AMC

29 shows, 29 sequences, oldest first.

6 of these moved between networks during their run and appear under each one.

Mad Men

2007–2015AMCDrama

A silhouetted adman falls past skyscrapers built out of his own advertising — smiling wives, stockinged legs, a hand holding a drink — and then, at the bottom, is sitting comfortably with a cigarette. Nobody lands. That is the joke and the thesis.

Seasons 1–7

Breaking Bad

2008–2013AMCDrama

Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.

Seasons 1–5

Rubicon

2010AMCDrama

An intelligence analyst finding a pattern nobody wants found, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

The Walking Dead

2010–2022AMCHorror

Rust, decay and abandoned objects, cut to a string figure that never resolves — a sequence about entropy rather than the dead.

Season 1

Hell on Wheels

2011–2016AMCDrama

Iron, sleepers and surveyor's tools — the transcontinental railroad introduced as labour rather than achievement.

Season 1

The Killing (US)

2011–2014AMC / NetflixCrime

The American remake of Forbrydelsen, moving the rain from Copenhagen to Seattle and keeping everything else.

Season 1

Low Winter Sun

2013AMCCrime

The British two-parter remade in Detroit and stretched to ten episodes, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Halt and Catch Fire

2014–2017AMCDrama

Elastic's red glitch: a screen tearing itself apart while the cast names surface out of the wreckage, over a Paul Haslinger synth line. Thirty seconds, and almost nothing in it is legible for more than a frame.

Seasons 1–4

Turn: Washington's Spies

2014–2017AMCDrama

Invisible ink, cipher keys and folded letters — a spy series introduced entirely through its tradecraft.

Seasons 1–4

Better Call Saul

2015–2022AMCCrime

A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.

Seasons 1–6

Fear the Walking Dead

2015–2023AMCHorror

Seventeen seconds and a card — the spinoff declining the parent show's decaying montage entirely.

Seasons 1–3

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

Into the Badlands

2015–2019AMCDrama

Ink-wash landscapes and weaponry, drawn in the style of the wuxia films the series is built from.

Season 1

Preacher

2016–2019AMCDrama

The Ennis and Dillon comic adapted with its worst instincts intact.

Season 1

The Night Manager

2016–2025BBC One / AMCDrama

Le Carré's arms dealer and the hotelier sent in after him, opened by weapons assembling out of luxury.

Season 2

The Son

2017–2019AMCDrama

Pierce Brosnan across two Texas timelines, from the Philipp Meyer novel.

Season 1

Lodge 49

2018–2019AMCComedy

A Long Beach fraternal lodge and a man who joins it looking for something he cannot name.

Season 1

McMafia

2018BBC One / AMCCrime

A banker pulled back into his family's Russian organised-crime money.

Season 1

The Little Drummer Girl

2018BBC One / AMCDrama

Park Chan-wook directing le Carré, in the most controlled colour palette on television that year.

Season 1

The Terror

2018–2019AMCHorror

The Franklin expedition frozen into the ice, with something on it that is not the cold.

Season 1

NOS4A2

2019–2020AMCHorror

Christmas ornaments and a vintage car rendered as threat — a sequence that makes tinsel frightening.

Season 1

Dispatches from Elsewhere

2020AMCDrama

Jason Segel's series about an alternate-reality game that may not be a game, opened in eleven seconds.

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

Dark Winds

2022–AMCCrime

Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police novels, opened across the same high desert the cases cross.

Season 1

Interview with the Vampire

2022–AMCHorror

Anne Rice adapted as a long interview, with an opening that lasts twenty-two seconds and does not waste one of them.

Season 1

Mayfair Witches

2023–AMCHorror

Anne Rice's New Orleans witches, in the same continuity AMC built for the vampires.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

2023–AMCHorror

The franchise moved to France, with a title sequence built out of religious iconography rather than decay.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: Dead City

2023–AMCHorror

Maggie and Negan in a cut-off Manhattan, in the first of the spin-offs to give its pairing the whole hour.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

2024AMCHorror

Rick and Michonne given the ending the parent series never got round to.

Season 1