Sci-Fi

Ships, starfields, and the promise of somewhere else.

272 shows · 335 sequences

The ones that kept changing

All 28 in Sci-Fi · every genre →

Doctor Who

1963–1989BBC OneSci-Fi

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

Doctor Who (2005)

2005–BBC OneSci-Fi

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

Babylon 5

1993–1998Syndication / TNTSci-Fi

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

The X-Files

1993–2002, 2016–2018FoxSci-Fi

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

Farscape

1999–2003Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

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

Stargate Atlantis

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

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

2020s

Pluribus

2025–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Vince Gilligan's first series after Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, opened in twenty-one seconds.

Season 1

Fallout

2024–Prime VideoSci-Fi

Retro-futurist advertising for a world that ended — the games' Vault-Tec aesthetic reproduced exactly, and varied per episode.

Season 1

Severance

2022–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Silo

2023–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Foundation

2021–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Mathematics rendered as architecture — the Prime Radiant's equations building and dissolving structures across millennia.

Season 1

Alice in Borderland

2020–NetflixSci-Fi

An emptied Tokyo shot as architecture — Shibuya with nobody in it, which is more unsettling than anything the games do.

Season 1

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

2022–Paramount+Sci-Fi

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

3 Body Problem

2024–NetflixSci-Fi

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

Andor

2022–2025Disney+Sci-Fi

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

Resident Alien

2021–SyfySci-Fi

An alien stranded in small-town Colorado, impersonating the doctor whose body he took.

Season 1

Dune: Prophecy

2024–HBOSci-Fi

The Bene Gesserit ten thousand years before the films, with a title sequence built from spice and sand.

Season 1

Invasion

2021–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Geometry spreading across the globe like frost, seen from far enough away that no one on the ground is visible.

Season 1

Ironheart

2025Disney+Sci-Fi

An MIT student building her own armour, and nine seconds to introduce her.

Season 1

Murderbot

2025–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Corporate spacefaring iconography interrupted by the soap operas its narrator would rather be watching.

Season 1

Halo

2022–2024Paramount+Sci-Fi

The Bungie games adapted, with Master Chief's helmet coming off in the first episode.

Season 1

Dark Matter

2024–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

One man's life branching into every version it could have taken, rendered by Imaginary Forces as a structure that will not stop dividing.

Season 1

The Institute

2025MGM+Sci-Fi

Stephen King's facility for children with abilities, who are told they are there to help.

Season 1

Snowpiercer

2020–2024TNT / AMCSci-Fi

The Bong Joon-ho film continued as a series on a train that cannot stop, opened in fourteen seconds.

Season 1

1899

2022NetflixSci-Fi

From the makers of Dark, and it shows: mirrored imagery and a ship's geometry folding back on itself, over a slowed cover of 'White Rabbit'.

Season 1

Loki

2021–2023Disney+Sci-Fi

Bureaucratic typography and timeline diagrams — a superhero series whose titles are styled after an office that manages history.

Season 1

The Acolyte

2024Disney+Sci-Fi

A Jedi murder mystery a century before the prequels, with ten seconds of titles for a franchise that opened on a crawl.

Season 1

Star Trek: Picard

2020–2023Paramount+Sci-Fi

An opening about memory rather than exploration. Fragments of a life — a vineyard, a Borg cube, a face — resolve out of swirling particles, and only at the very end does it admit it is a Star Trek show.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

WandaVision

2021Disney+Sci-Fi

A different decade's sitcom opening every week — hand-drawn fifties, animated sixties, video-tape seventies, saccharine eighties, mockumentary two-thousands — each one a faithful pastiche of a real show's titles, and each one a little more wrong than the last.

Season 1

Quantum Leap (2022)

2022–2024NBCSci-Fi

The revival, which restages the original's narrated premise for a new leaper thirty years on.

Season 1

Obi-Wan Kenobi

2022Disney+Sci-Fi

Ten years into the exile on Tatooine, with the character and the actor both back after seventeen years.

Season 1

Raised by Wolves

2020–2022HBO MaxSci-Fi

Androids, soil and bone rendered in the same clinical grey — a sequence with no warmth in it at all, for a show about parenting.

Season 1

The Peripheral

2022Prime VideoSci-Fi

William Gibson adapted across two futures, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Echo

2024Disney+Sci-Fi

The Hawkeye villain given her own series and a title sequence woven out of Choctaw history.

Season 1

Devs

2020FXSci-Fi

Alex Garland on determinism inside a quantum computing division, with two minutes of titles that behave like the machine.

Season 1

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier

2021Disney+Sci-Fi

Two supporting characters given the shield to argue over, and a title sequence built out of torn paper and news footage.

Season 1

Stargirl

2020–2022DC Universe / The CWSci-Fi

The Justice Society rebuilt by a teenager in small-town Nebraska.

Season 1

Constellation

2024Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Doubled and inverted imagery over ice and orbit — two versions of the same events, laid on top of one another.

Season 1

The Uncanny Counter

2020–2023OCNSci-Fi

Demon hunters working out of a noodle restaurant.

Season 1

Blade Runner: Black Lotus

2021–2022Adult SwimSci-Fi

The Blade Runner world animated, set between the two films.

Season 1

The Man Who Fell to Earth

2022Showtime / Paramount+Sci-Fi

The Tevis novel continued rather than remade, with Chiwetel Ejiofor as a second visitor.

