Sci-Fi · 2010s

74 shows81 sequences

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

3 sequences

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

4 sequences

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

1 sequence

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

2 sequences

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

1 sequence

The Flash

2014–2023The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Falling Skies

2011–2015TNTSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Legion

2017–2019FXSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

The Umbrella Academy

2019–2024NetflixSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Wayward Pines

2015–2016FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Under the Dome

2013–2015CBSSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Timeless

2016–2018NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

The Gifted

2017–2019FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

The Magicians

2015–2020SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

12 Monkeys

2015–2018SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Travelers

2016–2018NetflixSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Batwoman

2019–2022The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Revolution

2012–2014NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Runaways

2017–2019HuluSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Limitless

2015–2016CBSSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Haven

2010–2015SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

The Rain

2018–2020Netflix (Denmark)Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Lightning

2018–2021The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Colony

2016–2018USA NetworkSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Krypton

2018–2019SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Continuum

2012–2015ShowcaseSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Terra Nova

2011FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Caprica

2010SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Lost Girl

2010–2016Showcase / SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Almost Human

2013–2014FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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

1 sequence

Alphas

2011–2012SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Minority Report

2015FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Salvation

2017–2018CBSSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

El Ministerio del Tiempo

2015–2020La 1Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Frequency

2016–2017The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Real Humans

2012–2014SVT1Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

Outcasts

2011BBC OneSci-Fi

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

Season 1

1 sequence

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.