All shows

'Allo 'Allo!

1982–1992BBC OneComedy

A French café in occupied France, from the same writer as Dad's Army twenty years on.

Season 1

The $50,000 Pyramid

1981SyndicationDocumentary

One year of the Pyramid format at its highest stake, between the $20,000 and $25,000 versions.

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

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

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

12 Monkeys

2015–2018SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

12 oz. Mouse

2005–2020Adult SwimAnimation

Drawn deliberately badly in flat colour, and the show that pushed hardest at what the block would broadcast.

Season 1

13 Reasons Why

2017–2020NetflixDrama

Thirteen tapes left behind by a girl who has died, addressed one to each person she holds responsible.

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

19 Kids and Counting

2008–2015TLCDocumentary

An Arkansas family of twenty-one, and the programme TLC built a decade of its schedule around.

Season 1

2 Broke Girls

2011–2017CBSComedy

Two waitresses in Williamsburg saving towards a cupcake business, with the running total printed on screen at the end of every episode.

Season 1

21 Jump Street

1987–1990FoxCrime

Officers young enough to pass for pupils, in one of the four shows Fox launched its network with.

Season 1

227

1985–1990NBCComedy

A Washington apartment block told almost entirely from its front steps, where most of the cast spends most of the programme.

Season 1

24

2001–2010FoxDrama

A ticking clock and a card, and nothing else. For a series whose entire conceit is that time is passing, spending a minute on titles would have been the one unforgivable thing.

Season 1

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

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

30 Rock

2006–2013NBCComedy

Nineteen seconds of Art Deco signage and a brass sting, moving at roughly the speed the show's dialogue does.

Season 1

3rd Rock from the Sun

1996–2001NBCComedy

Aliens observing suburban Ohio, opened with the brightness of a travel advertisement for a planet.

Season 6

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

60 Minutes

1968–CBSDocumentary

A stopwatch and a ticking sound, and nothing else — the shortest argument any programme has made for its own title.

Season 23

6teen

2004–2010TeletoonAnimation

Six sixteen-year-olds working in the same shopping centre, from the Total Drama creators.

Season 1

The 7D

2014–2016Disney XDAnimation

The seven dwarfs before Snow White, animated in a rubber-hose style by Tom Ruegger's team.

Season 1

7th Heaven

1996–2007The WBDrama

A minister, his wife and seven children, in the longest-running family drama in American television.

Season 1

8 Out of 10 Cats

2005–Channel 4Comedy

A panel show about opinion polls, which spawned a Countdown crossover more popular than either parent.

Season 1

The 8 Show

2024NetflixDrama

Eight contestants paid by the second in a building where the higher floors earn more.

Season 1

8 Simple Rules

2002–2005ABCComedy

A father guarding his daughters, and the sitcom that had to keep going after John Ritter died during its second season.

Season 1

9-1-1: Nashville

2025–ABCDrama

The third 9-1-1, moving the format to Tennessee, with the franchise's siren-and-dispatch open rebuilt in country.

Season 1

90210

2008–2013The CWDrama

Beverly Hills, 90210 restarted for a new decade, keeping the postcode and the zip-code typography.

Season 1

Æon Flux

1991–1995MTVAnimation

Peter Chung's assassin, drawn in a style nothing else on television had, and killed off at the end of most early episodes.

Season 1

Étoile

2025Prime VideoDrama

Two ballet companies swapping their best dancers across the Atlantic, from the Gilmore Girls writers.

Season 1

A

A.N.T. Farm

2011–2014Disney ChannelComedy

Gifted children fast-tracked into a high school that does not want them there.

Season 1

Aaahh!!! Real Monsters

1994–1997NickelodeonAnimation

Monsters at school under a city dump, learning to frighten people as a trade.

Season 1

Abbott Elementary

2021–ABCComedy

A Philadelphia public school shot as a documentary, and the first network comedy in years to become a hit on its own terms.

Season 1

ABC's Wide World of Sports

1961–1998ABCDocumentary

"The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat" — a narration so well known that the ski-jumper who supplied the agony became famous for falling over.

Season 20

Absolutely Fabulous

1992–2012BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Twenty-one seconds of Julie Driscoll's 'This Wheel's on Fire', re-recorded for the show by its own star.

Season 1

Abstract: The Art of Design

2017–2019NetflixDocumentary

One designer an episode, with a title sequence rebuilt each time in that designer's own idiom — the rare series whose titles are the argument.

Season 1

According to Jim

2001–2009ABCComedy

Eight seasons of a Chicago family sitcom that critics ignored and audiences kept renewing.

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

Adam Ruins Everything

2015–2019truTVDocumentary

A comedian interrupting people to explain, with citations on screen, why what they believe is wrong.

Season 1

Adam-12

1968–1975NBCCrime

One patrol car, one shift, from the Dragnet producer.

Season 1

The Addams Family

1964–1966ABCComedy

Harpsichord, bass clarinet, and two finger snaps that half a century of television has never managed to shake off. The family assemble for a portrait while Lurch supplies the only three adjectives the song needs.

Seasons 1–2

Adolescence

2025NetflixDrama

A quiet card over domestic detail, for a series shot in single unbroken takes — the only cut in some episodes arrives in the titles.

Season 1

Adults

2025FXComedy

Five friends sharing a Queens house and failing at adulthood.

Season 1

Adventure Time

2010–2018Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Twenty-five seconds of a candy world that turns out to be a post-apocalyptic one, sung by a boy and a dog who have not noticed.

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

The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius

2002–2006NickelodeonAnimation

One of the first fully CG series made for American television week to week.

Season 1

The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet

1952–1966ABCComedy

A real family playing themselves for fourteen years, which is the longest-running live-action sitcom in American television.

Season 1

The Adventures of Pete & Pete

1993–1996NickelodeonComedy

Two brothers with the same name in a suburb tuned slightly wrong, scored by Polaris.

Season 1

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes

1984–1994ITV (Granada)Crime

Jeremy Brett's Holmes, and the Victorian-illustration open Granada reused across every retitled run of the series.

Seasons 1–2

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 Affair

2014–2019ShowtimeDrama

Fiona Apple's 'Container' over water and doubled imagery — two accounts of the same events, said in pictures before the show says it in structure.

Season 1

After Life

2019–2022NetflixComedy

Ricky Gervais on grief, in the smallest register he has ever worked in.

Season 1

The Afterparty

2022–2023Apple TV+Comedy

A different genre pastiche for every episode's narrator, which makes the titles the most honest summary the show could give of itself.

Season 1

Agatha All Along

2024Disney+Horror

The WandaVision villain given a witches' road to walk down, and a theme that was a joke song first.

Season 1

Agatha Christie's Marple

2004–2013ITVCrime

The ITV Marple, which adapted novels Miss Marple was never in by writing her into them.

Season 1

Agatha Christie's Poirot

1989–2013ITVCrime

Art Deco geometry and Christopher Gunning's theme — a title sequence that establishes the period, the register and the fastidiousness of the detective in one gesture.

Season 1

The Agency

2024–Paramount+ with ShowtimeDrama

The American adaptation of The Bureau, which this catalogue could not find footage of in its original French.

Season 1

Agent Carter

2015–2016ABCDrama

Post-war period design and a big-band arrangement, for the best-looking title sequence Marvel has put on television.

Season 1

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

Aggretsuko

2018–2023NetflixAnimation

Sanrio character design and death metal, in an opening that switches between the two exactly as the protagonist does.

Season 5

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

Airwolf

1984–1987CBS / USADrama

A helicopter emerging from a desert mesa to a synth fanfare, at a level of self-seriousness the decade rewarded.

Season 1

Akame ga Kill!

2014Tokyo MXAnimation

An assassin's guild against an empire, in a series that kills its cast far faster than the genre allows.

Season 1

Alas Smith and Jones

1984–1998BBC TwoComedy

Mel Smith and Griff Rhys Jones after Not the Nine O'Clock News, with a title that puns on a western.

Season 1

Alchemy of Souls

2022–2023tvNDrama

Souls swapped between bodies in a fictional kingdom, from the Hong sisters.

Season 1

Alex Haley's Queen

1993CBSDrama

Haley's last book filmed as three nights on CBS, following his own paternal grandmother.

Season 1

ALF

1986–1990NBCComedy

A sitcom built around a puppet the cast could not see, worked from a trench cut into the set floor.

Season 1
Season 3

Alfred Hitchcock Presents

1955–1962CBSCrime

Nine strokes of a pen, and then the man himself walks in from the right and stands inside his own outline. A director who had spent thirty years staying behind the camera made his silhouette the most recognisable thing on American television.

Seasons 1–7

Alias

2001–2006ABCDrama

Rapid-cut disguises and wigs, rebuilt every season as the show's premise was torn up and restarted — which happened more often than most series manage in a decade.

Seasons 1–5

Alias Grace

2017NetflixDrama

Quilt patterns assembling and unpicking themselves — the needlework the narrator hides behind, used as the structure of the telling.

Season 1

Alias Smith and Jones

1971–1973ABCDrama

Two outlaws promised an amnesty they have to stay out of trouble for twenty months to collect.

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

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

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 Alienist

2018–2020TNTCrime

An 1896 New York murder investigation using methods the police do not yet have a word for.

Season 1

All American

2018–2025The CWDrama

A South Los Angeles footballer recruited to a Beverly Hills school, from Spencer Paysinger's life.

Season 1

All Creatures Great & Small

2020–Channel 5 / PBSDrama

The Yorkshire vet stories remade, with a title sequence that is largely just the Dales.

Season 1

All in the Family

1971–1979CBSComedy

Two people at an upright piano singing about how things used to be — an opening performed live by the cast rather than scored.

Season 1

All My Children

1970–2011ABCDrama

Pine Valley, Agnes Nixon's serial, and the first American soap to put issue storylines in daytime.

Season 23
Season 41

All of Us

2003–2007UPN / The CWComedy

A blended family sitcom produced by Will and Jada Pinkett Smith, out of their own circumstances.

Season 1

All of Us Are Dead

2022–NetflixHorror

School notebooks, corridors and lab equipment, cut fast enough that the outbreak reads as timetabled.

Season 1

All Saints

1998–2009Seven NetworkDrama

An emergency ward in Sydney, running twelve years and outlasting most of its cast.

Season 1

All That

1994–2005NickelodeonComedy

A sketch show for children that launched Kenan Thompson, Amanda Bynes and Nick Cannon.

Season 1

Ally McBeal

1997–2002FoxComedy

Vonda Shepard singing over a lawyer walking through Boston — a theme so tied to the show that the singer became a recurring character.

Season 1

Almost Human

2013–2014FoxSci-Fi

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

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

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

The Amanda Show

1999–2002NickelodeonComedy

Amanda Bynes given her own sketch show out of All That, at seventeen.

Seasons 2–3

Amandaland

2025–BBC OneComedy

The Motherland spin-off, following the one character everybody else in it could not stand.

Season 1

The Amazing Race

2001–CBSDocumentary

A race around the world, opening on a map and a countdown that has won ten Emmys for its programme.

Season 10

The Amazing Race Canada

2013–CTVDocumentary

The format run entirely inside one country, which turns out to be quite large enough for it.

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

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

The Amazing World of Gumball

2011–2019Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A cat, a goldfish with legs, and a suburb assembled by layering drawn animation, models and live-action photography in the same shot.

Season 1

America's Funniest Home Videos

1989–ABCDocumentary

A clip show assembled entirely from what the audience sent in, and the longest-running entertainment programme ABC has.

Season 1

America's Most Wanted

1988–2013FoxDocumentary

The programme Fox launched itself on, and the one that turned a network into a switchboard.

Season 1

America's Next Top Model

2003–2018UPN / The CWDocumentary

The format that ran for twenty-four cycles and rebuilt its titles for most of them.

Season 1

American Dad!

2005–Fox / TBSAnimation

A CIA agent singing about his morning routine, in a sequence that varies its final line to suit the episode.

Season 1

American Dragon: Jake Long

2005–2007Disney ChannelAnimation

A New York teenager who is also the American Dragon, and the only one.

Season 1

American Dreams

2002–2005NBCDrama

A Philadelphia family in the mid-1960s, built around American Bandstand.

Season 1

American Gladiators

1989–1996SyndicationDocumentary

Members of the public running an assault course against professional athletes in lycra, in a format that outlived its own slot by decades.

Season 1

American Gods

2017–2021StarzDrama

A totem pole of clashing worship — neon crosses, satellite dishes, astronauts and idols stacked into one object, which is the novel's argument compressed into ninety seconds.

Season 1

American Gothic (1995)

1995–1996CBSHorror

A South Carolina sheriff who is something worse than corrupt, created by Shaun Cassidy and produced by Sam Raimi.

Season 1

American Horror Stories

2021–FXHorror

The American Horror Story spin-off, one self-contained hour at a time instead of one story a season.

Season 1

11 sequences

American Horror Story

2011–FXHorror

An anthology, so there is no returning sequence to protect: Kyle Cooper builds a new one from scratch every season and the only thing carried across is the lettering. The sixth season is absent below because it went further still and threw the titles out altogether.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 8 more

American Housewife

2016–2021ABCComedy

A woman who reckons herself the second-fattest in Westport, Connecticut, and says so at length.

Season 1

American Idol

2002–Fox / ABCDocumentary

The talent format that ran American primetime for a decade, opening on a spotlight and a logo that spins.

Season 1

American Pickers

2010–HistoryDocumentary

Two dealers driving across America buying things out of other people's barns.

Season 1

The Americans

2013–2018FXDrama

Soviet and American iconography intercut until they mirror each other exactly — the show's entire thesis in twenty-six seconds.

Season 1

Amphibia

2019–2022Disney ChannelAnimation

A Californian teenager stranded in a world of frog people, with a banjo theme to match.

Season 1

Ancient Aliens

2009–HistoryDocumentary

A documentary series whose answer to every question it raises is the same one.

Season 1

And Then There Were None

2015BBC OneCrime

Christie's island novel adapted straight, with a title sequence that counts the cast down as the story does.

Season 1

Andi Mack

2017–2019Disney ChannelDrama

A thirteen-year-old told that her sister is her mother, and the first Disney Channel series to give a main character a coming-out story.

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

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

The Andy Griffith Show

1960–1968CBSComedy

A father and son walking to a fishing hole while somebody whistles — twenty-three seconds, and one of the most quoted pieces of music in American television.

Season 1

Angel

1999–2004The WBHorror

The spinoff takes the parent show's structure and drops the jokes: Darling Violetta's 'Sanctuary' instead of surf-punk, city at night instead of monster movies. Like Buffy, the design holds for five years while the names in front of it keep moving.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 2 more

Angela Anaconda

1999–2001TeletoonAnimation

Photographs of real faces cut out and animated over drawn backgrounds, which is as unsettling as it sounds.

Season 1

Angels in America

2003HBODrama

Kushner's play filmed by Mike Nichols, opened by a flight across America into a Manhattan fountain.

Season 1

Anger Management

2012–2014FXComedy

Charlie Sheen's return to television after Two and a Half Men, opened in twelve seconds.

Season 1

Angie Tribeca

2016–2018TBSComedy

A police procedural played entirely as Airplane!, produced by Steve Carell and shot at that density of joke.

Season 1

The Angry Beavers

1997–2001NickelodeonAnimation

Two beaver brothers who have left home and are managing it badly.

Season 1

Angry Boys

2011ABC (Australia)Comedy

The follow-up to Summer Heights High, co-produced with HBO and the BBC and shot on three continents.

Season 1

Animal Control

2023–FoxComedy

Municipal animal control officers, in the only workplace sitcom where the supporting cast bites.

Season 1

Animal Kingdom

2016–2022TNTCrime

The Australian film remade in Southern California, following the same criminal family.

Season 1

The Animals of Farthing Wood

1993–1995BBC OneAnimation

Animals leaving a destroyed wood for a nature reserve, and a children's series that killed off its cast as it went.

Season 1

Animaniacs

1993–1998Fox Kids / The WBAnimation

A patter song with a different closing rhyme every week, sung by three cartoon characters at a tempo no live performer would attempt.

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

Anne with an E

2017–2019CBC / NetflixDrama

Prince Edward Island in stop-motion paper and pressed flowers, over The Tragically Hip.

Season 1

Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day

2011Fuji TVAnimation

Childhood friends reassembled by the one of them who died, who only one of them can see.

Season 1

Another Miss Oh

2016tvNDrama

Two women with the same name, and a man who can see a few seconds into the future.

Season 1

Another Period

2015–2018Comedy CentralComedy

Newport in 1902 shot as a reality series, with the confessional interviews and everything.

Season 2

Another World

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.

Season 26

Anpanman

1988–NTVAnimation

A superhero whose head is made of bread and who tears pieces off it to feed the hungry, running now for more than a thousand episodes.

Season 1

Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

2005–2012Travel ChannelDocumentary

The travel programme that treated a meal as reporting, opening on a passport stamp and a guitar line.

Season 1

Any Day Now

1998–2002LifetimeDrama

Two friends in Birmingham, told in the present and in 1963 at once.

Season 1

The Apothecary Diaries

2023–Tokyo MXAnimation

A poison expert conscripted into the imperial rear palace, solving what everyone else is covering up.

Season 1

Apparitions

2008BBC OneHorror

A Catholic priest working as an exorcist in modern London, and one of the most complained-about dramas the BBC has run.

Season 1

Apple & Onion

2018–2021Cartoon NetworkAnimation

An apple and an onion sharing a flat in a city of anthropomorphic food.

Season 1

The Apprentice

2004–NBCDocumentary

Manhattan from a helicopter over the O'Jays' For the Love of Money, which is the whole thesis of the programme in one sample.

Season 1

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

2000–2015Adult SwimAnimation

A rap theme introducing three fast-food items who do not solve crimes, performed with the conviction of a show that does.

Season 1

Aranyélet

2015–2018HBO HungaryCrime

A Budapest family whose comfortable life runs on crime, and the first Hungarian series HBO Europe made itself. Known abroad as Golden Life.

Season 1

Arcane

2021–2024NetflixAnimation

Painterly animation of two sisters pulling apart, rendered in the same hand-worked style as the series — one of the few animated openings that is not a step down from the show it introduces.

Season 1

Archer

2009–2023FXAnimation

Sixties spy-thriller title design executed straight — silhouettes, gun barrels and a brass sting, with the joke being that the show underneath refuses to match it.

Season 1

Archie Bunker's Place

1979–1983CBSComedy

All in the Family continued as a bar, four more years after the series that made Archie famous had finished.

Season 1

The Archie Show

1968–1969CBSAnimation

The cartoon whose fictional band had a real number one single, which is a thing that has happened once.

Season 1

Archive 81

2022NetflixHorror

Degraded videotape and splice marks — the found footage the show is built from, doing its own titles.

Season 1

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

1990–2000Nickelodeon / YTVHorror

A campfire, a handful of powder thrown into it, and a children's anthology that frightened a generation on a Saturday teatime.

Season 1

Are You Being Served?

1972–1985BBC OneComedy

The Grace Brothers department store, opened by a lift announcing each floor's stock.

Season 1

Arli$$

1996–2002HBOComedy

A sports agent played by Robert Wuhl, running seven seasons on almost no critical goodwill.

Season 1

Army Wives

2007–2013LifetimeDrama

Four wives and one husband on a South Carolina army post, and the series that made Lifetime a scripted network.

Season 1

Around the World in 80 Days with Michael Palin

1989BBC OneDocumentary

The Verne route without aircraft, and the series that turned a Python into Britain's travel presenter.

Season 1

Arrested Development

2003–2019Fox / NetflixComedy

A ukulele, a narrator, and a family photograph that gets less flattering the longer you look at it.

Season 1

Arrow

2012–2020The CWDrama

A narrated premise delivered every week in the first person, which the entire subsequent CW superhero slate copied verbatim.

Season 1

Art Attack

1990–2007ITVDocumentary

Neil Buchanan making things out of household rubbish, and the big art laid out on the floor at the end.

Season 1

The Artful Dodger

2023–Disney+Drama

Dickens's pickpocket grown up into a surgeon in colonial Australia, and still stealing on the side.

Season 1

Arthur

1996–2022PBSAnimation

An aardvark in the third grade, in the longest-running animated children's series in American television.

Season 1

As the World Turns

1956–2010CBSDrama

The turning globe that gave American daytime its most-copied image, over fifty-four years.

Season 41
Season 52

As Time Goes By

1992–2005BBC OneComedy

Judi Dench and Geoffrey Palmer meeting again thirty-eight years after they lost touch.

Season 1

As Told by Ginger

2000–2006NickelodeonAnimation

Middle school treated as continuing drama rather than a gag engine, which was unusual for the slot.

Season 1

The Ascent of Man

1973BBC TwoDocumentary

Jacob Bronowski on science as a human activity, made as the BBC's answer to its own Civilisation.

Season 1

Ash vs Evil Dead

2015–2018StarzHorror

A ten-second title card, which for a series this loud is the only restrained decision in it.

Season 1

Assassination Classroom

2015–2016Fuji TVAnimation

A class assigned to kill their own teacher, who is the best teacher any of them have had.

Season 2

Astro Boy

1963–1966Fuji TVAnimation

Tezuka's Mighty Atom, the first Japanese television animation series, and the start of the whole industry.

Season 1

At Home with Amy Sedaris

2017–2020truTVComedy

A homemaking show that is not one, opened in the idiom of 1970s daytime television.

Season 1

Atlanta

2016–2022FXComedy

Donald Glover's series, opened with the same refusal to signal genre that the episodes run on — you are never told what kind of half-hour this is.

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

Attack on Titan

2013–2023NHK General TV / MBSAnimation

A new opening for almost every cour, each one restating the series' situation as it currently stands — which over four seasons means the titles document a war changing sides.

Season 1

Atypical

2017–2021NetflixComedy

Twenty-five seconds of hand-drawn Antarctic imagery, taken from the interests of the character it is about.

Season 1

Auf Wiedersehen, Pet

1983–1986ITVComedy

Seven British builders sharing a hut on a Düsseldorf site, written as a comedy about not being able to find work at home.

Season 1
Season 2

Austin & Ally

2011–2016Disney ChannelComedy

A songwriter with stage fright and the performer who takes her songs.

Season 1

Austin 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

Australian Survivor

2002–Network TenDocumentary

The format remade locally three separate times before it finally stuck.

Season 2

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

Autumn in My Heart

2000KBS2Drama

The melodrama credited with starting the Korean wave, about two children swapped at the hospital.

Season 1

Avatar: The Last Airbender

2005–2008NickelodeonAnimation

Four elements demonstrated in turn by four benders, then a narrated history — a world explained completely in about a minute, every week.

Season 1

Avengers Assemble

2013–2019Disney XDAnimation

The film line-up animated weekly, with an opening as long as a station ident.

Season 1

The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes

2010–2012Disney XDAnimation

The most complete adaptation of the Avengers comics animation has managed, cancelled at two seasons.

Season 1

Avenue 5

2020–2022HBOComedy

A cruise-line logo in space, thirteen seconds long, with all the confidence of a company about to be sued.

Season 2

Awkward

2011–2016MTVComedy

A high-school accident mistaken for a suicide attempt, and the reputation that follows.

Season 1

B

Babar

1989–1991HBOAnimation

De Brunhof's elephant king animated in Canada, and told mostly in flashback to his own children.

Season 1

Baby Reindeer

2024NetflixDrama

Eighteen seconds and almost nothing in them, which for a series this claustrophobic is the correct amount of air.

Season 1

The Baby-Sitters Club

2020–2021NetflixComedy

The Ann M. Martin books adapted with a hand-lettered, sticker-book title sequence.

Season 1

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

Babylon Berlin

2017–Sky 1 / Das ErsteCrime

Weimar Berlin as a cabaret poster — Bauhaus type, jazz and a city that already knows how this ends.

Season 1

The Bachelor

2002–ABCDocumentary

The format that turned courtship into an elimination bracket, and gave the rose its own verb.

Season 1

Back at the Barnyard

2007–2011NickelodeonAnimation

Farm animals who behave like people the moment the farmer leaves.

Season 1

The Backyardigans

2004–2013Nick Jr.Animation

Five animals whose garden becomes a different world every episode, with a full musical score in a different genre each time.

Season 1

Bad Banks

2018–2020ZDF / ArteDrama

Frankfurt and London investment banking, made as a European co-production and shot in three languages.

Season 1

Bad Education

2012–BBC ThreeComedy

Jack Whitehall as a teacher less mature than his pupils.

Season 1

Bad Girls

1999–2006ITVDrama

A women's prison wing written by two of Prisoner Cell Block H's admirers, and ITV's answer to it.

Season 1

Bad Girls Club

2006–2017OxygenDocumentary

Seven women in a house chosen for how badly they were expected to get on.

Season 2

Bad Monkey

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Florida Keys sunshine playing over things that should not be in it — a comic crime series that keeps its tone in the titles.

Season 1

Bad Sisters

2022–Apple TV+Comedy

Five sisters and the man they intend to kill, arranged like a family portrait that keeps rearranging itself.

Season 1

Bagpuss

1974BBC OneAnimation

Thirteen episodes, and a sepia photograph opening that colours in when the cat wakes up — Smallfilms doing the whole premise in the titles.

Season 1

Balamory

2002–2005CBeebiesComedy

A Scottish island village painted in primary colours, with a theme that asks what the story is in it.

Season 1

Ballers

2015–2019HBOComedy

Miami, money and slow motion, cut to Big K.R.I.T. — an opening entirely comfortable with what the show is selling.

Season 1

Ballykissangel

1996–2001BBC OneDrama

An English priest posted to a village in Wicklow, and the BBC's most watched Sunday drama of the late nineties.

Season 1
Season 6

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour

1968–1970NBCComedy

Four costumed animals in a rock band, wrapped around cartoons and serials, with a theme that has outlived all of it.

Season 1

Bananaman

1983–1986BBC OneAnimation

The Beano strip animated with the Goodies doing the voices, and a narrator who explains the transformation every week.

Season 1

Bananas in Pyjamas

1992–2001ABC (Australia)Comedy

Two bananas, three teddy bears and a rat, made by the ABC and sold to eighty countries.

Season 1

Band of Brothers

2001HBODrama

Michael Kamen's theme over pencil sketches of soldiers dissolving into photographs — two and a half minutes, and among the most imitated title sequences ever made for television.

Season 1

Banshee

2013–2016CinemaxCrime

Amish country and violence intercut at the same speed, from the network's short-lived attempt at prestige action.

Season 1

Bar Rescue

2011–2017SpikeDocumentary

A consultant shouting a failing bar back into business over three days.

Season 1

Barbarians

2020–2022NetflixDrama

Fifteen seconds of iron and forest — a card rather than a sequence, for a series about an ambush.

Seasons 1–2

Baretta

1975–1978ABCCrime

An undercover detective and a cockatoo, with a Sammy Davis Jr. theme.

Season 1

Barnaby Jones

1973–1980CBSCrime

Buddy Ebsen as a retired investigator who comes back to work after his son is killed.

Season 1

Barney & Friends

1992–2010PBSComedy

A purple dinosaur who appears when children imagine him, and a closing song that became a schoolyard parody format.

Season 1

Barney Miller

1975–1982ABCComedy

A bass line so good it outlived the show entirely — a police-station sitcom remembered chiefly for forty seconds of funk.

Season 3

Baroness von Sketch Show

2016–2021CBCComedy

Four women writing and performing every sketch, with no host, no studio audience and no linking material.

Season 1

Barry

2018–2023HBOComedy

A plain card and a held shot, gone in under half a minute. The show's whole comic method — refusing to signal what kind of scene you are in — starts with its titles refusing to signal anything at all.

Season 2

The Basil Brush Show

2002–2007CBBCComedy

The fox puppet given a sitcom of his own, forty years after he first turned up on somebody else's.

Seasons 1–4

The Bastard Executioner

2015FXDrama

Kurt Sutter's fourteenth-century Wales, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Bates Motel

2013–2017A&EHorror

Norman Bates before Psycho, in eleven seconds of a neon sign that everyone already knows the ending of.

Season 1

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

Cartoon versions of the cast run at the camera and fight their way through the rogues' gallery, because the budget for that in live action did not exist and the animation is funnier anyway. Neal Hefti's twelve-bar riff has an eight-voice chorus whose entire lyric is the word Batman.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

The Batman

2004–2008Kids' WBAnimation

The series that had to follow Batman: The Animated Series and chose to look nothing like it.

Season 1

Batman Beyond

1999–2001The WBAnimation

The same animation house forty years on, trading the orchestral score for industrial percussion and a Gotham that has kept getting worse.

Season 1

Batman: Caped Crusader

2024–Prime VideoAnimation

The Animated Series team returning to a 1940s Gotham, with titles that quote their own 1992 sequence without repeating it.

Season 1

Batman: The Animated Series

1992–1995Fox KidsAnimation

No dialogue, no narration, and the character's name never appears — a full orchestral score over a robbery, a rooftop and a silhouette, and the audience is trusted to work it out.

Season 1

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

2008–2011Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Batman team-ups in the Silver Age idiom, opened with a straight-faced superhero fanfare.

Season 1

Battle Creek

2015CBSCrime

Vince Gilligan's script from a decade earlier, finally made, and cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Battle of the Planets

1978–1980SyndicationAnimation

Gatchaman recut for America with a robot added to explain away the footage that was cut.

Season 1

BattleBots

2000–2002Comedy CentralDocumentary

Home-built robots destroying each other inside a perspex box, and the reason a good many engineers exist.

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

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

Batwoman

2019–2022The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Baywatch

1989–2001NBC / SyndicationDrama

Los Angeles County lifeguards, and at its peak the most-watched television programme on Earth.

Season 1

The Beachcombers

1972–1990CBCDrama

Log salvage on the British Columbia coast, and the longest-running dramatic series Canadian television has made.

Season 14

Beakman's World

1992–1998TLC / CBSDocumentary

Science explained by a man in a green coat and a person in a rat suit, which is more rigorous than it sounds.

Season 4

Bear in the Big Blue House

1997–2006Playhouse DisneyComedy

A seven-foot bear who greets the camera by smelling it, and a moon in the window who sings the goodbye song.

Season 1

Beast King GoLion

1981–1982TV TokyoAnimation

Five lions that combine into one robot, later recut in America as Voltron.

Season 1

Beast Wars: Transformers

1996–1999Syndication / YTVAnimation

Transformers rebuilt in computer graphics on a fraction of the budget, which is why everybody is an animal.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

Beastars

2019–2021Fuji TVAnimation

A boarding school of carnivores and herbivores, opened by a stop-motion sequence unlike the series it introduces.

Season 1

BeastMaster

1999–2002SyndicationDrama

The 1982 film continued as a series, made in Australia.

Season 1

The Beatles Anthology

1995ABCDocumentary

The band's own account of itself, assembled with the three surviving members.

Season 1

Beau Séjour

2017–2021VRTCrime

A murdered girl who can be seen by five people, investigating her own death in a Flemish hotel.

Season 1

Beavis and Butt-Head

1993–MTVAnimation

Two teenagers on a sofa, and a guitar riff played about as well as they would play it.

Season 1

Beck

1997–TV4 (Sweden)Crime

Martin Beck, adapted from the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels that invented Nordic crime fiction, and still running after thirty years.

Season 27

Becker

1998–2004CBSComedy

A Bronx doctor with no patience for his patients, and a diner where nobody is much happier.

Season 1

Beef

2023–NetflixDrama

A different David Choe painting behind the title card of every episode, so the opening is a gallery hung one canvas at a time across the season.

Season 1

Beetlejuice

1989–1991ABC / Fox KidsAnimation

The Burton film animated with Danny Elfman's theme intact, and Lydia and the ghost as friends rather than adversaries.

Season 1

Before

2024Apple TV+Horror

Billy Crystal as a child psychiatrist and a boy who knows things he should not.

Season 1

Behind Her Eyes

2021NetflixDrama

A secretary having an affair with her employer and befriending his wife, in a thriller with an ending people argued about for weeks.

Season 1

Being Erica

2009–2011CBCDrama

A therapist sending his patient back to her own regrets, one per session.

Season 1

Being Human

2008–2013BBC ThreeHorror

A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a Bristol rental, introduced with the flatness of a house-share advert.

Season 1

Belfer

2016–2018Canal+ PolandCrime

A teacher arriving in a small Polish town where a pupil has been murdered, and finding the town would rather he did not ask.

Season 1

Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom

2009–2013Channel 5 / Nick Jr.Animation

Elves and fairies from the people who made Peppa Pig, drawn in the same flat two dimensions.

Season 1

Ben 10

2005–2008Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A theme that lists the premise as a countdown, over a boy who becomes ten different aliens.

Seasons 1–2

The Ben Stiller Show

1992–1993FoxComedy

Thirteen episodes, cancelled, then given an Emmy — the writers' room that produced most of the next decade's American comedy.

Season 1

Benidorm

2007–2018ITVComedy

An all-inclusive Spanish resort and the same British families returning to it for ten series.

Season 1

Benson

1979–1986ABCComedy

The Soap butler promoted into his own series and eventually into the lieutenant governorship.

Season 2

Bergerac (2025)

2025–U&DramaCrime

Jersey's detective revived forty-four years after the BBC original, with the island doing the same work it always did.

Season 1

Berlin

2023–NetflixCrime

The Money Heist prequel, giving the character who died in the second season a heist of his own.

Season 1

The Bernie Mac Show

2001–2006FoxComedy

A comedian raising his sister's three children and turning to camera to explain himself about it.

Seasons 3–5

Berserk

1997–1998Nippon TVAnimation

'Tell Me Why' — an English-language pop song with almost no relationship to the series it introduces, which has become part of the show's reputation.

Season 1

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

Better Things

2016–2022FXComedy

Twenty-nine seconds of domestic clutter, filmed with the affection of someone who lives in it.

Season 1

Betty

2020–2021HBOComedy

A group of women skateboarding in New York, expanded from the film Skate Kitchen.

Season 1

Between 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

The Beverly Hillbillies

1962–1971CBSComedy

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" — a bluegrass number that reached number one on the country chart while the series was running.

Season 1

Beverly Hills, 90210

1990–2000FoxDrama

Freeze-frames of a cast grinning at the camera over a synth-brass hook — the template every teen drama of the decade copied.

Season 1

Bewitched

1964–1972ABCComedy

Animated witches and a swing arrangement — a live-action sitcom that opens as a cartoon, which was the only way to show the magic on a 1964 budget.

Season 1

Beyond Evil

2021JTBCCrime

Two detectives in a small town, each convinced the other is the killer.

Season 1

Beyond Paradise

2023–BBC One / BritBoxCrime

Death in Paradise's detective moved to Devon, where the weather is the joke.

Season 1

Bibleman

1995–2010TBNSci-Fi

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

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

The Big Bang Theory

2007–2019CBSComedy

Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.

Season 1

Big Boys

2022–2025Channel 4Comedy

Jack Rooke's university comedy, which uses short animated stings rather than one fixed opening.

Season 1

Big Brother (UK)

2000–Channel 4 / ITVDocumentary

The eye, and a theme built out of the sound of the house — the format that made surveillance into a light entertainment brand.

Season 1
Season 8

The Big C

2010–2013ShowtimeComedy

Laura Linney given a terminal diagnosis and deciding to stop being polite about anything.

Season 1

Big City Greens

2018–Disney ChannelAnimation

A country family relocated to the city, opened at the speed of a banjo run.

Season 1

The Big Comfy Couch

1992–2006YTVComedy

A clown and her doll on a couch, with a clock-stretch exercise that gave the programme its shape.

Season 1

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year

2004–Channel 4Comedy

An annual quiz about the year just gone, running long past midnight and rebuilt from scratch each December.

Season 10

Big Hero 6: The Series

2017–2021Disney XD / Disney ChannelAnimation

The film's team continued in 2D, in a San Fransokyo drawn rather than modelled.

Season 1

Big Little Lies

2017–2019HBODrama

The school run, filmed like a threat. Mothers driving the coast road to Monterey with children in the back seat, over Michael Kiwanuka's 'Cold Little Heart'.