Season 1

Extrapolations

2023Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Climate data drawn as landscape — thirty-five seconds of a graph becoming a coastline.

Season 1

Brave New World

2020PeacockSci-Fi

Huxley adapted as Peacock's flagship launch drama, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Hello Tomorrow!

2023Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Timeshare salesmen selling lunar property in a retrofuturist America that never happened.

Season 1

Sunny

2024Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Domestic robotics rendered as cheerful product design, in exactly the register that makes a helpful machine frightening.

Season 1

Tribes of Europa

2021Netflix (Germany)Sci-Fi

Europe broken into warring tribes after a global blackout, opened in eleven seconds.

Season 1

Biohackers

2020–2021NetflixSci-Fi

A German medical student who chose her university for the professor she intends to expose.

Season 1

Ahsoka

2023–Disney+Sci-Fi

The animated character brought into live action, in the branch of the franchise that assumes you watched the cartoons.

Season 1

Alien: Earth

2025FXSci-Fi

Noah Hawley's Alien series, whose titles rebuild the slow-assembling wordmark of the 1979 film for television.

Season 1

The Book of Boba Fett

2021–2022Disney+Sci-Fi

The bounty hunter taking over a crime syndicate, in a spin-off that hands two of its seven episodes back to The Mandalorian.

Season 1

Cowboy Bebop (2021)

2021NetflixSci-Fi

A live-action restaging of one of the most admired title sequences in animation, shot-for-shot against Yoko Kanno's original arrangement.

Season 1

Hawkeye

2021Disney+Sci-Fi

A Christmas series about the Avenger with no powers, opening on a wall of comic-panel artwork.

Season 1

Island

2022–2023TVINGSci-Fi

Jeju as the ground of a long fight between demons and the people bound to stop them.

Season 1

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

2023–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Field notes, redacted files and creature silhouettes — a monster show introduced entirely through paperwork.

Season 2

Moon Knight

2022Disney+Sci-Fi

A man with dissociative identity disorder and an Egyptian god sharing him, with titles that split down the middle to match.

Season 1

Ms. Marvel

2022Disney+Sci-Fi

A Jersey City teenager who is a fan of the Avengers before she is one, in nine seconds of animated marker pen.

Season 1

Percy Jackson and the Olympians

2023–Disney+Sci-Fi

The novels adapted with their author involved, and titles that run at the end of the episode rather than the start.

Season 1
Season 2

Power Rangers Cosmic Fury

2023NetflixSci-Fi

The thirtieth season, and the first made for streaming rather than a children's channel.

Season 1

Power Rangers Dino Fury

2021–2022NickelodeonSci-Fi

Dinosaur rangers again, sixteen years on, with the first deaf ranger in the franchise.

Season 1

Secret Invasion

2023Disney+Sci-Fi

The first main-title sequence a major studio made with generative AI, and the argument about it drowned out the series underneath.

Season 1

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

2024–2025Disney+Sci-Fi

Four children lost in the galaxy, played as an eighties Amblin adventure.

Season 1

Station Eleven

2021HBOSci-Fi

Hand-drawn comic panels from the book within the book, animated just enough to move — the artefact the survivors carry, doing the introducing.

Season 1

2010s

Stranger Things

2016–NetflixSci-Fi

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

3%

2016–2020NetflixSci-Fi

Netflix's first Brazilian original: a selection process that lets three in a hundred cross to the other side.

Season 1

For All Mankind

2019–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Dark

2017–2020NetflixSci-Fi

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

The Man in the High Castle

2015–2019Prime VideoSci-Fi

Dick's occupied America, opened by newsreel light thrown across a map that has the wrong flags on it.

Season 1

Black Mirror

2011–Channel 4 / NetflixSci-Fi

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

Person of Interest

2011–2016CBSSci-Fi

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

The Expanse

2015–2022Syfy / Amazon Prime VideoSci-Fi

Orbital mechanics as graphic design — stations, ships and the Belt drawn as engineering schematics rather than spectacle.

Season 1

Westworld

2016–2022HBOSci-Fi

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

The Orville

2017–2022Fox / HuluSci-Fi

A ship passing the camera to a full orchestral fanfare, played entirely straight — a comedy whose titles are a sincere love letter to the ones this catalogue opens with.

Season 1

Star Trek: Discovery

2017–2024Paramount+Sci-Fi

A complete break from every Trek opening before it — no ship, no narration, just schematic drafting-table renderings of Starfleet hardware assembling and dissolving in empty space, with a pair of hands reaching through it all.

Seasons 1–2
Seasons 3–5

The Flash

2014–2023The CWSci-Fi

The same narrated formula as Arrow, delivered faster — which is at least appropriate.

Season 1

Falling Skies

2011–2015TNTSci-Fi

A resistance militia in occupied Boston, produced by Steven Spielberg, opened in eleven seconds.

Season 1

The 100

2014–2020The CWSci-Fi

A card and a sting for most of its run, expanding into a full sequence only at the end.

Season 7

Legion

2017–2019FXSci-Fi

Noah Hawley's series about a man who cannot trust his own perception, with title design to match.

Season 1

Orphan Black

2013–2017Space / BBC AmericaSci-Fi

One face fracturing into many, which is both the premise and a fair description of what Tatiana Maslany was asked to do every week.

Season 1

The Umbrella Academy

2019–2024NetflixSci-Fi

Comic-panel graphics and a brass sting, introducing seven siblings by number rather than name.

