Sci-Fi
Ships, starfields, and the promise of somewhere else.
Sci-fi accounts for 268 of the 2,618 shows here, with 332 opening title sequences from 1952 to the present.
More of them began in the 2010s than in any other decade — 71, against 55 in the 2020s.
29 rebuilt their titles mid-run, Doctor Who most of all with ten sequences.
268 shows · 332 sequences
The ones that kept changing
All 29 in Sci-Fi · every genre →
10 sequences
Doctor Who
Rebuilt for almost every Doctor, and each rebuild invented its own technique — a camera filming its own monitor, light photographed through moving slots, and finally the first computer-generated titles on British television.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–6
- Seasons 7–10
- and 7 more
8 sequences
Doctor Who (2005)
The revival kept the tunnel and the logo and threw out everything else, then carried on rebuilding — clouds, fire, clockwork — with a new arrangement of the same 1963 melody every few years.
- Season 1
- Seasons 2–4
- Seasons 5–6
- and 5 more
5 sequences
Babylon 5
Five seasons, five openings, and each one changes who is allowed to speak. The monologue passes from the station's first commander to his successor to his second-in-command, then splinters across the whole cast, then stops being a monologue at all.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 2 more
5 sequences
The X-Files
One sequence held untouched for seven years, then rebuilt twice as the cast turned over. The card at the end is the real trick: it reads 'The Truth Is Out There' most weeks, and something else entirely more than twenty times.
- Seasons 1–7
- Season 8
- Season 9
- and 2 more
4 sequences
Farscape
A Henson creature workshop pointed at space opera, and an opening that halves in ambition halfway through the run — the narrated version explaining the premise gives way to one that assumes you already know it.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
4 sequences
Stargate Atlantis
The same franchise moved to another galaxy, and the titles say so — a city rather than a gate, rising out of water instead of standing in a mountain.
- Season 1
- Seasons 2–3
- Season 4
- and 1 more
Most looked up in sci-fi
Pick a decade above for all 268
1 sequence
Stranger Things
Red letters assembling out of the dark in ITC Benguiat, glowing at the edges like a paperback cover left in the sun. An argument that a title sequence can be nothing but type and still do all the work.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequence
Pluribus
Vince Gilligan's first series after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, opened in twenty-one seconds of white dots on black that settle into the title and hold nothing else — no cast, no footage, no colour.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Fallout
Retro-futurist advertising for a world that ended — the games' Vault-Tec aesthetic reproduced exactly, and varied per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequence
3%
Netflix's first Brazilian original: a selection process that lets three in a hundred cross to the other side.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Severance
A man walking through his own head, drawn as a corporate-training diagram that keeps folding back into itself. Oliver Latta's animation, and the best argument in years that a title sequence can be the thesis.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequence
Silo
A cross-section of the silo, descending. The camera falls the length of a buried structure the characters spend the series failing to understand, which tells you the shape of the thing before the plot does.
- Season 1
1 sequence
For All Mankind
Archive footage of the space race, doctored — real newsreel edited so that the alternate history it depicts appears to have actually been filmed.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Foundation
Mathematics rendered as architecture — the Prime Radiant's equations building and dissolving structures across millennia.
- Season 1
10 sequencesDoctor Who
Rebuilt for almost every Doctor, and each rebuild invented its own technique — a camera filming its own monitor, light photographed through moving slots, and finally the first computer-generated titles on British television.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–6
- Seasons 7–10
- and 7 more
3 sequences
Dark
Faces split and mirrored against themselves, reflected into a second image that is never quite the same person — a show about the same people at four ages, saying so before a word is spoken.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequence
Alice in Borderland
An emptied Tokyo shot as architecture — Shibuya with nobody in it, which is more unsettling than anything the games do.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
A deliberate return to the old shape after two shows that avoided it — the Enterprise sweeping past ringed planets and ice moons, Pike narrating, and a theme that keeps reaching for Courage's original without ever quite quoting it.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceThe Man in the High Castle
Dick's occupied America, opened by newsreel light thrown across a map that has the wrong flags on it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
3 Body Problem
Three suns and a countdown, rendered as physics rather than drama — the orbital problem of the title animated until it stops looking solvable.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Black Mirror
A screen cracking, and that is the whole thing. Eighteen seconds of glitch and a fracture spreading across black glass — an anthology refusing to introduce anything, because each episode is a different show.
- Seasons 1–7
5 sequencesThe X-Files
One sequence held untouched for seven years, then rebuilt twice as the cast turned over. The card at the end is the real trick: it reads 'The Truth Is Out There' most weeks, and something else entirely more than twenty times.
- Seasons 1–7
- Season 8
- Season 9
- and 2 more
1 sequence
Person of Interest
Surveillance footage narrated by the machine watching it — an opening delivered from the point of view of the software, years before that was a common idea.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAndor
A Star Wars show that refuses the fanfare: a plain card, a few bars, and straight in. The restraint is the statement.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequence
Smallville
Remy Zero's 'Save Me' over a cast that changed almost completely across ten years, with the credits rebuilt around each departure.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Expanse
Orbital mechanics as graphic design — stations, ships and the Belt drawn as engineering schematics rather than spectacle.
- Season 1
1 sequenceResident Alien
An alien stranded in small-town Colorado, impersonating the doctor whose body he took.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Westworld
Things being manufactured, filmed as though it were tender: a horse and rider printed strand by strand, hands assembled out of white thread, a player piano working the theme out by itself. Rebuilt every season as the show's idea of what is being made changes.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequence
Firefly
A slide guitar and a weary blues vocal over a spaceship. Sonny Rhodes sings words the show's creator wrote, and the argument of the whole series — that this is a western that happens to be in orbit — is settled before a line of dialogue is spoken.
- Season 1
3 sequences
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Enterprise-D passing the camera at warp while Patrick Stewart reads the mission statement. Stately, slow and completely confident — it takes almost a minute and a half before anything happens, and it never once feels the need to hurry.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Seasons 3–7