a planned Ohio suburb, and the house that is already burning down in the first scene.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
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 sequenceMaestra: Strings of Truth
A conductor holding an orchestra together while the deaths around it accumulate.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMrs. America
The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, opened by period graphic design doing the arguing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMy Liberation Notes
Three siblings commuting out of the suburbs, in a series largely about wanting to be somewhere else.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Piece (2023)
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
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 sequenceThe Plot Against America
David Simon's Roth adaptation, opened by American stamps and postmarks turning quietly wrong.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRecord of Youth
A model trying to become an actor before his military service, against everyone's advice.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Red River
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
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 sequenceSullivan's Crossing
A neurosurgeon who goes back to her father's campground in Nova Scotia and stays.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSweet Magnolias
Three friends in a small South Carolina town, adapted from Sherryl Woods's novels.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Sympathizer
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 sequenceThe Terminal List
A Navy SEAL who comes home to work out that the ambush was arranged, from Jack Carr's novel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTwinkling Watermelon
The hearing son of deaf parents sent back to 1995, where he meets his father at nineteen.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWalker
Walker, Texas Ranger remade for the CW with the ranger's family moved into the foreground.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Were Liars
A summer on a private island off Massachusetts, and the accident nobody in the family will describe.
- Season 1