Season 1

Wayward Pines

2015–2016FoxSci-Fi

An Idaho town nobody can leave, from the Blake Crouch novels.

Season 1

His Dark Materials

2019–2022BBC One / HBOSci-Fi

Pullman's trilogy adapted with a title sequence that opens a window between worlds and keeps going through it.

Season 1

Supergirl

2015–2021CBS / The CWSci-Fi

The narrated-premise formula again, this time with a first-person introduction that ran for six seasons.

Season 3

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

2013–2020ABCSci-Fi

Marvel's first television series, opening with agency insignia and a brass sting rather than any of the heroes it is adjacent to.

Season 1

The OA

2016–2019NetflixSci-Fi

Famously withheld — the first season put its title card nearly an hour into the first episode, so most viewers met the opening long after the show had started.

Seasons 1–2

See

2019–2022Apple TV+Sci-Fi

Texture rather than image — rope, bark, cloth and skin filmed close enough to be read by hand, for a world that lost its sight generations ago.

Season 1

Under the Dome

2013–2015CBSSci-Fi

A Stephen King novel stretched across three summers, and eleven seconds of a town under glass.

Season 1

Altered Carbon

2018–2020NetflixSci-Fi

Bodies printed, sleeved and discarded in fluid — the show's premise, that a person is software and flesh is hardware, shown rather than explained.

Season 1

Doom Patrol

2019–2023HBO MaxSci-Fi

Collage and cut-out animation with the wrongness left in — a superhero opening that looks assembled from a scrapbook by someone unwell.

Season 1

Legends of Tomorrow

2016–2022The CWSci-Fi

Thirteen seconds, by a show that worked out earlier than its siblings that the narrated premise was a joke worth dropping.

Season 5

Sense8

2015–2018NetflixSci-Fi

Two minutes of documentary footage from eight cities — festivals, protests, traffic, dancing — cut so fast the places stop being separable. The longest opening on this site, and it earns it.

Seasons 1–2

Timeless

2016–2018NBCSci-Fi

A stolen time machine chased through American history, cancelled twice and revived once.

Season 1

The Twilight Zone (2019)

2019–2020CBS All AccessSci-Fi

Jordan Peele's revival, which rebuilds Marius Constant's theme and the spiral for a fourth time — sixty years after the original and still recognisably the same idea.

Season 1

The Gifted

2017–2019FoxSci-Fi

A family on the run in the X-Men world, made while Fox still held the rights.

Season 1

Humans

2015–2018Channel 4 / AMCSci-Fi

Domestic synths in an England that already has them, opened by faces that hold still a beat too long.

Season 1

The Magicians

2015–2020SyfySci-Fi

Magic treated as postgraduate study, opened with the seriousness of a university prospectus.

Season 1

12 Monkeys

2015–2018SyfySci-Fi

The Terry Gilliam film expanded into four seasons of time travel that actually resolves.

Season 1

Travelers

2016–2018NetflixSci-Fi

Consciousnesses sent back from a ruined future into people about to die anyway, so the timeline notices nothing.

Season 1

Batwoman

2019–2022The CWSci-Fi

Gotham without Batman, with the cowl passing twice across three seasons.

Season 1

Revolution

2012–2014NBCSci-Fi

Fifteen years after all electricity stopped working, from Eric Kripke and J. J. Abrams.

Season 1

Runaways

2017–2019HuluSci-Fi

Six teenagers who discover their parents are a supervillain cabal, from the Brian K. Vaughan comic.

Season 1

Limitless

2015–2016CBSSci-Fi

The film's premise as a procedural, opened by Prologue in twenty-two seconds of chemical bloom.

Season 1

Haven

2010–2015SyfySci-Fi

A Maine town where the afflictions are supernatural and hereditary, from the Stephen King novella.

Season 1

The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance

2019NetflixSci-Fi

The Henson prequel built with real puppets, opened by a sequence that shows you the crystal breaking before the story reaches it.

Season 1

The Rain

2018–2020Netflix (Denmark)Sci-Fi

A virus carried in rainfall, and two siblings crossing a depopulated Scandinavia.

Season 1

Black Lightning

2018–2021The CWSci-Fi

A retired hero returning to the work as a school principal in his fifties.

Season 1

Defiance

2013–2015SyfySci-Fi

A terraformed St. Louis shared by seven alien species, launched alongside a video game set in the same world.

Season 1

Colony

2016–2018USA NetworkSci-Fi

Occupied Los Angeles under an alien administration nobody has seen, opened in ten seconds.

Season 1

Krypton

2018–2019SyfySci-Fi

Superman's grandfather two hundred years before the planet dies, which the audience already knows it will.

Season 1

Continuum

2012–2015ShowcaseSci-Fi

Vancouver rendered as a surveillance grid, with the future arriving as an overlay on the present.

Season 1

Counterpart

2017–2019StarzSci-Fi

Imaginary Forces splitting everything in two — figures, corridors, the type itself — for a show about a man meeting the version of himself from the other side of a crossing.

Seasons 1–2

Inhumans

2017ABCSci-Fi

A cancelled film released as a series and shot partly for IMAX, in the least loved thing Marvel Television made.

Season 1

Terra Nova

2011FoxSci-Fi

A colony sent eighty-five million years into the past, cancelled after one season for cost.