Season 1

Big Love

2006–2011HBODrama

A family skating on ice that ends, over 'God Only Knows' — a marriage held up by something visibly about to give way.

Seasons 1–3

Big Mouth

2017–2025NetflixAnimation

Puberty rendered as a marching band of anxieties, with the hormone monsters given equal billing to the children.

Season 1

Big Time Rush

2009–2013NickelodeonComedy

A manufactured boy band playing a manufactured boy band, which then toured as one.

Season 1

Big Train

1998–2002BBC TwoComedy

Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' sketch show, which opens on nothing explaining itself and never does.

Season 1

The Big Valley

1965–1969ABCDrama

Barbara Stanwyck running a Stockton ranch, in the western that gave a woman the top billing.

Seasons 1–4

The Biggest Loser

2004–2020NBCDocumentary

A weight-loss competition whose titles were rebuilt around whichever pairing the season had chosen.

Season 5

The Bill

1983–2010ITVCrime

A London police station shot at ground level, under a rule the programme kept for twenty-seven years: no scene an officer is not present for.

Season 1
Season 4
Season 5

Bill 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

Billions

2016–2023ShowtimeDrama

Manhattan money photographed like weather — glass, helicopters and trading floors, with no people in any of it.

Season 1

Bing

2014–2019CBeebiesAnimation

A preschool rabbit and the small woollen carer who manages him, from Ted Dewan's books.

Season 1

Biohackers

2020–2021NetflixSci-Fi

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

Season 1

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

Birds of a Feather

1989–2020BBC One / ITVComedy

Two sisters in Chigwell whose husbands are both in prison.

Season 1
Season 10

A Bit of Fry & Laurie

1987–1995BBC TwoComedy

Sketches written and performed by two people who had just left Cambridge and sounded like it.

Season 2

Bitten

2014–2016SpaceHorror

The only female werewolf in existence, from the Kelley Armstrong novels, made in Canada.

Season 2

Black Bird

2022Apple TV+Crime

Prison corridors and Midwestern fields intercut, so the confinement and the killing ground read as one landscape.

Season 1

Black Books

2000–2004Channel 4Comedy

A bookshop run by a man who does not want customers, from Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan.

Season 1

Black Clover

2017–2021TV TokyoAnimation

A boy born without magic in a world made of it, across thirteen different openings.

Season 4

Black Dynamite

2012–2015Adult SwimAnimation

The blaxploitation pastiche film continued as a series, with the seventies title grammar intact.

Season 1

Black Jesus

2014–2019Adult SwimComedy

Aaron McGruder's live-action series, with Jesus living in Compton.

Season 2

A Black Lady Sketch Show

2019–2023HBOComedy

Robin Thede's sketch series, opened by a title sequence with more production value than most of the sketches.

Season 1

Black Lightning

2018–2021The CWSci-Fi

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

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

Black Sails

2014–2017StarzDrama

Carved wood and bone — ships, skulls and rigging rendered as scrimshaw, animated as though the carving were happening as you watch.

Season 1

Black Summer

2019–2021NetflixHorror

The Z Nation prequel, played without any of the parent series' jokes and shot in long unbroken takes.

Seasons 1–2

Blackadder

1983–1989BBC OneComedy

Four series, four centuries, and a theme re-orchestrated each time to suit the period — lute, harpsichord, military band.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

The Blacklist

2013–2023NBCCrime

Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.

Season 1

Blade Runner: Black Lotus

2021–2022Adult SwimSci-Fi

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

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

Blankety Blank

1979–1990BBC OneDocumentary

A panel game with a deliberately worthless prize, and a microphone shaped like a fishing rod.

Season 1

Bleach

2004–TV TokyoAnimation

Fifteen different openings across its original run, each one a complete restyling — a long-running series that treated its titles as a rotating commission rather than a fixed asset.

Season 1

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War

2022–TV TokyoAnimation

The final arc animated a decade after the original series ended, with a new opening for each cour in the tradition the show established.

Season 1

Bleak House

2005BBC OneDrama

Dickens serialised the way he was published — half-hour instalments, twice a week — with a title sequence cut to match.

Season 1

Bless the Harts

2019–2021FoxAnimation

A North Carolina family whose matriarch talks to a Jesus only she can see.

Season 1

The Bletchley Circle

2012–2014ITVCrime

Four women who broke codes during the war, using the same habits on a murder afterwards.

Season 1

Blinded

2019–2021TV4Drama

A financial journalist sleeping with the bank chief she is investigating. Swedish title Fartblinda — speed-blind.

Season 1

Blindspot

2015–2020NBCCrime

A woman found in Times Square covered in tattoos that are each a case.

Season 1

Blood & Water

2020–2023NetflixDrama

A Cape Town teenager who believes a swimming champion at her new school is the sister abducted at birth.

Season 2

Blood Drive

2017SyfyHorror

A grindhouse pastiche about cars that run on human blood, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Blood of Zeus

2020–NetflixAnimation

Greek vase painting animated into motion, with the title card restaged for each episode's myth.

Season 1

Bloodhounds

2023–2026NetflixCrime

Two young boxers working off a debt for a Seoul loan shark, and trying to stop.

Season 1

Bloodline

2015–2017NetflixDrama

A Florida Keys family whose eldest brother comes home, told across one summer and a confession.

Season 1

Blossom

1990–1995NBCComedy

A teenager narrating her own life to camera in a house otherwise entirely male, opening on a dance she performs herself.

Season 1

Blue Bloods

2010–2024CBSCrime

Three generations of one New York police family, fourteen seasons long.

Seasons 10–12

Blue Eye Samurai

2023–NetflixAnimation

Ink, forge-fire and steel — a blade being made, in the same brushwork the series uses for its violence.

Season 1

Blue Heelers

1994–2006Seven NetworkCrime

A country police station in the fictional town of Mount Thomas, twelve seasons long.

Season 4

Blue Lock

2022–TV AsahiAnimation

Football shot like a psychological thriller, with the players lit as though they are about to commit something.

Season 1

Blue Mountain State

2010–2011SpikeComedy

A football scholarship treated as a licence rather than a job, in Spike's fraternity comedy.

Season 1

Blue Peter

1958–BBC OneDocumentary

The world's longest-running children's programme, opening on a ship in full sail and a hornpipe.

Season 45
Season 64

The Blue Planet

2001BBC OneDocumentary

The first of the BBC's ocean series, and the template its sequel and the Planet Earth films all inherited.

Season 1

Blue Planet II

2017BBC OneDocumentary

Hans Zimmer and Radiohead scoring the ocean — the first natural history series to hire a film composer and a rock band for its titles.

Season 1

Blue Water High

2005–2008ABC (Australia)Drama

A surf academy on the northern beaches, with the cast chosen partly for whether they could actually surf.

Season 1

Blue's Clues

1996–2006NickelodeonAnimation

A host talking directly to camera and waiting for an answer, which changed how American preschool television was made.

Season 1

Bluestone 42

2013–2015BBC ThreeComedy

A bomb disposal detachment in Helmand, played as a workplace comedy without pretending the work is safe.

Season 1

Bluey

2018–ABC Kids / Disney+Animation

A blue heeler puppy and her family, animated in Brisbane, whose titles introduce the whole household in under half a minute.

Seasons 1–3

Blunt Talk

2015–2016StarzComedy

Patrick Stewart as a British cable news anchor in Los Angeles, from Jonathan Ames.

Season 1

BMF

2021–StarzCrime

The Black Mafia Family out of 1980s Detroit, produced by 50 Cent.

Season 1

Boardwalk Empire

2010–2014HBOCrime

One man on a beach while the tide brings him bottles. No montage, no cast — just Nucky Thompson standing still as Prohibition washes up around his shoes, to The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Seasons 1–5

The Bob Newhart Show

1972–1978CBSComedy

A psychologist commuting through Chicago, filmed at the pace of a man who is not looking forward to his day.

Season 1

Bob the Builder

1999–2011BBC OneAnimation

Stop-motion construction with a call and response the programme never varies, and a number one Christmas single.

Season 1

Bob's Burgers

2011–FoxAnimation

Three running gags in nineteen seconds — the burger of the day, the shop next door, and the pest-control van — all three rewritten for every single episode.

Season 1

Bobby's World

1990–1998Fox KidsAnimation

Howie Mandel's stand-up child character animated, with Mandel voicing both the boy and his father.

Season 1

Bocchi the Rock!

2022Tokyo MXAnimation

A guitarist too anxious to speak to her own band, animated with more formal invention than almost anything else in its year.

Season 1

Bodies

2023NetflixCrime

One corpse in one Whitechapel alley, found by four detectives in four different centuries.

Season 1

Bodkin

2024NetflixCrime

An Irish coastal town shot as podcast artwork — the true-crime aesthetic the series is making fun of, deployed without a wink.

Season 1

BoJack Horseman

2014–2020NetflixAnimation

A man drifting through his own life on his back while Los Angeles slides past above him, ending in a pool. Six seasons of the same slow fall, with the crowd around him quietly changing.

Seasons 1–6

The Bold and the Beautiful

1987–CBSDrama

Los Angeles fashion houses, and the most widely watched daytime serial in the world.

Season 1
Season 38

Bom Dia, Verônica

2020–2024NetflixCrime

A São Paulo police clerk who starts investigating a case nobody assigned her.

Season 1

Bonanza

1959–1973NBCDrama

A burning map and four men riding out of it — one of the first title sequences designed to show off colour television, which is precisely why it looks like that.

Season 1

Bondi Rescue

2006–Network TenDocumentary

The lifeguards at Bondi Beach, filmed across a summer at a time.

Season 8

Bones

2005–2017FoxCrime

Skeletal reconstruction rendered as clean laboratory graphics — a procedural that opens on anatomy rather than crime.

Season 2

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

Boomtown

2002–2003NBCCrime

A Los Angeles crime series that told each case from five points of view, and opened with the device stated up front.

Season 1

Boon

1986–1995ITVCrime

A retired fireman on a motorcycle, in the ITV drama that ran nine years on the strength of Jim Diamond's theme.

Season 5

The Boondocks

2005–2014Adult SwimAnimation

Aaron McGruder's strip animated in an anime register, opened by Asheru's theme over ink-wash stills.

Season 1

Boots

2025NetflixDrama

A closeted teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1990, from Greg Cope White's memoir.

Season 1

Bordertown

2016FoxAnimation

A Seth MacFarlane-produced border comedy, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Bored to Death

2009–2011HBOComedy

A pulp-paperback cover come to life — Brooklyn drawn as a detective magazine by Dean Haspiel, panel by panel.

Season 1

Borgen

2010–2022DR1Drama

Danish coalition politics, opened with the restraint the subject demands and none of the urgency an American network would insist on.

Season 4

The Borgias

2011–2013ShowtimeDrama

Neil Jordan's Renaissance papacy, opened in gilt and shadow.

Season 1

The Boroughs

2026NetflixDrama

A 2026 Netflix series — and the reason an earlier attempt at Suburra was rejected, since this is what that search kept returning.

Season 1

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations

2017–2023TV TokyoAnimation

The Naruto sequel, following the son of the boy the first series was about.

Season 1

Bosch

2014–2021Prime VideoCrime

Los Angeles at night from a helicopter, over Caught A Ghost's 'Can't Let Go' — a city filmed the way the detective sees it, from above and at a distance.

Season 1

Bosom Buddies

1980–1982ABCComedy

Two admen who take rooms in a women-only building in drag, and the first thing Tom Hanks was known for.

Season 1

Boss

2011–2012StarzDrama

Kelsey Grammer as a Chicago mayor concealing a degenerative diagnosis, opened to Robert Plant.

Season 1

Boston Blue

2025–CBSCrime

The Blue Bloods spin-off, moving a Reagan to Boston and a different police family's dinner table.

Season 1

Boston Common

1996–1997NBCComedy

A Virginian who follows a woman to Boston and takes a job at the university she attends.

Season 1

Boston Legal

2004–2008ABCComedy

Legal-drama iconography played as farce, from the same producer as Ally McBeal and with the same refusal to take the profession seriously.

Season 1

Boston Public

2000–2004FoxDrama

David E. Kelley's high school, running alongside his legal series on the same network.

Season 1

Bottom

1991–1995BBC TwoComedy

Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in a Hammersmith flat, hitting each other.

Season 1

Boy Meets World

1993–2000ABCComedy

A cast montage rebuilt every season as its lead grew from eleven to eighteen, which few sitcoms have had to solve.

Season 1

The Boys

2019–Prime VideoDrama

Superhero iconography rendered as corporate branding and then defaced — the show's whole argument, done in graphics.

Season 1

The Boys Presents: Diabolical

2022Prime VideoAnimation

Eight animated shorts in the same universe, each by a different studio, and eleven seconds to introduce all of them.

Season 1

The Brady Bunch

1969–1974ABCComedy

A three-by-three grid of faces all looking at each other — a title sequence so structurally famous that the grid alone is the reference.

Season 1

The Bradys

1990CBSDrama

The Brady children as adults, played as an hour-long drama, which lasted six weeks.

Season 1

The Brak Show

2000–2003Adult SwimAnimation

The Space Ghost villain relocated to a 1950s sitcom family, with the sitcom open played completely straight.

Season 1

Brandy & Mr. Whiskers

2004–2006Disney ChannelAnimation

A pampered dog and a manic rabbit stranded together in the Amazon.

Season 1

Braquo

2009–2016Canal+Crime

Olivier Marchal's Paris police series, about four officers who stop pretending to follow the law.

Season 1

Brass Eye

1997–2001Channel 4Comedy

The Day Today's successor, with a new themed opening built for each episode's subject — crime, drugs, science, sex.

Season 1

Brave New World

2020PeacockSci-Fi

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

Season 1

BraveStarr

1987–1988SyndicationAnimation

Filmation's science-fiction western, and the last series the studio finished before it closed.

Season 1

Bread

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

Carla Lane's Liverpool family, signing on and eating together, in the decade that made both political.

Season 1

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

Breathe

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A father working his way up a transplant list by removing the people above his son.

Season 1

Briarpatch

2019–2020USA NetworkCrime

A Texas border town where the zoo animals have got out, which the series treats as background.

Season 1

Brickleberry

2012–2015Comedy CentralAnimation

A national park staffed entirely by people who should not be near one, opened in ten seconds.

Season 1

Brideshead Revisited

1981ITVDrama

Geoffrey Burgon's theme over an English country house — eleven hours of television that changed what British drama believed it could spend money on.

Season 1

The Bridge

2011–2018SVT / DR1Crime

The Øresund Bridge at night, and Choir of Young Believers — a border filmed as a character, which is what the show is about.

Season 3

Bridgerton

2020–NetflixDrama

Engraved invitations, wax seals and bees, assembled like a society page being typeset — the gossip sheet that drives the plot, doing the credits.

Season 1
Season 2

Brimstone

1998–1999FoxHorror

A damned detective sent back from hell to recapture a hundred and thirteen escaped souls, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Britain's Got Talent

2007–ITVDocumentary

The variety format that exported itself to seventy countries, and the theme it kept for its first four series.

Seasons 1–4

The Brittas Empire

1991–1997BBC OneComedy

A leisure centre run by the least suitable manager in British comedy.

Season 1

Broad City

2014–2019Comedy CentralComedy

Abbi and Ilana's New York, opened in ten seconds of hand-drawn scribble.

Season 1

Broadchurch

2013–2017ITVCrime

Dorset cliffs and a beach, filmed as beautifully as a tourist board would want and used for the opposite purpose.

Season 1

Brooklyn Bridge

1991–1993CBSComedy

Gary David Goldberg's memory of a 1950s Jewish family in Bensonhurst.

Season 1

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

2013–2021Fox / NBCComedy

Precinct signage and a horn line in twenty-one seconds — a cop show opening with no sirens in it.

Seasons 1–5
Seasons 6–8

Brookside

1982–2003Channel 4Drama

Channel 4's launch-night serial, shot on a real close of houses the production company had bought.

Season 1

Brothers & Sisters

2006–2011ABCDrama

The Walker family and the business they inherit, with Sally Field and Rachel Griffiths.

Season 1

Brum

1991–2002BBC OneComedy

A small yellow car loose in a city, told without dialogue — a preschool series that is closer to silent film than to television.

Season 1

Brush Strokes

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

A painter and decorator who cannot stop flirting, written by the Birds of a Feather pair.

Season 1

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

7 sequences

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997–2003The WB / UPNHorror

An organ sting, a shot of the moon, and then Nerf Herder's surf-punk theme over black-and-white monster-movie footage that bursts into colour. The design never changed in seven years; the fifty seconds behind it were re-cut every one of them.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 4 more

The Bugs Bunny Show

1960–2000ABC / CBSAnimation

The prime-time repackaging of the Warner shorts, with an original curtain-raiser animated for television.

Season 1

Bullseye

1981–1995ITVDocumentary

Darts and general knowledge, and a cartoon bull who throws better than the contestants.

Season 1

The Bullwinkle Show

1959–1964ABC / NBCAnimation

Jay Ward's squirrel and moose, which began as Rocky and His Friends and was renamed for the character who talked more.

Season 1

Bunheads

2012–2013ABC FamilyComedy

Amy Sherman-Palladino's dance-school series, one season long and talked about since.

Season 1

The Bureau

2015–2020Canal+Drama

French intelligence procedure filmed with the patience of the job, and widely held to be the best spy series ever made for television.

Season 1

Burn Notice

2007–2013USA NetworkCrime

A narrated premise about being blacklisted, delivered over Miami heat in thirty-one seconds.

Season 1

Business Proposal

2022SBSComedy

A blind date under a false identity that turns out to be with the company's chief executive.

Season 1

The Busy World of Richard Scarry

1994–1996ShowtimeAnimation

Busytown animated faithfully enough that the books' cutaway drawings survive intact.

Season 1

Butterflies

1978–1983BBC TwoComedy

Carla Lane's series about a housewife considering an affair and never quite having one.

Season 1

Button Moon

1980–1988ITVAnimation

Puppets made of kitchen utensils flying to a moon made of a button, with a theme sung by Peter Davison's wife and later covered by him.

Season 1

The Buzz on Maggie

2005–2006Disney ChannelAnimation

A teenage fly in a rubbish dump, which the series treats as an ordinary suburb.

Season 1

Byker Grove

1989–2006BBC OneDrama

A Newcastle youth club, and the series Ant and Dec came out of.

Season 11

C

Cabinet of Curiosities

2022NetflixHorror

A physical cabinet opened drawer by drawer, each one holding the object that episode is about — an anthology that indexes itself.

Season 1

Cable Girls

2017–2020Netflix (Spain)Drama

Four switchboard operators in 1928 Madrid, Netflix's first Spanish original.

Season 1

Cagney & Lacey

1981–1988CBSCrime

Two detectives introduced as colleagues rather than as a novelty, which in 1981 was itself the statement.

Season 2

Caillou

1997–2011Teletoon / PBSAnimation

A four-year-old with no hair and very little patience, adapted from Quebec picture books.

Season 1

California Dreams

1992–1996NBCComedy

A Californian high school band, made by the Saved by the Bell producers for the same Saturday morning block.

Season 1
Seasons 3–5

Californication

2007–2014ShowtimeComedy

Los Angeles from a convertible, with a writer who has not written anything in some years.

Season 1

Caliphate

2020SVT1Drama

A Stockholm schoolgirl recruited online, and the officer who cannot get anyone to listen. Swedish title Kalifat.

Season 1

Call My Agent!

2015–2020France 2Comedy

Paris and a jazz figure, in the register of a film the agency's clients would be too grand to appear in.

Season 1

Call the Midwife

2012–BBC OneDrama

Poplar's district nurses through the fifties and sixties, opened the same way for well over a decade.

Season 1

Camberwick Green

1966BBC OneAnimation

A musical box that opens to reveal whichever character the episode is about — a title sequence that is also the casting.

Season 1

Camelot

2011StarzDrama

The Arthur legend with Eva Green as Morgan, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Camp Lazlo

2005–2008Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A Brazilian spider monkey at a scout camp run by a humourless beetle.

Season 1

Cannon

1971–1976CBSCrime

William Conrad as a private investigator, the first Quinn Martin series built around a heavy-set lead.

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

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

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

Car 54, Where Are You?

1961–1963NBCComedy

Two Bronx patrolmen, with a theme that lists everything going wrong in New York and then asks where the car is.

Season 1

Cardcaptor Sakura

1998–2000NHKAnimation

CLAMP's magical girl, with a new costume every episode and three separate openings across the run.

Season 3

The Care Bears Family

1986–1988ABCAnimation

The greetings-card bears given a series, with a stare that resolves every plot.

Season 1

Carmen Sandiego

2019–2021NetflixAnimation

The game-show thief given an origin, animated in flat colour and a lot of red.

Season 1

Carnival Row

2019–2023Prime VideoDrama

Victorian illustration of wings, horns and hooves, catalogued like a natural history plate of a population being policed.

Season 1

Carnivàle

2003–2005HBOHorror

Tarot cards dissolving into Depression-era photographs and newsreel, so the reading and the history become the same footage. Another Emmy winner, and still one of the strangest things a network put in front of a drama.

Seasons 1–2

The Carol Burnett Show

1967–1978CBSComedy

Twenty-three seconds and a Bob Mackie gown, from the variety show that taught American television how a sketch ensemble should work.

Season 1

Caroline in the City

1995–1999NBCComedy

A Manhattan cartoonist drawing a strip about her own life, and the colourist who is in love with her.

Season 1
Season 3

The Casagrandes

2019–2022NickelodeonAnimation

The Loud House spin-off, following the Mexican American family next door into the city.

Season 1

Casi Ángeles

2007–2010Telefe (Argentina)Drama

Cris Morena's Buenos Aires teen musical, which exported across Latin America and Israel.

Season 1

Castle

2009–2016ABCCrime

Typewriter keys and New York, for a series about a novelist who follows a detective around.

Season 2

Castle Rock

2018–2019HuluHorror

A Maine town assembled out of forty years of Stephen King, with a main title that keeps rebuilding the same house.

Season 1

Castlevania

2017–2021NetflixAnimation

Gothic architecture and stained glass rendered as a slow climb, refusing the game series' rock score for something closer to a requiem.

Seasons 1–4

Casualty

1986–BBC OneDrama

Holby City Hospital's emergency department, and the longest-running primetime medical drama in the world.

Season 27

Catchphrase

1986–ITVDocumentary

Say what you see, and a golden robot called Mr Chips who was the reason anyone watched.

Season 1

CatDog

1998–2005NickelodeonAnimation

A cat and a dog sharing one body, and a theme song that spends its whole length asking how.

Season 1

Catherine the Great

2019HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Helen Mirren as the empress in her last decades, in four parts.

Season 1

Celebrity Deathmatch

1998–2007MTVAnimation

Claymation celebrities fighting to the death in a wrestling ring, with commentary played completely straight.

Season 1

Chad Powers

2025–HuluComedy

A disgraced quarterback who returns to college football in prosthetics under an assumed name.

Season 1

Chainsaw Man

2022–TV TokyoAnimation

An opening built almost entirely out of film references — a different movie restaged in nearly every shot, at a speed that makes spotting them a second viewing's work.

Season 1

The Chair Company

2025HBOComedy

Tim Robinson on a man who will not let a collapsing office chair go.

Season 1

ChalkZone

2002–2008NickelodeonAnimation

A world made of everything ever erased from a blackboard.

Season 1

Chapelwaite

2021–EpixHorror

Jerusalem's Lot filmed as a nineteenth-century gothic, from the King short story the vampire novel grew out of.

Season 1

Chappelle's Show

2003–2006Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-two seconds of animation and a beat, for the sketch show that defined a decade of American comedy in two and a half seasons.

Season 1

Charles in Charge

1984–1990CBS / SyndicationComedy

A student paying his rent by minding somebody else's children, in a sitcom CBS cancelled and syndication brought back.

Season 1

Charlie and Lola

2005–2008CBeebiesAnimation

Lauren Child's collage illustration animated as collage, with children rather than actors doing the voices.

Season 1

Charlie's Angels

1976–1981ABCCrime

Three detectives working for a voice on a speakerphone, and a title sequence that explains the entire premise in narration before a scene is played.

Season 1

8 sequences

Charmed

1998–2006The WBHorror

Love Spit Love's cover of 'How Soon Is Now?' over the Book of Shadows and three sisters, re-cut every season. It goes further than that, though: the credits were rebuilt whenever the cast of an episode changed, so a season carries several versions rather than one — eight of them in the second year alone.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 5 more

Cheer

2020–2022NetflixDocumentary

A Texas junior college cheerleading squad, filmed as a sport rather than as a sideline to one.

Season 1

Cheers

1982–1993NBCComedy

A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.

Seasons 1–11

Chef's Table

2015–NetflixDocumentary

Food shot in extreme close-up to classical strings — a cookery series that opens like a perfume advertisement and means it.

Season 1

Chernobyl

2019HBODrama

No montage and no metaphor — the camera simply moves through the plant's corridors and control rooms while Hildur Guðnadóttir's score, built from recordings made inside a power station, does the rest.

Season 1

Chesapeake Shores

2016–2022Hallmark ChannelDrama

A daughter called home to a Maryland inn, in the series that showed Hallmark could run a returning drama rather than only films.

Seasons 1–2

Chewing Gum

2015–2017E4Comedy

Michaela Coel's Tower Hamlets comedy, made three years before I May Destroy You.

Season 1

The Chi

2018–ShowtimeDrama

Lena Waithe's South Side, following several lives that keep intersecting.

Seasons 1–3

Chicago Fire

2012–NBCDrama

The first of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the other two were built out from.

Season 1

Chicago Hope

1994–2000CBSDrama

The medical drama that premiered the same week as ER and spent six years being the other one.

Season 5

Chicago Justice

2017NBCCrime

The fourth Chicago series, cancelled after thirteen episodes — the only one Dick Wolf could not make stick.

Season 1

Chicago Med

2015–NBCDrama

The third Chicago series, sharing a city and a crossover schedule with the other two.

Season 1

Chicago P.D.

2014–NBCCrime

The second of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the crossovers usually run through.

Season 1

Chief of War

2025–Apple TV+Drama

Hawaiian carving, cloth and volcanic landscape, filmed as artefacts of a nation rather than scenery.

Season 1

Childhood's End

2015SyfySci-Fi

The Arthur C. Clarke novel adapted across three nights.

Season 1

Childrens Hospital

2008–2016Adult SwimComedy

A hospital soap parody that changed its own premise whenever it got bored, Rob Corddry's first series.

Season 3

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

2018–2020NetflixHorror

The Archie witch as horror rather than sitcom, from the Riverdale producers.

Season 1

China Beach

1988–1991ABCDrama

An evacuation hospital on the Vietnamese coast, told from the women posted to it rather than the men passing through.

Season 1

Chip 'n' Dale: Park Life

2021–2024Disney+Animation

The chipmunks in a city park, dialogue-free, animated in France.

Season 1

CHiPs

1977–1983NBCCrime

California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers, filmed almost entirely on freeways.

Season 1

Chorlton and the Wheelies

1976–1979ITVAnimation

A happiness dragon in Wheelie World, from the studio that went on to make Danger Mouse.

Season 1

The Chosen

2017–VidAngel / Prime VideoDrama

The crowdfunded life of Christ, with a title sequence that deliberately does not look like a Bible show.

Seasons 1–4

Chowder

2007–2010Cartoon NetworkAnimation

An apprentice cook in Marzipan City, animated over patterned backgrounds that never stop moving.

Season 1

Chozen

2014FXAnimation

An animated rapper released from prison, from the Archer production team.

Season 1

The Chris Isaak Show

2001–2004ShowtimeComedy

The musician playing himself and his band playing themselves, in a series about their own touring.

Season 1

The Chronicles of Narnia

1988–1990BBC OneDrama

Lewis adapted across four serials, with costumes and matte paintings doing what the budget could not.

Season 1

Chuck

2007–2012NBCComedy

Consumer electronics and spy hardware cut together at the same speed, for a show that could never decide which it was about — correctly.

Season 1

ChuckleVision

1987–2009BBC OneComedy

Two brothers and a slapstick format that ran for twenty-one series on the strength of one exchange.

Season 1
Seasons 17–20

Chuno

2010KBS2Drama

Slave hunters in late Joseon, shot handheld in the mountains and unusually violent for its slot.

Season 1

Cidade dos Homens

2002–2005TV GloboDrama

Two boys growing up in a Rio favela, made by the City of God team either side of the film.

Season 1

Cigarette Girl

2023NetflixDrama

The Indonesian kretek industry in the 1960s, and a woman who is not allowed near the part of it she is best at. Original title Gadis Kretek.

Season 1

Circle of Fear

1972–1973NBCHorror

An anthology that began as Ghost Story with a host and a hotel, then dropped both and renamed itself halfway through.

Season 1

The Cisco Kid

1950–1956SyndicationDrama

The first television series filmed in colour, three years before anyone in America could receive it.

Season 1

Citadel

2023–Prime VideoDrama

The Russo brothers' spy franchise, built to spawn local-language series in several countries at once.

Season 1

Citizen Smith

1977–1980BBC OneComedy

John Sullivan's first series, a Tooting revolutionary with no revolution, written five years before Only Fools and Horses.

Season 1

City on a Hill

2019–2022ShowtimeCrime

Boston in the early nineties, a corrupt FBI agent and the prosecutor trying to use him.

Season 1

City on Fire

2023Apple TV+Crime

New York in the year of the blackout, burning at the edges of the frame — another Imaginary Forces main title, and a much colder one.

Season 1

The Clangers

1969–1974BBC OneAnimation

Knitted creatures on a small planet who speak in swanee whistles, narrated as though it were a nature programme.

Season 1

Clannad

2007–2009TBSAnimation

A Kyoto Animation adaptation that spends a full season setting up what the second season does to you.

Season 1

Clarence

2014–2018Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A relentlessly cheerful boy and two friends, drawn in a loose line that never tidied itself up.

Season 1

Clarissa Explains It All

1991–1994NickelodeonComedy

The first Nickelodeon live-action series built around a girl, addressed straight to camera.

Season 1

Clarkson's Farm

2021–Prime VideoDocumentary

Jeremy Clarkson farming a thousand Cotswold acres badly, and the year-shaped structure the titles borrow from.

Season 1

Class of 3000

2006–2008Cartoon NetworkAnimation

André 3000's series about an Atlanta music class, with a theme he wrote and performed himself.

Season 1

Claws

2017–2022TNTCrime

A Florida nail salon laundering money for a pill mill, staged in saturated colour throughout.

Season 1

The Cleaning Lady

2022–2025FoxCrime

A Filipino doctor in Las Vegas cleaning for organised crime to pay for her son's treatment.

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

The Cleveland Show

2009–2013FoxAnimation

The Family Guy spin-off, moving Cleveland Brown to Virginia and giving him a theme song about it.

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

Clone High

2002–2023MTV / MaxAnimation

A theme that introduces the entire premise as a shouted list of historical figures, which remains the fastest exposition in animation.

Season 1

The Closer

2005–2012TNTCrime

Kyra Sedgwick's LAPD deputy chief, and the most-watched drama basic cable had at the time.

Season 1

Club de Cuervos

2015–2019NetflixComedy

Netflix's first Spanish-language original, about two siblings inheriting a football club.

Season 1

Clueless

1996–1999ABC / UPNComedy

The film continued at Bronson Alcott High, with most of the cast replaced and Dionne kept.

Season 1
Season 3

Coach

1989–1997ABCComedy

A Minnesota football program run by three men who are markedly better at the game than at the rest of their lives.

Season 1

Cobra Kai

2018–2025YouTube Red / NetflixDrama

The Karate Kid continued forty years on, with a title card that has been restaged in several different styles across the run.

Season 1

Code Black

2015–2018CBSDrama

The busiest emergency room in America, named for the state it spends most of its time in.

Season 1

Code Geass

2006–2008MBS / TBSAnimation

Mecha and monarchy over a rock track, with the aristocratic cast posed like a fashion shoot.

Season 1

Codename: Kids Next Door

2002–2008Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A spy-thriller opening for five children fighting adults, played with the seriousness of a much larger programme.

Season 1

The Colbert Report

2005–2014Comedy CentralComedy

An eagle, a flag and a barrage of adjectives flying at the camera — a parody of cable-news branding so precise that cable news started copying it back.

Season 1

Cold Case

2003–2010CBSCrime

Evidence boxes and faded photographs, for a procedural whose whole method is that the past is filed somewhere.

Season 1

The Colgate Comedy Hour

1950–1955NBCComedy

A live variety hour with a different star each week, made to take the audience off Ed Sullivan.

Season 4

Colin From Accounts

2022–Binge / Paramount+Comedy

An Australian comedy that begins with a hit dog and is named after him.

Season 1

Colony

2016–2018USA NetworkSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Columbo

1971–2003NBC / ABCCrime

Twenty-four seconds, and for much of the run no sequence at all — a series confident enough to open on the murder and let the detective arrive late.

Season 1

Come Outside

1993–1997BBC TwoDocumentary

Auntie Mabel and her dog Pippin flying a spotted aeroplane to find out where one ordinary thing comes from.

Season 1

The Commish

1991–1996ABCCrime

A police commissioner who solves things by talking, in a series built against the action shows around it.

Season 1

Common Side Effects

2025Adult SwimAnimation

A mushroom that cures anything, and everyone who would rather it did not exist.

Season 1

Community

2009–2015NBC / YahooComedy

Study-group detritus on a table, in a show that spent six seasons abandoning its own format for whatever genre it fancied that week.

Season 1

Conan

2010–2021TBSComedy

The show Conan O'Brien built after losing The Tonight Show, opening on a cartoon of himself.

Season 1

Connections

1978BBC OneDocumentary

James Burke tracing one invention to another across centuries, in a structure the titles set up before he says a word.

Season 1

The Conners

2018–2025ABCComedy

Roseanne continued without her, after the network cancelled the revival it had just recommissioned.

Season 1
Season 5

Constantine

2014–2015NBCHorror

The Hellblazer comic adapted, cancelled after thirteen episodes and continued in animation.

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 Continental: From the World of John Wick

2023PeacockCrime

The hotel's origin in 1970s New York, three episodes long.

Season 1

Continuum

2012–2015ShowcaseSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Control Z

2020–2022NetflixDrama

A Mexican school where a hacker exposes every student's secrets, opened in nine seconds.

Season 1

The Corner

2000HBODrama

David Simon and David Mills's West Baltimore miniseries, made three years before The Wire took the same corner.

Season 1

Coronation Street

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

Season 1
Season 31

Cory in the House

2007–2008Disney ChannelComedy

That's So Raven's brother moved into the White House as the chef's son.

Season 1

The Cosby Show

1984–1992NBCComedy

A family dancing to a new arrangement of the same theme every season — jazz, big band, calypso — which makes it one of the earliest American sitcoms to treat its opening as something to redo annually.

Season 1

Count Arthur Strong

2013–2017BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Steve Delaney's radio character given a sitcom around him, co-written by Graham Linehan.

Season 1

Count Duckula

1988–1993ITV (Cosgrove Hall)Animation

The Danger Mouse villain spun off into his own castle, a vegetarian vampire duck.

Season 1

Countdown

1982–Channel 4Documentary

The first programme Channel 4 ever broadcast, and a clock sequence that has been recognisable to British afternoons for forty years.

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

A Country Practice

1981–1994Seven NetworkDrama

A rural New South Wales medical practice, and one of Australian television's defining serials.

Season 1

Countryfile

1988–BBC OneDocumentary

Sunday evening rural affairs, and one of the most watched factual programmes in Britain.

Season 24

The Couple Next Door

2023–Channel 4 / StarzDrama

Two couples in a Leeds cul-de-sac, and what starts once one of them looks over the fence.

Season 1

Coupling

2000–2004BBC TwoComedy

Six friends in a bar, structured as farce rather than warmth — the British sitcom most often, and most unfairly, compared to Friends.

Season 1

Courage the Cowardly Dog

1999–2002Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Twenty-nine seconds establishing a farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere and a dog who is right to be frightened.

Season 1

Cousin Skeeter

1998–2002NickelodeonComedy

A boy and the puppet cousin who moves in with him, which nobody in the series treats as unusual.

