PBS
23 shows, 24 sequences, oldest first.
5 of these moved between networks during their run and appear under each one.
1 sequenceMister Rogers' Neighborhood
1968–2001PBSComedy
Thirty-three years of the same arrival: the door, the cardigan, the shoes, the song.
- Season 1
2 sequencesSesame Street
1969–PBS / HBOComedy
Children running through a New York street to a song asking how to get there — an opening that has been remade every decade for over fifty years.
- Season 1
- Seasons 24–25
1 sequenceThe Electric Company
1971–1977PBSComedy
The Children's Television Workshop's reading show for older children, with Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno in the cast.
- Season 1
1 sequenceZoom
1972–1978PBSComedy
A children's programme made entirely of what children sent in, down to the address they had to sing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAustin City Limits
1974–PBSDocumentary
The longest-running music programme in American television, opening on a painted Austin skyline that is not quite the real one.
- Season 20
1 sequenceReading Rainbow
1983–2006PBSDocumentary
LeVar Burton reading to children for twenty-three years, and "but you don't have to take my word for it".
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Joy of Painting
1983–1994PBSDocumentary
Bob Ross finishing a landscape in twenty-six minutes, over thirty-one seasons and a permanent afterlife online.
- Season 29
1 sequenceSquare One TV
1987–1994PBSComedy
Mathematics taught as sketch comedy, including a police procedural parody called Mathnet.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShining Time Station
1989–1995PBSComedy
The American frame built around the Thomas films, with a foot-tall conductor living inside the station wall.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
1991–1995PBSDocumentary
A geography quiz whose house band sang the answers, and which taught a generation of children where Ouagadougou is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBarney & Friends
1992–2010PBSComedy
A purple dinosaur who appears when children imagine him, and a closing song that became a schoolyard parody format.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGhostwriter
1992–1995PBSDrama
A ghost that communicates only in written words, and a group of Brooklyn children who solve cases with it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceLamb Chop's Play-Along
1992–1995PBSComedy
Shari Lewis and her puppets, and the song that does not end.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBill Nye the Science Guy
1993–1998PBS / SyndicationDocumentary
Science for children at the speed of a music video, with a theme that shouts the presenter's name.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Magic School Bus
1994–1997PBSAnimation
A science teacher who shrinks her class and drives them through the lesson, with Lily Tomlin at the wheel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWishbone
1995–1998PBSDrama
A Jack Russell terrier imagining himself into classic literature, one novel per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceArthur
1996–2022PBSAnimation
An aardvark in the third grade, in the longest-running animated children's series in American television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaillou
1997–2011Teletoon / PBSAnimation
A four-year-old with no hair and very little patience, adapted from Quebec picture books.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBetween the Lions
2000–2010PBSAnimation
A family of lions running a library, in a reading programme built by the people who made Sesame Street.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCyberchase
2002–PBSAnimation
Three children pulled into a network to stop a villain with mathematics, which is the plot and the curriculum at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Vietnam War
2017PBSDocumentary
Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part account, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAll Creatures Great & Small
2020–Channel 5 / PBSDrama
The Yorkshire vet stories remade, with a title sequence that is largely just the Dales.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMiss Scarlet and The Duke
2020–Alibi / PBSCrime
A woman who inherits her father's detective agency in Victorian London and declines to sell it.
- Season 1