Sci-Fi · 2010s
The 2010s account for 71 of the 268 sci-fi shows here, and 79 opening sequences.
No decade here has more sci-fi openings than this one.
Syfy carries the most, with twelve.
71 shows79 sequences
1 sequenceStranger 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 sequence3%
Netflix's first Brazilian original: a selection process that lets three in a hundred cross to the other side.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFor 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
3 sequencesDark
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 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 sequenceBlack 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
1 sequencePerson 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 sequenceThe Expanse
Orbital mechanics as graphic design — stations, ships and the Belt drawn as engineering schematics rather than spectacle.
- Season 1
4 sequencesWestworld
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 sequenceThe Orville
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
2 sequencesStar Trek: Discovery
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
1 sequenceThe Flash
The same narrated formula as Arrow, delivered faster — which is at least appropriate.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFalling Skies
A resistance militia in occupied Boston, produced by Steven Spielberg, opened in eleven seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe 100
A card and a sting for most of its run, expanding into a full sequence only at the end.
- Season 7
1 sequenceLegion
Noah Hawley's series about a man who cannot trust his own perception, with title design to match.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOrphan Black
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
1 sequenceWayward Pines
An Idaho town nobody can leave, from the Blake Crouch novels.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHis Dark Materials
Pullman's trilogy adapted with a title sequence that opens a window between worlds and keeps going through it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSupergirl
The narrated-premise formula again, this time with a first-person introduction that ran for six seasons.
- Season 3
2 sequencesThe OA
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.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceSee
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
1 sequenceUnder the Dome
A Stephen King novel stretched across three summers, and eleven seconds of a town under glass.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAltered Carbon
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
1 sequenceDoom Patrol
Collage and cut-out animation with the wrongness left in — a superhero opening that looks assembled from a scrapbook by someone unwell.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLegends of Tomorrow
Thirteen seconds, by a show that worked out earlier than its siblings that the narrated premise was a joke worth dropping.
- Season 5
1 sequenceSense8
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
1 sequenceTimeless
A stolen time machine chased through American history, cancelled twice and revived once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Twilight Zone (2019)
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
1 sequenceThe Gifted
A family on the run in the X-Men world, made while Fox still held the rights.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHumans
Domestic synths in an England that already has them, opened by faces that hold still a beat too long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Magicians
Magic treated as postgraduate study, opened with the seriousness of a university prospectus.
- Season 1
1 sequence12 Monkeys
The Terry Gilliam film expanded into four seasons of time travel that actually resolves.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTravelers
Consciousnesses sent back from a ruined future into people about to die anyway, so the timeline notices nothing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBatwoman
Gotham without Batman, with the cowl passing twice across three seasons.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRevolution
Fifteen years after all electricity stopped working, from Eric Kripke and J. J. Abrams.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRunaways
Six teenagers who discover their parents are a supervillain cabal, from the Brian K. Vaughan comic.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLimitless
The film's premise as a procedural, opened by Prologue in twenty-two seconds of chemical bloom.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHaven
A Maine town where the afflictions are supernatural and hereditary, from the Stephen King novella.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
The Henson prequel built with real puppets, opened by a sequence that shows you the crystal breaking before the story reaches it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Rain
A virus carried in rainfall, and two siblings crossing a depopulated Scandinavia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBlack Lightning
A retired hero returning to the work as a school principal in his fifties.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDefiance
A terraformed St. Louis shared by seven alien species, launched alongside a video game set in the same world.
- Season 1
1 sequenceColony
Occupied Los Angeles under an alien administration nobody has seen, opened in ten seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKrypton
Superman's grandfather two hundred years before the planet dies, which the audience already knows it will.
- Season 1
1 sequenceContinuum
Vancouver rendered as a surveillance grid, with the future arriving as an overlay on the present.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCounterpart
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
1 sequenceInhumans
A cancelled film released as a series and shot partly for IMAX, in the least loved thing Marvel Television made.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTerra Nova
A colony sent eighty-five million years into the past, cancelled after one season for cost.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaprica
The Battlestar Galactica prequel, fifty years earlier, about the invention of the Cylons rather than the war with them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCloak & Dagger
Two New Orleans teenagers whose powers only work near each other, which the titles make the whole design out of.
- Season 2
1 sequenceLost Girl
A succubus choosing neither Fae court, in one of Canada's longest-running genre exports.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlmost Human
A detective partnered with an android in 2048, cancelled after thirteen episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceKilljoys
Fourteen seconds, a logo and a bass hit — a bounty-hunter show with no interest in explaining itself first.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlphas
People with abilities that each cost them something, run as a case-of-the-week team show.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSalvation
An asteroid six months from Earth and a government that would rather not say so.
- Season 1
1 sequenceEl Ministerio del Tiempo
A secret Spanish government department policing doors into the country's own history.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrequency
A ham radio that reaches the operator's dead father twenty years earlier, from the 2000 film.
- Season 1
1 sequenceReal Humans
Household androids in a Sweden otherwise exactly like this one, remade in Britain as Humans.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutcasts
A human settlement on Carpathia five years after Earth stopped answering.
- Season 1
1 sequenceManiac
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
1 sequence11.22.63
King's time-travel novel as eight hours, in which the past resists being changed and pushes back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAtlantis
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
1 sequenceChildhood's End
The Arthur C. Clarke novel adapted across three nights.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Discovery of Witches
A historian who finds an enchanted manuscript in the Bodleian and cannot put it back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDominion
Archangels at war over a walled Las Vegas, twenty-five years after the film it follows.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFuture Man
A janitor recruited by time travellers because he finished a video game nobody else could.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceHeroes Reborn
The revival, five years after the original stopped, and one season long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Mandalorian
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
1 sequencePower Rangers Beast Morphers
Animal DNA and Grid energy, and the first season made after Hasbro bought the franchise.
- Season 1
1 sequencePower Rangers Dino Charge
Energems and dinosaur spirits, and the season that ran two years under one name.
- Season 1
2 sequencesPower Rangers Megaforce
The twentieth-anniversary season, built to reach back through the whole franchise.
- Season 1
- Season 2