Season 1

Cover Up

1984–1985CBSDrama

A fashion photographer and her model working as agents, and the series remembered for how its lead died.

Season 1

Covert Affairs

2010–2014USA NetworkDrama

A CIA trainee promoted early for reasons she is not told.

Season 1

Cow and Chicken

1997–1999Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A cow and a chicken with human parents whose faces are never shown above the waist.

Season 1

Cowboy Bebop

1998–1999TV Tokyo / WOWOWAnimation

A jazz record given ninety seconds of animation. Silhouettes and hard-edged colour panels cut on the beat of a big band, borrowing the grammar of 1960s film titles so completely that the show it opens looks like a rediscovery rather than a debut.

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

Cracker

1993–2006ITVCrime

Nineteen seconds, and no attempt to make its criminal psychologist look like someone you would want to meet.

Season 1

Craig of the Creek

2018–Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A wooded creek run entirely by the children who play in it, mapped like a country.

Season 1

Cranford

2007–2009BBC OneDrama

Elizabeth Gaskell's Cheshire town, with Judi Dench and most of the British stage.

Season 1

Crash Landing on You

2019–2020tvNDrama

A South Korean heiress paraglides into North Korea, and the opening treats the border as scenery rather than politics.

Season 1

Crashing

2017–2019HBOComedy

Pete Holmes sleeping on other comedians' sofas after his marriage ends, opened in eighteen seconds.

Season 1

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend

2015–2019The CWComedy

A musical comedy that threw away its theme song every year and wrote a new one, each arguing with the last about whether the word in the title is fair.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

Crazyhead

2016Channel 4Horror

Two women who can see demons, from the writer of Misfits, and cancelled after six episodes.

Season 1

Creepshow

2019–ShudderHorror

The Romero and King film continued as an anthology, with the comic-book panels doing the same work in the titles.

Season 1

Criminal Justice

2019–Disney+ HotstarCrime

The BBC series remade in India, running longer than the original did.

Season 1

Criminal Minds

2005–CBS / Paramount+Crime

Case files and profiler jargon in thirty-one seconds, from a procedural that has now run for two decades.

Season 1

Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders

2016–2017CBSCrime

The spin-off that moved the profiling unit to crimes against Americans abroad.

Season 1

The Critic

1994–1995ABC / FoxAnimation

Al Jean and Mike Reiss's film critic, made between their Simpsons runs and cancelled by two networks.

Season 1

Critical Role

2015–Twitch / YouTubeComedy

A tabletop campaign broadcast live, which by its second campaign had a fully animated title sequence of its own.

Season 2

The Crocodile Hunter

1996–2004Animal PlanetDocumentary

Steve Irwin handling animals at arm's length or closer, for eight years.

Season 1

The Crocodile Hunter Diaries

2002–2006Animal PlanetDocumentary

The spin-off following the zoo's staff between expeditions, rather than Irwin in the field.

Season 1

Cross

2024–Prime VideoCrime

James Patterson's Alex Cross novels, with a second-season sequence rebuilt from scratch.

Season 2

Crossing Jordan

2001–2007NBCCrime

A Boston medical examiner who investigates her own cases against instruction.

Season 1

Crossroads

1964–1988ATV Midlands / CentralDrama

A Midlands motel, taped so fast that the sets famously wobbled, and watched by fifteen million people anyway.

Season 7

The Crowded Room

2023Apple TV+Drama

Tom Holland in a 1979 case built on the Billy Milligan story.

Season 1

The Crown

2016–2023NetflixDrama

Molten gold pouring, cooling and assembling itself into a crown, over Hans Zimmer. No faces and no footage — the object outlasts everyone who wears it, which is the show's entire argument.

Seasons 1–6

Cruel Summer

2021–2023FreeformDrama

Two girls, three summers and one accusation, told from both sides at once and cut between them.

Season 1

Crusade

1999TNTSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Crystal Maze

1990–Channel 4Documentary

Four themed zones and a warehouse in Essex, opened with an orchestral fanfare grander than any game show has earned before or since.

Season 5

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

2000–2015CBSCrime

The Who over forensic macro photography, and the sequence that turned laboratory work into prime-time spectacle for a decade.

Season 1

CSI: Cyber

2015–2016CBSCrime

The last CSI, moving the forensics from bodies to hard drives, and the one the franchise ended on.

Season 2

CSI: Miami

2002–2012CBSCrime

The first CSI spin-off, opened by The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".

Season 1

CSI: NY

2004–2013CBSCrime

The third CSI, opened by "Baba O'Riley".

Season 1

CSI: Vegas

2021–2024CBSCrime

The franchise returned to the city it started in, with two of the original cast and the same Who song.

Season 1

Cubicles

2019–SonyLIV / TVFComedy

A first job in an Indian IT firm, from the studio that made Panchayat and Kota Factory.

Season 1

Cuckoo

2012–2019BBC ThreeComedy

A daughter returning from a gap year married to an American with no discernible occupation.

Season 1

Culinary Class Wars

2024–NetflixDocumentary

A hundred anonymous Korean chefs cooking against twenty famous ones, the unknown half dressed in black throughout.

Season 1

Cunk on Earth

2022BBC TwoComedy

Philomena Cunk presenting human civilisation, opened by a ten-second parody of every documentary open ever made.

Season 1

The Cuphead Show!

2022NetflixAnimation

The game's 1930s rubber-hose style animated properly, which is the whole point of it.

Season 1

Curb Your Enthusiasm

2000–2024HBOComedy

A tuba, a circus march, and nothing else. Twenty-four years and twelve seasons on a piece of production-library music picked because it sounded like a man walking into trouble.

Seasons 1–12

The Curse

2023Showtime / A24Comedy

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's series about a house-flipping couple, whose opening credits are different in every single episode.

Season 1

The Curse of Oak Island

2014–HistoryDocumentary

Two brothers digging a Nova Scotian island for treasure, across more than a decade of not finding it.

Season 1

The Cursed

2020tvNHorror

A girl who can kill by curse and the reporter who decides to use her.

Season 1

Cyberchase

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

Cyberpunk: Edgerunners

2022NetflixAnimation

Franz Ferdinand over Night City, cut by Studio Trigger at a speed that dares you to keep up.

Season 1

Cybill

1995–1998CBSComedy

An actress whose career never quite happened, written closely around the one its star actually had.

Season 1

D

D.P.

2021–2023NetflixDrama

Military police chasing deserters, and the conscription system that produces them.

Season 1

Da Ali G Show

2000–2004Channel 4 / HBOComedy

Sacha Baron Cohen's three characters interviewing people who did not know.

Season 1

Da Vinci's Demons

2013–2015StarzDrama

David Goyer's young Leonardo, opened by a sequence built entirely from his own notebook drawings.

Season 1

Da Vinci's Inquest

1998–2005CBCCrime

A Vancouver coroner written from the real one, who later became the city's mayor.

Season 1

Dad's Army

1968–1977BBC OneComedy

The Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, opened by animated arrows advancing and retreating across a map of Europe.

Season 1

Dahaad

2023Prime VideoCrime

A Rajasthan sub-inspector connecting a series of deaths nobody has treated as murders.

Season 1

The Daily Show

1996–Comedy CentralComedy

A news-graphics package rebuilt for each of its four hosts, and the programme that made the fake-news desk a form.

Season 1

Daisy Jones & The Six

2023Prime VideoDrama

A fictional 1970s band told as a rockumentary, with the songs written for it.

Season 1

Dallas

1978–1991CBSDrama

A three-panel split screen over the Dallas skyline, and the theme that defined what a primetime soap was allowed to sound like.

Season 10

Damages

2007–2012FX / DirecTVCrime

Legal documents, blood and Manhattan glass, cut in the same non-linear fashion the series tells its story.

Season 1

Dance Moms

2011–2019LifetimeDocumentary

A Pittsburgh dance studio, the children in it, and the mothers watching from behind the glass.

Season 1

Dancing on Ice

2006–ITVDocumentary

Celebrities skating in pairs, judged by Torvill and Dean, who had won the thing for real.

Season 7

Dandadan

2024–Tokyo MXAnimation

Aliens and ghosts arguing over the same two teenagers, opened by Creepy Nuts at a sprint.

Season 1

Danger Man

1960–1968ITVDrama

Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, the series he left to make The Prisoner.

Season 1

Danger Mouse

1981–1992ITV (Cosgrove Hall)Animation

A one-eyed secret-agent mouse under a Mayfair pillar box, and the most exported British cartoon of its decade.

Season 1

Danny Phantom

2004–2007NickelodeonAnimation

A narrated origin sung over the transformation, in the tradition the network had been running since Doug.

Season 1

The Danny Thomas Show

1953–1964ABC / CBSComedy

Eleven years of a nightclub comedian's home life, and the series The Andy Griffith Show was spun out of.

Season 1

Daredevil

2015–2018NetflixCrime

Blood-red liquid pouring upward into the shapes of New York — the courthouse, the church, the skyline — then the scales of justice and a man who cannot see any of it.

Seasons 1–3

Daredevil: Born Again

2025–Disney+Crime

The revival, which rebuilds the Netflix series' red-liquid city rather than replacing it.

Season 1

Daria

1997–2002MTVAnimation

The cast doing ordinary things badly while the lead refuses to participate, over Splendora's 'You're Standing on My Neck'.

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

Dark Angel

2000–2002FoxSci-Fi

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

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

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

Dark Shadows

1966–1971ABCHorror

Waves against a cliff and a theremin-adjacent wail, broadcast live on weekday afternoons — a gothic soap that ran over twelve hundred episodes.

Season 1

Dark Winds

2022–AMCCrime

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

Season 1

The Darling Buds of May

1991–1993ITVComedy

H. E. Bates's Kent farming family, and the series that made Catherine Zeta-Jones a household name inside a fortnight.

Season 1

Dateline NBC

1992–NBCDocumentary

NBC's newsmagazine, which outlasted every other network attempt at the form by turning into a true-crime hour.

Season 1

Dave's World

1993–1997CBSComedy

Dave Barry's columns turned into a sitcom, with the household drawn rather than filmed in the titles.

Season 1

Davey and Goliath

1960–1975SyndicationAnimation

A boy and his talking dog, stop-motion, funded by the Lutheran church and animated by the Gumby studio.

Season 1

Dawson's Creek

1998–2003The WBDrama

Paula Cole over a Massachusetts creek — a theme so tied to the show that its absence from the streaming release became a story in itself.

Season 1

The Day of the Jackal

2024–Sky Atlantic / PeacockDrama

Celeste singing over a European manhunt — a series that opens like a Bond film and then declines to behave like one.

Season 1

The Day Today

1994BBC TwoComedy

News-graphics bombast pushed just past the point of sense — a parody so accurate that actual bulletins caught up with it within a decade.

Season 1

Days of Our Lives

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

Season 1

DC Super Hero Girls

2019–2021Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The DC heroines at high school, from the Powerpuff Girls' creative lineage.

Season 1

De Twaalf

2019–2022VRTCrime

A Belgian trial told from the jury box rather than the bench. Remade in Australia as The Twelve.

Season 1

Dead Boy Detectives

2024NetflixHorror

Two dead schoolboys who refuse to move on and open a detective agency instead, out of the Sandman comics.

Season 1

Dead Like Me

2003–2004ShowtimeComedy

Reapers, toast and small municipal death — an opening that treats the afterlife as clerical work, which is the joke the series runs on.

Season 1

Dead Ringers

2023Prime VideoHorror

The Cronenberg film remade with Rachel Weisz as both twins.

Season 1

Dead Set

2008E4Horror

A zombie outbreak that the Big Brother house does not notice, written by Charlie Brooker before Black Mirror.

Season 1

Dead to Me

2019–2022NetflixComedy

A widow and the woman she meets at grief counselling, who knows rather more about the death than she says.

Season 1

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

Deadliest Catch

2005–Discovery ChannelDocumentary

Bering Sea crab boats, opening on the sea doing the thing that makes the programme's title literal.

Season 1

Deadly Class

2019SyfyDrama

A boarding school for assassins in 1987, from the Rick Remender comic.

Season 1

Deadly Women

2005–2021Discovery Channel / Investigation DiscoveryDocumentary

Murders committed by women, reconstructed by actors and narrated flat, across fourteen seasons of the Investigation Discovery house style.

Season 1

Deadwind

2018–2023Yle (Finland)Crime

A Helsinki homicide detective returning to work after her husband's death. Known at home as Karppi.

Season 2

Deadwood

2004–2006HBODrama

A horse, mud, and a camp being built out of both. The sequence is almost entirely animals and construction — the town assembling itself while nobody is watching.

Seasons 1–3

Dear John

1986–1987BBC OneComedy

A divorced man at a support group of the similarly abandoned, written by John Sullivan.

Season 1

Death and Other Details

2024HuluCrime

A murder on an ocean liner, opened in the manner of a Saul Bass film title.

Season 1

Death by Lightning

2025NetflixDrama

Garfield's presidency and Guiteau's pursuit of it, told as the collision it was.

Season 1

Death in Paradise

2011–BBC OneCrime

Caribbean colour and a calypso theme, for a murder series that has never once let its setting look threatening.

Season 1

The Defenders

1961–1965CBSDrama

A father-and-son legal practice taking cases the era's networks were not supposed to broadcast — abortion, blacklisting, euthanasia.

Season 1

Defending Jacob

2020Apple TV+Crime

New England woods and suburban windows, filmed at the distance a parent stands from a child they no longer recognise.

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

Degrassi High

1989–1991CBCDrama

The Degrassi cast moved up to secondary school, and the point the series stopped softening anything.

Season 1

Degrassi Junior High

1987–1989CBCDrama

The Canadian schools series that cast actual teenagers and let them look like it, and the start of a franchise still running.

Season 1

Degrassi: The Next Generation

2001–2015CTV / MuchMusicDrama

A cast montage rebuilt every season across fourteen years, tracking a school through several complete changes of pupil.

Season 14

Delhi Crime

2019–NetflixCrime

Delhi at night from a moving vehicle, with none of the stylisation the subject would normally attract.

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

Dempsey and Makepeace

1985–1986ITVCrime

An American detective seconded to London and the aristocrat he is partnered with, who married in real life.

Season 1

Dennis the Menace and Gnasher

2009–2013CBBCAnimation

The Beano strip animated for CBBC, with the comic's line kept largely intact.

Season 1

Department S

1969–1970ITVDrama

An Interpol unit for cases nobody else can explain, which gave Jason King his own spin-off.

Season 1

Departures

2008–2012OLN (Canada)Documentary

Two friends travelling for a year with a cameraman, shot with more care than the format usually gets.

Season 1

Dept. Q

2025NetflixCrime

Edinburgh stone and basement strip-lighting — a cold-case unit introduced by the room it was exiled to.

Season 1

Descendants of the Sun

2016KBS2Drama

A special forces captain and a surgeon in a fictional war zone, and the series that started the Hallyu streaming wave.

Season 1

Designated Survivor

2016–2018ABCDrama

The housing secretary kept away from the State of the Union, and therefore president by the end of it.

Season 1

Designing Women

1986–1993CBSComedy

Georgia On My Mind over an Atlanta design firm, with the cast photographed like a society page.

Season 6

Desperate Housewives

2004–2012ABCDrama

Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.

Season 1

Detention

1999–2000Kids' WBAnimation

Nine children in permanent after-school detention, animated in a flat 1950s style that nothing else on the block used.

Season 1

The Detour

2016–2019TBSComedy

A family road trip that goes wrong in a different way every season, written by a married couple about themselves.

Season 4

Detroiters

2017–2018Comedy CentralComedy

Two advertising men making local commercials in Detroit, played by two friends who grew up there.

Season 1

The Deuce

2017–2019HBODrama

Forty-second Street as a marquee — neon, peep-show signage and the traffic of a block being monetised, assembled from the era's own advertising.

Season 1

Deutschland 83

2015–2020RTL / AmazonDrama

Cold War East and West cut together over eighties pop, with the period's own graphic design doing the work.

Season 1

Deutschland 86

2018Amazon Prime VideoDrama

The Deutschland 83 spy sent to Angola and South Africa three years on, in the middle chapter of the trilogy.

Season 1

The Devil Judge

2021tvNDrama

A televised trial system in a near-future Korea, run by a judge with his own plan for it.

Season 1

Devil May Cry

2025NetflixAnimation

The Capcom games animated by the Castlevania team, with an opening cut to match.

Season 1

Devious Maids

2013–2016LifetimeDrama

Beverly Hills housekeepers investigating a murder in one of the houses, from the Desperate Housewives creator.

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

Dexter

2006–2013ShowtimeCrime

Breakfast filmed as though it were a murder. A mosquito swatted, a blood orange crushed, a shaving nick, a steak sliced, floss drawn tight — every shot of an ordinary morning framed exactly as the violence the show never puts on screen this early.

Seasons 1–8

Dexter: Original Sin

2024–Paramount+ with ShowtimeCrime

The prequel, which restages the breakfast routine of the original's titles for a younger version of the same man.

Season 1

Dexter: Resurrection

2025ShowtimeCrime

The continuation that throws away the two-minute breakfast ritual the original was famous for and replaces it with a six-second card.

Season 1

Dexter's Laboratory

1996–2003Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Thirty seconds of a boy genius and the sister who ruins everything, in the flat graphic style that defined a decade of the network.

Season 1

Dharma & Greg

1997–2002ABCComedy

A free spirit and a lawyer who marry on their first date.

Season 1

Diagnosis: Murder

1993–2001CBSCrime

Dick Van Dyke as a doctor who solves murders, spun off from Jake and the Fatman.

Season 1

The Dick Van Dyke Show

1961–1966CBSComedy

A man walking into his own living room and either tripping over the ottoman or stepping neatly around it — two versions shot, and the network alternated them.

Season 1
Season 2

Dickinson

2019–2021Apple TV+Comedy

Nineteenth-century Amherst scored with modern pop, and a title card restaged for each episode's poem.

Season 1

Dicte

2013–2016TV 2Crime

A crime reporter back in Aarhus after a divorce, from the Elsebeth Egholm novels.

Season 1

Diff'rent Strokes

1978–1985NBCComedy

Two boys from Harlem adopted by a Park Avenue widower, in the sitcom that turned a nine-year-old's disbelief into a catchphrase.

Season 1

A Different World

1987–1993NBCComedy

A historically Black college rendered in bold graphic design, with the theme re-recorded by a different artist across the run — Aretha Franklin among them.

Season 2

Digimon Adventure

1999–2000Fuji TVAnimation

Seven children pulled into a digital world, opened by "Butter-Fly" — a song that has outlived every reboot.

Season 1

Dinosaur Train

2009–PBS KidsAnimation

A Tyrannosaurus raised by Pteranodons, riding a train between geological periods.

Season 1

Dinosaurs

1991–1994ABCComedy

A Henson animatronic sitcom about a working family in the Mesozoic, which finished by freezing the world over.

Season 1

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

2016–2017BBC AmericaComedy

Douglas Adams's holistic detective remade in Seattle, still working on the principle that everything is connected.

Season 1

Dirt

2007–2008FXDrama

Courteney Cox as the editor of a celebrity tabloid, cancelled during the writers' strike.

Season 2

Dirty Money

2018–2020NetflixDocumentary

One corporate fraud an episode, opening on money being counted by a machine that never stops.

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

Disenchantment

2018–2023NetflixAnimation

A fantasy kingdom introduced with the same long pan Groening's other shows use, and the same willingness to hide jokes in the background.

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

The District

2000–2004CBSCrime

A police chief running Washington on statistics, loosely modelled on the man who did it in New York.

Season 1

Doc Martin

2004–2022ITVComedy

A London surgeon with a blood phobia relocated to a Cornish village that will not leave him alone.

Season 1

Doctor Foster

2015–BBC OneDrama

A GP who works out that her husband is having an affair, and then takes it apart methodically.

Season 1

10 sequences

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

8 sequences

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

Doctors

2000–2024BBC OneDrama

A Midlands surgery, twenty-four years of daytime, and one self-contained story an episode.

Season 7

Dog the Bounty Hunter

2004–2012A&EDocumentary

A Hawaii bail bondsman and his family, in the series that made A&E a reality network.

Season 1

Dog with a Blog

2012–2015Disney ChannelComedy

A stepfamily's dog who can talk, and keeps a blog about them that none of them know exists.

Season 1

Dollhouse

2009–2010FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Dominion

2014–2015SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23

2012–2013ABCComedy

A Midwesterner sharing a New York flat with the worst possible person, and James Van Der Beek playing himself.

Season 1

The Donna Reed Show

1958–1966ABCComedy

A sitcom its star produced herself, which is why the mother in it has a job the plot takes seriously.

Season 8

Doogie Howser, M.D.

1989–1993ABCComedy

A sixteen-year-old physician, and a synth theme that became shorthand for the entire decade.

Seasons 1–4

Doogie Kameāloha, M.D.

2021–2023Disney+Comedy

The Doogie premise moved to Oʻahu, with a title sequence built as a scrapbook rather than a montage.

Seasons 1–2

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

Doomwatch

1970–1972BBC OneSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Dope Thief

2025Apple TV+Crime

Philadelphia rowhouses and police insignia, degraded until the badge and the disguise become hard to tell apart.

Season 1

Dora the Explorer

2000–2019NickelodeonAnimation

A bilingual preschool series built on asking the audience questions and leaving room for the answer.

Season 1

Doraemon (2005)

2005–TV AsahiAnimation

The robot cat from the twenty-second century, remade in 2005 with an entirely new voice cast after twenty-six years of the old one.

Season 1

Doug

1991–1999Nickelodeon / ABCAnimation

A mouth-percussion theme over a boy walking to school — an opening performed almost entirely with a human voice.

Season 1

Down Cemetery Road

2025–Apple TV+Crime

Mick Herron before Slough House: a missing girl and an accountant who will not stop looking for her.

Season 1

Downton Abbey

2010–2015ITVDrama

A dog's back, a bell board and a house — thirty-one seconds establishing an entire social order without showing a single face.

Season 1

Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman

1993–1998CBSDrama

A Boston doctor practising in 1860s Colorado Springs.

Seasons 2–3

Dracula

2020BBC OneHorror

Moffat and Gatiss after Sherlock, with three feature-length episodes and a different idea in each.

Season 1

Dragnet

1951–1959, 1967–1970NBCCrime

Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.

Season 1

Dragon Ball

1986–1989Fuji TVAnimation

Toriyama's Journey to the West, from before the series turned into the one everyone remembers.

Season 1

The Dragon Prince

2018–NetflixAnimation

Twenty-seven seconds of moving illustration, closer to a book being opened than a montage.

Season 1

Dragon Tales

1999–2005PBS Kids / CBCAnimation

Two children who reach a dragon world by reciting a rhyme over a scale they find in a toy box.

Season 1

Dragons' Den

2005–BBC TwoDocumentary

The Japanese format Britain took and exported again, opening on money stacked in front of five people who are not going to give you any.

Season 1

Drake & Josh

2004–2007NickelodeonComedy

Two stepbrothers in San Diego, from the All That writers' room.

Season 4

Drawn Together

2004–2007Comedy CentralAnimation

A reality-house parody whose cast are each drawn in a different studio's style.

Seasons 1–2

Dream On

1990–1996HBOComedy

A man whose inner life is old black-and-white television clips, which the titles establish before a word is said.

Season 1

The Dresden Files

2007SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Drew Carey Show

1995–2004ABCComedy

A Cleveland department-store personnel manager, opened for two seasons by a cartoon of his own face.

Seasons 1–2

Drop Dead Diva

2009–2014LifetimeComedy

A model who dies and wakes up in the body of a lawyer, which is a body-swap comedy and a legal procedural at once.

Season 1

Drop the Dead Donkey

1990–1998Channel 4Comedy

A television newsroom recorded days before broadcast so that real headlines could be written in.

Season 5

The Dropout

2022HuluDrama

Silicon Valley branding assembled and then quietly taken apart, for a company that was never anything but branding.

Season 1

Drunk History

2013–2019Comedy CentralComedy

History retold by someone too drunk to tell it, lip-synced straight-faced by actors in costume.

Season 1

Dublin Murders

2019BBC One / StarzCrime

Tana French's first two novels braided into one eight-part case.

Season 1

Duck Dynasty

2012–2017A&EDocumentary

A Louisiana family who got rich making duck calls, and then considerably richer being filmed doing it.

Season 1

DuckTales

1987–1990SyndicationAnimation

One of the most durable theme songs ever written for television, over a minute of ducks solving problems with money.

Season 1

DuckTales (2017)

2017–2021Disney XDAnimation

The reboot, which rerecorded the 1987 theme rather than replacing it — the rare remake that understood the song was the asset.

Season 1

Due South

1994–1999CTVCrime

A Mountie seconded to Chicago, playing the politeness entirely straight against the city around him.

Season 1

The Dukes of Hazzard

1979–1985CBSComedy

A Georgia county run by the man who owns it, and a car that spends a good part of every hour off the ground.

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

Dungeons & Dragons

1983–1985CBSAnimation

Six children pulled off a fairground ride into the game, with the ride itself doing the work of the title sequence.

Season 1

Durarara!!

2010–2016Tokyo MXAnimation

Ikebukuro told through a dozen viewpoints that only connect in the last act.

Season 1

Dynasty

1981–1989ABCDrama

Gold lettering, oil money and an orchestral theme played with no irony whatsoever — the decade's idea of wealth, stated in ninety seconds.

Season 1

E

Early Edition

1996–2000CBSDrama

A man who receives tomorrow's newspaper today, delivered by a cat.

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

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

Earthworm Jim

1995–1996The WBAnimation

The game adapted with its own voice cast and most of its absurdity intact.

Season 1

EastEnders

1985–BBC OneDrama

An aerial pull-back over the Thames and the drum that answers it — thirty-two seconds that have barely changed in forty years.

Season 1
Season 41

Echo

2024Disney+Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Ed Sullivan Show

1948–1971CBSDocumentary

Twenty-three years of Sunday nights, and the stage the Beatles and Elvis were introduced to America from.

Season 1

Ed, Edd n Eddy

1999–2009Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Wobbling outlines and a scat vocal, drawn deliberately so that every line shakes — the last major American cartoon animated entirely by hand on paper.

Season 1

Eek! The Cat

1992–1997Fox KidsAnimation

A purple cat whose motto is that it never hurts to help, in a series built entirely on disproving it.

Season 1

Eerie, Indiana

1991–1993NBCHorror

A boy who works out that his new town is the centre of every strange thing in America.

Season 1

Eight Is Enough

1977–1981ABCDrama

A newspaper columnist with eight children, and a theme song that counts them.

Season 1

El Chavo del Ocho

1971–1980TelevisaComedy

A boy living in a barrel in a Mexico City tenement, and the most watched Spanish-language series ever made.

Seasons 4–6

El Ministerio del Tiempo

2015–2020La 1Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

El Señor de los Cielos

2013–TelemundoCrime

A narco drama loosely built on Amado Carrillo Fuentes, and Telemundo's longest-running original.

Season 2

El Tigre: The Adventures of Manny Rivera

2007–2008NickelodeonAnimation

A boy from a family of both superheroes and supervillains, who has not chosen yet.

Season 1

The 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

Elementary

2012–2019CBSCrime

Holmes and a female Watson in New York, opened by a Rube Goldberg machine assembling itself.

Season 1

Elena of Avalor

2016–2020Disney ChannelAnimation

A crown princess ruling a Latin American-inspired kingdom before she is old enough to be queen.

Season 1

Elite

2018–2024NetflixDrama

Eleven seconds of school crest and bass drop. The shortest opening on this site that still manages to be about class.

Season 1

Ellen

1994–1998ABCComedy

A Los Angeles bookshop owner, in the sitcom whose fourth season changed what American television would say out loud.

Season 1

The Ellen DeGeneres Show

2003–2022SyndicationComedy

Nineteen years of daytime, opening on a host dancing her way in through the audience.

Seasons 1–3

Elsbeth

2024–CBSCrime

The Good Wife's oddest lawyer given a Columbo format of her own, and nine seconds to introduce it.

Season 1

Elvira's Movie Macabre

1981–1986SyndicationHorror

A horror host wrapped around public-domain films, and the character that outlasted every film she introduced.

Season 4

Emergency!

1972–1977NBCDrama

Los Angeles County paramedics, made with the fire department's cooperation and credited with popularising the profession.

Season 1

Emily in Paris

2020–NetflixComedy

Paris as a postcard rack — every landmark in order, photographed exactly as the show's protagonist would photograph them.

Season 1

Emmerdale

1972–ITVDrama

A Yorkshire Dales farming serial that dropped Farm from its name in 1989 and kept the landscape.

Season 27
Season 49

The Emperor's New School

2006–2008Disney ChannelAnimation

The Emperor's New Groove continued as a school comedy, with the film's narrator still interrupting.

Season 1

Empire Falls

2005HBODrama

Richard Russo adapting his own novel about a Maine mill town that has already lost.

Season 1

The Empress

2022–NetflixDrama

Habsburg portraiture and court embroidery, arranged so the jewellery reads as restraint rather than wealth.

Season 1

Empress Ki

2013–2014MBCDrama

A Goryeo woman who becomes empress of the Yuan court, across fifty-one episodes.

Season 1

Empty Nest

1988–1995NBCComedy

The Golden Girls' neighbour given his own house, two grown daughters and a conspicuously large dog.

Season 1

The End of the F***ing World

2017–2019Channel 4 / NetflixDrama

Sixties pop over two teenagers on a road trip that is going to end badly — an opening that is much sweeter than anything it introduces.

Season 1

Endeavour

2012–2023ITVCrime

The Morse prequel, which quotes Pheloung's Morse-code motif in its own theme without repeating it.

Season 1

The English

2022BBC Two / Prime VideoDrama

Emily Blunt and Chaske Spencer crossing 1890 Wyoming, and — for this catalogue — the single most disruptive title in the whole project.

Season 1

Enlightened

2011–2013HBOComedy

Nature footage of the sort used in wellness videos, played entirely straight — which becomes the joke the moment the show starts.

Season 1

Entourage

2004–2011HBOComedy

Los Angeles from a moving car, and Jane's Addiction — an opening that is essentially an advertisement for the lifestyle the show is about.

Season 1

Episodes

2011–2017Showtime / BBC TwoComedy

Two British writers watching their sitcom be remade badly in Los Angeles, with Matt LeBlanc as himself.

Season 1

The Equalizer (1985)

1985–1989CBSCrime

A retired intelligence officer advertising his services in the classifieds, scored by Stewart Copeland the year after the Police stopped.

Season 1

ER

1994–2009NBCDrama

James Newton Howard's theme over sliding doors, gurneys and light — the template every medical drama since has either copied or deliberately avoided.

Season 1
Season 10

Erased

2016Fuji TVAnimation

A man sent back to his own childhood to prevent a murder, opened with the cold blue of a Hokkaido winter.

Season 1

The Eric André Show

2012–Adult SwimComedy

A talk-show set destroyed by its own host before the first guest arrives — an opening that is demolished and rebuilt every episode.

Season 1

Euphoria

2019–HBODrama

Bodies, water and neon shot at the point where a party stops being fun, over Labrinth. Beautiful in a way that is deliberately hard to enjoy.

Season 1
Season 2

Eureeka's Castle

1989–1991NickelodeonComedy

Puppets in a castle carried by a giant, made for the channel's pre-school block before it had one.

Season 1

Eureka

2006–2012Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Eve

2003–2006UPNComedy

The rapper Eve as a Miami fashion designer, in one of the run of sitcoms UPN built its Monday nights on.

Season 1

Even Stevens

2000–2003Disney ChannelComedy

Shia LaBeouf as the youngest of three in a Sacramento family.

Season 1

Ever Decreasing Circles

1984–1989BBC OneComedy

Richard Briers after The Good Life, running every committee in his cul-de-sac.

Season 1

Everwood

2002–2006The WBDrama

A New York surgeon moving his family to a Colorado mountain town after his wife's death.

Season 1

Everybody Hates Chris

2005–2009UPN / The CWComedy

Chris Rock narrating his own Bed-Stuy adolescence, opened by the family on the stoop.

Season 1

Everybody Loves Raymond

1996–2005CBSComedy

A brass sting and a family photograph, in forty-eight seconds that promise nothing more complicated than what you are about to get.

Season 1

Evil

2019–2024CBS / Paramount+Horror

Religious iconography and clinical diagrams intercut, so that possession and psychiatry are presented with equal weight — which is the show's entire method.

Season 1

The Exorcist

2016–2018FoxHorror

A sequel to the film rather than a remake, which it does not admit until the end of the first season.

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

Extracurricular

2020NetflixCrime

A model student funding his own tuition by running a criminal enterprise after school.

Season 1

Extraordinary Attorney Woo

2022ENADrama

An autistic lawyer at a Seoul firm, and the biggest word-of-mouth hit Korean television had that year.

Season 1

Extrapolations

2023Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Extreme Makeover: Home Edition

2003–2020ABCDocumentary

A family's house rebuilt in a week, opening on the bus that is about to move.

Season 3

Eyes of Wakanda

2025Disney+Animation

Wakandan agents across four periods of history, opened by a hand-drawn sequence unlike anything else Marvel has put on television.

Season 1

EZ Streets

1996–1997CBSCrime

Paul Haggis's crime drama, cancelled in nine episodes and cited ever since as an ancestor of the prestige era.

Season 1

F

F Is for Family

2015–2021NetflixAnimation

A 1970s sitcom opening built out of wood panelling, cigarette smoke and a father arriving home — the era's own title design, with the warmth removed.

Season 1

F Troop

1965–1967ABCComedy

A frontier cavalry post run badly, opened by a sung account of how badly.

Season 1

The F.B.I.

1965–1974ABCCrime

Nine seasons made with the Bureau's cooperation and its approval of every script, from the Quinn Martin production line.

Season 1

The Facts of Life

1979–1988NBCComedy

A girls' boarding school in Peekskill, spun off from Diff'rent Strokes and running three years longer than it.

Season 1
Season 7
Season 8

The Fades

2011BBC ThreeHorror

The unburied dead accumulating in the air above a British town, and a teenager who can see them.

Season 1

Faerie Tale Theatre

1982–1987ShowtimeDrama

Shelley Duvall's anthology of fairy tales, each directed by a different film-maker and cast from Hollywood.

Season 1

The Fairly OddParents

2001–2017NickelodeonAnimation

A theme that runs through the entire premise as a checklist, revised several times across sixteen years.

Season 1

Faking It

2014–2016MTVComedy

Two friends mistaken for a couple who decide not to correct anyone.

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

Falcon Crest

1981–1990CBSDrama

Napa vineyards filmed like an estate agent's brochure, for a family who spend nine seasons trying to take it from each other.

Season 1

The Fall

2013–2016BBC TwoCrime

Belfast, and a series that shows you the killer in the first episode and spends three series on the pursuit anyway.

Season 1

The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

1976–1979BBC OneComedy

A middle manager who fakes his own death by leaving his clothes on a beach, weekly.

Season 1

The Fall Guy

1981–1986ABCDrama

A Hollywood stuntman working as a bounty hunter, with a theme song about being unknown.

Season 1

The Fall of the House of Usher

2023NetflixHorror

Corporate portraiture rotting in place — a pharmaceutical dynasty photographed like old money and left to decay in frame.

Season 1

Falling Skies

2011–2015TNTSci-Fi

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

Fame

1982–1987NBC / SyndicationDrama

The film continued at the High School of Performing Arts, with a cast who did their own dancing.

Season 1

Family Affairs

1997–2005Channel 5Drama

The soap Channel 5 launched with, and the one that had to build an audience from nothing five nights a week.

Season 3

Family Feud

1976–ABC / SyndicationDocumentary

Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.

Season 1
Season 35

Family Guy

1999–FoxAnimation

A musical number performed by the family about how television used to have values — a sitcom opening from the 1970s, done straight and then undercut.

Season 1
Season 10

The Family Man

2019–Prime VideoDrama

A middle-class Mumbai father who is also a National Investigation Agency officer, and cannot tell his family either job is real.

Season 3

Family Matters

1989–1998ABC / CBSComedy

A Chicago family and a theme about the tiny things adding up, from a spinoff that was quietly taken over by a neighbour.