Season 1

Caprica

2010SyfySci-Fi

The Battlestar Galactica prequel, fifty years earlier, about the invention of the Cylons rather than the war with them.

Season 1

Cloak & Dagger

2018–2019FreeformSci-Fi

Two New Orleans teenagers whose powers only work near each other, which the titles make the whole design out of.

Season 2

Lost Girl

2010–2016Showcase / SyfySci-Fi

A succubus choosing neither Fae court, in one of Canada's longest-running genre exports.

Season 1

Almost Human

2013–2014FoxSci-Fi

A detective partnered with an android in 2048, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Killjoys

2015–2019SyfySci-Fi

Fourteen seconds, a logo and a bass hit — a bounty-hunter show with no interest in explaining itself first.

Season 1

Alphas

2011–2012SyfySci-Fi

People with abilities that each cost them something, run as a case-of-the-week team show.

Season 1

Minority Report

2015FoxSci-Fi

The film continued a decade after precrime was shut down, and cancelled after ten episodes.

Season 1

Salvation

2017–2018CBSSci-Fi

An asteroid six months from Earth and a government that would rather not say so.

Season 1

El Ministerio del Tiempo

2015–2020La 1Sci-Fi

A secret Spanish government department policing doors into the country's own history.

Season 1

Frequency

2016–2017The CWSci-Fi

A ham radio that reaches the operator's dead father twenty years earlier, from the 2000 film.

Season 1

Real Humans

2012–2014SVT1Sci-Fi

Household androids in a Sweden otherwise exactly like this one, remade in Britain as Humans.

Season 1

Outcasts

2011BBC OneSci-Fi

A human settlement on Carpathia five years after Earth stopped answering.

Season 1

Maniac

2018NetflixSci-Fi

Retro-futurist hardware and pharmaceutical diagrams in a palette borrowed from 1980s Japan — a computer's idea of a mind, drawn by the machine trying to fix one.

Season 1

11.22.63

2016HuluSci-Fi

King's time-travel novel as eight hours, in which the past resists being changed and pushes back.

Season 1

Atlantis

2013–2015BBC OneSci-Fi

The BBC's Saturday teatime myth series after Merlin, with the same job to do and the same slot to do it in.

Season 1

Childhood's End

2015SyfySci-Fi

The Arthur C. Clarke novel adapted across three nights.

Season 1

A Discovery of Witches

2018–2022Sky One / Sky MaxSci-Fi

A historian who finds an enchanted manuscript in the Bodleian and cannot put it back.

Season 1

Dominion

2014–2015SyfySci-Fi

Archangels at war over a walled Las Vegas, twenty-five years after the film it follows.

Season 1

Future Man

2017–2020HuluSci-Fi

A janitor recruited by time travellers because he finished a video game nobody else could.

Seasons 1–2

Heroes Reborn

2015–2016NBCSci-Fi

The revival, five years after the original stopped, and one season long.

Season 1

The Mandalorian

2019–2023Disney+Sci-Fi

A chapter card and Ludwig Göransson's bass recorder — the first live-action Star Wars series opens like a serial, which is what it is.

Season 1

Power Rangers Beast Morphers

2019NickelodeonSci-Fi

Animal DNA and Grid energy, and the first season made after Hasbro bought the franchise.

Season 1

Power Rangers Dino Charge

2015–2016NickelodeonSci-Fi

Energems and dinosaur spirits, and the season that ran two years under one name.

Season 1

Power Rangers Megaforce

2013NickelodeonSci-Fi

The twentieth-anniversary season, built to reach back through the whole franchise.

Season 1
Season 2

2000s

Smallville

2001–2011The WB / The CWSci-Fi

Remy Zero's 'Save Me' over a cast that changed almost completely across ten years, with the credits rebuilt around each departure.

Season 1

Firefly

2002FoxSci-Fi

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

Heroes

2006–2010NBCSci-Fi

An eclipse and a card, in twelve seconds. The restraint is the point — a superhero show refusing to open like one.

Season 1

Fringe

2008–2013FoxSci-Fi

Pseudo-scientific terms floating in coloured fog — and the colour is the plot: the palette changes to tell you which universe or era the episode is set in.

Season 1
Season 4
Season 5

Star Trek: Enterprise

2001–2005UPNSci-Fi

The franchise's most argued-over opening: no orchestra, no starfield, but a montage of real human exploration — sailing ships, biplanes, spacesuits — under a soft-rock ballad. Half the audience never forgave it, which is its own kind of achievement.

Seasons 1–2
Seasons 3–4

Stargate Atlantis

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

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

Misfits

2009–2013E4Sci-Fi

Community-service orange and a storm, with superpowers treated as one more thing happening to people who already had enough going on.

Season 1

Life on Mars

2006–2007BBC OneSci-Fi

A Manchester detective wakes in 1973 and cannot establish whether he is mad, in a coma, or back in time — the show's own summary, delivered as narration.

Season 1

Torchwood

2006–2011BBC Three / BBC OneSci-Fi

The Doctor Who spinoff that wanted to be taken seriously, opening with Cardiff, a rift and a great deal of blue light.

Season 1

Warehouse 13

2009–2014SyfySci-Fi

Artefacts on shelves, filmed like a museum inventory that has started moving on its own.

Season 1

Stargate Universe

2009–2011SyfySci-Fi

The franchise's darkest entry, and its plainest opening — no fanfare, no gate, just a ship going somewhere nobody chose.