Season 1

Family Ties

1982–1989NBCComedy

A family portrait being drawn and redrawn, over a duet about what would happen without you — sixties parents and a Reagan-voting son.

Season 1

The Famous Jett Jackson

1998–2001Disney ChannelComedy

A teenage action star who moves his own production to his grandmother's town in North Carolina.

Season 1

Fanboy & Chum Chum

2009–2014NickelodeonAnimation

Two boys in superhero costumes they never take off, in one of Nickelodeon's first CG series.

Season 1

Fantasy Island

1977–1984ABCDrama

"De plane! De plane!" — an island where wishes are granted and then examined.

Season 1

Fargo

2014–FXCrime

Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.

Season 1

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

Farzi

2023–Prime VideoCrime

A struggling artist forging banknotes well enough to destabilise the currency.

Season 1

Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids

1972–1985CBSAnimation

A North Philadelphia junkyard, with a moral at the end and a live-action introduction at the start.

Season 1

Fatal Attraction

2023Paramount+Drama

The 1987 film reworked as a series that takes the other side of the story seriously.

Season 1

Father Brown

2013–BBC OneCrime

Chesterton's priest detective moved to the 1950s Cotswolds, and the most durable daytime drama the BBC has.

Season 1

Father Dowling Mysteries

1989–1991NBC / ABCCrime

A Chicago priest and a nun solving murders, cancelled by NBC and picked up by ABC.

Season 1

Father Knows Best

1954–1960CBS / NBCComedy

The Anderson family of Springfield, and the series the phrase came from.

Season 1

Father Ted

1995–1998Channel 4Comedy

Three priests on a rock in the Atlantic, introduced by a whistle tune and some of the flattest scenery ever put in a title sequence.

Season 1

Fauda

2015–Yes / NetflixDrama

An Israeli undercover unit and the Palestinian militants it pursues, played from both sides.

Season 1

Fawlty Towers

1975–1979BBC TwoComedy

A hotel sign whose letters are rearranged into a different rude anagram every episode — the earliest running title gag in this catalogue by two decades.

Season 1

FBI: International

2021–2025CBSCrime

The franchise's Budapest-based Fly Team, covering American interests across Europe.

Season 1

FBI: Most Wanted

2020–2025CBSCrime

The first FBI spin-off, following the fugitive task force, in nine seconds of title card.

Season 1

Fear Factor

2001–2012NBCDocumentary

The Dutch format that asked contestants to eat things, opening on a montage of them regretting it.

Season 1

Fear Itself

2008NBCHorror

Masters of Horror moved to a broadcast network and cut to fit it, which is most of what went wrong.

Season 1

Fear the Walking Dead

2015–2023AMCHorror

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

Seasons 1–3

Felicity

1998–2002The WBDrama

J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves's college drama, opened by a montage that changed as often as its lead's haircut did.

Season 1

Ferris Bueller

1990–1991NBCComedy

The film adapted for television without its star, and remembered mostly for opening with a joke about that.

Season 1

Feud

2017–2024FXDrama

Ryan Murphy's anthology of famous enmities, retitled from scratch for each pair.

Season 2

Final Space

2018–2021TBS / Adult SwimAnimation

A prisoner adrift in space with an alien that everyone in the galaxy wants.

Season 1

Fire Country

2022–CBSDrama

A convict on a Northern California firefighting crew, working off his sentence.

Season 1

Fired Up

1997–1998NBCComedy

Two women sacked from a public relations firm who start their own out of a spare room.

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

Fireman Sam

1987–BBC OneAnimation

A Welsh fire station in stop-motion, made in Welsh first and dubbed into English second.

Season 1

The First Lady

2022ShowtimeDrama

Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama told in parallel across one season.

Season 1

Fish Hooks

2010–2014Disney ChannelAnimation

A high school inside a pet-shop fish tank, animated over photographed backgrounds.

Season 1

Five Days at Memorial

2022Apple TV+Drama

A New Orleans hospital across the five days after Katrina, and the decisions taken inside it.

Season 1

The Flash

2014–2023The CWSci-Fi

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

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

Flashpoint

2008–2012CTV / CBSCrime

A Toronto tactical unit, and the first Canadian drama to air simultaneously on an American network.

Season 1

Fleabag

2016–2019BBC Three / Prime VideoComedy

Phoebe Waller-Bridge's series, which opens by looking directly at you and skips the formality of a title sequence entirely.

Season 1

The Flight Attendant

2020–2022HBO MaxCrime

Saul Bass by way of an in-flight safety card — flat colour, cut paper and a woman falling through all of it.

Season 1

Flight of the Conchords

2007–2009HBOComedy

Cut-paper animation of two New Zealanders failing to make it in New York, assembled with the same handmade cheapness as the band it is about.

Seasons 1–2

The Flintstones

1960–1966ABCAnimation

The first animated series in American primetime, and the source of a theme that did not arrive until the third season — the first two opened on something else entirely.

Season 1

Flower of Evil

2020tvNCrime

A detective investigating a case that leads to her own husband's past.

Season 1

Food Wars! Shokugeki no Soma

2015–2020Tokyo MXAnimation

Competitive cooking staged as combat, with the reaction shots doing most of the work.

Season 1

Fool Me Once

2024NetflixCrime

A widow who sees her dead husband on a nanny camera, from the Harlan Coben deal.

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

Forensic Files

1996–2011TLC / Court TV / truTVDocumentary

Real cases retold through the laboratory work that closed them, and the programme that made luminol a household word.

Season 1

Forever Knight

1992–1996CBS / SyndicationHorror

A vampire working homicide nights in Toronto, introduced with narration explaining the arrangement every week.

Season 1

Fortitude

2015–2018Sky AtlanticCrime

An Arctic settlement where nothing decays and a killing therefore cannot be buried.

Season 1

Fosse/Verdon

2019FXDrama

Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon's working marriage, opened in eleven seconds because the choreography is the show.

Season 1

Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends

2004–2009Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A boarding house for imaginary friends whose children have outgrown them.

Season 1

The Fosters

2013–2018ABC Family / FreeformDrama

A couple raising biological, adopted and foster children together, on a channel then rebranding around exactly that audience.

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

Fraggle Rock

1983–1987HBOComedy

Jim Henson's series about three societies who cannot see each other properly, made to be co-produced in every country that bought it.

Season 1

Fraggle Rock: Back to the Rock

2022–2024Apple TV+Comedy

The Henson revival, which rebuilds the 1983 theme shot for shot with new puppets.

Season 1

The Franchise

2024HBOComedy

The crew of a failing superhero film, from Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes.

Season 1

Frankie Drake Mysteries

2017–2021CBCCrime

Toronto's only female private detective in the 1920s, from the Murdoch Mysteries producers.

Season 1

Franklin

2024Apple TV+Drama

Eighteenth-century Paris in ink and gold leaf, assembling the diplomacy the series is about out of correspondence.

Season 1

Frasier

1993–2004NBCComedy

A skyline drawn in simple lines while a man sings about tossed salads and scrambled eggs, and declines to explain either.

Season 1

Freakazoid!

1995–1997The WBAnimation

A superhero theme performed at a volume and speed that make the joke before the show has started.

Season 1

Freaks and Geeks

1999–2000NBCComedy

School photographs taken one at a time, with each cast member visibly hating the process — Joan Jett over the least flattering portraits anyone would agree to.

Season 1

Freddy's Nightmares

1988–1990SyndicationHorror

An anthology hosted by Freddy Krueger, made while the films were still coming out and stranger than any of them.

Season 1

French and Saunders

1987–2007BBC TwoComedy

Twenty years of film parodies, and the double act that came out of the Comic Strip.

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

Fresh Meat

2011–2016Channel 4Comedy

Six students sharing a Manchester house, from the Peep Show writers.

Season 1

Fresh Off the Boat

2015–2020ABCComedy

A Taiwanese-American family moving to Orlando in 1995, from Eddie Huang's memoir.

Season 1

The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air

1990–1996NBCComedy

An entire origin story rapped over an animated title card — the longest opening of its era, cut down substantially after the first season.

Season 1

Friday Night Dinner

2011–2020Channel 4Comedy

The same family, the same meal, every week, for six series.

Season 1

Friday Night Lights

2006–2011NBCDrama

Explosions in the Sky over Texas fields and floodlights — a football show whose titles are almost entirely landscape and weather.

Season 1

Friday the 13th: The Series

1987–1990SyndicationHorror

An antiques shop recovering cursed objects, sharing nothing with the films but a title.

Season 1

Fridays

1980–1982ABCComedy

ABC's answer to Saturday Night Live, best remembered for the night Andy Kaufman refused to say his lines.

Season 1

Friends

1994–2004NBCComedy

A fountain, an umbrella and six people who are not, on any reading of the physics, getting less wet.

Season 6

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

From

2022–MGM+Horror

'Que Sera, Sera' over a town nobody can leave — a cheerful standard used as a threat, which is the oldest trick in horror and still works.

Season 1

From Dusk till Dawn: The Series

2014–2016El ReyHorror

Rodriguez remaking his own film at series length, on the channel he founded to show it.

Season 1

From the Earth to the Moon

1998HBODrama

Tom Hanks's twelve-part Apollo history, opened by archive footage cut to Michael Kamen's march.

Season 1

Frontline

1994–1997ABC (Australia)Comedy

A current affairs programme satirised from inside its own newsroom, and the model most workplace mockumentaries since have followed.

Season 1

Frozen Planet

2011BBC OneDocumentary

Ice filmed as architecture, and George Fenton again — twenty-six seconds with no animal in them at all.

Season 1

Fruits Basket

2019–2021TV TokyoAnimation

The second adaptation, which ran the manga to its end rather than stopping partway.

Season 1

Full Circle

2023HBO MaxCrime

New York cut into overlapping fragments, so that separate lives keep occupying the same frame before the plot connects them.

Season 1

Full Frontal with Samantha Bee

2016–2022TBSComedy

A weekly satire whose opening graphics were redesigned more often than most dramas change a season.

Season 1

Full House

1987–1995ABCComedy

A San Francisco picnic and a song about everywhere you look — the platonic form of the American family-sitcom opening.

Season 1

Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood

2009–2010MBS / TBSAnimation

Alchemical circles and transmutation, animated at a scale the first adaptation could not afford.

Season 1

The Fungies!

2020–2021Cartoon Network / HBO MaxAnimation

A mushroom child scientist in a prehistoric fungal town.

Season 1

Futurama

1999–Fox / Comedy Central / HuluAnimation

Like The Simpsons, an opening built to differ every week — a new caption under the logo and a different scrap of old cartoon on the screen the ship flies past — wrapped around Christopher Tyng's theme and a crash into a billboard.

Seasons 1–4
Seasons 6–7

Future Man

2017–2020HuluSci-Fi

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

Seasons 1–2

Future-Worm!

2016–2018Disney XDAnimation

A time-travelling worm and the boy who built his flask, from Ryan Quincy.

Season 1

G

G vs E

1999–2000USA NetworkHorror

Two agents of the Corps recruiting the dead to fight people who have sold their souls, shot to look like a 1970s exploitation print.

Season 1

G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero

1985–1986SyndicationAnimation

A toy line turned into a war cartoon where nobody is ever hit, and a theme that spells the acronym out.

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

Game of Thrones

2011–2019HBODrama

A map that rebuilds itself each week. The clockwork cities shown change with the locations the episode visits, which makes it the rare title sequence carrying actual information.

Season 1
Season 8

Game On

1995–1998BBC TwoComedy

Three flatmates and an agoraphobic landlord, recast in the middle and carried on regardless.

Season 1

Gangs of London

2020–Sky Atlantic / AMC+Crime

A London crime empire after its head is killed, directed with the fight choreography of a feature.

Season 1

Gargoyles

1994–1997DisneyAnimation

A thousand years of stone, narrated with the gravity of a Shakespearean prologue — which given how much of the cast came from Star Trek, it very nearly is.

Season 1

Garth Marenghi's Darkplace

2004Channel 4Comedy

A title sequence pretending to be a lost 1980s horror series, complete with the production faults the conceit requires.

Season 1

General Hospital

1963–ABCDrama

American daytime's longest-running scripted programme still in production.

Season 16
Season 43

Generator Rex

2010–2013Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A boy who can rebuild his own limbs into machines, in a world where nanites turned everything else monstrous.

Season 1

A Gentleman in Moscow

2024Showtime / Paramount+Drama

A count sentenced to house arrest in a Moscow hotel for thirty years, from the Amor Towles novel.

Season 1

Gentleman Jack

2019–2022BBC One / HBODrama

Anne Lister's coded diaries dramatised by Sally Wainwright, with Suranne Jones addressing the camera directly.

Season 1

Geordie Shore

2011–2025MTVDocumentary

Jersey Shore relocated to Newcastle, and the format that gave British reality its next decade.

Season 1

George & Tammy

2022ShowtimeDrama

George Jones and Tammy Wynette, with both leads singing their own recordings.

Season 1

The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show

1950–1958CBSComedy

A sitcom in which the husband watches the rest of the episode on a television in his study and comments on it — thirty years before anyone called that postmodern.

Season 1

George Lopez

2002–2007ABCComedy

A Los Angeles factory manager and the family around him, and the longest-running American sitcom led by a Latino cast.

Season 1

George of the Jungle

1967ABCAnimation

Jay Ward's Tarzan parody, and a theme that warns you about the tree before he hits it.

Season 1

Get a Life

1990–1992FoxComedy

A thirty-year-old paperboy still living at home, in a sitcom that got stranger every week.

Season 1

The Get Down

2016–2017NetflixDrama

The South Bronx in 1977, where disco is ending and hip hop has not been given a name yet.

Season 1

Get Smart

1965–1970NBC / CBSComedy

A man walking through a corridor of doors that each slam behind him, ending in a phone box that drops him into headquarters. The joke is the length of it.

Season 3

Ghost Adventures

2008–Travel ChannelDocumentary

Three men locking themselves overnight inside buildings they believe are haunted.

Season 1

The Ghost and Molly McGee

2021–2023Disney ChannelAnimation

A relentlessly positive girl and the ghost whose curse bound him to her.

Season 1

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

2002–2005AnimaxAnimation

Yoko Kanno again, this time with Origa singing in Russian over cybernetic bodies being assembled — a sequence that treats the human form as hardware.

Season 2

Ghost Whisperer

2005–2010CBSHorror

Jennifer Love Hewitt talking to the dead in a small Maryland town.

Season 1

Ghosts

2019–2023BBC OneComedy

The Horrible Histories troupe as the dead of one country house, opened by all of them at once.

Season 1

Ghostwriter

1992–1995PBSDrama

A ghost that communicates only in written words, and a group of Brooklyn children who solve cases with it.

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

The Gilded Age

2022–HBODrama

Gold leaf, marble and needlework assembling into Fifth Avenue interiors — new money buying its way into an old frame, told entirely through surfaces.

Season 1

Gilligan's Island

1964–1967CBSComedy

A theme song that narrates the entire premise, names every castaway, and was rewritten after the first season to stop leaving two of them out.

Season 3

Gilmore Girls

2000–2007The WB / The CWDrama

Carole King's 'Where You Lead' rewritten as a mother-and-daughter duet, over a small Connecticut town in every season at once.

Season 1

Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life

2016NetflixComedy

Four ninety-minute films returning to Stars Hollow nine years on, one for each season of the year.

Season 1

Gimme a Break!

1981–1987NBCComedy

Nell Carter keeping house for a widowed police chief, in a sitcom built entirely around her.

Season 1

Ginny & Georgia

2021–NetflixDrama

A mother of thirty and a daughter of fifteen, and the fifteen years between them nobody will explain.

Seasons 1–2

Gintama

2006–2021TV TokyoAnimation

Samurai comedy in an alien-occupied Edo, and one of the longest lists of distinct opening sequences in television.

Season 1

Girl from Nowhere

2018–2021GMM 25 / NetflixHorror

A girl who transfers into a different school every episode and exposes what it is hiding.

Season 1

Girl Meets World

2014–2017Disney ChannelComedy

The Boy Meets World sequel, following the next generation of the same family.

Season 1

The Girlfriend Experience

2016–2021StarzDrama

Steven Soderbergh's anthology, each season a different woman and a different arrangement.

Season 1

Girls5eva

2021–2024Peacock / NetflixComedy

A one-hit girl group reassembling in their forties, opened by their own hit.

Season 1

The Glades

2010–2013A&ECrime

A Chicago detective exiled to Florida, working murders he keeps being told are not his.

Season 1

Gladiators

1992–2000ITVDocumentary

Contenders ready, gladiators ready — a Saturday-night format built entirely out of its own catchphrases.

Seasons 1–8

Glee

2009–2015FoxComedy

An Ohio show choir, and the series that briefly made network television a singles chart.

Season 1

The Glory

2022–2023NetflixDrama

A go board, scar tissue and winter light — the revenge plot laid out as a game with pieces already placed.

Season 1

GLOW

2017–2019NetflixComedy

A 1980s syndication opening played completely straight — chrome type, freeze-frames and spandex, as though the show inside it were the wrestling programme rather than a series about making one.

Seasons 1–3

Goblin

2016–2017tvNDrama

A nine-hundred-year-old immortal looking for the bride who can end him. Known abroad as Guardian: The Lonely and Great God.

Season 1

Godfather of Harlem

2019–2021EpixCrime

Bumpy Johnson out of prison in 1963 and finding Harlem taken, with Malcolm X across the street.

Season 4

Godless

2017NetflixDrama

The frontier shot as landscape photography and left to sit — no montage, no faces, just weather crossing New Mexico for over a minute.

Season 1

Gogglebox

2013–Channel 4Documentary

People watching television, filmed watching television, which turned out to be the format of the decade.

Season 1

Going Straight

1978BBC OneComedy

Fletcher out of prison and trying to stay out, six episodes after Porridge finished.

Season 1

Gokusen

2002–2008NTVComedy

A yakuza heir teaching maths at a school for delinquents.

Season 1

The Goldbergs

2013–2023ABCComedy

Adam Goldberg's own 1980s home videos turned into a sitcom about making them.

Season 1

The Golden Girls

1985–1992NBCComedy

'Thank You for Being a Friend' over four women and a Miami kitchen — a theme so tied to the show that the original songwriter's version is now the obscure one.

Season 7

The Golden Palace

1992–1993CBSComedy

The Golden Girls minus one, running a Miami hotel for a single season before CBS stopped.

Season 1

Goliath

2016–2021Prime VideoDrama

Billy Bob Thornton as a lawyer working out of a Santa Monica bar.

Season 1

Gomorrah

2014–2021Sky Atlantic ItaliaCrime

Naples and the Camorra, shot in concrete and sodium light with no romance permitted anywhere in it.

Season 1

Good Behavior

2016–2017TNTCrime

A thief on parole and the hitman she decides not to turn in.

Season 1

Good Cop

2012BBC OneCrime

A Liverpool response officer who stops waiting for the system to work.

Season 1

The Good Doctor

2017–2024ABCDrama

An autistic surgical resident, adapted from the Korean series of the same name.

Season 1

The Good Fight

2017–2022CBS All Access / Paramount+Drama

Office furniture, law books and televisions exploding in slow motion, one after another, to an orchestral swell — a legal drama blowing up its own set every week.

Season 2

A Good Girl's Guide to Murder

2024–BBC iPlayerCrime

A sixth-former who reopens a closed murder case as her school project and will not put it down.

Season 1

The Good Life

1975–1978BBC OneComedy

A couple turning their Surbiton garden into a smallholding, next door to neighbours who would rather they did not.

Season 1

The Good Lord Bird

2020ShowtimeDrama

John Brown's raid told by a boy he mistakes for a girl, opened in the idiom of a nineteenth-century woodcut.

Season 1

Good Luck Charlie

2010–2014Disney ChannelComedy

A teenager filming video diaries for her baby sister, which is the framing device and the title.

Season 1

Good Morning, Miss Bliss

1987–1989NBC / Disney ChannelComedy

The series Saved by the Bell was rebuilt out of, with Hayley Mills teaching in Indiana.

Season 1

Good Omens

2019–2026Amazon Prime Video / BBC TwoComedy

An angel and a demon who have both grown too fond of England to let it end, from Pratchett and Gaiman.

Season 1
Season 2

The Good Place

2016–2020NBCComedy

Pastel clouds, cartoon signage and a chime — an afterlife rendered as municipal branding, which is the joke the whole series is built on.

Season 1

Good Times

1974–1979CBSComedy

A Chicago housing project and a gospel-inflected theme whose lyrics nobody has ever fully agreed on.

Season 1

The Good Wife

2009–2016CBSDrama

Chicago legal iconography in thirty-nine seconds, from the network drama most often argued to be the best of its era.

Seasons 1–2

Good Witch

2015–2021Hallmark ChannelDrama

A film series turned into a returning one, about a woman whose neighbours are never quite sure about her.

Season 1

The Goodies

1970–1982BBC TwoComedy

Three men on a trandem who will do anything, anytime — sketch comedy shot like a silent film.

Season 1

Goodness Gracious Me

1998–2001BBC TwoComedy

A radio sketch show that transferred to television and gave British comedy going for an English one.

Season 1

Goodnight Sweetheart

1993–1999BBC OneComedy

A man who finds a London alley that leads back to 1940 and keeps a wife in each decade.

Seasons 1–6

Goosebumps

1995–1998Fox Kids / YTVHorror

A briefcase blowing open in a wind that follows a dog down a street — thirty seconds of genuine dread aimed at nine-year-olds.

Season 1

Gotham

2014–2019FoxCrime

The city before the character — architecture, rain and corruption, with the costume kept firmly off screen.

Season 1

Grace & Favour

1992–1993BBC OneComedy

The Are You Being Served? staff inheriting a country manor, with most of the original cast.

Season 1

Grace and Frankie

2015–2022NetflixComedy

Two women whose husbands leave them for each other, and who then have to live together.

Season 1

Grace Under Fire

1993–1998ABCComedy

Brett Butler as a single mother working at an oil refinery, in a sitcom built on her stand-up.

Season 1

Graceland

2013–2015USA NetworkCrime

Undercover agents from three agencies sharing a confiscated beach house.

Season 2

Gran Hotel

2011–2013Antena 3Drama

A 1905 luxury hotel and the disappearance of a chambermaid, from the team who went on to make Velvet and Cable Girls.

Season 1

Grand Designs

1999–Channel 4Documentary

One self-build per episode, opening on drawings that assemble themselves into the house you are about to watch fail to be finished on time.

Season 20

Grandstand

1958–2007BBC OneDocumentary

Five hours of live sport on a Saturday afternoon, held together by a man at a desk and the teleprinter behind him.

Season 23
Season 33

Grange Hill

1978–2008BBC OneDrama

A London comprehensive school taken seriously, opening on a comic strip and a sausage on a fork.

Season 1
Seasons 13–16

Gravity Falls

2012–2016Disney Channel / Disney XDAnimation

A cipher hidden in the last second of every opening, so the title sequence is itself a puzzle the audience was expected to solve across two seasons.

Season 1

Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies

2023Paramount+Drama

The Pink Ladies four years before the film, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

The Great

2020–2023HuluComedy

Catherine's rise told as farce, and billed on screen as an occasionally true story.

Season 1

The Great British Bake Off

2010–BBC Two / Channel 4Documentary

Bunting, a tent and a xylophone — twenty seconds of deliberate gentleness, and one of the most effective pieces of format branding on British television.

Season 1

Great Expectations

2011BBC OneDrama

The Dickens novel in three parts, with Gillian Anderson as Miss Havisham.

Season 1

Great Railway Journeys

1980–1999BBC TwoDocumentary

A writer and a railway line, one country per episode, in the strand that gave Michael Palin his second career.

Season 1

Great Teacher Onizuka

1999–2000Fuji TVAnimation

A former biker gang leader who becomes a teacher for the wrong reasons and stays for the right ones.

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

Greek

2007–2011ABC FamilyComedy

Fraternity and sorority life at a fictional Ohio university, taken seriously enough to run four seasons.

Season 1

Green Acres

1965–1971CBSComedy

A duet in which husband and wife argue about the move the series is built on, sung directly to camera.

Season 1

Green Eggs and Ham

2019–2022NetflixAnimation

Fifty Seuss words expanded into two seasons, animated with more craft than the premise suggests.

Season 2

Green Lantern: The Animated Series

2011–2013Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The first fully CG DC series, cancelled after one season when its toy line failed.

Season 1

Green Wing

2004–2007Channel 4Comedy

A hospital comedy shot with speed-ramped transitions between every scene, which the titles establish first.

Season 1

Grey's Anatomy

2005–ABCDrama

Twenty-seven seconds of surgical instruments and a guitar figure, from a series that has now outlived most of the shows that copied it.

Season 1

The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

2001–2007Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Two children who win the Grim Reaper in a limbo contest and keep him as a friend.

Season 1

Grimm

2011–2017NBCHorror

A Portland detective who can see the creatures the fairy tales were written about, opened in eleven seconds.

Season 1

Grimsburg

2024–FoxAnimation

Jon Hamm as a detective in a town where every case is someone he knows.

Season 2

Grotesquerie

2024FXHorror

Ryan Murphy's detective series about a series of killings that read as tableaux.

Season 1

Grounded for Life

2001–2005Fox / The WBComedy

A young Staten Island family, told out of order within each episode.

Season 1

Growing Pains

1985–1992ABCComedy

A Long Island psychiatrist who moved his practice into the house so his wife could go back to reporting.

Season 1

The Guardian

2001–2004CBSDrama

A corporate lawyer sentenced to community service in child advocacy, which turns out to be the real job.

Season 1
Seasons 2–3

Guardians of the Galaxy

2015–2019Disney XDAnimation

The team animated after the first film, in the same eleven-second house style as the rest of the block.

Season 1

Guiding Light

1952–2009CBSDrama

Seventy-two years on radio and television between them — the longest-running story ever told in any medium.

Season 44
Season 51

Gullak

2019–SonyLIVComedy

A lower-middle-class family in a small north Indian town, narrated by their piggy bank.

Season 4

Guns & Gulaabs

2023NetflixCrime

A 1990s opium town played as comedy, from the Gunjan Saxena directors.

Season 1

Gurren Lagann

2007TV TokyoAnimation

A mecha series whose opening escalates as fast as the show does, and which by the end is operating at a scale the first episode could not have suggested.

Season 1

Gyeongseong Creature

2023–2024NetflixHorror

Occupied Seoul in 1945, and what the occupiers are keeping in the hospital basement.

Season 1

H

H.R. Pufnstuf

1969–1970NBCComedy

Sid and Marty Krofft's first series, and the reason a generation associates foam costumes with a talking flute.

Season 1

H2O: Just Add Water

2006–2010Network TenDrama

Three Gold Coast girls who become mermaids on contact with water, and an Australian export that reached a hundred and twenty countries.

Season 1

Hacks

2021–MaxComedy

Las Vegas residency glamour, played straight enough to sting — a comedian's brand doing the work of a title sequence.

Season 1

Haikyu!!

2014–2020MBS / TBSAnimation

Volleyball animated with the weight of a fight scene, over a rock track that never lets the tempo drop.

Season 1

Hailey's On It!

2023–2024Disney ChannelAnimation

A girl with a list of every thing she is afraid of and a deadline to do all of them.

Season 1

Hajime no Ippo

2000–2014Nippon TVAnimation

A bullied shopkeeper's son taken into a boxing gym, and one of the few sports series that gets the training right.

Season 1

Hale and Pace

1988–1998ITVComedy

Two former schoolteachers doing sketch comedy for ITV for a decade.

Season 1

Half & Half

2002–2006UPNComedy

Two half-sisters who grew up apart, living in the same San Francisco building as adults.

Season 1

Halo

2022–2024Paramount+Sci-Fi

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

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

Hammer House of Horror

1980ITVHorror

Hammer's one television anthology, made after the films had stopped and shot on the same estate.

Season 1

Hamster & Gretel

2022–2024Disney ChannelAnimation

A brother and sister given superpowers, except only the hamster got them.

Season 1

Hana Yori Dango

2005–2007TBSDrama

The manga that became Boys Over Flowers in Korea and Meteor Garden in Taiwan, in its Japanese live-action form.

Season 1

Hancock's Half Hour

1956–1961BBCComedy

Galton and Simpson's radio series moved to television, and the point at which British sitcom stopped being a variety turn.

Season 1

The Handmaid's Tale

2017–2025HuluDrama

Red cloaks and white wings shot from above, arranged into the geometry of a system rather than a group of people.

Seasons 1–2

Handy Manny

2006–2011Playhouse DisneyAnimation

A bilingual repairman whose tools talk, and the programme that taught a generation of American children their first Spanish.

Season 1

Hang Time

1995–2000NBCComedy

A girl on a boys' high school basketball team, made for the Saturday morning block.

Season 2

Hangin' with Mr. Cooper

1992–1997ABCComedy

A retired basketball player teaching gym in Oakland and sharing a house with two women he went to school with.

Season 1
Seasons 4–5

Hannibal

2013–2015NBCHorror

A figure forming out of blood in water, on network television at ten o'clock. Twenty-one seconds, and among the most beautiful things any broadcast network has aired.

Season 1

Happy Days

1974–1984ABCComedy

A fifties jukebox theme that started as a closing song and was promoted to the opening once it became a hit record.

Season 1

Happy Endings

2011–2013ABCComedy

Six friends in Chicago talking over one another at a speed most sitcoms do not attempt.

Season 1

Happy Tree Friends

2000–Mondo MediaAnimation

Woodland animals drawn in the shape of greetings cards and then killed in every episode, made for the web years before television wanted it.

Season 1

Happy Valley

2014–2023BBC OneCrime

Sally Wainwright's Calder Valley series, which opens with almost nothing and is all the bleaker for it.

Season 1

Hardcastle and McCormick

1983–1986ABCCrime

A retired judge and the ex-convict he paroles into being his driver, chasing the cases he could not convict.

Season 1

Hardcore Pawn

2010–2015truTVDocumentary

A Detroit pawnbroker and the arguments across his counter, which are most of the programme.

Season 1

Harley Quinn

2019–DC Universe / HBO MaxAnimation

The adult animated Harley, whose opening is short enough that the show keeps rewriting it episode to episode.

Season 1

Harry Enfield & Chums

1990–1992BBC TwoComedy

Enfield's characters given a series each week, and most of British catchphrase comedy for a decade after.

Season 1

Hart of Dixie

2011–2015The CWDrama

A New York surgeon who inherits half a general practice in Alabama and finds she cannot leave it.

Season 1

Hart to Hart

1979–1984ABCCrime

A wealthy married couple who solve murders, introduced by their own butler in voiceover.

Season 1

Harvey Beaks

2015–2017NickelodeonAnimation

A well-behaved bird and the two feral children who are his best friends.

Season 1

Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law

2000–2007Adult SwimAnimation

Birdman as a lawyer representing Hanna-Barbera characters, opened in the register of a network legal drama.

Season 1

The Haunting of Bly Manor

2020NetflixHorror

The Turn of the Screw as the second Haunting, with the same company of actors in different parts.

Season 1

The Haunting of Hill House

2018–2020NetflixHorror

The house drawn as an architectural plate, rooms opening into rooms, with figures standing in doorways you are not meant to notice on a first pass.

Season 1

Have Gun – Will Travel

1957–1963CBSDrama

A gunfighter who advertises in the newspaper, and one of the first westerns to open on a business card.

Seasons 1–6

Have I Got News for You

1990–BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Newspaper mastheads and printing presses, rebuilt periodically across thirty-five years of British political humiliation.

Season 1

Haven

2010–2015SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

Hawaii Five-0 (2010)

2010–2020CBSCrime

The reboot, which keeps the 1968 theme almost note for note and rebuilds the wave and the zoom around it in high definition.

Season 1

Hawaii Five-O

1968–1980CBSCrime

The wave, the zoom onto the hotel balcony, and one of the four or five most recognisable television themes ever recorded.

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

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe

1983–1985SyndicationAnimation

A man holding a sword above his head announcing that he has the power, at a volume that defined an entire decade of toy advertising.

Season 1

Head of the Class

1986–1991ABCComedy

A history teacher handed the gifted programme at a Manhattan school, played by a stand-up who had never taught anyone.

Season 1

Healer

2014–2015KBS2Drama

A night courier who takes any job without asking what it is, and the reporter who works out who he is.

Season 1

Heartbeat

1992–2010ITVDrama

A Yorkshire village policeman in the 1960s, opened by the Buddy Holly song the series is named for.

Season 1

Heartbreak High

1994–1999Ten / ABC (Australia)Drama

A Sydney comprehensive, revived by Netflix thirty years later.

Season 1

Heartland

2007–CBCDrama

A family ranch in Alberta, and the longest-running one-hour drama in Canadian television.

Seasons 1–3

Heated Rivalry

2025–CraveDrama

Two rival ice hockey players who spend a decade hiding what is between them, from Rachel Reid's novel.

Season 1

Hee Haw

1969–1993CBS / SyndicationComedy

Country music and cornfield jokes, cancelled by CBS in the rural purge and then outliving it in syndication by twenty years.

Season 1

The Heirs

2013SBSDrama

The children of chaebol families at the same school, arranged by inheritance rather than friendship.

Season 1

Helix

2014–2015SyfyHorror

A CDC team at an Arctic research base, opened in ten seconds because the show never slows down either.

Season 1

Hell on Wheels

2011–2016AMCDrama

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

Season 1

Hell's Kitchen

2005–FoxDocumentary

Flames, a skull made of a chef's hat, and Gordon Ramsay shouting — the titles tell you exactly what the hour is.

Season 1

Hellbound

2021–NetflixHorror

Twenty-five seconds of smoke and scripture, over before the dread has anywhere to settle.

Season 1

Hello Tomorrow!

2023Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Helstrom

2020HuluHorror

The last of Marvel's television output before the Disney+ era swallowed it, and the only one that is a horror series.

Season 1

Hemlock Grove

2013–2015NetflixHorror

A Pennsylvania steel town with a werewolf and a biotech company in it, and one of Netflix's first three originals.

Season 1

Her Private Life

2019tvNComedy

A gallery curator running a fan site for an idol, and the director who finds out.

Season 1

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

1995–1999SyndicationDrama

A narrated mythological premise delivered with total conviction over New Zealand hillsides.

Season 1

The Herculoids

1967–1969CBSAnimation

Alex Toth designs on an alien planet, in the run of Hanna-Barbera action shows that got them banned from Saturday mornings for violence.

Season 1

Herman's Head

1991–1994FoxComedy

A man's four personified impulses arguing inside his skull while the plot happens outside it.

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

Heroes Reborn

2015–2016NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Hetty Wainthropp Investigates

1996–1998BBC OneCrime

A Lancashire pensioner who opens a detective agency because nobody will give her a job.

Season 1

Hey Arnold!

1996–2004NickelodeonAnimation

A jazz theme over a city block, for a children's cartoon that treated urban childhood with unusual seriousness.

Season 1

Hey Dude

1989–1991NickelodeonComedy

Teenagers working a dude ranch in Arizona, in one of the first scripted series Nickelodeon made itself.

Season 1

Hey Duggee

2014–CBeebiesAnimation

A dog running a scout group for small animals, structured around a badge per episode.

Season 1

Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi

2004–2006Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The Japanese pop duo animated as cartoon versions of themselves, with a theme they recorded.

Season 1

Hi-de-Hi!

1980–1988BBC OneComedy

A 1950s holiday camp, the fourth David Croft series in this catalogue.

Season 1

The High Chaparral

1967–1971NBCDrama

An Arizona cattle ranch and the Mexican family it marries into, from the producer of Bonanza.

Season 1

High Maintenance

2016–2020HBOComedy

A weed delivery cyclist as the only connection between otherwise unrelated New York stories.

Season 1

High Potential

2024–ABCCrime

A cleaner with an exceptional mind who starts solving the cases in the files she is dusting.

Season 1

High Seas

2019–2020NetflixCrime

Two sisters on a 1940s liner to Rio, and a passenger who was never on the manifest.

Season 1

Higher Ground

2000Fox FamilyDrama

A wilderness school for troubled teenagers, cancelled after one season and remembered for its cast list.

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

Hightown

2020–2024StarzCrime

A fisheries agent in Provincetown pulled into an overdose investigation she should not be near.

Season 1

Highway Patrol

1955–1959SyndicationCrime

Broderick Crawford saying "Ten-four" into a car radio, which entered the language from here.

Season 1

Hijack

2023–Apple TV+Drama

Flight paths, cabin geometry and a clock — a series told in real time, saying so before it starts.

Season 2

Hilda

2018–2023NetflixAnimation

Luke Pearson's blue-haired girl and the Nordic folklore living beside her town.

Season 1

Hill Street Blues

1981–1987NBCCrime

Mike Post's piano over squad cars pulling out into snow — the sequence that taught American drama an opening could be melancholy rather than exciting.

Season 1

The Hills

2006–2010MTVDocumentary

The Laguna Beach spin-off that moved to Los Angeles, and the show that made the word scripted an argument.

Season 1

Hinterland

2013–2016S4C / BBC OneCrime

Aberystwyth and the country behind it, shot twice over - once in Welsh as Y Gwyll, once in English.

Season 1

Hip-Hop Evolution

2016–2020NetflixDocumentary

Shad interviewing the people who were actually in the room, decade by decade.

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

Histeria!

1998–2000Kids' WBAnimation

History taught as an Animaniacs-style variety show, made to satisfy an educational broadcasting requirement.

Season 1

The Hitchhiker

1983–1991HBOHorror

HBO's first original series: an anthology introduced by a man on a road who never explains himself.

Season 1

Hockey Night in Canada

1952–CBC / SportsnetDocumentary

A theme so embedded that when the CBC lost the rights to it in 2008 the story led the national news.

Season 70

The Hogan Family

1986–1990NBCComedy

A sitcom that changed its name twice while on the air, from Valerie to Valerie's Family to this one.

Season 1

Hogan's Heroes

1965–1971CBSComedy

A prisoner-of-war camp run as a sabotage operation, opened by a march whistled rather than sung.

Season 1

Holby City

1999–2022BBC OneDrama

The Casualty spin-off that moved upstairs to the surgical wards and outlasted most of what was around it.

Season 12

The Hollow Crown

2012–2016BBC TwoDrama

The history plays filmed as features, with a title card so brief it barely qualifies as a sequence.

Season 1

Hollyoaks

1995–Channel 4Drama

A Chester soap aimed at an audience twenty years younger than any other British serial's.

Season 14

Hollywood Squares

1986–1989SyndicationDocumentary

The noughts-and-crosses game revived for syndication, with nine celebrities stacked in a lit grid.

Season 1

Holocaust

1978NBCDrama

The miniseries that put the word into everyday use in Germany, where half the country watched it.

Season 1

Home and Away

1988–Seven NetworkDrama

Summer Bay, still running after nearly forty years, with the opening remade every few seasons.

Season 1
Season 38

Home Improvement

1991–1999ABCComedy

Power tools and a grunting brass riff, in the register of the fictional DIY programme the show is about.

Season 1

Home Movies

1999–2004UPN / Adult SwimAnimation

Nineteen seconds, squiggle-drawn, from the series that established the improvised-dialogue style its creator would later bring to Bob's Burgers.

Season 1

Homeland

2011–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jazz, archive news audio and a child in a lion mask — a fever dream assembled from half a century of American foreign policy, recut every season with that year's crisis in it.

Season 1
Season 6
Season 8

The Honeymooners

1955–1956CBSComedy

A moon over Brooklyn and an orchestra — the sitcom that most American sitcoms since are a variation on, in thirty-nine episodes.

Season 1

Hong Kong Phooey

1974ABCAnimation

A janitor dog who is a secret kung fu detective, with Scatman Crothers singing his own theme.

Season 1

Hope & Gloria

1995–1996NBCComedy

A talk show producer and a hairdresser sharing a Pittsburgh apartment building.

Season 1
Season 2

Hormones

2013–2015GMM 25Drama

A Bangkok school series that broke Thai television's rules about what teenagers could be shown doing.

Season 2

Hornblower

1998–2003ITVDrama

Forester's naval officer, made not as a series but as eight television films spread over five years.

Season 1

Horrible Histories

2009–CBBCComedy

Sketch comedy about history for children that adults watched anyway, with the titles redrawn between series.

Season 5

Hospital Playlist

2020–2021tvNDrama

Five doctors who have been friends since medical school, and a band they will not stop forming.

Season 1

Hot in Cleveland

2010–2015TV LandComedy

Three Los Angeles women whose plane diverts, and who find that in Ohio they are considered striking.

Season 1

Hot Stove League

2019–2020SBSDrama

A baseball club's front office in the closed season, which is where the title's stove is.

Season 1

Hotel Cocaine

2024MGM+Crime

The Mutiny Hotel in late-seventies Miami, and everyone who passed through its lobby.

Season 1

House

2004–2012FoxDrama

Anatomical illustration and MRI imagery over Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' — a diagnostic show that opens by looking inside a body rather than at one.

Season 8
Season 1

House of Anubis

2011–2013NickelodeonDrama

An English boarding school with an Egyptian secret underneath it, remade by Nickelodeon from a Dutch and Belgian original.

Season 1
Season 2

House of Cards

2013–2018NetflixDrama

Washington in time-lapse, shot at dusk and left to run — monuments, traffic and cloud moving over a city where nothing visibly happens. Jeff Beal's theme does the menace.

Seasons 1–6

House of the Dragon

2022–HBODrama

The parent show mapped a continent; this one traces a bloodline. Where Game of Thrones built cities, these titles follow blood running through stone channels and a tapestry recording who killed whom.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

HouseBroken

2021–2023FoxAnimation

A group-therapy circle of neighbourhood pets, run by a poodle who is not qualified.

Season 1

How I Met Your Father

2022–2023HuluComedy

The How I Met Your Mother format restaged, with the same framing device and fifteen seconds of titles.

Season 1

How I Met Your Mother

2005–2014CBSComedy

Fourteen seconds of photographs and a ukulele — a nine-year story introduced by a handful of snapshots.

Season 1

How It's Made

2001–Discovery ChannelDocumentary

Manufacturing filmed without a presenter, a plot or a raised voice, for over thirty seasons.

Season 15

How to Get Away with Murder

2014–2020ABCCrime

Law-school iconography cut against evidence photographs, so the lecture and the crime scene share a visual language.

Season 1

How to Make It in America

2010–2011HBOComedy

New York street fashion and hustle, cut to Aloe Blacc — the East Coast answer to Entourage, and a better title sequence than the show got credit for.

Season 1

How to Sell Drugs Online (Fast)

2019–2022NetflixComedy

A teenager who builds Europe's largest online drug market from his bedroom to win back a girlfriend, and eleven seconds to say so.

Season 1

How To with John Wilson

2020–2023HBODocumentary

New York filmed on the street by one man with a camera, and titles assembled from the same accidental footage the series is made of.

Season 1

Howards End

2017BBC One / StarzDrama

Kenneth Lonergan's Forster adaptation, with titles built from cut-paper Edwardian silhouettes.

Season 1

Howards' Way

1985–1990BBC OneDrama

Boatyards and money on the Solent, which the BBC ran opposite Dallas and Dynasty on purpose.

Season 1

The Huckleberry Hound Show

1958–1961SyndicationAnimation

The first animated series to win an Emmy, and the show Yogi Bear was a supporting segment in.

Season 1

Hudson & Rex

2019–CitytvCrime

A St John's detective and his German shepherd, remade from an Austrian series that ran for twenty years.

Season 1

Huff

2004–2006ShowtimeDrama

A psychiatrist whose own life comes apart after a patient's suicide.

Season 1

The Hughleys

1998–2000ABCComedy

A family moving to a white suburb and the father who cannot stop noticing it.

Season 1

Hulk and the Agents of S.M.A.S.H.

2013–2015Disney XDAnimation

The Hulks as a team, framed as a documentary crew filming themselves.

Season 1

Human Planet

2011BBC OneDocumentary

The BBC natural-history unit turning its cameras on people, one habitat per episode.

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

Hung

2009–2011HBOComedy

Detroit in decline, filmed with more sympathy than the premise would lead you to expect.

Season 1

Hunter × Hunter

2011–2014Nippon TVAnimation

One opening held for most of a hundred and forty-eight episodes, which for a shonen series of that length is close to unheard of.

Season 1

Hunters

2020–2023Prime VideoDrama

Seventies exploitation-poster design applied to Nazi hunting in 1977 New York, with all the tastelessness that implies deliberately left in.

Season 1

The Hunting Wives

2025–NetflixDrama

A Massachusetts family relocated to east Texas, and the shooting club the wife falls in with.

Season 1

Hustle

2004–2012BBC OneCrime

Playing cards, sleight of hand and London — a con-artist series whose titles are themselves a piece of misdirection.

Season 1

I

I Am the Night

2019TNTCrime

Patty Jenkins directing a story that runs alongside the Black Dahlia case without being it.

Season 1

I Am Weasel

1997–2000Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The Cow and Chicken spin-off, with a theme that is mostly the title said repeatedly.

Season 1

I Dream of Jeannie

1965–1970NBCComedy

A full animated origin story every week — the bottle, the beach, the astronaut — told in sixty seconds so the episode never has to.

Season 1

I Love Lucy

1951–1957CBSComedy

A satin heart on a cigarette-brand backdrop — a title card that exists because the sponsor paid for it, and which outlived the sponsor by seventy years.

Season 1

I Spy

1965–1968NBCDrama

Two agents under cover as a tennis player and his trainer, and the first American drama to cast a Black actor as a lead.

Season 1

I, Claudius

1976BBC TwoDrama

A snake crossing a Roman mosaic — one image, held for forty-five seconds, and among the most efficient title sequences ever made.

Season 1

I'll Be Gone in the Dark

2020HBODocumentary

Michelle McNamara's search for the Golden State Killer, finished by other people after she died.

Season 1

I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here!

2002–ITVDocumentary

Celebrities in an Australian jungle, and one of the few formats whose titles are remade from scratch every series.

Season 24

I'm Alan Partridge

1997–2002BBC TwoComedy

A theme with all the brass of a chat show its subject is no longer allowed to host, over a Travel Tavern car park.

Season 1

I'm Dying Up Here

2017–2018ShowtimeDrama

The 1970s Los Angeles stand-up scene, produced by Jim Carrey.

Season 1

iCarly

2007–2012NickelodeonComedy

A web show made in a Seattle flat, five years before that was an ordinary thing for a teenager to do.

Season 1

Ice Road Truckers

2007–2017HistoryDocumentary

Haulage across frozen lakes in the Northwest Territories, opening on the ice doing what the ice does.

Season 1

An Idiot Abroad

2010–2012Sky1Documentary

Karl Pilkington sent to the wonders of the world by two people enjoying it more than he is.

Season 3

The Idol

2023HBODrama

Studio lighting, mirrors and pop-star iconography, presented without irony.

Season 1

Impractical Jokers

2011–truTVComedy

Four friends daring each other in public, with a hidden-camera open that ran unchanged for nine seasons.

Seasons 1–9

In Living Color

1990–1994FoxComedy

Graffiti, dance and a Heavy D theme — a sketch show that opened at a volume network television had not previously permitted.

Season 1

In Plain Sight

2008–2012USA NetworkCrime

A US marshal running witness protection in Albuquerque.

Season 1

In the Flesh

2013–2014BBC ThreeHorror

Cured zombies sent home to the villages that killed them, opened in twelve seconds.

Season 1

In the Heat of the Night

1988–1995NBC / CBSCrime

The 1967 film continued as a series, with Carroll O'Connor as the chief.

Season 1

In the Night Garden...

2007–2009CBeebiesComedy

Two minutes of a boat, a sleeping child and a narrator naming everything in the garden, before a programme designed to send that child to sleep.

Season 1

In Treatment

2008–2021HBODrama

Nineteen seconds and a chair. For a show that is entirely two people talking in one room, the titles decline to leave it.

Season 1

The Inbetweeners

2008–2010E4Comedy

Twenty-one seconds of school corridor, with no attempt to make any of the four look like someone you would want to be.

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

Industry

2020–HBODrama

Twenty-two seconds of type and glass. A trading-floor show whose opening is over before you have settled, which is roughly how the job is depicted.

Season 1

Infinity Train

2019–2021Cartoon Network / HBO MaxAnimation

A train of endless carriages, each its own world, with a nine-second open that refuses to explain any of it.

Season 1

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

Ink Master

2012–2018SpikeDocumentary

Tattoo artists competing on other people's skin, which raises the stakes over most craft contests.

Season 2
Season 5

Insecure

2016–2021HBOComedy

Twenty-one seconds of South Los Angeles and a beat, changing its track from season to season while the shape of the thing stays identical.

Season 1

Inside Amy Schumer

2013–2022Comedy CentralComedy

A sketch show with stand-up and street interviews between, and eleven seconds to get into it.

Season 1

Inside Job

2021–2022NetflixAnimation

Conspiracy iconography assembled into a corporate onboarding video — every hidden-world cliché filed and badged.

Season 1

Inside No. 9

2014–2024BBC TwoComedy

Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton's anthology, every episode set somewhere numbered nine, opened in seventeen seconds by a brass hare.

Season 1

Inspector Gadget

1983–1986SyndicationAnimation

A Peter Sellers impression with helicopter arms, and a theme that is In the Hall of the Mountain King with the serial numbers filed off.

Season 1

Inspector George Gently

2007–2017BBC OneCrime

A Northumberland detective in the 1960s, and a series that uses the decade for its politics rather than its clothes.

Season 2

The Institute

2025MGM+Sci-Fi

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

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

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

Invader Zim

2001–2006NickelodeonAnimation

Gothic-industrial design on a children's network, with a theme that sounds like it was made under duress.

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

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

Inventing Anna

2022NetflixDrama

Fashion-magazine layout and Manhattan gloss, assembled with the confidence of something that cannot afford itself.

Season 1

Invincible

2021–Prime VideoAnimation

A title card that gets progressively more blood-spattered as the season goes on — the show's escalation, tracked in one graphic.

Season 1

Iris

2009KBS2Drama

A secret agent thriller shot across five countries, and the most expensive Korean drama made to that point.

Season 1

Irma Vep

2022HBODrama

Olivier Assayas remaking his own film as a series about remaking a film, with silent-era titles to match.

Season 1

Iron Chef

1993–1999Fuji TVDocumentary

A cookery contest staged as a martial-arts tournament, presided over by a man in a gold cape.

Season 1

Iron Chef America

2005–2018Food NetworkDocumentary

The Fuji format remade in a Food Network kitchen, with the man in the gold cape replaced by a chairman.

Season 1

Iron Fist

2017–2018NetflixDrama

The last of the four Defenders series, and the one that completes the set here.

Season 1

Ironheart

2025Disney+Sci-Fi

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

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

It (1990)

1990ABCHorror

Two nights on ABC, and the reason a generation of viewers will not stand near a storm drain.

Season 1

It Ain't Half Hot Mum

1974–1981BBC OneComedy

A Royal Artillery concert party in wartime India, and the Croft series that has aged worst.

Season 1

The IT Crowd

2006–2013Channel 4Comedy

Eight-bit pixel art and a chiptune, for a basement full of people nobody upstairs wants to think about.

Season 1

It: Welcome to Derry

2025HBOHorror

The King adaptation's prequel series, set in the 1960s cycle.

Season 1

It's a Living

1980–1989ABC / SyndicationComedy

Waitresses at a restaurant on the thirteenth floor, cancelled by ABC and revived in syndication.

Season 1
Season 2

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

2005–FX / FXXComedy

Photographs of Philadelphia over a jaunty public-domain waltz, with the episode's absurd title card dropped into the middle of it.

Seasons 2–4

It's Garry Shandling's Show

1986–1990ShowtimeComedy

A sitcom whose theme song is about being a sitcom theme song, six years before The Larry Sanders Show.

Season 1

It's Okay to Not Be Okay

2020tvNDrama

A psychiatric carer and a children's author, told through illustrated fairy tales between episodes.

Season 1

It's Pony

2020–2022NickelodeonAnimation

A girl whose pony lives in the house and is not remotely house-trained in any sense.

Season 1

Itaewon Class

2020JTBCDrama

An ex-convict opening a bar in Itaewon to ruin the company that ruined his father.

Season 1

Ivor the Engine

1959–1977ITV / BBC OneAnimation

A Welsh locomotive who wants to sing in the choir, drawn in pencil and cut out by hand.

Season 1

J

Jabberjaw

1976–1978ABCAnimation

A drumming shark in an underwater band, which is Scooby-Doo restaged in 2076 with Curly Howard's voice.

Season 1

Jack Ryan

2018–2023Prime VideoDrama

Satellite imagery, intercepted signals and maps — an analyst's view of the world rather than a field agent's.

Season 2

Jackanory

1965–1996BBC OneDrama

One actor, one chair, one book read aloud for fifteen minutes — the least televisual idea the BBC ever ran for thirty years.

Season 1

Jackie Chan Adventures

2000–2005Kids' WBAnimation

Jackie Chan as an archaeologist hunting talismans, with the real Chan answering fan questions at the end of each episode.

Season 1

JAG

1995–2005NBC / CBSDrama

Navy lawyers across ten seasons, and the series NCIS was spun out of.

Season 9

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

Jake and the Fatman

1987–1992CBSCrime

A Hawaii prosecutor and his investigator, spun out of a single episode of Matlock.

Season 1

Jamie and the Magic Torch

1976–1979ITVAnimation

A torch that opens a hole in the bedroom floor down a helter-skelter into Cuckoo Land.

Season 1

The Jamie Foxx Show

1996–2001The WBComedy

A hotel in Los Angeles run by relatives, and the nephew who wants to act instead.

Season 1

Jane the Virgin

2014–2019The CWComedy

A telenovela about a woman inside a telenovela, opened in the form it is parodying and loving at once.

Season 1

Jay Jay the Jet Plane

1998–2005PBS KidsAnimation

Talking aeroplanes at a small airfield, made first on video and later for television.

Season 1

Jeeves and Wooster

1990–1993ITVComedy

Wodehouse played by Fry and Laurie, who had spent the previous decade writing sketches together.

Season 1

The Jeffersons

1975–1985CBSComedy

'Movin' On Up' over a family arriving at a Manhattan apartment — a theme that functions as a plot summary and a thesis at once.

Season 1

Jem and the Holograms

1985–1988SyndicationAnimation

A record executive with a holographic alter ego, and a series that stopped for a music video every episode.

Season 1

Jeremiah

2002–2004ShowtimeSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Jericho

2006–2008CBSDrama

Thirteen seconds and a mushroom cloud on the horizon, seen from a Kansas town that has no idea what happened.

Season 1

Jericho (2016)

2016ITVDrama

A shanty town thrown up under a Victorian railway viaduct in Yorkshire, and ITV's attempt at a British western.

Season 1

Jersey Shore

2009–2012MTVDocumentary

Eight housemates in Seaside Heights, and the most watched series MTV has ever had.

Season 1

Jesse

1998–2000NBCComedy

A single mother working in her father's Buffalo bar while training as a nurse.

Season 1

Jessica Jones

2015–2019NetflixCrime

Purple watercolour bleeding across Hell's Kitchen while a noir trumpet plays — the colour of the villain seeping into every frame before he is named.

Seasons 1–3

Jesus of Nazareth

1977RAI / ITVDrama

Zeffirelli's six-hour life of Christ, cast so deeply that the titles are mostly name cards.

Season 1

The Jetsons

1962–1963ABCAnimation

The same studio's future to answer its own past, with a theme that names the whole family in about fifteen seconds.

Season 1

Jewel in the Palace

2003–2004MBCDrama

A kitchen servant who rises to be the king's physician, and the drama that carried Korean television across Asia.

Season 1

Jimmy Kimmel Live!

2003–ABCComedy

ABC's late-night hour, opening on a Hollywood Boulevard that the show films on the pavement outside.

Season 23

The Jinx

2015–2024HBODocumentary

Andrew Jarecki's Robert Durst films, opened by a sequence that tells you nothing and implies everything.

Season 1

Joan of Arcadia

2003–2005CBSDrama

A teenager who talks to God, introduced by a Joan Osborne song that asks what if God were one of us — the rare case of a theme predating and defining the premise.

Season 1

Joey

2004–2006NBCComedy

The Friends spin-off, moving one character to Los Angeles and finding out how much of the show had been the other five.

Season 1

John Adams

2008HBODrama

The thirteen colonies' flags and founding documents animated into a single banner, over a fife-and-drum theme.

Season 1

John from Cincinnati

2007HBODrama

David Milch's surfing series, cancelled after one season and still argued about.

Season 1

The John Larroquette Show

1993–1996NBCComedy

A recovering alcoholic managing a bus terminal at night, in a sitcom NBC steadily made lighter against its writers' wishes.

Season 1

Johnny Bravo

1997–2004Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A pompadour, a bass riff and a character who has never once been correct about anything.

Season 1

Johnny Test

2005–2014Kids' WB / Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A boy who lets his scientist sisters test inventions on him in exchange for whatever he wants that week.

Season 1

Josie and the Pussycats

1970–1971CBSAnimation

An Archie Comics spin-off built around a band, with records released under the characters' names.

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

The 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

Judge Judy

1996–2021SyndicationDocumentary

Small claims heard by a former family court judge who lets almost nobody finish a sentence.

Season 1

Judging Amy

1999–2005CBSDrama

A family court judge and her social worker mother, built from the creator's own mother's career.

Season 1

Jujutsu Kaisen

2020–MBS / TBSAnimation

Eve's 'Kaikai Kitan' over animation that keeps breaking its own frame — one of the sequences that made the studio's reputation.

Season 1

Julia

2022–2023HBO MaxDrama

Butter, copper pans and a test kitchen — cooking shot the way the era's own television shot it, with none of the modern gloss.

Season 1

Jumong

2006–2007MBCDrama

The founding of Goguryeo across eighty-one episodes, and one of the largest audiences Korean television has held.

Season 1

Jurassic World: Camp Cretaceous

2020–2022NetflixAnimation

Six children on Isla Nublar during the events of the 2015 film, which nobody comes to collect.

Season 1

Just Shoot Me!

1997–2003NBCComedy

A fashion magazine staffed by people who should not be near one. The titles start as a full sequence and end as a logo.

Season 1
Seasons 3–5

Just the Ten of Us

1988–1990ABCComedy

The Growing Pains teacher spun off with eight children of his own.

Season 1

Justice League

2001–2006Cartoon NetworkAnimation

An orchestral fanfare and seven heroes introduced in sequence, from the same production team as Batman: The Animated Series and with the same refusal to condescend.

Season 1

Justified

2010–2015FXCrime

Kentucky hills and hip-hop — Gangstagrass over holler country, which should not work and entirely does.

Season 6

K

KaBlam!

1996–2000NickelodeonAnimation

An animated anthology framed as a comic book being read, with the hosts drawn on the page.

Season 1

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

Kamikaze

2021HBO MaxDrama

A Danish teenager who survives the plane crash that kills her family and spends her inheritance trying not to feel it.

Season 1

Kate & Allie

1984–1989CBSComedy

Two divorced friends sharing a Greenwich Village apartment and bringing up their children in it together.

Season 1

Kath & Kim

2002–2007ABC (Australia)Comedy

A mother and daughter in outer-suburban Melbourne, and the most quoted Australian comedy of its decade.

Season 2

The Keepers

2017NetflixDocumentary

The unsolved killing of a Baltimore nun, and what her former pupils found when they investigated it themselves fifty years on.

Season 1

Keeping Up Appearances

1990–1995BBC OneComedy

Hyacinth Bucket, pronounced Bouquet, and the relatives she would rather nobody met.

Season 1

Keeping Up with the Kardashians

2007–2021E!Documentary

Fourteen years of a family photograph rebuilt every season, and ten seconds to do it in.

Season 1

Kenan & Kel

1996–2000NickelodeonComedy

The All That double act given their own series, and "Who loves orange soda?"

Season 1

Kevin Spencer

1999–2005The Comedy NetworkAnimation

A Canadian animated series about a chain-smoking sociopath and his parents, drawn as crudely as it is written.

Season 4

Key & Peele

2012–2015Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-six seconds and two names, from a sketch show that spent its budget on the sketches.

Season 1

Kick Buttowski: Suburban Daredevil

2010–2012Disney XDAnimation

A boy in a stunt suit treating an ordinary suburb as a series of ramps.

Season 1

Kickin' It

2011–2015Disney XDComedy

A martial arts dojo in a shopping centre, and the longest-running live-action comedy Disney XD made.

Season 3

Kidding

2018–2020ShowtimeDrama

Jim Carrey as a children's television presenter coming apart, directed by Michel Gondry.

Season 1

The Kids in the Hall

1988–1995CBC / HBOComedy

Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet playing surf rock over five men in a doorway — a sketch show whose theme became more famous than most of its sketches.

Season 1

Kids Incorporated

1984–1994Syndication / Disney ChannelComedy

A band of children playing covers in a converted warehouse, and where Fergie and Jennifer Love Hewitt both started.

Season 1

Kiff

2023–Disney ChannelAnimation

An optimistic squirrel and her deadpan bunny best friend in a town that indulges neither.

Season 1

Kill la Kill

2013–2014MBSAnimation

Trigger's first series, cut at a speed that leaves the title cards behind.

Season 1

The Killing

2007–2012DR1Crime

Copenhagen in the dark and the rain, over twenty-nine seconds that established the visual language of an entire decade of Nordic crime drama.

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

Killing Eve

2018–2022BBC America / BBC OneCrime

Hand-drawn ink over a chase across Europe, in the register of a fashion illustration rather than a thriller.

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

Kim Possible

2002–2007Disney ChannelAnimation

'Call Me, Beep Me' over split-screen spy graphics — a theme so tied to the show that Disney rerecorded it for the live-action film and was widely told not to.

Season 1

Kim's Convenience

2016–2021CBCComedy

A Korean-Canadian family running a Toronto corner shop, adapted from the play by the man who wrote it.

Season 1

Kimba the White Lion

1965–1967Fuji TVAnimation

Tezuka's Jungle Emperor, the first colour Japanese animated series, and a question Disney has been asked about ever since.

Season 1

Kindred: The Embraced

1996FoxHorror

Vampire clans running San Francisco as organised crime, cancelled after eight episodes.

Season 1

King of Kensington

1975–1980CBCComedy

A Toronto corner-shop owner in the Kensington Market, and the sitcom a fifth of the country watched.

Season 2

The King of Queens

1998–2007CBSComedy

A delivery driver, his wife and her father in Rego Park, nine seasons long.

Season 1

King of the Hill

1997–FoxAnimation

Four men drinking beer in an alley, and a guitar riff. Thirty-one seconds that tell you the show has no interest in going anywhere.

Season 1
Season 14

Kingdom

2019–2021NetflixHorror

Joseon-era ink painting turning plague-ridden — court robes and mountains overrun by figures that do not move like the living.

Season 2

Kipper

1997–2000ITVAnimation

Mick Inkpen's dog animated at the pace of the picture books, which is to say slowly and on purpose.

Season 1

Kitchen Nightmares

2007–FoxDocumentary

The American Ramsay format, louder than the Channel 4 original it was remade from.

Season 1

Knight Rider

1982–1986NBCDrama

A narrated premise, a scanning red light and a synth arpeggio — the most efficient piece of eighties television branding after the A-Team's.

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

Knots Landing

1979–1993CBSDrama

A cul-de-sac shot from above, with the neighbours' houses laid out like a diagram of everyone's business.

Season 1

Knowing Me, Knowing You with Alan Partridge

1994–1995BBC TwoComedy

The radio chat show moved to television, opening on a title sequence that is itself the character's idea of a good one.

Season 1

Kodoku no Gurume

2012–TV TokyoDrama

A salesman eating alone in a different restaurant each week, narrating his own meal. Known abroad as Solitary Gourmet.

Season 1

Kojak

1973–1978CBSCrime

New York in the seventies, a lollipop, and a brass theme that has aged considerably better than the decade around it.

Season 1

Kolchak: The Night Stalker

1974–1975ABCHorror

A reporter whistling in a car park, and a premise established in twenty-six seconds — the direct ancestor of The X-Files, as Chris Carter has said repeatedly.

Season 1

KonoSuba: God's Blessing on This Wonderful World!

2016–Tokyo MXAnimation

An isekai where the hero's party is uniformly useless and the show knows it.

Season 1

Krapopolis

2023–FoxAnimation

Dan Harmon's mythological Greek city, run badly by a family of gods and monsters.

Season 1

Kruk

2018–2021Canal+ PolandCrime

A Białystok detective returning to the town he grew up in, with a subtitle that translates as whispers are heard after dark.

Season 1

Krypto the Superdog

2005–2006Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Superman's dog on Earth without him, living with a boy in suburban Metropolis.

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

The Krypton Factor

1977–1995ITVDocumentary

A general knowledge round, an assault course and a mental agility test, opening on a rotating wireframe grid that was expensive in 1977.

Season 1

Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness

2011–2016NickelodeonAnimation

The DreamWorks films continued weekly, opened in ten seconds of brush-and-ink.

Season 1

Kuroko's Basketball

2012–2015Mainichi BroadcastingAnimation

A basketball player whose entire skill is being unnoticeable.

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

L

The L Word

2004–2009ShowtimeDrama

A circle of women in West Hollywood, and a theme song that lists what the show is about out loud.

Season 1

L.A. Law

1986–1994NBCDrama

A car boot slamming on a personalised numberplate, and Mike Post again — the legal drama that defined the form for a decade.

Season 1

La Casa de las Flores

2018–2020NetflixComedy

A Mexico City florist family and the second family the father has been keeping.

Season 1

La Femme Nikita

1997–2001USA NetworkDrama

Cold blue corridors and electronic music, for a series that treated its agency as an antagonist from the first frame.

Season 1

La Reina del Sur

2011–2023TelemundoCrime

Arturo Pérez-Reverte's Sinaloan trafficker, remade in English by USA Network as Queen of the South.

Season 1

Lady Dynamite

2016–2017NetflixComedy

Maria Bamford's series about Maria Bamford, structured across three timelines and opened in fifteen seconds.

Season 1

Lady in the Lake

2024Apple TV+Crime

Two women in 1960s Baltimore, one investigating and one already dead.

Season 1

Laguna Beach

2004–2006MTVDocumentary

Real teenagers filmed like a drama, and the format most of MTV's next decade was built on.

Season 1

Lamb Chop's Play-Along

1992–1995PBSComedy

Shari Lewis and her puppets, and the song that does not end.

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

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

Lark Rise to Candleford

2008–2011BBC OneDrama

Flora Thompson's hamlet and its market town, adapted into four years of BBC Sunday evenings.

Season 1

The Larry Sanders Show

1992–1998HBOComedy

A talk-show opening for a talk show that does not exist, performed with total conviction by a band and an announcer who are also characters.

Season 1

Las Vegas

2003–2008NBCDrama

Casino surveillance as an ensemble drama, opening on the Strip at the hour it looks best.

Season 1

Last Chance U

2016–2023NetflixDocumentary

Junior college football players with one season left to be recruited, and a marching-band cue for a theme.

Season 1

The Last Dance

2020ESPN / NetflixDocumentary

Archive footage cut to a hip-hop bed, treating a basketball season as a heist film.

Season 1

The Last Days of Ptolemy Grey

2022Apple TV+Drama

Samuel L. Jackson given a drug that returns his memory for thirty days.

Season 1

The Last Kingdom

2015–2022BBC America / NetflixDrama

Earth, ash and iron assembling into a map of a divided England, with the borders shifting as the seasons go on.

Season 1

The Last Man on Earth

2015–2018FoxComedy

The last man alive, who turns out not to be, and who is not much of a loss to anybody either way.

Season 1

The Last of Us

2023–HBODrama

Cordyceps growing across a map — mould spreading through a continent in time-lapse until the shapes it leaves behind resolve into two figures. Gustavo Santaolalla's guitar, carried over from the game.

Season 1

The Last Panthers

2015Sky AtlanticCrime

A jewel heist across Europe, opening on the title track of Blackstar — the last title music David Bowie wrote.

Season 1

Last Resort

2012–2013ABCDrama

A submarine crew who refuse an order and declare an island sovereign, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

The Last Ship

2014–2018TNTDrama

A destroyer at sea when a pandemic takes the rest of the world.

Season 2

Last Tango in Halifax

2012–2020BBC OneDrama

Two people who were sweethearts at school meeting again in their seventies, and the families that have accumulated since.

Season 1

The Last Thing He Told Me

2023Apple TV+Crime

A houseboat, a marina and water — a disappearance introduced by the place the missing man left behind.

Season 1

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

2014–HBOComedy

A weekly half-hour whose animated globe-and-newsprint open has run essentially unchanged for a decade.

Season 1

Late Night with Conan O'Brien

1993–2009NBCComedy

An unknown writer handed the 12.30 slot, and sixteen years to grow into it.

Season 1

Late Night with David Letterman

1982–1993NBCComedy

New York at night shot from a moving car, over a jazz-organ theme — the opening that decided what a late-night talk show looks like.

Season 1

Late Show with David Letterman

1993–2015CBSComedy

Letterman moved to CBS and to a theatre on Broadway, which the titles put on screen every night for twenty-two years.

Season 1

Laverne & Shirley

1976–1983ABCComedy

A skipping chant and two women walking through Milwaukee — the Happy Days spinoff that outrated its parent.

Season 1

Law & Order

1990–NBCCrime

The original, and the source of the two-note sting that half of American television has been quoting ever since.

Season 1
Season 20

Law & Order: Criminal Intent

2001–2011NBC / USA NetworkCrime

The franchise entry that follows the criminal rather than the case, and so has to break the format's own rule about not showing you the answer.

Season 1

Law & Order: Organized Crime

2021–NBC / PeacockCrime

Stabler brought back a decade after leaving Special Victims Unit, into a serialised format the franchise had never used.

Season 1

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit

1999–NBCCrime

The franchise's chung-chung and a narrated premise, held for a quarter of a century — the longest-running opening in this catalogue by some distance.

Season 1
Season 15

Law & Order: Trial by Jury

2005–2006NBCCrime

The shortest-lived Law & Order, cancelled after thirteen episodes, covering the half of the format the parent series skipped.

Season 1

Law & Order: UK

2009–2014ITVCrime

American scripts reshot in London with the two-part structure intact, and the chung-chung kept.

Season 6

The Lawrence Welk Show

1951–1982ABC / SyndicationDocumentary

Champagne music, bubbles in the titles, and thirty-one years of the same band leader counting in.

Season 1

Lazarus

2025Adult SwimAnimation

Shinichirō Watanabe's series with action by Chad Stahelski, opened to Kamasi Washington.

Season 1

Lazor Wulf

2019–2021Adult SwimAnimation

A wolf with a laser bolted to his back, in fourteen seconds of open.

Season 1

The League

2009–2015FX / FXXComedy

A fantasy football league and the friendships it slowly destroys.

Season 1

The League of Gentlemen

1999–2017BBC TwoHorror

Royston Vasey, a local shop, and a radio series that arrived on television already knowing exactly what it looked like.

Season 1

The Leftovers

2014–2017HBODrama

The rare show that threw out a perfectly good title sequence and replaced it with its opposite. One season of grief painted as a Renaissance ceiling, then a complete reversal into snapshots and a country song.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

Legacies

2018–2022The CWHorror

The third series in the Vampire Diaries line, set at a boarding school for the supernatural.

Season 1

The Legacy

2014–2017DR1 (Denmark)Drama

Four siblings fighting over an artist mother's estate. Arvingerne at home.

Season 1

The Legend of Korra

2012–2014NickelodeonAnimation

The Avatar sequel, which keeps the four-element structure of its predecessor's opening and moves it into an industrial age.

Season 1

The Legend of the Blue Sea

2016–2017SBSDrama

A mermaid and a con artist, reincarnated from a Joseon folk tale into modern Seoul.

Season 1

Legend of the Seeker

2008–2010SyndicationDrama

Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth novels, from the Hercules and Xena producers.