Season 1

Dark Angel

2000–2002FoxSci-Fi

Post-collapse Seattle in thirty-five seconds, from James Cameron's only substantial television project.

Season 1

Andromeda

2000–2005SyndicationSci-Fi

Another posthumous Roddenberry premise, opened with a ship, a collapsed republic and a great deal of lens flare.

Season 1
Season 3

Primeval

2007–2011ITVSci-Fi

Anomalies in time opening across England and letting prehistory through, in ITV's answer to the revived Doctor Who.

Season 3

Dollhouse

2009–2010FoxSci-Fi

Bodies wiped and rewritten, shown as blank figures being dressed — a premise stated without a word.

Season 1

The 4400

2004–2007USA NetworkSci-Fi

Four thousand four hundred missing people returned at once, introduced through the photographs of who they were.

Season 1

Eureka

2006–2012Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

Twelve seconds of small-town Americana with the physics quietly wrong in the background.

Season 1

Kyle XY

2006–2009ABC FamilySci-Fi

A teenager found in the woods with no memory and no navel, which is the whole first episode's mystery in one detail.

Season 1

Sanctuary

2008–2011SyfySci-Fi

A refuge for cryptids run by a 150-year-old doctor, shot almost entirely on green screen.

Season 1

Phil of the Future

2004–2006Disney ChannelSci-Fi

A family from 2121 stranded in the present when their time machine breaks.

Season 1

The Sarah Jane Adventures

2007–2011CBBCSci-Fi

The Doctor Who spin-off built for children, giving a companion from 1973 her own series thirty-four years later.

Season 1

Doctor Who (2005)

2005–BBC OneSci-Fi

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

The Dead Zone

2002–2007USA NetworkSci-Fi

The Stephen King adaptation as a weekly series, with a man who reads futures by touch.

Season 1

FlashForward

2009–2010ABCSci-Fi

Everyone on Earth blacks out for two minutes and seventeen seconds and sees the same day six months ahead.

Season 1

The Dresden Files

2007SyfySci-Fi

Jim Butcher's wizard private investigator in Chicago, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Mutant X

2001–2004SyndicationSci-Fi

A Marvel-adjacent series made in Canada that Fox sued over for resembling the X-Men.

Season 1

Life on Mars (US)

2008–2009ABCSci-Fi

The American remake of the BBC series, opening on 1973 New York and the Bowie song both versions are named for.

Season 1

The Lost Room

2006Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

A motel room that stopped existing in 1961 and left its contents behind as objects with impossible properties.

Season 1

Tru Calling

2003–2005FoxSci-Fi

A morgue attendant who relives days, opened with the clock imagery the premise requires.

Season 1

Jeremiah

2002–2004ShowtimeSci-Fi

J. Michael Straczynski's series about a world where everyone over puberty died fifteen years ago.

Season 1

Cleopatra 2525

2000–2001SyndicationSci-Fi

Half-hour science fiction from the Hercules and Xena producers, paired with Jack of All Trades in one hour.

Season 1

Threshold

2005–2006CBSSci-Fi

Geometric contact imagery and a rising tone, from one of three first-contact series the American networks launched in the same season.

Season 1

Odyssey 5

2002ShowtimeSci-Fi

Five astronauts sent back five years to prevent the destruction of Earth, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Witchblade

2001–2002TNTSci-Fi

A New York detective bonded to a sentient gauntlet, from the Top Cow comic.

Season 1

Jake 2.0

2003–2004UPNSci-Fi

An NSA computer technician infused with nanites in an accident, and made a field agent because of it.

Season 1

Special Unit 2

2001–2002UPNSci-Fi

A Chicago police unit whose caseload is entirely mythological, and which nobody else in the department believes exists.

Season 1

The 10th Kingdom

2000NBCSci-Fi

Ten hours of fairy tale in which Manhattan and the Nine Kingdoms turn out to share a mirror.

Season 1

Battlestar Galactica

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The only title sequence on this site that reports the plot. Under the Gayatri Mantra and the Cylon text, the American version ends on a count of the surviving human population — a figure recalculated for each episode, so the titles get worse as the show goes on.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3
Season 4

Kamen Rider: Dragon Knight

2008–2009The CWSci-Fi

Kamen Rider Ryuki rebuilt for American Saturday mornings, and the only Kamen Rider to win an Emmy.

Season 1

The Lone Gunmen

2001FoxSci-Fi

The X-Files spin-off about its three conspiracy theorists, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Power Rangers Dino Thunder

2004ABC FamilySci-Fi

The season that brought the original green ranger back as a palaeontology teacher.

Season 1

Power Rangers Jungle Fury

2008Toon DisneySci-Fi

Kung fu students who take animal spirits, working out of a pizza parlour.

Season 1

Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue

2000Fox KidsSci-Fi

A season whose rangers are a government rescue service rather than teenagers chosen by a wizard.

Season 1

Power Rangers Mystic Force

2006Toon DisneySci-Fi

The magic season, with wands instead of morphers and a mother among the rangers.

Season 1

Power Rangers Ninja Storm

2003ABC FamilySci-Fi

The season after Fox Kids closed, made in New Zealand and pitched lighter than the ones before it.

Season 1

Power Rangers Operation Overdrive

2007Toon DisneySci-Fi

Treasure hunting across continents, and the first season to put the rangers on a payroll.