Season 1

The Legend of Vox Machina

2022–Prime VideoAnimation

The first Critical Role campaign animated as a series, with a proper broadcast title sequence to go with it.

Season 1

Legends of the Hidden Temple

1993–1995NickelodeonDocumentary

A children's game show staged inside a temple, presided over by a talking stone head.

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

Legion

2017–2019FXSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Lessons in Chemistry

2023Apple TV+Drama

Laboratory glassware and 1950s kitchen surfaces filmed identically, so the science and the domesticity become the same set of tools.

Season 1

Letterkenny

2016–2023CraveComedy

A cold open, a card, and back out — a rural Ontario comedy that spends as little time on formalities as its characters would.

Season 1

Leverage

2008–2012TNTCrime

Twenty seconds of heist iconography, in a show that opens each episode with a job already half underway.

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

Lie to Me

2009–2011FoxCrime

A deception expert reading faces frame by frame, built on the research of the psychologist who consulted on it.

Season 1

Life (2007)

2007–2009NBCCrime

A detective released after twelve years for a crime he did not commit, handed back his badge and a very large settlement.

Season 1

The Life & Times of Tim

2008–2012HBOAnimation

A man in New York whose every conversation makes his situation worse, drawn as simply as possible.

Season 1

The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams

1977–1978NBCDrama

A man wrongly accused who goes to live in the mountains with a bear, and NBC's biggest surprise of 1977.

Season 1

Life Goes On

1989–1993ABCDrama

The first American series built around a lead actor with Down syndrome, opening on the Beatles.

Season 1

Life in Pieces

2015–2019CBSComedy

One family across four short stories an episode, told out of order and cut together at the end.

Season 1

The Life of Riley

1949–1958NBCComedy

A radio sitcom moved to television twice, the second time with William Bendix finally allowed to play the part he had on radio.

Season 1

Life on Earth

1979BBC TwoDocumentary

The series that invented the modern natural history film, and the template for everything Attenborough made afterwards.

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

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

Life Unexpected

2010–2011The CWDrama

A girl in foster care who finds both her birth parents and asks them to take her back.

Season 1

Life with Louie

1995–1998Fox KidsAnimation

Louie Anderson's Wisconsin childhood animated, with his own father as the character the show turns on.

Season 1

Life with Lucy

1986ABCComedy

Lucille Ball's last series, pulled after eight episodes of a thirteen-episode order.

Season 1

The Light in Your Eyes

2019JTBCDrama

A woman who can turn back time and ages a lifetime doing it, which the series does not explain until it has to.

Season 1

Lilyhammer

2012–2014NRK1 / NetflixCrime

Netflix's first original commission, and an opening that plays a New Jersey mobster in rural Norway entirely straight.

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

The Lincoln Lawyer

2022–NetflixCrime

Connelly's defence attorney working out of the back seat of a car, brought to television a decade after the film.

Season 1

Line of Duty

2012–2021BBC Two / BBC OneCrime

Redaction as a design language — evidence bags, case files and blocks of black covering the parts you are not cleared for.

Season 1

Little America

2020–2022Apple TV+Drama

Half-hour films about immigrants to the United States, each based on a real person.

Season 1

Little Bear

1995–2001CBC / Nick Jr.Animation

Maurice Sendak's drawings animated in no hurry whatever, and about the quietest programme Nick Jr. ever ran.

Season 1

Little Britain

2003–2006BBC Three / BBC OneComedy

A radio series moved to television, narrated as though it were a documentary about a country nobody has heard of.

Season 1

Little Dorrit

2008BBC OneDrama

Dickens serialised across fourteen parts, opened by ink and engraving that assemble the Marshalsea.

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

Little Fires Everywhere

2020HuluDrama

Two mothers in a planned Ohio suburb, and the house that is already burning down in the first scene.

Season 1

Little House on the Prairie

1974–1983NBCDrama

Three girls running down a hill, one of whom falls — a shot kept in for nine years because it was better than the take where nobody did.

Season 1

Little Mosque on the Prairie

2007–2012CBCComedy

A Muslim congregation renting a prairie church hall, in a sitcom that became Canada's most exported comedy.

Season 4

Little Women

2017BBC OneDrama

Alcott in three parts, with a title sequence made of cut paper and pressed flowers.

Season 1

The Littles

1983–1985ABCAnimation

Six-inch people with tails living inside the walls, from the John Peterson books.

Season 1

Liv and Maddie

2013–2017Disney ChannelComedy

Dove Cameron playing identical twins with opposite lives.

Season 1

Live

2018tvNDrama

Beat officers at a Seoul substation, from the writer of the Reply series.

Season 1

The Living Planet

1984BBC OneDocumentary

The Life on Earth sequel, on habitats rather than lineages, opening on the planet doing the sorting.

Season 1

Living Single

1993–1998FoxComedy

Queen Latifah performing the theme over Brooklyn — a sitcom opening sung by one of its own stars.

Season 1

Locke & Key

2020–2022NetflixHorror

Keys turning in locks that open onto rooms which should not exist, drawn from the comic's own conceit.

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

Logan's Run

1977–1978CBSSci-Fi

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

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

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 Lone Gunmen

2001FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Lone Ranger

1949–1957ABCDrama

Rossini's William Tell overture attached so firmly to a masked rider that the music has never fully got free of it.

Season 1

Lonesome Dove

1989CBSDrama

Basil Poledouris scoring a cattle drive from Texas to Montana — the miniseries that proved the western was not finished after all.

Season 1

Long Story Short

2025NetflixAnimation

Raphael Bob-Waksberg's family comedy, which jumps decades between scenes and uses its titles to say so.

Season 1

Long Way Round

2004Sky OneDocumentary

Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman riding from London to New York the long way, and the map that opens each leg.

Season 1

Loot

2022–Apple TV+Comedy

Extreme wealth drawn as a cheerful animated inventory — yachts, jets and foundations, arranged like a toy catalogue.

Season 1

The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

2022–Prime VideoDrama

Sand and iron filings moving into Chladni patterns under sound — a title sequence built by playing music at a physical surface rather than animating it.

Season 1

Los Espookys

2019–2022HBOComedy

Handmade horror props filmed lovingly and badly on purpose — fake blood, rubber and fog, exactly the standard the characters work to.

Season 1

Lost

2004–2010ABCDrama

One word, drifting slowly out of the dark towards the camera, over a low tone that is barely a piece of music. Fifteen seconds, no cast, no footage — the cheapest main title of any network drama of its size, and the most imitated.

Seasons 1–6

Lost Girl

2010–2016Showcase / SyfySci-Fi

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

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 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

Lou Grant

1977–1982CBSDrama

The Mary Tyler Moore Show character moved into an hour-long newspaper drama — the only American series to make that jump.

Season 1

The Loud House

2016–NickelodeonAnimation

One boy, ten sisters, and a theme song that has to introduce all eleven of them.

Season 1

The Loudest Voice

2019ShowtimeDrama

Roger Ailes and the building of Fox News, one episode per significant year.

Season 1

Louie

2010–2015FXComedy

A man walking to a comedy club and eating a slice of pizza, singing his own theme — fifty-two seconds with no jokes in them.

Season 1

Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends

1998–2000BBC TwoDocumentary

Theroux embedding himself with American subcultures and letting the awkwardness do the work.

Season 1

Love & Death

2023HBO MaxCrime

Suburban Texas in the early eighties — lawns, church halls and kitchen counters filmed with the flatness of a case file.

Season 1

The Love Boat

1977–1987ABCComedy

A cruise ship with a new guest cast every week, introduced by name in the titles.

Season 3

Love, Death + Robots

2019–NetflixAnimation

Three icons — a heart, a skull, a robot — recombined every episode to declare which of the three that instalment is going to be. The shortest possible statement of an anthology's rules.

Season 1

Lovecraft Country

2020HBOHorror

Twelve seconds — a card, a horn stab, and straight into an episode that will not be the same genre as the last one.

Season 1

Lovely Runner

2024tvNDrama

A fan travelling back fifteen years to stop her favourite singer's death.

Season 1

Low Winter Sun

2013AMCCrime

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

Season 1

Lucifer

2016–2021Fox / NetflixDrama

Eleven seconds and a card, from a procedural that would rather get to the case.

Season 1

Luck

2011–2012HBODrama

Milch and Michael Mann at a racetrack, ended after one season when horses died during production.

Season 1

Luke Cage

2016–2018NetflixCrime

Harlem projected onto a man's skin — brownstones, crowds and streets mapped across a body that cannot be marked. The one Marvel Netflix opening that is about a place rather than a mood.

Seasons 1–2

Luther

2010–2019BBC OneCrime

Massive Attack's 'Paradise Circus' over a city at night, with a detective who is already losing before the episode starts.

Season 1

The Lying Game

2011–2013ABC FamilyDrama

Twins separated at birth swapping places, from the author of Pretty Little Liars.

Season 1

M

MAS*H

1972–1983CBSComedy

A comedy that opens every week with casualties being carried off a helicopter. Nurses and surgeons run for the landing pad while the theme plays underneath — an instrumental of a song the network would not let anyone sing, because of what its chorus says.

Seasons 1–11

MacGyver

1985–1992ABCDrama

Improvised solutions cut fast enough that you never see how any of them work, which is also true of the episodes.

Season 1

Mad About You

1992–2019NBCComedy

A married couple in New York, over a theme that was re-recorded repeatedly and once sung by the show's own stars.

Season 1

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

Madam Secretary

2014–2019CBSDrama

A CIA analyst made Secretary of State, in the political drama CBS ran opposite prestige cable.

Season 1

Made in Abyss

2017–AT-XAnimation

A children's-book art style over a descent that gets progressively less survivable.

Season 1

Made in Heaven

2019–2023Prime VideoDrama

Two Delhi wedding planners, and everything the families hire them to conceal.

Season 1

Madeline

1993–2007The Family ChannelAnimation

Bemelmans' twelve little girls in two straight lines, animated in the style of the books.

Season 1

MADtv

1995–2016FoxComedy

Mad magazine turned into a sketch show, with Alfred E. Neuman in the titles and a cast that changed almost every year.

Season 9

Maestra: Strings of Truth

2023–2024tvNDrama

A conductor holding an orchestra together while the deaths around it accumulate.

Season 1

Maggie and the Ferocious Beast

2000–2002TeletoonAnimation

A girl, a spotted beast and a pig live on Nowhere Land, where nothing much goes wrong.

Season 1

Magic City

2012–2013StarzDrama

A Miami Beach hotel in 1959, on the night Castro takes Havana.

Season 1

The Magic Roundabout

1965–1977BBC OneAnimation

A French stop-motion series that Eric Thompson re-narrated in English without translating the scripts, inventing different characters over the same pictures.

Season 1

The 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

The Magicians

2015–2020SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

Magnificent Century

2011–2014Show TV / Star TVDrama

Suleiman the Magnificent's court, and the series that made Turkish dizi a global export.

Season 3

Magnum, P.I.

1980–1988CBSCrime

Hawaii, a Ferrari and a moustache, over a theme so brash it dates the decade to within about eighteen months.

Season 1

Major Crimes

2012–2018TNTCrime

The Closer continued around Mary McDonnell's captain rather than Kyra Sedgwick's chief.

Season 1

Making a Murderer

2015–2018NetflixDocumentary

Manitowoc County in winter over a plucked string figure — the sequence that defined what a Netflix true-crime series would look like for the next decade.

Season 1

Malcolm & Eddie

1996–2000UPNComedy

Malcolm-Jamal Warner and Eddie Griffin sharing a Kansas City bar, four years after The Cosby Show ended.

Season 1

Malcolm in the Middle

2000–2006FoxComedy

They Might Be Giants' 'Boss of Me' over archive film of chaos — falling, crashing and general misadventure, cut faster than a network comedy usually dares.

Season 1

Mama's Family

1983–1990NBC / SyndicationComedy

A Carol Burnett Show sketch given its own house, dropped by NBC and then run for four more years in syndication.

Season 1

Man Down

2013–2017Channel 4Comedy

Greg Davies as a teacher whose life is a sustained emergency, with Rik Mayall as his father.

Season 1

The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

Season 1

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

A Man on the Inside

2024–NetflixComedy

A retired professor sent undercover into a care home, from the creator of The Good Place.

Season 1

Man v. Food

2008–2022Travel Channel / Cooking ChannelDocumentary

A presenter attempting restaurant eating challenges built to be impossible, and losing more often than not.

Season 10

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

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

Manhattan

2014–2015WGN AmericaDrama

The scientists at Los Alamos, and the families billeted alongside them who were told nothing.

Season 1

Manhunt

2024Apple TV+Drama

Period engraving and telegraph type, assembling the pursuit of Lincoln's killer out of the era's own printed matter.

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

Mao Mao: Heroes of Pure Heart

2019–2020Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A cat sheriff who wants to be a legendary hero and is instead responsible for a valley of fruit people.

Season 1

March Comes in Like a Lion

2016–2018NHKAnimation

A teenage professional shogi player and the depression the game is holding at bay.

Season 1

Marco Polo

2014–2016NetflixDrama

Ink drawings of the Silk Road bleeding across parchment — cities, armies and mountains growing out of the map as the journey extends east.

Seasons 1–2

Marcus Welby, M.D.

1969–1976ABCDrama

A family doctor in Santa Monica, and the first ABC series to finish a season as the most-watched programme in America.

Season 1

Mare of Easttown

2021HBOCrime

Delaware County in winter — vinyl siding, chain-link, a quarry — over Lucius's 'Drunk'. Thirty-four seconds that refuse to make the place look like anything but itself.

Season 1

Marianne

2019NetflixHorror

A horror novelist who discovers the witch she invented has been real the whole time, and eleven seconds to say it.

Season 1

Married... with Children

1987–1997FoxComedy

Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.

Season 1

Marry My Husband

2024tvNDrama

A woman murdered by her husband, sent back ten years to arrange a different outcome.

Season 1

Marseille

2016–2018NetflixDrama

The port city from the water, for Netflix's first French commission — a political drama that opens like a tourist board film and then does not behave like one.

Season 1

Martial Law

1998–2000CBSCrime

Sammo Hung as a Chinese detective in Los Angeles, doing his own stunts at forty-six.

Season 1

Martin

1992–1997FoxComedy

Detroit, a hip-hop bed and a lead who plays most of the supporting cast himself.

Seasons 1–2

The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack

2008–2012Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A boy raised by a whale, in a sea-shanty register that got steadily more unsettling.

Season 1

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

2017–2023Prime VideoComedy

Fifties Manhattan as a fashion plate — silhouettes, hemlines and neon, moving at the speed the dialogue does.

Season 1

Mary & George

2024Sky Atlantic / StarzDrama

A mother steering her son into James I's bed and the court that followed.

Season 1

Mask Girl

2023NetflixCrime

One woman played by three actors across three decades, from the webtoon.

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

MasterChef Australia

2009–Network TenDocumentary

The British format remade at far greater length, and for several years the most watched thing on Australian television.

Season 2

Masters of Horror

2005–2007ShowtimeHorror

An anthology giving a different established horror director an hour each week.

Season 1

Masters of Sex

2013–2016ShowtimeDrama

Masters and Johnson's research, opened by a sequence of double meanings built out of 1950s stock footage.

Season 1

Masters of the Air

2024Apple TV+Drama

Bomber nose art, contrails and flak, in the tradition of Band of Brothers — and at over two and a half minutes, one of the longest openings on this site.

Season 1

Masters of the Universe: Revelation

2021NetflixAnimation

Kevin Smith's continuation of the 1983 series, opened in the same fanfare it inherited.

Season 1

Match of the Day

1964–BBC OneDocumentary

Barry Stoller's theme, unchanged since 1970, over whatever graphics the decade happens to allow.

Season 7
Season 62

Matlock

1986–1995NBC / ABCCrime

Andy Griffith as a defence attorney in a grey suit, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Matt Houston

1982–1985ABCCrime

A Texas oil heir running a detective agency in Los Angeles because he is bored.

Season 1

Maude

1972–1978CBSComedy

The All in the Family spin-off, with a theme song that lists historical women and lands on Maude.

Season 1

Max & Ruby

2002–2020Nick Jr. / Treehouse TVAnimation

A rabbit of three and his sister of seven, in a world where no adult ever appears on screen.

Season 1

Max Headroom

1987–1988ABCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Maxx

1995MTVAnimation

Sam Kieth's comic animated almost panel for panel, about a homeless man who is a superhero in another world.

Season 1

Mayans M.C.

2018–2023FXCrime

The Sons of Anarchy spin-off, on the other side of the California border.

Season 1

Mayday

2013BBC OneCrime

A May Queen vanishing on the morning of the procession, and a village that suspects itself.

Season 1

Mayfair Witches

2023–AMCHorror

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

Season 1

McCloud

1970–1977NBCCrime

A New Mexico marshal seconded to the NYPD, part of the rotating NBC Mystery Movie wheel.

Season 1

McHale's Navy

1962–1966ABCComedy

A PT boat crew running a black market in the South Pacific.

Season 1

McLeod's Daughters

2001–2009Nine NetworkDrama

Two half-sisters who inherit a South Australian cattle station and run it with an all-female crew.

Season 1
Season 5

McMafia

2018BBC One / AMCCrime

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

Season 1

McMillions

2020HBODocumentary

The man who stole every winning piece in the McDonald's Monopoly game for twelve years.

Season 1

Meadowlands

2007Showtime / Channel 4Drama

A family in witness protection on an estate where everyone else is hiding something too.

Season 1

Medium

2005–2011NBC / CBSCrime

Patricia Arquette as a consultant to the district attorney who dreams the cases.

Season 1

Meet the Press

1947–NBCDocumentary

The longest-running programme in television history, and fifteen seconds of titles to show for seventy-seven years.

Season 77

Megas XLR

2004–2005Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A New Jersey mechanic who finds a giant robot in a scrapyard and bolts a car to its head.

Season 1

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya

2006–2009Tokyo MXAnimation

A schoolgirl who can rewrite reality and has not been told, in an adaptation that first broadcast its episodes deliberately out of order.

Season 1
Season 2

Melissa & Joey

2010–2015ABC Family / FreeformComedy

A local politician and the man who becomes her nanny, in the longest-running sitcom ABC Family made.

Season 1

Melrose Place

1992–1999FoxDrama

The same freeze-frame grammar as its parent show, moved to an apartment complex and given a considerably nastier theme.

Season 1

Men Behaving Badly

1992–1998ITV / BBC OneComedy

Two flatmates and the phrase the British press attached to a decade.

Season 1

Men of a Certain Age

2009–2011TNTDrama

Three friends at the wrong end of their forties, written by Ray Romano and Mike Royce.

Season 1

The Mentalist

2008–2015CBSCrime

A red smiley face drawn in blood, which is the whole of the series' mythology compressed into one image.

Season 1

Merlin

2008–2012BBC OneDrama

Camelot rendered in gold and firelight, with a narration establishing a prophecy in about the time it takes to say one.

Season 1

Metal Mickey

1980–1983ITVComedy

A robot in a suburban family sitcom, directed by Micky Dolenz of the Monkees.

Season 1

Metalocalypse

2006–2013Adult SwimAnimation

A death-metal theme written and performed by the show's creator, for a cartoon about a band whose concerts have a body count.

Season 1

Miami Vice

1984–1990NBCCrime

Flamingos, jai alai and pastel architecture over Jan Hammer — a title sequence that sold an entire aesthetic and arguably a city.

Season 1

The Middle

2009–2018ABCComedy

An Indiana family with no money and no prospects, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Midnight Caller

1988–1991NBCDrama

A former policeman taking calls on late-night radio, and one of the first American dramas to write about AIDS.

Season 1

Midnight Diner (2009)

2009–2014MBSDrama

The original MBS run of the Shinjuku diner open from midnight to seven, seven years before Netflix continued it as Tokyo Stories.

Season 1

Midnight Diner: Tokyo Stories

2016–2019Netflix / MBSDrama

Two minutes of Tokyo at night before anyone speaks — a series whose opening is longer and slower than most shows' cold opens, deliberately.

Season 1

Midnight Mass

2021NetflixHorror

Crockett Island in grey water and grey weather, with a church at the centre of it and nothing yet visibly wrong.

Season 1

Midsomer Murders

1997–ITVCrime

A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.

Season 1

Miffy and Friends

2003–2005KRO / CITVAnimation

Dick Bruna's rabbit animated in stop motion, keeping the flat colours and the two-dot face intact.

Season 1

Miffy's Adventures Big and Small

2015–2019KRO-NCRV / Tiny PopAnimation

The same rabbit remade in computer animation a decade later, and given considerably more to do.

Season 1

The Mighty B!

2008–2011NickelodeonAnimation

Amy Poehler's Honeybee scout collecting every badge in existence.

Season 1

The Mighty Boosh

2004–2007BBC ThreeComedy

A stage show that became a radio series that became a television series, and kept the crimping in all three.

Season 1

Mighty Max

1993–1994SyndicationAnimation

A toy line turned into a series with Tim Curry and Richard Moll in it, and a body count.

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

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

The Mighty Nein

2025Prime VideoAnimation

Critical Role's second campaign animated, three years after The Legend of Vox Machina did the first.

Season 1

Mike & Molly

2010–2016CBSComedy

Two people who meet at an overeaters group on the north side of Chicago.

Season 1
Seasons 4–6

Mike Tyson Mysteries

2014–2020Adult SwimAnimation

Scooby-Doo's structure with Mike Tyson, a ghost, a pigeon and an adopted daughter.

Season 1

Mildred Pierce

2011HBODrama

Todd Haynes's five-part Cain adaptation with Kate Winslet.

Season 1

Millennium

1996–1999FoxHorror

Chris Carter's other series, opened with the same Mark Snow unease as The X-Files and none of its wit — thirty-four seconds that promise a much worse world.

Season 1

Milo Murphy's Law

2016–2019Disney XDAnimation

A boy for whom anything that can go wrong does, from the Phineas and Ferb creators.

Season 1

Mind Your Language

1977–1979ITV (LWT)Comedy

An adult English class of national stereotypes, opened by a blackboard that spells the title out in every student's hand.

Seasons 1–3

Minder

1979–1994ITVComedy

Arthur Daley and his minder, and a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about Dennis Waterman.

Season 1

Mindhunter

2017–2019NetflixCrime

Reel-to-reel tape, evidence photographs and audio equipment intercut so tightly that the interview and the crime become one process. Clinical, and much nastier for it.

Season 1

The Mindy Project

2012–2017Fox / HuluComedy

Mindy Kaling as an obstetrician with a romantic-comedy view of her own life.

Season 1

Minor Adjustments

1995NBCComedy

A child psychologist who is markedly better with other people's children than with his own.

Season 1

Minority Report

2015FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Miracle Workers

2019–2023TBSComedy

An anthology that keeps its cast and changes everything else — heaven, the Dark Ages, the Oregon Trail, the apocalypse.

Season 2

Miracles

2003ABCHorror

A church investigator of the unexplained, cancelled after six of its thirteen episodes aired.

Season 1

Miraculous: Tales of Ladybug & Cat Noir

2015–TF1Animation

Two Parisian teenagers who transform into superheroes and spend six seasons not working out who the other one is.

Season 5
Season 6

Miranda

2009–2015BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Miranda Hart addressing the camera in a joke shop, in eleven seconds of open.

Season 1

Mirzapur

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A carpet-trading family running the guns and opium of an eastern Uttar Pradesh town.

Season 1

Misaeng

2014tvNDrama

A go player with no qualifications put into a trading company, and the office drama that made Korea talk about its own working hours.

Season 1

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

Miss 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

The Missing

2014–2016BBC OneCrime

A child vanishing in France and the two timelines that follow it, eight years apart.

Season 1

Mission: Impossible

1966–1973CBSDrama

A lit fuse crossing the screen while clips from the episode ahead flash past it — a title sequence recut every week from the show it introduces.

Season 2

Mister Rogers' Neighborhood

1968–2001PBSComedy

Thirty-three years of the same arrival: the door, the cardigan, the shoes, the song.

Season 1

Misty

2018JTBCDrama

A news anchor accused of murder, and the husband defending her without knowing.

Season 1

The Mitchell and Webb Situation

2001Play UKComedy

David Mitchell and Robert Webb's first sketch series, five years before the one everyone remembers.

Season 1

Mob City

2013TNTCrime

Frank Darabont's post-Walking Dead series, on 1940s Los Angeles, cancelled after six episodes.

Season 1

Mob Psycho 100

2016–2022Tokyo MXAnimation

Paint, distortion and animation techniques that change every few seconds — a title sequence used as a showcase for what the studio can do.

Season 1

Mock the Week

2005–2022BBC TwoComedy

A topical panel show whose titles cut the week's news into a strobing collage before anyone speaks.

Season 1

Modern Family

2009–2020ABCComedy

Fourteen seconds of family photographs sliding into place, and a card. Nothing else.

Season 1

Modern Love

2019–2021Prime VideoDrama

The New York Times column adapted an essay per episode.

Season 1

Moesha

1996–2001UPNComedy

Brandy Norwood as a Los Angeles teenager, and UPN's first real hit.

Season 1

The Mole

2001–2008ABCDocumentary

Contestants building a prize fund while one of them sabotages it, and nobody knows which.

Season 1

Mom

2013–2021CBSComedy

A newly sober mother and her newly sober mother, in a Chuck Lorre sitcom that got steadily less comfortable on purpose.

Season 8

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

Monday Night Football

1970–ABCDocumentary

The programme that moved American football into primetime, and gave it a fanfare to arrive on.

Season 2

Money Heist

2017–2021NetflixCrime

Red jumpsuits, Dalí masks and the Royal Mint rendered as a heist diagram, with 'Bella Ciao' turned from a partisan song into a brand.

Seasons 3–5

Monk

2002–2009USA NetworkCrime

Randy Newman singing about being obsessive over a detective straightening things — a theme that explains the character faster than the pilot does.

Season 1

The Monkees

1966–1968NBCComedy

A band assembled for a television series that then became an actual band, with the titles as their first single.

Season 1

Monster

2004–2005Nippon TVAnimation

Restrained to the point of austerity — portraits, European streets and a single held tone, for a series about a doctor who saved the wrong life.

Season 1

Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

2022NetflixCrime

Domestic surfaces filmed too closely — carpet, wallpaper, a fish tank — so ordinary rooms read as evidence before anything has happened in them.

Season 1

Monsters

1988–1991SyndicationHorror

A half-hour anthology from the Tales from the Darkside producers, with a creature in every episode and a budget for none of them.

Season 1

Monsters at Work

2021–2024Disney+Animation

Monsters, Inc. after the switch from screams to laughter, told from the maintenance floor.

Season 1

Monty Python's Flying Circus

1969–1974BBC OneComedy

Terry Gilliam's cut-out animation and a Sousa march — a title sequence that behaves like a sketch, because it is one.

Season 1

The Moon Embracing the Sun

2012MBCDrama

A king and the shaman he was betrothed to as a boy, in the year's most-watched Korean drama.

Season 1

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

Moonbase 8

2020ShowtimeComedy

Three astronauts in an Arizona simulator, none of whom will ever go to the moon.

Season 1

Moonbeam City

2015Comedy CentralAnimation

A Patrick Nagel pastiche in neon and chrome, which is the entire aesthetic argument of the series.

Season 1

Moonlighting

1985–1989ABCComedy

Al Jarreau singing a theme written for the show, over two people who spend four seasons refusing to admit anything.

Season 1

Moral Orel

2005–2008Adult SwimAnimation

Stop-motion in the Davey and Goliath idiom, which by its third season had stopped being a parody at all.

Season 1

The Morecambe & Wise Show

1968–1983BBC Two / ThamesComedy

Bring Me Sunshine and a skip off stage, in front of the largest audience British television has ever had.

Season 2

Mork & Mindy

1978–1982ABCComedy

An egg-shaped spacecraft over Boulder, Colorado, and a theme that has to establish an alien, a roommate and a sitcom simultaneously.

Season 1

The Morning Show

2019–Apple TV+Drama

Broadcast graphics assembling and collapsing — the machinery of a network morning programme, shown as the thing that eats the people in front of it.

Season 1
Season 3

Mortal Kombat: Conquest

1998–1999SyndicationSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Motorcity

2012Disney XDAnimation

A hidden Detroit beneath a corporate city, from the Titmouse studio, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Mouse

2021tvNCrime

A patrol officer hunting a psychopath, in a series that spends its first quarter setting up a reversal.

Season 1

Mozart in the Jungle

2014–2018Prime VideoComedy

A New York orchestra and the conductor who takes it apart, opened in thirteen seconds.

Season 1

Mr Benn

1971–1972BBC OneAnimation

A man in a bowler hat, a costume shop and a changing room door, thirteen times.

Season 1

Mr Inbetween

2018–2021FXCrime

An Australian hitman's domestic life, opened in twelve seconds because the series has no interest in ceremony.

Season 1

Mr Selfridge

2013–2016ITVDrama

The American who opened a department store on Oxford Street and spent everything keeping it.

Season 1

Mr Squiggle

1959–1999ABC (Australia)Comedy

A marionette from the moon with a pencil for a nose, turning children's scribbles into drawings for forty years.

Season 1

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

2024–Prime VideoDrama

The film remade as a series about the marriage rather than the shooting, with Donald Glover and Maya Erskine.

Season 1

Mr. Bean

1990–1995ITVComedy

A man dropped from the sky in a spotlight while a choir sings about him in Latin, every week, for a character who never explains himself.

Season 1

Mr. Bean: The Animated Series

2002–2019ITVAnimation

The character animated, which suits him — he barely spoke in live action either.

Season 1

Mr. Belvedere

1985–1990ABCComedy

An English butler working for a Pittsburgh family, out of a film series forty years older than the sitcom.

Season 1

Mr. Dressup

1967–1996CBCComedy

A tickle trunk, two puppets and twenty-nine years of the same man drawing on a pad — Canada's answer to Mister Rogers, made by a man who worked on it.

Season 19

The Mr. Men Show

2008–2009Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Roger Hargreaves' shapes rebuilt as a sketch show, forty years after the books.

Season 2

Mr. Mercedes

2017–2019AudienceCrime

King's retired detective and the man who drove a car into a queue of people looking for work.

Season 1
Season 3

Mr. Pickles

2013–2019Adult SwimAnimation

A family dog who is secretly satanic, opened in the visual language of a wholesome fifties cartoon.

Season 1

Mr. Queen

2020–2021tvNComedy

A modern chef's soul trapped in a Joseon queen's body, from the Chinese web series Go Princess Go.

Season 1

Mr. Robot

2015–2019USA NetworkDrama

There is no title sequence. There is a card, and the card is the whole design — which makes this the rare show whose opening is defined by what it refuses to do.

Seasons 1–4

Mr. Show with Bob and David

1995–1998HBOComedy

The American sketch show that took Monty Python's structure — sketches flowing into one another rather than ending — and put it on cable.

Season 1

Mr. Sunshine

2018tvNDrama

A Korean boy sold into slavery who returns as an American marine, set in the last years before annexation.

Season 1

Mrs. America

2020FX on HuluDrama

The fight over the Equal Rights Amendment, opened by period graphic design doing the arguing.

Season 1

Mrs. Brown's Boys

2011–BBC One / RTÉ OneComedy

A Dublin matriarch played by the man who writes her, taped with the crew, the corpsing and the fluffed lines all left in.

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

MTV Unplugged

1989–MTVDocumentary

Sixteen seconds and an acoustic guitar — a format whose whole argument is in the title card.

Season 1

Mummies Alive!

1997SyndicationAnimation

Four Egyptian mummies revived in San Francisco to guard the reincarnation of a pharaoh's son.

Season 1

The Munsters

1964–1966CBSComedy

The rival monster sitcom, launched the same year, opening with a surf-rock instrumental and a family filing out of a house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane.

Season 1

Muppet Babies

1984–1991CBSAnimation

The Muppets as toddlers in a nursery, spun out of a dream sequence in The Muppets Take Manhattan.

Season 1

The Muppet Show

1976–1981ITV / SyndicationComedy

An opening that changes every week by design: Statler and Waldorf get a new heckle, Gonzo gets a new way to fail the closing note, and the arch fills with whoever is in that episode.

Season 1

The Muppets (2015)

2015–2016ABCComedy

The Muppets as a workplace mockumentary, which lasted one season and a mid-season change of format.

Season 1

Murder One

1995–1997ABCCrime

Steven Bochco's experiment in giving a single trial an entire season, and the courtroom-portrait titles that went with it.

Season 2

Murder, She Wrote

1984–1996CBSCrime

A typewriter, a bicycle and Cabot Cove — twelve seasons of the most reassuring opening ever attached to a programme about repeated homicide.

Season 1

Murderbot

2025–Apple TV+Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Murdoch Mysteries

2008–Citytv / CBCCrime

A Toronto detective in the 1890s using methods the era has not invented yet, past twenty seasons.

Season 1

Murphy Brown

1988–2018CBSComedy

A Washington newsroom and a Motown needle-drop that changed every episode — the theme was a different soul record each week.

Season 1

The Musketeers

2014–2016BBC OneDrama

Dumas serialised for Sunday evenings, with ink and gunpowder titles to match.

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

MXC

2003–2007SpikeComedy

Takeshi's Castle redubbed into something considerably ruder, with the original footage left exactly as it was.

Season 1

My Adventures with Superman

2023–Adult Swim / MaxAnimation

Clark, Lois and Jimmy in their twenties, animated in an anime register with an opening to match.

Season 1

My Brilliant Friend

2018–2024HBO / RAIDrama

Naples in the fifties rendered in faded photography, for an adaptation that spans fifty years of two lives.

Season 2

My Family

2000–2011BBC OneComedy

A Chiswick dentist and the relatives he cannot get out of the house, written by a rotating room on the American model.

Season 3
Season 6

My Hero Academia

2016–MBS / TBSAnimation

Superhero iconography by way of shonen convention, with a new opening for each season announcing how much worse things have got.

Season 1

My Liberation Notes

2022JTBCDrama

Three siblings commuting out of the suburbs, in a series largely about wanting to be somewhere else.

Season 1

My Life as a Teenage Robot

2003–2009NickelodeonAnimation

A teenage combat robot who would rather be at school, drawn in hard mid-century angles.

Season 1

My Little Pony 'n Friends

1986–1987SyndicationAnimation

The Hasbro line's first series, thirty years before the franchise found an audience it had not been aimed at.

Season 1

My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic

2010–2019The Hub / Discovery FamilyAnimation

A toy line handed to an animator who took it entirely seriously, and an audience nobody had forecast.

Season 1

My Mister

2018tvNDrama

A middle-aged engineer and a young woman in debt, in one of the quietest series Korean television has made.

Season 1

My Name Is Earl

2005–2009NBCComedy

A petty criminal working through a written list of everything he has done wrong, one item an episode.

Season 1

My Roommate Is a Gumiho

2021tvNComedy

A nine-tailed fox nine hundred years from becoming human, sharing a flat with the student who swallowed his bead.

Season 1

My Sassy Girl

2017SBSComedy

The film remade as a Joseon romance, with a princess in place of the original's student.

Season 1

My So-Called Life

1994–1995ABCDrama

Snapshots and handwriting, in the register of a teenager's own notebook rather than a network's idea of one.

Season 1

My Three Sons

1960–1972ABC / CBSComedy

Fred MacMurray raising three boys, opening on animated feet in a row that everyone remembers before the theme.

Season 1

My Two Dads

1987–1990NBCComedy

A girl left to two men, either of whom might be her father, by a court that declines to establish which.

Season 1

My Wife and Kids

2001–2005ABCComedy

Damon Wayans running a household on a theory of parenting he makes up as he goes.

Season 4

Mystery Road

2018–ABCCrime

The Australian outback shot as landscape rather than backdrop, for a detective series about who the land belongs to.

Season 2

Mystery Science Theater 3000

1988–1999, 2017–2018Comedy Central / Sci-Fi Channel / NetflixComedy

A man and two robots heckling films, whose theme song exists to explain the premise and then says so out loud.

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

MythBusters

2003–2018Discovery ChannelDocumentary

Two special-effects builders testing folklore with explosives, introduced by a montage of the explosives.

Season 1

Mythic Quest

2020–2025Apple TV+Comedy

Twelve seconds of game-engine fantasy, presented with the seriousness of a launch trailer for a product nobody in the show can finish.

Season 1

N

The Naked Brothers Band

2007–2009NickelodeonComedy

A mockumentary about a children's rock band, played by two brothers who really were one.

Season 1

The Naked Director

2019–2021NetflixDrama

Toru Muranishi and the 1980s Japanese adult video industry.

Season 2

Nanalan'

1998–2004CBCAnimation

A puppet toddler spends the day at her grandmother's, filmed at grass height.

Season 1

Nancy Drew

2019–2023The CWCrime

The teenage detective relocated to a haunted Maine town.

Season 1

The Nanny

1993–1999CBSComedy

Cartoon animation narrating how a woman from Flushing ended up in a Manhattan townhouse — a premise delivered entirely in the titles.

Season 1

Narcos

2015–2017NetflixCrime

Archive photographs, surveillance stills and evidence shots of the real Medellín cartel, cut to Rodrigo Amarante's 'Tuyo' — a bolero written to sound like something Escobar's father would have played.

Seasons 1–3

Narcos: Mexico

2018–2021NetflixCrime

The parent show's archive-and-evidence method moved north — Guadalajara and Sinaloa in period photography, with the same documentary flatness.

Seasons 1–3

Naruto

2002–2007TV TokyoAnimation

Nine openings across five years, each announcing a new arc — and the first is the one an entire generation can still hum.

Season 1

Naruto Shippuden

2007–2017TV TokyoAnimation

Twenty distinct openings across a decade, changed roughly every cour — one of the largest rotations of title sequences any series has produced.

Season 1

Nash Bridges

1996–2001CBSCrime

Don Johnson in San Francisco with a yellow Barracuda, after Miami Vice.

Season 1

Nathan For You

2013–2017Comedy CentralComedy

Twenty-seven seconds of business-advice-show graphics, delivered with the flatness that makes everything after it land.

Season 1

NBA on NBC

1990–2002NBCDocumentary

Roundball Rock, written by John Tesh and hummed into an answering machine because he had no way to record it — the most fondly remembered sports theme in America.

Season 1

NBC Nightly News

1970–NBCDocumentary

Fourteen seconds of brass and a rotating globe, which is what a network evening bulletin has been reduced to.

Season 47

NCIS

2003–CBSCrime

Naval insignia, photographs and a snare roll, refreshed periodically as a cast that has now turned over almost completely came and went.

Season 10
Season 1

NCIS: Hawai'i

2021–2024CBSCrime

The first NCIS led by a woman, and eleven seconds of titles to say so.

Season 1

NCIS: Los Angeles

2009–2023CBSCrime

The first NCIS spin-off, fourteen seasons of undercover work.

Season 5

NCIS: New Orleans

2014–2021CBSCrime

The franchise moved to a city with a soundtrack, which the titles spend all twenty-one seconds on.

Season 1

NCIS: Origins

2024–CBSCrime

Gibbs in 1991, twenty-one years before the parent series began.

Season 1

NCIS: Sydney

2023–Paramount+ / Network 10Crime

The first NCIS made outside America, with an Australian and American team sharing a desk.

Season 1

Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide

2004–2007NickelodeonComedy

A middle-school survival manual delivered to camera, one tip per episode.

Season 1

The Neighborhood

2018–2026CBSComedy

A relentlessly friendly Midwestern family moving into a Black neighbourhood in Pasadena, and the man next door who would rather they had not.

Season 8

Neighbours

1985–2025Seven / Ten (Australia)Drama

Ramsay Street across forty years, and a theme song that survived every cast, network and cancellation.

Season 1
Season 39

Neo Yokio

2017–2018NetflixAnimation

Ezra Koenig's magistocrat comedy, animated in Japan and pitched somewhere nobody has located since.

Season 1

Neon Genesis Evangelion

1995–1996TV TokyoAnimation

Ninety seconds cut faster than the eye resolves, with whole frames of text and diagram flashed for one frame each. Yoko Takahashi's theme is bright, major-key J-pop laid over imagery that is doing nothing of the kind, and the mismatch is the point rather than an accident.

Season 1

Never Have I Ever

2020–2023NetflixComedy

Mindy Kaling's high-school series, narrated by John McEnroe for reasons the titles do not explain.

Season 1

Never Mind the Buzzcocks

1996–2015BBC TwoComedy

A music panel game whose identity parade round outlasted most of the acts standing in it.

Season 1

The New Addams Family

1998–1999YTV / Fox FamilyComedy

The 1964 scripts remade almost line for line in Vancouver, thirty-four years afterwards.

Season 1

The New Adventures of He-Man

1989–1990SyndicationAnimation

He-Man moved off Eternia into space, with a redesigned cast and almost none of the original's iconography.

Season 1

The New Adventures of Old Christine

2006–2010CBSComedy

A divorced mother whose former husband's new girlfriend is also called Christine, which is where the title comes from.

Season 1

New Amsterdam

2018–2023NBCDrama

A public hospital run by a director who keeps asking how he can help.

Season 1

New Girl

2011–2018FoxComedy

Zooey Deschanel and three flatmates, with a theme the cast sings themselves.

Season 1

The New Look

2024Apple TV+Drama

Couture construction shown as engineering — pattern, thread and seam assembling a silhouette, by Imaginary Forces.

Season 1

The New Pope

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Nuns dancing in front of a neon crucifix to a house track, for two and a half minutes, entirely straight-faced. Paolo Sorrentino's sequel keeps the sequence that made the first series notorious and makes it longer.

Season 1

New Tricks

2003–2015BBC OneCrime

Retired detectives reopening cold cases, with a theme song sung by Dennis Waterman about the premise.

Season 1

Newhart

1982–1990CBSComedy

The Vermont inn sitcom, and the source of what is still widely held to be the best final scene in American television.

Season 1

Newsnight

1980–BBC TwoDocumentary

The BBC's late analysis programme, opening on a rotating globe of headlines rather than a presenter.

Season 1

NewsRadio

1995–1999NBCComedy

Thirty seconds of a radio newsroom and a horn riff, from a workplace sitcom that never quite got the audience it deserved.

Season 1

The Newsroom

2012–2014HBODrama

Broadcast news history as a procession of anchors, presses and control rooms, scored by Thomas Newman with more reverence than the show it introduces ever quite earns.

Season 1

The Next Step

2013–2025Family ChannelDrama

A dance studio filmed as a documentary about itself, which ran for twelve years.

Season 1

Nickelodeon Guts

1992–1995NickelodeonDocumentary

Children competing on wires and ramps, and climbing a fake mountain that shed foam.

Season 1

Nicky, Ricky, Dicky & Dawn

2014–2018NickelodeonComedy

Quadruplets who share everything including the title, and want to share less of it.

Season 1

Nielegalni

2018Canal+ PolandCrime

A Polish intelligence unit whose members do not officially exist.

Season 1

The Night Agent

2023–NetflixDrama

Surveillance geometry and a ringing phone, built out of the one object the whole premise hangs on.

Season 1

Night Court

1984–1992NBCComedy

Eighteen seconds of bass guitar and a Manhattan courthouse at night.

Season 1

Night Gallery

1969–1973NBCHorror

Rod Serling walking through a gallery of paintings, each one introducing that week's story — a title sequence rebuilt around new artwork every episode.

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 Night Of

2016HBOCrime

New York at night from inside a cab, the city sliding past in sodium light, cut so that nothing quite resolves — which is the state of the evidence for the entire series.

Season 1

Nightline

1980–ABCDocumentary

A late bulletin that began as nightly updates on the Iran hostage crisis and outlived the crisis by forty-five years.

Season 1

Nikita

2010–2013The CWDrama

The third screen version of the Besson film, after the 1997 series this catalogue holds as La Femme Nikita.

Season 2

Nine Perfect Strangers

2021–HuluDrama

Wellness-retreat imagery filmed until it turns sinister — smoothies, mountains and breathing exercises, all slightly too still.

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

Nip/Tuck

2003–2010FXDrama

A mannequin being marked up for surgery, over a pop song — cosmetic work presented as retail, which is the show's position on it.

Season 1

No Offence

2015–2018Channel 4Crime

Paul Abbott's Manchester police series, opened in eighteen seconds by Peter Anderson Studio.

Season 1

Noble House

1988NBCDrama

Four nights of Hong Kong boardroom warfare, from the James Clavell novel.

Season 1

Noel's House Party

1991–1999BBC OneComedy

Saturday night from a fictional house in Crinkley Bottom, and the programme that dropped celebrities into gunge on purpose.

Season 2

Noggin the Nog

1959–1965BBC OneAnimation

Norse sagas drawn from the Lewis chessmen, narrated in the register of a bedtime story about a war.

Season 1

The Norm Show

1999–2001ABCComedy

Norm Macdonald as a hockey player struck off and sentenced to social work.

Season 1

Normal People

2020BBC Three / HuluDrama

Twenty-four seconds and a card, for an adaptation that treats silence as its main instrument.

Season 1

Norsemen

2016–2020NRK1 / NetflixComedy

Viking iconography played with total sincerity by a comedy shot twice, in Norwegian and English, on the same sets.

Season 1

North and South

1985–1994ABCDrama

Two West Point friends on opposite sides of the Civil War, over a Bill Conti march.

Season 1

Northern Exposure

1990–1995CBSComedy

A moose walking through an empty Alaskan town, which is the entire opening and remains one of television's best jokes about scale.

Season 1

NOS4A2

2019–2020AMCHorror

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

Season 1

Not Going Out

2006–BBC OneComedy

Lee Mack's flat-share sitcom, written joke-first and the longest-running British studio comedy still in production.

Season 1

Not the Nine O'Clock News

1979–1982BBC TwoComedy

The sketch show that launched Rowan Atkinson and Mel Smith, opening on a parody of the bulletin it was scheduled against.

Season 1

Nowhere Man

1995–1996UPNSci-Fi

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

Season 1

NTSF:SD:SUV::

2011–2013Adult SwimComedy

A procedural parody whose title is an acronym joke that never resolves, opened in fourteen seconds.

Season 1

Numb3rs

2005–2010CBSCrime

An FBI agent and his mathematician brother, with the equations drawn over the city in the titles.

Season 1

Nurse Jackie

2009–2015ShowtimeComedy

Hospital corridors and pills, filmed with the brightness of a pharmaceutical advertisement.

Season 1

NYPD Blue

1993–2005ABCCrime

Mike Post's theme over a New York shot with the handheld looseness that got the show its reputation before anyone had seen an episode.

Season 1

O

The O.C.

2003–2007FoxDrama

Phantom Planet's 'California' over Newport Beach, in thirty-two seconds that sold an entire idea of southern California to a generation.

Season 1

O.J.: Made in America

2016ESPNDocumentary

Nearly eight hours on one trial and a century of Los Angeles, opened in sixteen seconds because there is no time to spare.

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

The Oath

2018–2019CrackleCrime

A gang made up of serving police officers, opened by Imaginary Forces.

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

Occupation

2009BBC OneDrama

Three soldiers from one Manchester regiment and the years after Basra.

Season 1

Occupied

2015–2020TV2 NorgeDrama

A Norwegian political thriller about a soft occupation, opened with the calm of a corporate annual report.

Season 1

October Faction

2020NetflixHorror

Two monster hunters whose teenage children do not know what the family business is.

Season 1

Octonauts

2010–CBeebiesAnimation

A crew of animals working out of an underwater base, each episode built around a real marine species.

Season 1

The Odd Couple

1970–1975ABCComedy

A narrated premise about two divorced men sharing an apartment, delivered in the tone of a public information film.

Season 2

Odd Squad

2014–PBS KidsComedy

Child agents investigating mathematical strangeness, played entirely deadpan.

Season 1

Odyssey 5

2002ShowtimeSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Offer

2022Paramount+Drama

The making of The Godfather, opened in the visual language of the film it is about.

Season 1

The Office

2005–2013NBCComedy

Scranton, a car park and a filing cabinet, shot like stock footage for a regional business — twenty-two seconds that promise nothing will happen.

Season 1

Oggy and the Cockroaches

1998–France 3Animation

A French cartoon with almost no dialogue in it, which is the reason it sold to nearly every country there is.

Season 1
Season 6

Oh, Doctor Beeching!

1995–1997BBC OneComedy

A branch-line station waiting to be closed by the Beeching cuts, from the writers of Hi-de-Hi!

Season 1

OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes

2017–2019Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A hero-supply plaza run as a beat-em-up, with the video game's grammar kept in the titles.

Season 1

Oktoberfest 1900

2020ARDDrama

A Nuremberg brewer trying to force his way into Munich's festival, and the family he spends to do it.

Season 1

The Old Grey Whistle Test

1971–1988BBC TwoDocumentary

The serious music programme to Top of the Pops' singles chart, with a harmonica riff and a star-kicker cartoon.

Season 1

Olive Kitteridge

2014HBODrama

Coastal Maine in muted colour, at the pace of a woman who has decided not to be pleased about anything.

Season 1

On Becoming a God in Central Florida

2019ShowtimeDrama

Kirsten Dunst working her way up a pyramid scheme that destroyed her family.

Season 1

Once Upon a Time

2011–2018ABCDrama

A card hidden inside the episode's own imagery — the title appears somewhere in the opening scene rather than over a sequence, in a different place every week.

Season 1

One Day at a Time

2017–2020Netflix / PopComedy

The Norman Lear sitcom remade around a Cuban American family, with the 1975 theme rerecorded by Gloria Estefan.

Season 1

One Foot in the Grave

1990–2000BBC OneComedy

Victor Meldrew, forcibly retired at sixty and furious about everything since.

Season 1

One Life to Live

1968–2012ABCDrama

Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

Season 21
Season 44

One on One

2001–2006UPNComedy

A Baltimore sports broadcaster whose teenage daughter moves in with him, and the spine of UPN's comedy block for five years.

Season 1

One Piece

1999–Fuji TVAnimation

The longest-running opening rotation in television — more than twenty distinct sequences over a quarter of a century, each announcing a new arc.

Season 1

One Piece (2023)

2023–NetflixDrama

The live-action adaptation builds its opening from the crew's own belongings — maps, hats, weapons — rather than restaging the anime's.

Season 1

One Punch Man

2015–TV TokyoAnimation

A screaming rock track and animation of enormous ambition, for a hero who wins every fight in one hit and is bored by it.

Season 1

One Step Beyond

1959–1961ABCHorror

An anthology that claimed every story was true, a year before The Twilight Zone said the opposite.

Season 1

One Tree Hill

2003–2012The WB / The CWDrama

Gavin DeGraw's 'I Don't Want to Be' over a small North Carolina town, re-cut every season until the show dropped the sequence entirely.

Seasons 1–4

Only Connect

2008–BBC Four / BBC TwoDocumentary

A quiz whose easiest round asks what four things have in common, and whose hardest does not admit there is a connection at all.

Season 1

Only Fools and Horses

1981–2003BBC OneComedy

A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.

Season 1

Only Murders in the Building

2021–HuluComedy

The Arconia drawn as a cutaway illustration with the residents inside it, redrawn each season as the building's secrets change.

Season 1

The Only Way Is Essex

2010–ITV2Documentary

Structured reality built around a group of Essex friends, and the format most British television copied afterwards.

Season 2

Only When I Laugh

1979–1982ITVComedy

Three men in a hospital ward who are not especially ill, and the registrar who cannot discharge them.

Season 1

Open All Hours

1976–1985BBC OneComedy

Ronnie Barker again, this time behind a corner-shop till with a faulty cash register.

Season 1

Orange Is the New Black

2013–2019NetflixDrama

Extreme close-ups of real formerly incarcerated women's faces — eyes, mouths, tattoos — cut to Regina Spektor. Not one of them is a cast member, which is the point.

Seasons 1–7

The Order

2019–2020NetflixHorror

A university secret society of magicians and the werewolves who police them, which is two shows at once and knows it.

Season 1

The Originals

2013–2018The CWHorror

The Vampire Diaries spinoff, moving the family to New Orleans and giving them a title sequence the parent show never had.

Season 2

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 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

Os Normais

2001–2003TV GloboComedy

A Rio couple narrating their own relationship to camera, in the sitcom that reset Brazilian television comedy.

Season 1

The Osbournes

2002–2005MTVDocumentary

Ozzy Osbourne singing Crazy Train as a lounge number over a title card done in gold leaf, which is the joke the whole series runs on.

Season 1

Oswald

2001–2003NickelodeonAnimation

A blue octopus and his dachshund in a town drawn without a straight line in it.

Season 1

Our Girl

2013–2020BBC OneDrama

An army medic on tour, in a drama that recast its lead and kept going.

Season 1

Our Miss Brooks

1952–1956CBSComedy

Eve Arden as a high-school English teacher, in a radio transfer that ran on both media at once.

Season 1

Ouran High School Host Club

2006Nippon TVAnimation

A scholarship student mistaken for a boy and conscripted into the school's host club.

Season 1

Out of This World

1987–1991SyndicationComedy

A girl with an alien father who can stop time by touching her fingertips together.

Season 1

Outcasts

2011BBC OneSci-Fi

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

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 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

Outlander

2014–StarzDrama

'The Skye Boat Song' rewritten for a woman instead of a prince, over standing stones and Highland weather — and re-recorded in a new style each season to match wherever the story has been dragged.

Season 1

Outnumbered

2007–2016BBC OneComedy

Two parents and three children, with the children's dialogue largely improvised.

Season 1

Outrageous Fortune

2005–2010TV3Comedy

A West Auckland crime family whose matriarch decides, when her husband goes to prison, that the rest of them will go straight.

Season 1

The Outsider

2020HBOHorror

Twenty seconds of smeared, doubled imagery — a face that will not resolve into one face, which is the entire mystery stated up front.

Season 1

Over the Garden Wall

2014Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Nineteenth-century American illustration and a wax-cylinder recording, for a miniseries that spends ten episodes pretending to be much older than it is.

Season 1

Overlord

2015–AT-XAnimation

A player left inside a shut-down game as his own undead avatar, playing the villain straight.

Season 1

The Owl House

2020–2023Disney ChannelAnimation

A human girl apprenticed to a witch on the Boiling Isles.

Season 1

Oz

1997–2003HBOCrime

HBO's first hour-long drama, and the opening that established what the network's title sequences would be for the next twenty years — narrated, tattooed, and entirely unwilling to reassure you.

Season 1
Season 4

Ozark

2017–2022NetflixCrime

Five glyphs inside the letter O — a boat, a gun, a cross, a bird, a body of water — chosen for the episode they introduce. The title card is a table of contents.

Season 1
Season 2

Ozzy & Drix

2002–2004Kids' WBAnimation

The film Osmosis Jones continued as a series, with a white blood cell and a cold pill policing a teenager's body.

Season 1

P

P-Valley

2020–StarzDrama

Katori Hall's Mississippi Delta strip club, opened by a sequence shot with the same neon grammar as the club itself.

Season 1

Pachinko

2022–Apple TV+Drama

The entire cast dancing in a pachinko parlour, grinning, in period costume — a sequence with no relationship to the show's tone and all the better for it.

Season 1

The Pacific

2010HBODrama

The companion piece to Band of Brothers, with charcoal drawings taking the place of the pencil sketches and Hans Zimmer taking the place of Michael Kamen.

Season 1

Pacific Blue

1996–2000USA NetworkCrime

Bicycle police in Santa Monica, pitched by its own network as Baywatch on bikes.

Season 1

Pair of Kings

2010–2013Disney XDComedy

Two brothers from Chicago who inherit an island kingdom neither of them had heard of.

Seasons 1–3

Palm Royale

2024–Apple TV+Comedy

Late-sixties Palm Beach as a resort brochure — pastels, poolside and social climbing, all rendered with a completely straight face.

Season 1

Pan Am

2011–2012ABCDrama

Mad Men at altitude, cancelled after one season of very expensive period detail.

Season 1

Panchayat

2020–Prime VideoComedy

An engineering graduate taking a village secretary's job in Uttar Pradesh because nothing better came.

Season 1

Panorama

1953–BBC OneDocumentary

The longest-running current affairs programme in the world, and a theme borrowed from Rachmaninoff.

Season 30

Pantheon

2022–2023AMC+Animation

Uploaded human consciousnesses at war, animated and almost entirely overlooked.

Season 1

The Paper

2025–PeacockComedy

The Office's documentary crew turning up at a dying Ohio newspaper, twelve years after they left Scranton.

Season 1

Parade's End

2012BBC Two / HBODrama

Tom Stoppard adapting Ford Madox Ford across the First World War.

Season 1

Paranoia Agent

2004WOWOWHorror

Satoshi Kon's only television series, opened by the entire cast laughing in front of disasters.

Season 1

Parasyte: The Grey

2024NetflixHorror

The Iwaaki manga relocated to Korea, running alongside the Japanese continuity rather than remaking it.

Season 1

Parker Lewis Can't Lose

1990–1993FoxComedy

Ferris Bueller as a weekly series, shot on wide lenses with a narrator who never once stops talking.

Season 1

The Parkers

1999–2004UPNComedy

The Moesha spin-off, with a mother and daughter enrolled at the same community college.

Season 1

Parks and Recreation

2009–2020NBCComedy

Pawnee's municipal signage and a brass fanfare, pitched at exactly the level of civic pride the show's protagonist has for a mid-sized Indiana town.

Seasons 1–7

Party of Five

1994–2000FoxDrama

Five siblings and a house, over BoDeans — an opening that establishes an absence rather than a cast.

Season 1

Pasión de Gavilanes

2003–2022Telemundo / CaracolDrama

Three brothers avenging their sister, and one of the most exported Colombian telenovelas.

Season 1

Passions

1999–2008NBCDrama

A daytime serial that ran witchcraft, a living doll and an orangutan nurse alongside the usual, and was the last new one American network daytime commissioned.

Season 1

Patriot

2015–2018Prime VideoDrama

An intelligence officer who processes his work by performing it as folk music, and an opening that treats that as unremarkable.

Season 1

Pawn Stars

2009–HistoryDocumentary

A Las Vegas pawn shop, three generations of one family, and a guy they call an expert once an episode.

Season 1

Peacemaker

2022–HBO MaxComedy

The entire cast dancing in formation, in costume, completely deadpan, to Wig Wam's 'Do Ya Wanna Taste It'. No plot content whatsoever, and the best argument on this site for titles as a bit.

Season 1

Peaky Blinders

2013–2022BBC Two / BBC OneCrime

Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' over Birmingham furnaces and a man walking away from a fire — a period drama scored entirely out of period.

Season 1

Pee-wee's Playhouse

1986–1990CBSComedy

A Saturday morning show designed by artists from the New York gallery scene, with a theme sung by Cyndi Lauper under a pseudonym.

Season 1

Peep Show

2003–2015Channel 4Comedy

Nineteen seconds and a card, for a comedy shot almost entirely from inside its characters' heads.

Season 4

PEN15

2019–2021HuluComedy

Two adult women playing themselves at thirteen among actual thirteen-year-olds, opened in the register of a middle-school video project.

Season 1

The Penguin

2024HBOCrime

A flooded, ruined Gotham shot like a crime photograph — standing water, wet brick, no heroics anywhere in it.

Season 1

Penn & Teller: Fool Us

2011–ITV / The CWDocumentary

Magicians performing one trick each for two men who will say afterwards whether they worked out how it was done.

Season 1

Penn Zero: Part-Time Hero

2015–2017Disney XDAnimation

A part-time hero zapped into a different world every episode, each drawn in its own style.

Season 1

Penny Dreadful

2014–2016ShowtimeHorror

Victorian specimen jars, insects and anatomical plates, filmed with the patience of a museum catalogue and none of its detachment.

Season 1

Pennyworth

2019–2022Epix / HBO MaxDrama

Alfred as a young SAS veteran in an alternative 1960s London, which is a stranger idea than the Batman it leads to.

Season 1

Peppa Pig

2004–Channel 5Animation

A preschool series drawn in flat two dimensions and sold to a hundred and eighty countries, which is more than almost anything else British television has made.

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

The Perfect Couple

2024NetflixCrime

The cast dancing on a Nantucket lawn in wedding clothes, entirely straight-faced — a tonal misdirection the series never repeats.

Season 1

Perfect Strangers

1986–1993ABCComedy

'Nothing's Gonna Stop Me Now' over Chicago — one of the decade's most earnest sitcom themes attached to one of its silliest premises.

Season 1

The Peripheral

2022Prime VideoSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Perry Mason

2020–2023HBOCrime

Depression-era Los Angeles rendered in ink and light leaks, over in twenty-one seconds — a deliberately curt opening for a show about a very slow investigation.

Season 1

Perry Mason (1957)

1957–1966CBSCrime

'Park Avenue Beat' — a jazz chart with a walking bass, over a courtroom drama that ran for nine years on almost nothing else.

Season 1

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 Persuaders!

1971–1972ITVDrama

Roger Moore and Tony Curtis as bickering millionaires, opened by John Barry's most-covered television theme.

Season 1

Petticoat Junction

1963–1970CBSComedy

The Shady Rest Hotel, sharing a universe with Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies.

Season 1

Peyton Place

1964–1969ABCDrama

The primetime serial that proved American networks could run a soap after dark, twice a week.

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 Phil Silvers Show

1955–1959CBSComedy

A military march for a sergeant running every racket on the base — the ancestor of every workplace comedy about a charming fraud.

Season 1

Phineas and Ferb

2007–2015Disney ChannelAnimation

A theme that lists everything the characters intend to build over the summer, at a tempo that leaves no room to breathe.

Season 1

Picket Fences

1992–1996CBSDrama

Small-town Wisconsin filmed as pastoral before every episode demonstrates it is anything but.

Season 2

Pickle and Peanut

2015–2018Disney XDAnimation

A pickle and a peanut, animated over photographed backgrounds and stock imagery.

Season 1

Pie in the Sky

1994–1997BBC OneCrime

A detective who would rather run his restaurant, and is not allowed to retire from either.

Season 1

Pigeon Street

1981BBC OneAnimation

A street of neighbours introduced one at a time, including a long-distance lorry driver called Long Distance Clara.

Season 1

The Pillars of the Earth

2010StarzDrama

Ken Follett's cathedral built across eight hours of twelfth-century England.

Season 1

Ping Pong the Animation

2014Fuji TVAnimation

Masaaki Yuasa drawing table tennis in a line nobody else would have approved.

Season 1

Pingu

1986–2006SF DRSAnimation

A Swiss claymation penguin speaking an invented language, so it needed no dubbing to sell anywhere.

Season 1

Pinky and the Brain

1995–1998The WBAnimation

A theme that explains the premise as a call and response, ending on the same question every week and never answering it.

Season 1

Pinocchio

2014–2015SBSDrama

A reporter who hiccups when she lies, in a drama about what television news does to the people in it.

Season 1

The Pitt

2025–HBO MaxDrama

A deliberate homage to ER's titles — the same rhythm, the same institutional blue — for a series that runs one shift in real time.

Season 1

PJ Masks

2015–2024Disney JuniorAnimation

Three children who become animal-themed heroes at night, from the French picture books.

Season 1

The PJs

1999–2001Fox / The WBAnimation

Eddie Murphy's stop-motion housing-project comedy, animated in foam rather than drawn.

Seasons 1–2

A Place in the Sun

2000–Channel 4Documentary

British buyers shown three houses abroad, running daily for a quarter of a century.

Season 1

Planet Earth

2006BBC OneDocumentary

George Fenton's orchestral swell over the planet from orbit — twenty-nine seconds that set the house style for every natural history series since.

Season 1

Platonic

2023–Apple TV+Comedy

Hand-lettered titles over Los Angeles in the afternoon, keeping the show's register exactly: pleasant, and slightly off.

Season 1

Playhouse 90

1956–1960CBSDrama

Ninety minutes of live original drama every week, and the anthology from which Rod Serling, John Frankenheimer and most of the era's writers emerged.

Season 1

Please Like Me

2013–2016ABC2Comedy

An Australian comedy that rewrites its opening for every episode — a different song, a different set of images, in a show otherwise built on stillness.

Season 1

Plebs

2013–2022ITV2Comedy

Ancient Rome played as a flatshare, with the empire happening somewhere off to one side.

Season 1

The Plot Against America

2020HBODrama

David Simon's Roth adaptation, opened by American stamps and postmarks turning quietly wrong.

Season 1

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

Pocoyo

2005–2010La 2 / CITVAnimation

A Spanish preschool series played out on plain white, with no scenery at all to compete with the four-year-old and the narrator who argues with him.

Season 1

Point Pleasant

2005FoxHorror

The devil's daughter washed up in a New Jersey beach town, from the Buffy writers' room.

Season 1

Pokémon

1997–TV TokyoAnimation

The longest-running video-game adaptation on television, and a theme song that outlasted every cast change.

Season 1
Season 5

Poker Face

2023–PeacockCrime

Seventies title design executed exactly, for a case-of-the-week mystery deliberately built on the Columbo model.

Season 1

Poldark (2015)

2015–2019BBC OneDrama

Winston Graham's Cornish captain home from the American war to find his father dead and his fiancée engaged to his cousin.

Season 1

Police Squad!

1982ABCComedy

Six episodes of the Airplane! team's deadpan, cancelled on the grounds that watching it required looking at it.

Season 1

Poltergeist: The Legacy

1996–1999Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelHorror

A secret society investigating the supernatural from a San Francisco island house.

Season 1

Popee the Performer

2000–2001Kids StationAnimation

A circus in the desert, animated in early CGI and far more violent than its length suggests.

Season 1

Porridge

1974–1977BBC OneComedy

Ronnie Barker inside HMP Slade, opened by a judge's sentencing read over the prison gates.

Season 1

Port Charles

1997–2003ABCDrama

The General Hospital spin-off that later restructured itself into thirteen-week arcs with an ending each — the closest American daytime came to a limited series.

Season 1

Portlandia

2011–2018IFCComedy

Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein on a city that is mostly an attitude, with a theme they wrote and perform themselves.

Season 1

Pose

2018–2021FXDrama

Ballroom culture rendered in gold and satin, with the house names given the billing a network usually reserves for stars.

Season 1

Postman Pat

1981–2017BBC OneAnimation

A rural postman and his black and white cat, stop-motion, with a theme everyone in Britain can finish.

Season 1

Power

2014–2020StarzCrime

A New York club owner running a drug network behind it, and the franchise Starz built out of him.

Season 1

Power Book III: Raising Kanan

2021–2026StarzCrime

The Power universe wound back to 1991 Queens, following the character the first series had already killed.

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 Cosmic Fury

2023NetflixSci-Fi

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

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 Dino Fury

2021–2022NickelodeonSci-Fi

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

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 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 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 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 Megaforce

2013NickelodeonSci-Fi

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

Season 1
Season 2

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 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 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

Power Rangers Zeo

1996Fox KidsSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Powerpuff Girls

1998–2005Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Narrated origin, sugar, spice and everything nice — a premise delivered in one sentence over sixties-modern graphic design.

Season 1

The Practice

1997–2004ABCDrama

Boston law offices in grey and brown, from the producer who would spin this off into Boston Legal and lighten it considerably.

Season 1

Preacher

2016–2019AMCDrama

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

Season 1

Prehistoric Planet

2022–2023Apple TV+Documentary

Attenborough narrating the Cretaceous as though a camera crew had been there, with a title sequence to match.

Season 1

Press Gang

1989–1993ITVDrama

A school newspaper written by Steven Moffat, which is why the dialogue is faster than the format.

Season 1

Press Your Luck

1983–1986CBSDocumentary

A quiz built around a board that could take everything back, and a contestant who memorised its patterns.

Season 1

Presumed Innocent

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Evidence photographs and courtroom stone, shot cold enough that guilt and innocence look identical.

Season 1

The Pretender

1996–2000NBCDrama

A man raised in a laboratory who can become any professional he reads about, running from the people who made him.

Season 1

Pretty Little Liars

2010–2017FreeformDrama

Four girls shushing the camera over a coffin — twenty-two seconds that state the entire premise and the entire threat.

Season 1

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin

2022–2024HBO MaxHorror

The Pretty Little Liars premise remade as a slasher, with a title sequence that finally commits to the genre.

Season 1

The Price Is Right

1972–CBSDocumentary

"Come on down" — the longest-running game show in American television, opening the same way for fifty years.

Season 1
Season 36

Pride and Prejudice

1995BBC OneDrama

Carl Davis's theme over needlework and a country lane — the adaptation against which every subsequent Austen has been measured.

Season 1

Primal

2019–2024Adult Swim / MaxAnimation

Twenty seconds of charcoal and blood, with no dialogue anywhere in it — which is also true of most of the series.

Season 1

Prime Suspect

1991–2006ITVCrime

Stephen Warbeck's theme over London at night — spare, cold, and entirely without the reassurance the genre usually offers.

Season 1

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

Prison Break

2005–2017FoxDrama

Blueprints and tattoo ink treated as the same document — which, for this show's premise, they are.

Season 1

Prison Playbook

2017–2018tvNComedy

A baseball pitcher jailed weeks before signing for the major leagues, and the wing he ends up in.

Season 1

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

The Professionals

1977–1983ITVCrime

Two CI5 agents and the controller who points them, in the ITV action series that spent a decade being complained about.

Season 1

Profiler

1996–2000NBCCrime

Crime-scene imagery rendered as a mind reconstructing it — the visual grammar every profiler series has used since.

Season 1

Project Runway

2004–Bravo / LifetimeDocumentary

Designers given a day and a budget, and Heidi Klum telling one of them they are out.

Seasons 1–4

The Protectors

1972–1974ITV (ITC)Crime

Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter as international investigators, in half-hour episodes shot across Europe.

Season 1

The Proud Family

2001–2005Disney ChannelAnimation

Penny Proud and her family, opened by a theme Solange recorded with Destiny's Child.

Season 1

The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder

2022–Disney+Animation

The revival, which rerecorded the 2001 theme with a new cast rather than writing a new one.

Season 1

Providence

1999–2002NBCDrama

A plastic surgeon returning to Rhode Island, advised by her dead mother.

Season 1

Psych

2006–2014USA NetworkCrime

'I Know, You Know' — a theme re-recorded in a different genre for special episodes, which makes it a rare case of a comedy varying its own titles.

Season 4

Puella Magi Madoka Magica

2011Tokyo MXAnimation

A magical-girl opening played completely straight, which turns out to be the series' first and most effective lie about what it is.

Season 1

The Punisher

2017–2019NetflixCrime

A skull assembling out of gun smoke and muzzle flash, with the ordnance doing the drawing. Blunter than its siblings, deliberately.

Seasons 1–2

Punk'd

2003–2015MTVComedy

Ashton Kutcher's hidden-camera show, and Candid Camera restaged for people with publicists.

Season 4

Punky Brewster

1984–1986NBCComedy

A girl abandoned in a Chicago apartment building and raised by the man who manages it.

Season 1

The Purge

2018–2019USA NetworkHorror

The film franchise given two seasons of television, opened in sixteen seconds.

Season 1

Pushing Daisies

2007–2009ABCComedy

Storybook illustration and saturated colour, pitched exactly between a fairy tale and a mortuary — which is the show.

Season 1

Pustina

2016HBO CzechCrime

A girl disappears from a north Bohemian village that a mining company is trying to buy. The title means Wasteland.

Season 1

Q

QI

2003–BBC Two / BBC OneComedy

Sepia illustration and a music-box theme, in a panel show that has changed almost nothing about its opening in two decades and two hosts.

Season 1

Quantico

2015–2018ABCDrama

FBI recruits and a bombing, told across two timelines.

Season 1

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

Quantum Leap (2022)

2022–2024NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Queen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story

2023NetflixDrama

The Bridgerton prequel, opened by an animated sequence in the manner of an illuminated manuscript.

Season 1

Queen of Tears

2024tvNDrama

A married couple at the top of a retail conglomerate, three years in and barely speaking.

Season 1

The Queen's Gambit

2020NetflixDrama

Pieces, pills and ceiling tiles falling through one another — the board and the addiction rendered as the same descending motion.