Season 1

Power Rangers RPM

2009ABC FamilySci-Fi

The season set after the robots won, played as comedy inside a domed last city.

Season 1

Power Rangers S.P.D.

2005ABC Family / Toon DisneySci-Fi

The franchise's police year, rebuilt from Tokusou Sentai Dekaranger and set two decades ahead of the children watching it.

Season 1

Power Rangers Time Force

2001Fox KidsSci-Fi

Rangers sent back from the year 3000, remade from Mirai Sentai Timeranger.

Season 1

Power Rangers Wild Force

2002Fox KidsSci-Fi

The tenth Power Rangers year, remade from Hyakujuu Sentai Gaoranger and the last of them produced in America for a decade.

Season 1

Taken

2002Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

Spielberg's twenty-hour abduction serial, following three families over fifty years and broadcast across ten consecutive nights.

Season 1

Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

2008–2009FoxSci-Fi

The films continued between the second and third, with Bear McCreary scoring it and Fox cancelling it after two seasons.

Season 1

1990s

The X-Files

1993–2002, 2016–2018FoxSci-Fi

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

Stargate SG-1

1997–2007Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The gate opening, every week, for ten years — David Arnold's film theme rearranged for television and a sequence that never stopped being about one piece of hardware.

Season 1
Season 6
Season 9
and 1 more

Mighty Morphin Power Rangers

1993–1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Japanese Super Sentai footage cut against American actors, and the biggest thing on children's television for three years.

Season 1

Star Trek: Voyager

1995–2001UPNSci-Fi

The most purely beautiful of the Trek openings — Voyager skimming a comet, threading a nebula and sliding past a gas giant while Jerry Goldsmith writes the loneliest theme in the franchise. Nothing about it is in a hurry to get home.

Seasons 1–3
Seasons 4–7

Babylon 5

1993–1998Syndication / TNTSci-Fi

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

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

1993–1999SyndicationSci-Fi

A title sequence that starts still and learns to move. The station hangs motionless in the early years; by the war it is surrounded by traffic, which is the whole arc of the show in ninety seconds.

Seasons 1–3
Seasons 4–7

Farscape

1999–2003Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

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

Sliders

1995–2000Fox / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

A wormhole opening in a San Francisco street, and four people falling into it — the same shot every week for a show about never seeing the same world twice.

Season 2

Roswell

1999–2002The WB / UPNSci-Fi

Dido over a New Mexico desert, for a series that treats an alien conspiracy as primarily a problem of adolescence.

Season 1

seaQuest DSV

1993–1996NBCSci-Fi

A submarine, an orchestral fanfare and a narrated mission statement — Spielberg's answer to Star Trek, set downwards.

Season 1

The Outer Limits (1995)

1995–2002Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The revival, which keeps the control-voice conceit and rebuilds the imagery around nineties computer graphics.

Season 1

Lexx

1997–2002Citytv / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

A living insect-shaped ship the size of a planet, introduced with the seriousness of an opera and the budget of a regional theatre. Rebuilt every season, and stranger each time.

Season 2
Season 3
Season 4

The Secret World of Alex Mack

1994–1998NickelodeonSci-Fi

A girl doused in a chemical spill who can turn into a puddle of silver.

Season 1

Big Bad Beetleborgs

1996–1998Fox KidsSci-Fi

Three children granted the powers of their favourite comic by a phasm they let out of a haunted house.

Season 1
Season 2

Space: Above and Beyond

1995–1996FoxSci-Fi

Marines fighting an interstellar war, written by two X-Files producers and cancelled after the one season they had planned five of.

Season 1

Earth: Final Conflict

1997–2002SyndicationSci-Fi

Developed from Gene Roddenberry's notes after his death, and it shows in the titles: benign-looking aliens, civic architecture and a great deal of blue, all arranged to look like a press release rather than an invasion.

Season 1
Season 3
Season 5

VR Troopers

1994–1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

The Power Rangers formula applied to virtual reality, using footage from three different Japanese series at once.

Season 1

Bibleman

1995–2010TBNSci-Fi

A superhero with a lightsaber and scripture, made straight to video and then broadcast.

Season 1

The Worst Witch

1998–2001ITVSci-Fi

Jill Murphy's boarding school for witches, filmed a year before the first Harry Potter book was published in America.

Season 1

The Sentinel

1996–1999UPNSci-Fi

A detective whose five senses were permanently heightened by eighteen months alone in the jungle.

Season 1

Crusade

1999TNTSci-Fi

The Babylon 5 sequel, cancelled after thirteen episodes before any of them aired in order.

Season 1

Space Cases

1996–1997NickelodeonSci-Fi

Children lost on an alien ship, co-created by Peter David and Bill Mumy of Lost in Space.

Season 1

Nowhere Man

1995–1996UPNSci-Fi

A photojournalist whose entire identity is erased between courses of a dinner, over one photograph.

Season 1

Seven Days

1998–2001UPNSci-Fi

A government project that can send one man back exactly seven days, once, to undo a disaster.

Season 1

Total Recall 2070

1999Showtime / SpaceSci-Fi

A Canadian series taking more from Blade Runner than from the film it is named after.

Season 1

The Demon Headmaster

1996–1998BBC OneSci-Fi

A headmaster who hypnotises through his spectacles, from the Gillian Cross books, and the most frightening thing CBBC put out in the 1990s.

Season 1

The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr.

1993–1994FoxSci-Fi

A bounty hunter in 1893 chasing a device from the future, cancelled after one season and quoted ever since.

Season 1

Animorphs

1998–2000NickelodeonSci-Fi

Children who can turn into any animal they touch, from the books that sold sixty million copies.

Season 1

Earth 2

1994–1995NBCSci-Fi

Colonists on a planet that turns out to be alive, cancelled on a cliffhanger after twenty-one episodes.

Season 1

Highlander: The Series

1992–1998SyndicationSci-Fi

Queen's 'Princes of the Universe' over swordplay and lightning, and a narration explaining immortality every week for six years.

Season 1

The Journey of Allen Strange

1997–2000NickelodeonSci-Fi

An alien stranded on Earth and taken in by the family who find him.

Season 1

Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman

1993–1997ABCSci-Fi

Superman rewritten as a workplace romance, on the principle that Clark is the real man and the cape is the costume.

Season 1

Masked Rider

1995–1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Kamen Rider adapted for American television as a family sitcom with a monster in it.

Season 1

Mighty Morphin Alien Rangers

1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

Ten episodes bridging two seasons, with the regular cast turned into children and rangers from another planet standing in.

Season 1

Mortal Kombat: Conquest

1998–1999SyndicationSci-Fi

The games' tournament set six hundred years earlier, made for syndication and cancelled on a cliffhanger.

Season 1

Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nog

1998–1999Fox KidsSci-Fi

Irish myth given the Power Rangers treatment, shot in Ireland with armour instead of spandex.

Season 1

Ninja Turtles: The Next Mutation

1997–1998Fox KidsSci-Fi

The live-action Turtles made by the Power Rangers producers, and the one that added a fifth.

Season 1

Power Rangers in Space

1998Fox KidsSci-Fi

The season written as an ending, which rated well enough that the franchise carried on for decades.

Season 1

Power Rangers Lost Galaxy

1999Fox KidsSci-Fi

The first season to break the format and start again with a wholly separate cast and setting.

Season 1

Power Rangers Turbo

1997Fox KidsSci-Fi

The season that started with a feature film and handed four of the five suits to a new cast mid-run.

Season 1

Power Rangers Zeo

1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

The season straight after Mighty Morphin, remade from Chouriki Sentai Ohranger.

Season 1

So Weird

1999–2001Disney ChannelSci-Fi

A girl touring with her mother's band and investigating what she finds on the road, made darker than the channel usually allowed.

Season 1

Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad

1994–1995SyndicationSci-Fi

A garage band's keyboard player digitised into a computer to fight what lives there, adapted from Denkou Choujin Gridman.

Season 1

Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters from Beverly Hills

1994–1995USA NetworkSci-Fi

Four teenagers given powers by an alien tattoo, in a title that explains the whole programme.

Season 1

1980s

Star Trek: The Next Generation

1987–1994SyndicationSci-Fi

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

Quantum Leap

1989–1993NBCSci-Fi

Narration explaining a premise too complicated to infer, over a theme by Mike Post — the anthology format's problem solved in sixty seconds every week.

Season 1
Season 4

War of the Worlds

1988–1990SyndicationSci-Fi

A sequel to the 1953 film in which the aliens were never defeated, only dormant.

Season 1

The Twilight Zone (1985)

1985–1989CBSSci-Fi

The first revival, with the Grateful Dead re-recording Marius Constant's motif — the middle of three attempts at the same idea, all of which are now in this catalogue.

Season 1

Alien Nation

1989–1990FoxSci-Fi

The film continued as a series, with a buddy-cop format used to work through immigration and prejudice week by week.

Season 1

Amazing Stories

1985–1987NBCSci-Fi

John Williams scoring an animated history of storytelling — cave paintings to campfires to television — for Spielberg's anthology.

Season 1

Max Headroom

1987–1988ABCSci-Fi

A cyberpunk satire about television, broadcast on television, twenty minutes into the future.

Season 1

Automan

1983–1984ABCSci-Fi

A hologram crime-fighter generated by a police clerk's own program, made the year after Tron and looking it.

Season 1

V

1984–1985NBCSci-Fi

Visitor iconography and a red banner, borrowing its design language from twentieth-century propaganda quite deliberately.

Season 1

Knightmare

1987–1994ITVSci-Fi

A blindfolded child walked through a bluescreen dungeon by teammates who can see it — the first television format built on a video game's logic.

Season 1

The Ray Bradbury Theater

1985–1992HBO / USA NetworkSci-Fi

Bradbury adapting himself, introduced each week from an office full of the objects the stories came from.

Season 1

The Tripods

1984–1985BBC OneSci-Fi

The John Christopher novels adapted at great expense and cancelled two thirds of the way through the story.

Season 1

Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future

1987–1988SyndicationSci-Fi

Live action against computer animation, built so that a toy could shoot at the screen.

Season 1

Galactica 1980

1980ABCSci-Fi

The fleet reaching Earth at last, on a tenth of the original's budget and for ten episodes.

Season 1

The Greatest American Hero

1981–1983ABCSci-Fi

A schoolteacher handed a flying suit by aliens who lost the instruction manual in the first episode and never found it.

Season 1

Superboy

1988–1992SyndicationSci-Fi

Clark Kent at university in Florida, made for syndication while the films were between instalments.

Season 1

V: The Final Battle

1984NBCSci-Fi

The sequel miniseries to V, three nights long, and the point the story stopped being an allegory and became a war.

Season 1

1970s

The Six Million Dollar Man

1973–1978ABCSci-Fi

A crash, a countdown and the promise that they can rebuild him — narration that entered the language more thoroughly than the show did.

Season 1

The Incredible Hulk

1977–1982CBSSci-Fi

A narrated origin, a green transformation, and a piano coda so sad it became the show's real signature — though that plays over the closing credits, not these.

Season 1

Space: 1999

1975–1977ITVSci-Fi

The most confident opening Gerry Anderson ever made: a burst of brass, then a rapid-fire montage of clips from the episode you are about to watch, so no two broadcasts were identical.

Season 1
Season 2

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

1979–1981NBCSci-Fi

A disco-scored space opera that opens with a shuttle, a starfield and absolutely no embarrassment about either.

Season 1

Land of the Lost

1974–1976NBCSci-Fi

A raft over a waterfall into a closed pocket universe, written by Dorothy Fontana and David Gerrold for Saturday mornings.

Season 1

Blake's 7

1978–1981BBC OneSci-Fi

BBC electronic music and a rotating logo, rebuilt each series as the crew was killed off — which on this show happened often enough to matter.

Seasons 1–4

The Bionic Woman

1976–1978ABC / NBCSci-Fi

The Six Million Dollar Man's spinoff, with the same narrated-reconstruction structure and a better theme.

Season 1

UFO

1970–1971ITVSci-Fi

Anderson's first live-action series, set in a 1980 that never arrived, with purple wigs and a Barry Gray theme.

Season 1

Wonder Woman

1975–1979ABC / CBSSci-Fi

An animated comic-book opening with a disco theme that names the character and tells her what to do, repeatedly.

Season 2

Battlestar Galactica (1978)

1978–1979ABCSci-Fi

Stu Phillips's fanfare over Colonial Vipers and a narrated prologue about a lost tribe of humanity — the version the 2004 series would later strip of every ounce of that grandeur.

Season 1

Sapphire & Steel

1979–1982ITVSci-Fi

Two operatives who are not people, sent to repair breaks in time, explained to the audience only by a narrated list of elements.

Season 1

The Tomorrow People

1973–1979ITVSci-Fi

Children evolving telepathy in a Thames Television series remade twice since.

Season 1

Doomwatch

1970–1972BBC OneSci-Fi

A government department investigating the science that is about to go wrong, from two Doctor Who writers.

Season 1

Survivors

1975–1977BBC OneSci-Fi

Terry Nation's plague series, in which the titles kill the world in forty seconds using nothing but a broken test tube and a series of passport stamps.

Season 1

The Amazing Spider-Man

1977–1979CBSSci-Fi

CBS's live-action Spider-Man, dropped in part because the network did not want to be known for comic books.

Season 1

Logan's Run

1977–1978CBSSci-Fi

The film continued as a series, running fourteen episodes before CBS stopped it.

Season 1

1960s

Doctor Who

1963–1989BBC OneSci-Fi

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

Star Trek

1966–1969NBCSci-Fi

The one that set the shape of every space-opera opening since: a ship crossing the frame, a captain narrating a mission statement, and a melody built to be hummed. Alexander Courage wrote it as a fanfare and a lounge tune at the same time.

Season 1
Seasons 2–3

The Prisoner

1967–1968ITVSci-Fi

Thunder, a Lotus Seven driven hard past Parliament, a resignation letter slammed onto a desk, and then gas under the door of a man's own flat. Two minutes that explain the entire premise without a narrator, and end with the only line the show ever needed: I am not a number.

Season 1

Thunderbirds

1965–1966ITVSci-Fi

Five, four, three, two, one — the countdown, the launch bays, and Barry Gray's march. Probably the most quoted title sequence Britain has produced.

Season 1

Lost in Space

1965–1968CBSSci-Fi

John Williams, decades before anyone was calling him that, writing a fanfare for a family stranded in a jelly-mould spaceship.

Season 1

The Outer Limits

1963–1965ABCSci-Fi

The control-voice narration that takes over your television set — a premise so effective that the sequence is better remembered than most of the episodes.

Season 1

The Invaders

1967–1968ABCSci-Fi

A Quinn Martin series about one man who knows and cannot prove it, narrated in the second person.

Season 1

Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons

1967–1968ITVSci-Fi

Anderson's darkest supermarionation series, opened by two rings of light moving across a wall.

Season 1

The Time Tunnel

1966–1967ABCSci-Fi

Two scientists thrown through history, opened by a spiral that became the show's whole identity.

Season 1

Land of the Giants

1968–1970ABCSci-Fi

Irwin Allen's last 1960s series, about a suborbital flight stranded on a world of giants.

Season 2

Stingray

1964–1965ITVSci-Fi

"Stand by for action!" — the first British series filmed entirely in colour, and it opens by saying so.

Season 1

1950s

The Adventures of Superman

1952–1958SyndicationSci-Fi

"Faster than a speeding bullet" — the narration that defined the character for a generation before any film did.

Season 1

The Twilight Zone

1959–1964CBSSci-Fi

Three different openings in five seasons, and the one everybody can hum arrived third. Rod Serling narrates the audience into another dimension over abstractions that were, for 1959, genuinely strange television.

Season 1
Season 2
Seasons 3–5