Season 1

The Queen's Nose

1995–2003BBC OneComedy

A fifty pence piece that grants wishes, from the Dick King-Smith book.

Season 1

Queer as Folk (UK)

1999–2000Channel 4Drama

Russell T Davies on Manchester's Canal Street, remade later in America and never bettered.

Season 1

Queer as Folk (US)

2000–2005ShowtimeDrama

The Russell T Davies series remade in Pittsburgh and run for five seasons — four more than the original managed.

Season 1

Queer Eye

2018–NetflixDocumentary

Two minutes of the five hosts introduced one at a time, in the format's own house style of relentless warmth.

Season 1

A Question of Sport

1970–2023BBC OneDocumentary

The longest-running sports quiz on television, with a picture board and a what-happened-next round.

Season 20

The Quick Draw McGraw Show

1959–1962SyndicationAnimation

A horse sheriff who cannot shoot, with Snooper and Blabber and Augie Doggie filling out the half hour.

Season 1

Quincy, M.E.

1976–1983NBCCrime

A Los Angeles medical examiner who investigates, and the ancestor of every forensic procedural since.

Season 1

R

Rabbit Hole

2023Paramount+Drama

Kiefer Sutherland as a corporate spy framed for murder, opened in sixteen seconds.

Season 1

The Rain

2018–2020Netflix (Denmark)Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Rainbow

1972–1992ITVComedy

Zippy, George and Bungle, and a theme about a paintbox in the sky that ran for twenty years.

Season 1

Rainbow Brite

1984–1986SyndicationAnimation

A Hallmark character licensed into a cartoon, in the era when the toy came first and the series followed.

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

Raising Hope

2010–2014FoxComedy

A young father raising a baby with his own parents' help, from the My Name Is Earl creator.

Season 1

Rake

2010–2018ABCComedy

Sydney and a barrister who is his own worst client, opened with rather more restraint than he ever manages.

Season 1

Ramy

2019–2022HuluComedy

Ramy Youssef's series about a first-generation Egyptian American trying to be a good Muslim, opened in nine seconds flat.

Season 1

Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)

1969–1970ITVCrime

A private investigator and his dead partner, who only he can see, in a white suit.

Season 1

Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja

2012–2015Disney XDAnimation

A ninth-grader handed an eight-hundred-year-old ninja suit and no instructions.

Season 1

Ranking of Kings

2021–2022Fuji TVAnimation

A deaf prince who cannot lift a sword, in a picture-book style that hides how hard the series hits.

Season 2

Rapunzel's Tangled Adventure

2017–2020Disney ChannelAnimation

The film continued in hand-drawn animation, which the feature never was.

Season 1

Ratched

2020NetflixHorror

Mid-century clinical design turned lurid — surgical steel, pastel tile and hypodermics arranged with the care of a fashion shoot.

Season 1

Rawhide

1959–1965CBSDrama

A cattle drive that never arrives, with Frankie Laine's theme and a young Clint Eastwood.

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

Ray Donovan

2013–2020ShowtimeCrime

Los Angeles at street level — a fixer's city, shot from the driver's seat rather than the hills.

Season 4

Re:Zero − Starting Life in Another World

2016–TV TokyoAnimation

A boy who restarts from a save point every time he dies, and remembers all of it.

Season 1

Reacher

2022–Prime VideoCrime

Lee Child's drifter, adapted at the scale the books describe rather than the one previous adaptations settled for.

Season 1

Reading 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

Ready Steady Go!

1963–1966ITVDocumentary

"The weekend starts here" — the British pop programme that put the Beatles, the Stones and Motown on the same stage.

Season 1

The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest

1996–1999Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The 1964 Hanna-Barbera series rebuilt for the nineties, with early CG sequences inside it.

Season 1

The Real Ghostbusters

1986–1991ABCAnimation

The film continued as a cartoon, keeping the theme and adding Real to the title because another studio already had the name.

Season 1

Real Humans

2012–2014SVT1Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Real World

1992–2019MTVDocumentary

"This is the true story of seven strangers" — the narration that invented the reality format, and the one every parody since has copied.

Season 1

Reba

2001–2007The WB / The CWComedy

Reba McEntire as a Houston mother holding a divorce together, with a theme she sings herself.

Season 1

ReBoot

1994–2001YTVAnimation

The first television series animated entirely by computer, and set inside one.

Season 1

Recess

1997–2001ABCAnimation

A brass march over a school playground treated as a sovereign state, which is exactly how the series plays it.

Season 1

Record of Youth

2020tvNDrama

A model trying to become an actor before his military service, against everyone's advice.

Season 1

Rectify

2013–2016SundanceTVDrama

Rural Georgia at a pace matching the series — a man released after nineteen years, and titles that refuse to hurry him.

Season 1

Red Dwarf

1988–BBC Two / DaveComedy

The last human alive, three million years from Earth, introduced with a mining ship the size of a city and a theme sung over the end of it.

Season 1
Season 10

The Red Green Show

1991–2006CHCH-TV / CBCComedy

A lodge of middle-aged Canadian men and the duct tape with which they solve everything.

Season 1

The Red River

2021–2023OPENDrama

A Greek period drama on the Asia Minor catastrophe and the generation displaced by it. Original title Το κόκκινο ποτάμι.

Season 2

The Red Road

2014–2015SundanceTVDrama

A New Jersey policeman and a Ramapough man held together by what each knows about the other.

Season 1

Redwall

1999–2002TeletoonAnimation

Brian Jacques' abbey mice animated in Canada, with the villains drawn considerably better than the heroes.

Season 1

The Regime

2024HBODrama

Palace portraiture and state iconography assembled into propaganda for a country that does not exist.

Season 1

Regular Show

2010–2017Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A blue jay and a raccoon employed as groundskeepers, opened with a synth sting and almost no information.

Season 1

The Rehearsal

2022–HBOComedy

Constructed sets and blueprints presented with total sincerity, which is the only register the show ever uses.

Season 2

Reign

2013–2017The CWDrama

Mary, Queen of Scots at the French court, with a deliberately anachronistic soundtrack.

Season 2

Reilly, Ace of Spies

1983ITVDrama

Sidney Reilly across twelve parts, and the serial that gave Sam Neill his first lead.

Season 1

Relic Hunter

1999–2002SyndicationDrama

Tia Carrere as a professor recovering antiquities, in the syndication boom that followed Xena.

Season 1

Rellik

2017BBC OneCrime

A murder investigation told backwards — the title is killer reversed, and so is the series.

Season 1

Remington Steele

1982–1987NBCCrime

A narrated premise about a detective agency with an invented boss, delivered by the woman who invented him.

Season 1

The Ren & Stimpy Show

1991–1996NickelodeonAnimation

Rubber-limbed animation and a jaunty theme, both of which are considerably more unhinged than a children's network should have permitted.

Season 1

Renegade

1992–1997Syndication / USA NetworkCrime

A framed policeman on a motorcycle, made for syndication by the people who made The A-Team.

Season 1

Rentaghost

1976–1984BBC OneComedy

An agency staffed entirely by ghosts, which is a sitcom premise and a title sequence at the same time.

Season 1

The Replacements

2006–2009Disney ChannelAnimation

Two orphans with a phone number that replaces any adult in their lives.

Season 1

Reply 1988

2015–2016tvNDrama

Five families in one Seoul alley in 1988, and the most loved of the Reply series.

Season 1

Reply 1994

2013tvNDrama

A Seoul boarding house of students up from the provinces, and the second of the three Reply series.

Season 1

Reply 1997

2012tvNDrama

Busan schoolfriends and first-generation fandom, told from a reunion looking back.

Season 1

Republic of Doyle

2010–2014CBCCrime

A father-and-son detective agency in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Season 1

Requiem

2018BBC OneHorror

A cellist in a Welsh village that remembers a disappearance she does not.

Season 1

Rescue Me

2004–2011FXDrama

New York firefighters after 2001, introduced without a single heroic frame in it.

Season 1

The Residence

2025NetflixCrime

The White House drawn as a cutaway doll's house, every room a suspect — a whodunnit that hands you the floor plan first.

Season 1

Resident Alien

2021–SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Restaurant

2017–2021SVT (Sweden)Drama

A Stockholm restaurant family from 1945 onwards. Vår tid är nu at home — "our time is now".

Season 1

The Returned

2012–2015Canal+Horror

The dead walking back into an Alpine town as though nothing happened, opened by Mogwai over a collapsing dam.

Season 1

Revenge

2011–2015ABCDrama

The Count of Monte Cristo relocated to the Hamptons.

Season 1

Revolution

2012–2014NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Rhoda

1974–1978CBSComedy

The first Mary Tyler Moore spin-off, following Rhoda Morgenstern back to New York.

Season 1

Rick and Morty

2013–Adult SwimAnimation

A montage of adventures that mostly never happened, re-cut every season out of clips from episodes that do not exist.

Season 1

The Rifleman

1958–1963ABCDrama

A widowed rancher and his son, opened by twelve rounds fired down a street in under ten seconds.

Season 1

The Righteous Gemstones

2019–2025HBOComedy

Eleven seconds of gold-plated megachurch branding, delivered with exactly the sincerity the family would want.

Season 1

Ringer

2011–2012The CWDrama

A woman who takes over her twin sister's identity and finds it is worse than the one she left.

Season 1

Ripper Street

2012–2016BBC One / Prime VideoCrime

Whitechapel in the years after the murders, policed by men the murders made famous.

Season 1

Riptide

1984–1986NBCCrime

Two Vietnam veterans running a detective agency from a boat, with a helicopter called the Screaming Mimi.

Season 1

Rise of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

2018–2020NickelodeonAnimation

The turtles redrawn in a hand-animated style closer to a comic than the CG series before it.

Season 1

Rising Damp

1974–1978ITVComedy

Leonard Rossiter as a boarding-house landlord, and the most successful ITV sitcom of the seventies.

Season 1

The Rising of the Shield Hero

2019–Tokyo MXAnimation

The isekai hero given the defensive weapon and none of the credit.

Season 1

Rita

2012–2020TV 2Comedy

A Danish schoolteacher who is very good at her job and bad at everything else.

Season 1

River Monsters

2009–2017Animal PlanetDocumentary

A biologist catching freshwater fish large enough to account for the local legends about them.

Season 1

Riverdale

2017–2023The CWDrama

Archie comics restaged as neon-lit noir, with the town's diner shot like a crime scene.

Season 1

Riviera

2017–2020Sky AtlanticDrama

A widow discovering what her husband's money was, retitled between seasons as the show moved away from the coast it is named for.

Season 1
Season 3

Rizzoli & Isles

2010–2016TNTCrime

A Boston detective and a medical examiner, from the Tess Gerritsen novels.

Season 1

Road Rovers

1996–1997Kids' WBAnimation

Domestic dogs from six countries turned into a superhero team by a scientist who does not explain much.

Season 1

Road to Avonlea

1990–1996CBCDrama

Montgomery's Prince Edward Island stories, made by the CBC with Disney paying half the bill.

Season 1
Season 5

Robin of Sherwood

1984–1986ITVDrama

The Robin Hood that put a horned god behind the legend, scored throughout by Clannad.

Season 1

Robin's Nest

1977–1981ITVComedy

The second Man About the House spin-off, with Robin running a bistro in Fulham.

Season 2

Robot Chicken

2005–Adult SwimAnimation

A chicken reanimated with machinery and forced to watch television, which is the show's premise and its title sequence at once.

Season 1

Robot Wars

1998–2018BBC TwoDocumentary

Twenty-one seconds of sparks and industrial metal, for a programme in which people destroyed their own hardware for sport.

Seasons 1–4

Robotech

1985SyndicationAnimation

Three unrelated Japanese series cut together into one American saga, and the opening is where the seam shows: the same theme and the same establishing pan every week, then a different logo card and a different war.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

Roc

1991–1994FoxComedy

A Baltimore refuse collector and his family, and a season shot live to air on purpose.

Season 1

Rocket Boys

2022–2023SonyLIVDrama

Homi Bhabha and Vikram Sarabhai building India's nuclear and space programmes.

Season 1

Rocket Power

1999–2004NickelodeonAnimation

Four children in a California beach town who do every extreme sport in sequence.

Season 1

The Rockford Files

1974–1980NBCCrime

A telephone rings, an answering machine picks up, and a stranger leaves a message that is usually bad news and occasionally a joke at Rockford's expense. Then the theme starts. The private detective is introduced by the people avoiding him.

Seasons 1–6

Rocko's Modern Life

1993–1996NickelodeonAnimation

An Australian wallaby in O-Town, written for children with as much as possible smuggled past them.

Season 1

Roger Ramjet

1965–1969SyndicationAnimation

A five-minute cartoon about a pilot who takes a pill for twenty seconds of super strength, drawn as cheaply as that sounds.

Season 1

Rolie Polie Olie

1998–2004CBC / Playhouse DisneyAnimation

A world of robots built entirely out of spheres and cylinders, computer-animated in Toronto.

Season 1

Rome

2005–2007HBODrama

Graffiti coming alive on Roman walls — painted figures fighting, coupling and marching across plaster while the camera tracks past. The city's own scrawl doing the work a montage usually does.

Seasons 1–2

Romper Room

1953–1994SyndicationComedy

A franchised preschool programme licensed to local stations, each with its own hostess and the same magic mirror.

Season 1

Roobarb

1974BBC OneAnimation

Felt-tip animation that boils and shimmers because it was drawn one frame at a time and never traced twice.

Season 1

The Rookie

2018–ABCCrime

Los Angeles patrol work, opened with the network-procedural confidence the format has run on since Hill Street Blues.

Season 1

Rookie Blue

2010–2015Global / ABCCrime

Five recruits out of the academy in Toronto, made as a summer series for two countries at once.

Season 1

Roots

1977ABCDrama

The miniseries that changed what American television believed it was allowed to broadcast, opened with Quincy Jones and a slave ship.

Season 1

The Ropers

1979–1980ABCComedy

Three's Company's landlords given their own series, from the British spin-off George and Mildred.

Season 1

Roseanne

1988–2018ABCComedy

A family at a kitchen table, laughing at something you cannot hear, rebuilt for every season across twenty years and a thirty-year gap.

Season 1
Season 10

Rosemary & Thyme

2003–2007ITVCrime

Two gardeners who keep finding bodies in the borders they have been hired to replant.

Season 1

Rosewood

2015–2017FoxCrime

A private pathologist in Miami working the cases the police have already closed.

Season 1

Rosie and Jim

1990–2000ITVComedy

Two rag dolls on a narrowboat who come alive when the adult is not looking.

Season 1

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

Rotten

2018–2019NetflixDocumentary

The food supply chain taken apart one commodity at a time, in seventeen seconds of things going bad.

Season 1

Round the Twist

1989–2001ABC / Seven NetworkComedy

An Australian children's series set in a lighthouse, with a theme song that asks whether strange things ever happen to you.

Season 1

Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In

1967–1973NBCComedy

Psychedelic panels opening onto one-liners, cut faster than anything else on 1960s television and directly responsible for the pacing of sketch comedy since.

Season 3

Royal Canadian Air Farce

1993–2008CBCComedy

A radio sketch troupe of twenty years' standing moved to television, and kept there for fifteen more.

Season 1

The Royal Family

1991–1992CBSComedy

Redd Foxx and Della Reese as a couple whose children move back in, and the series Foxx died making.

Season 1

Royal Pains

2009–2016USA NetworkComedy

A concierge doctor in the Hamptons, in the middle of USA's blue-sky decade.

Season 1

The Royals

2015–2018E!Drama

An invented British royal family behaving badly, on a channel that had spent a decade filming real ones.

Season 1

Rubicon

2010AMCDrama

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

Season 1

Rugrats

1991–2004NickelodeonAnimation

Mark Mothersbaugh scoring a baby's-eye view of a living room — the theme is closer to a Devo B-side than to children's television.

Season 1

Rules of Engagement

2007–2013CBSComedy

Two couples at opposite ends of a relationship and one man at neither, in the sitcom CBS used for years as a gap-filler.

Season 3

Run

2020HBO / Sky ComedyComedy

Two people who agreed years ago that either could send one word and the other would drop everything.

Season 1

Runaways

2017–2019HuluSci-Fi

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

Season 1

RuPaul's Drag Race

2009–Logo / VH1 / MTVDocumentary

Eighteen seconds that get remade every season — new logo treatment, new track, new set of queens.

Season 1

RuPaul's Drag Race All Stars

2012–2016Logo TVDocumentary

Returning queens competing again, in the spin-off that handed the eliminations to the contestants.

Season 1

Russian Doll

2019–2022NetflixDrama

Twenty-eight seconds, which is all a show about the same night repeating needs. The joke is that you will see it many more times than the episode count suggests.

Season 1

The Ruth Rendell Mysteries

1987–2000ITVCrime

Rendell adapted for thirteen years, mostly as Wexford and occasionally as the standalone novels.

Season 1

Ryan's Hope

1975–1989ABCDrama

An Irish-American family running a bar near a Manhattan hospital, in a serial set in a real neighbourhood rather than an invented town.

Season 1

S

S.W.A.T.

1975–1976ABCCrime

The original, cancelled after two seasons over its violence, and remembered mostly for a theme that reached number one.

Season 1

S.W.A.T. (2017)

2017–2025CBSCrime

The reboot, which ran eight seasons to the original's two and rebuilt the theme rather than dropping it.

Season 1

Sabrina the Teenage Witch

1996–2003ABC / The WBComedy

The Archie Comics witch as a TGIF sitcom, seven seasons across two networks.

Season 1

Sacred Games

2018–2019NetflixCrime

Mumbai rendered as a mandala of crime and religion, with the city's iconography arranged into something closer to a devotional image.

Season 1

Sailor Moon

1992–1997TV AsahiAnimation

The series that built the magical-girl template, opened by "Moonlight Densetsu" across five separate runs.

Season 4

Sakamoto Days

2025–TV Tokyo / NetflixAnimation

A retired hitman running a corner shop, and everyone from the old life who keeps turning up.

Season 1

Salem

2014–2017WGN AmericaHorror

The witch trials with actual witches, and the series that turned a superstation into a scripted network.

Season 1

Salute Your Shorts

1991–1992NickelodeonComedy

Camp Anawanna, and a theme song the campers sing badly on purpose.

Season 1

Salvation

2017–2018CBSSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Sam & Cat

2013–2014NickelodeonComedy

A crossover spin-off pairing characters from iCarly and Victorious.

Season 1

Samurai Champloo

2004–2005Fuji TVAnimation

Nujabes and Shing02 over Edo-period swordplay — hip-hop and historical drama treated as obviously compatible, which nobody had assumed before.

Season 1

Samurai Jack

2001–2017Cartoon Network / Adult SwimAnimation

A villain narrating his own defeat of the hero, over graphic-design animation that owes more to UPA than to Saturday morning.

Season 1

Samurai Pizza Cats

1990–1991TV TokyoAnimation

Kyatto Ninden Teyandee rewritten wholesale in English by writers working without translated scripts.

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

The Sandbaggers

1978–1980ITVDrama

British intelligence run as an office job, with the operations mostly discussed rather than shown.

Season 1

The Sandman

2022–2025NetflixDrama

Seventeen seconds of sand and a card. For a series adapted from a comic famous for its lettering, the titles are almost aggressively plain.

Seasons 1–2

Sanford and Son

1972–1977NBCComedy

Quincy Jones writing a harmonica blues for a junkyard — one of the few sitcom themes composed by someone of that stature.

Season 1

Sanjay and Craig

2013–2016NickelodeonAnimation

A boy and his talking snake, drawn in the loosest line Nickelodeon has ever put on air.

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

Sarah & Duck

2013–2017CBeebiesAnimation

A girl, her duck, and a narrator who talks to both of them, in fifteen seconds of open.

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

Saturday Night Live

1975–NBCComedy

A new cast montage every single season for fifty years — New York at night, the current company photographed in it, and a band playing over the top. The longest-running rotating title sequence on television.

Season 1

Saved by the Bell

1989–1993NBCComedy

Freeze-frames of six teenagers over a theme about being late — Saturday morning television's most durable export.

Season 1

Saved by the Bell: The College Years

1993–1994NBCComedy

The Bayside cast moved to a university for one season, in prime time rather than Saturday morning.

Season 1

Saved by the Bell: The New Class

1993–2000NBCComedy

Bayside kept and the pupils replaced, for seven seasons rather more than anyone had expected.

Season 1
Seasons 6–7

Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story

2020SonyLIVCrime

The Bombay securities scandal, and one of the most imitated Indian title sequences of the streaming era.

Season 1

Scandal

2012–2018ABCDrama

Shonda Rhimes's Washington fixer series, and the show that made the phrase 'it's handled' a network brand.

Season 1

Scarecrow and Mrs. King

1983–1987CBSDrama

A divorced housewife recruited into intelligence work by accident.

Season 1

Scavengers Reign

2023MaxAnimation

Alien biology drawn with botanical-illustration patience — organisms doing something to each other that the show will spend an episode explaining.

Season 1

Schitt's Creek

2015–2020CBCComedy

A motel sign and a town crest, in the register of a place that has never once considered how its name reads.

Season 1

Schmigadoon!

2021–2023Apple TV+Comedy

A couple trapped inside a Golden Age musical that will not let them leave until they find true love.

Season 1

School 2017

2017KBS2Drama

The seventh entry in a school series running since 1999, each with a new cast and year in the title.

Season 1

Schoolhouse Rock!

1973–2009ABCAnimation

Three-minute songs about grammar and arithmetic dropped between Saturday morning cartoons, and remembered longer than the cartoons.

Season 1

Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

1969–1970CBSAnimation

A theme that asks the title as a question, over a van and five characters who have been drawn the same way for fifty-five years.

Season 1

Scorpion

2014–2018CBSDrama

A team of geniuses contracted by Homeland Security, very loosely based on a real consultant's account of himself.

Season 1

Scott Pilgrim Takes Off

2023NetflixAnimation

The O'Malley books animated by Science SARU, with an opening in the full Japanese OP tradition.

Season 1

Scream

2015–2016MTVHorror

The film franchise remade as a weekly series, with a new mask of its own.

Season 1

Scream Queens

2015–2016FoxHorror

Ryan Murphy's sorority slasher, with a title sequence longer than most of the deaths.

Season 1

Scrubs

2001–2010NBC / ABCComedy

Twelve seconds, an X-ray and a guitar — a medical comedy that spends less time on titles than most shows spend on a network ident.

Season 1

SCTV

1976–1984Global / NBCComedy

A sketch show shaped as a fictional television station, which let it parody the whole schedule rather than one programme at a time.

Season 1

Sea Hunt

1958–1961SyndicationDrama

Lloyd Bridges as a freelance diver, and the most successful syndicated series of its decade.

Season 1

SeaChange

1998–2019ABC (Australia)Comedy

A city lawyer moving to a coastal town, and the series that put the phrase into Australian English.

Season 1

Sealab 2021

2000–2005Adult SwimAnimation

A 1972 Hanna-Barbera series redubbed into something else entirely, keeping the original's animation and none of its intentions.

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

Search for Tomorrow

1951–1986CBS / NBCDrama

Thirty-five years of American daytime, and the serial that was on air before most of the networks carrying it were.

Season 1

Search Party

2016–2022TBS / HBO MaxComedy

A missing-person search taken up by four Brooklynites who mostly want something to be part of.

Season 1

Secret Army

1977–1979BBC OneDrama

An escape line moving Allied airmen out of occupied Belgium, played without any of the adventure the premise invites.

Season 1

Secret Diary of a Call Girl

2007–2011ITV2 / ShowtimeDrama

Billie Piper addressing the camera between clients, adapted from the Belle de Jour blog.

Season 1

Secret Garden

2010–2011SBSDrama

A department store heir and a stuntwoman who wake up in each other's bodies.

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

The Secret Life of the American Teenager

2008–2013ABC FamilyDrama

A teen pregnancy drama that ran five seasons on the channel that had spent the decade before avoiding the subject.

Season 1

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

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

Seinfeld

1989–1998NBCComedy

A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.

Season 1

Sense and Sensibility

2008BBC OneDrama

Andrew Davies adapting Austen across three parts, a decade after he did Pride and Prejudice.

Season 1

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

The Sentinel

1996–1999UPNSci-Fi

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

Season 1

A Series of Unfortunate Events

2017–2019NetflixComedy

Lemony Snicket adapted with a title sequence whose lyrics are rewritten for every book — the song spends every verse telling you to stop watching.

Seasons 1–3

The Serpent Queen

2022–2024StarzDrama

Catherine de' Medici narrating her own rise directly to camera.

Season 1

Servant

2019–2023Apple TV+Horror

A doll's house filmed as an actual house — a brownstone rendered in miniature, with something wrong in one of the rooms.

Season 1

Servant of the People

2015–20191+1Comedy

A history teacher accidentally elected president of Ukraine, played by a comedian who was then elected president of Ukraine.

Season 1

Sesame 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

Seven Days

1998–2001UPNSci-Fi

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

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

Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

2015–2016FXComedy

Denis Leary as a failed rock singer reforming his band around his own daughter.

Season 1

Sex and the City

1998–2004HBOComedy

A tutu, a bus and a splash of dirty water — an opening whose entire joke is that New York does not care who you think you are.

Season 1

Sex Education

2019–2023NetflixComedy

Twenty seconds of hand-drawn scrawl and pop, pitched exactly at the notebook margins the show is set among.

Season 2

The Sex Lives of College Girls

2021–2022HBO MaxComedy

Four roommates at a Vermont university, from Mindy Kaling, who has made this arrangement work before.

Season 1

Shadow and Bone

2021–2023NetflixDrama

A sequence that changes with the episode — the imagery inside the letterforms is recut each week to match what is about to happen.

Seasons 1–2

Shadowhunters

2016–2019FreeformHorror

Runes burning into skin, and a New York rendered as a warded city.

Season 1

Shake It Up

2010–2013Disney ChannelComedy

Two Chicago dancers on a local television show, with Zendaya in her first series.

Season 1

Shameless

2011–2021ShowtimeComedy

A bathroom door opening on each member of the family in turn — an entire household characterised through one room.

Season 1

Shantaram

2022Apple TV+Drama

Nine seconds and a card. One of the shortest openings in the catalogue, for one of its longest-gestating adaptations.

Season 1

Shark Tank

2009–ABCDocumentary

The American Dragons' Den, with the same format's Japanese parent behind both.

Season 1

Sharp Objects

2018HBOCrime

Wind Gap seen at speed from a car window, with words hidden in the frame — the same trick the show plays for eight episodes, put in the titles from the first minute.

Season 1

Sharpe

1993–2008ITVDrama

A rifleman commissioned out of the ranks in the Peninsular War, filmed for its first runs in Crimea.

Season 1

She-Hulk: Attorney at Law

2022Disney+Comedy

A lawyer who is also a Hulk, in the one Marvel series that opens like a network sitcom and means it.

Season 1

She-Ra and the Princesses of Power

2018–2020NetflixAnimation

The 1985 toy line rebuilt by Noelle Stevenson into something the original could not have carried.

Season 1

Sherlock

2010–2017BBC OneCrime

London shot as data — maps, magnification and chemical traces, cut to a violin figure that never quite settles.

Season 1

Sherlock Holmes (1984)

1984–1994ITVCrime

Granada's adaptation, played on a Baker Street built outdoors in Manchester and continued until Jeremy Brett could no longer work.

Season 1

Shetland

2013–BBC OneCrime

North Atlantic weather over islands where everyone already knows everyone, which is the constraint the series runs on.

Season 1

The Shining (1997)

1997ABCHorror

King's own remake for television, made largely because he disliked what Kubrick had done with the book.

Season 1

Shining Time Station

1989–1995PBSComedy

The American frame built around the Thomas films, with a foot-tall conductor living inside the station wall.

Season 1

Shōgun

2024–FXDrama

Ink and weather. Landscapes, ships and figures resolve out of washes of black and grey as though the frame is being painted while you watch, then dissolve before any of it settles.

Season 1

Shōgun (1980)

1980NBCDrama

The Clavell miniseries that ran five nights and made a genre out of the Western sailor in feudal Japan.

Season 1

Shortland Street

1992–TVNZ 2Drama

New Zealand's nightly hospital serial, running since 1992 and re-cut its titles roughly once a decade.

Seasons 10–13

Show Me a Hero

2015HBODrama

David Simon on a Yonkers housing desegregation fight, opened by one of the longest title sequences on premium television.

Season 1

Shrinking

2023–Apple TV+Comedy

Hand-drawn scribbles over domestic footage, in the register of a therapist's notebook margin.

Season 1

Sigmund and the Sea Monsters

1973–1975NBCComedy

A sea monster thrown out by his family for being unable to frighten anyone, hidden in a beach clubhouse.

Season 1

Signal

2016tvNCrime

A walkie-talkie connecting a present-day profiler to a detective in 1989.

Season 1

Silent Witness

1996–BBC OneCrime

Forensic pathology rendered as abstraction — a thirty-year-old series whose titles have been redesigned repeatedly while the eye at the centre of them stayed.

Season 21

Silicon Valley

2014–2019HBOComedy

An animated Bay Area skyline of tech-company headquarters, rebuilt every season to match who was winning that year. The joke only works because it kept being updated — logos appear, get acquired, and vanish between seasons.

Season 1
Season 3
Season 4
and 2 more

Silk Stalkings

1991–1999CBS / USA NetworkCrime

Palm Beach sex-crimes detectives, and the show that effectively invented USA Network's original programming.

Season 1

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

Silver Spoon

2014–2021NTVCrime

A Russian oligarch's son forced to work as a policeman, and the most exported Russian drama of its decade. Original title Мажор.

Season 3

Silver Spoons

1982–1986NBCComedy

A boy sent to live with the father who never grew up, and the model train he rides through the house.

Season 1

SilverHawks

1986SyndicationAnimation

ThunderCats moved into space by the same studio, with the same narrator shouting the same way.

Season 1

Simon & Simon

1981–1989CBSCrime

Two brothers running a San Diego detective agency with opposite methods.

Season 1

The Simpsons

1989–FoxAnimation

The only main title in television built to be different every week: the chalkboard, the saxophone solo and the couch gag all change, so the sequence is a format rather than a film.

Seasons 1–20
Season 21

The Singing Detective

1986BBC OneDrama

Dennis Potter's serial, in which a hospitalised writer's hallucinations arrive as 1940s dance numbers — and the titles set that up without explaining it.

Season 1

The Single Guy

1995–1997NBCComedy

A novelist whose friends are all married, scheduled by NBC between Friends and Seinfeld and never forgiven for it.

Season 1

The Sinner

2017–2021USA NetworkCrime

An anthology that begins with the crime and spends the season on why.

Season 2

Sister, Sister

1994–1999ABC / The WBComedy

Twins separated at birth and reunited in a shopping mall, played by twins.

Season 1

Sisters

1991–1996NBCDrama

Four sisters in Illinois, in a network drama that let all four of them be difficult.

Season 1

Six Feet Under

2001–2005HBODrama

Digital Kitchen's procession of small deaths: hands letting go, a crow on a wire, a hearse, feet on a mortuary table. It won the Emmy and set the template most prestige-drama openings still follow.

Seasons 1–5

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

Ski Sunday

1978–BBC TwoDocumentary

A downhill run cut to Pop Looks Bach, and a theme that in Britain means winter rather than skiing.

Season 43

Skins

2007–2013E4Drama

A new cast every two series, and a new title sequence with them — the show rebuilt itself from scratch twice and the openings track it.

Seasons 1–4

The Sky at Night

1957–BBC One / BBC FourDocumentary

The longest-running programme with the same presenter in television history, opening on Sibelius' At the Castle Gate.

Season 1

Sky Castle

2018–2019JTBCDrama

Four families in a gated Seoul compound competing over university admissions.

Season 1

Sky King

1951–1962NBC / ABCDrama

An Arizona rancher who catches criminals from a twin-engined aeroplane, out of the radio serial.

Season 1

Skysurfer Strike Force

1995–1996SyndicationAnimation

Five pilots on energy surfboards, from the syndication block that ran opposite the Saban shows.

Season 1

Slam Dunk

1993–1996TV AsahiAnimation

A delinquent who joins the basketball team to impress a girl and stays for the game.

Season 1

Sledge Hammer!

1986–1988ABCComedy

A detective who holds conversations with his revolver, in a parody ABC scheduled directly against the police shows it was mocking.

Season 1

Sleeper Cell

2005–2006ShowtimeDrama

An FBI agent undercover in a Los Angeles terrorist cell, two seasons long.

Season 1

Sleepy Hollow

2013–2017FoxHorror

Ichabod Crane woken in the present day, with the Horseman following him.

Season 1

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

Slings and Arrows

2003–2006The Movie NetworkComedy

A Canadian series about a Shakespearean festival, with a different theatrical opening for each of its three seasons.

Season 2

Slow Horses

2022–Apple TV+Drama

London surveillance imagery over a theme Mick Jagger wrote for the show — a spy series whose titles are as shabby and unglamorous as its office.

Season 1

Smack the Pony

1999–2003Channel 4Comedy

A sketch show written and performed by women, at a point when British television had decided that was a format rather than a fact.

Season 1

Small Island

2009BBC OneDrama

Andrea Levy's Windrush novel in two parts, moving between Jamaica and a Earls Court boarding house.

Season 1

Small Wonder

1985–1989SyndicationComedy

A robot girl passed off as a daughter, in a syndicated sitcom that few people quite believe existed.

Seasons 1–2

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

Smart Guy

1997–1999The WBComedy

A ten-year-old skipped ahead to high school, and the two older siblings who have to sit next to him.

Season 1

SMILF

2017–2019ShowtimeComedy

A single mother in South Boston, cancelled after two seasons.

Season 1

Smiling Friends

2020–Adult SwimAnimation

A tiny company whose job is making people happy, with a title card that is over almost before it starts.

Seasons 1–2

Smoke

2025Apple TV+Crime

Fire filmed close enough to lose its shape — an arson series whose titles are almost entirely texture.

Season 1

Smother

2021–2023RTÉ One / BBCDrama

A death on a Clare beach and the family who all have a reason to have wanted it.

Season 1

Snabba Cash

2021–2022NetflixCrime

The Stockholm crime films continued as a series, following the money rather than the men.

Season 2

Sneaky Pete

2015–2019Prime VideoCrime

A con man hiding inside his cellmate's identity, from Bryan Cranston and David Shore.

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

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

So You Think You Can Dance

2005–2024FoxDocumentary

The dance contest built to the Idol template by Idol's own producer, and one of the few competition formats to run its production credits over the performance rather than after it.

Season 1

Soap

1977–1981ABCComedy

A narrator recapping a plot that has already become unmanageable, ending every week on the same weary question about what will happen next.

Season 1

Soldier Soldier

1991–1997ITVDrama

A fictional infantry regiment and the families attached to it, which made two of its cast into pop stars.

Season 1

Solid Gold

1980–1988SyndicationDocumentary

The weekly chart countdown as a dance routine, with its own troupe named after it.

Season 1

Solo Leveling

2024–Tokyo MXAnimation

Hiroyuki Sawano scoring a power fantasy at exactly the scale it wants to be taken at.

Season 1

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em

1973–1978BBC OneComedy

Frank Spencer in a beret, and stunts Michael Crawford performed himself.

Season 1

Somebody Feed Phil

2018–NetflixDocumentary

Phil Rosenthal eating his way around the world, with a theme song written and sung about him by his friends.

Season 5

Somebody Somewhere

2022–2024HBOComedy

Kansas roads and grain elevators, filmed without a trace of irony — a small show that declines to make its setting a joke.

Season 1

Something So Right

1996–1997NBCComedy

A remarried couple with children from three previous marriages between them.

Season 1

The Son

2017–2019AMCDrama

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

Season 1

Son of the Beach

2000–2002FXComedy

A Baywatch parody produced by Howard Stern, and one of FX's first originals.

Season 1

Sonic Prime

2022–2024NetflixAnimation

A shattered multiverse of Sonics, opened in twelve seconds.

Season 1

The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour

1971–1974CBSComedy

A married double act insulting each other between songs, in the variety hour that made Cher a television star.

Season 1

Sons of Anarchy

2008–2014FXCrime

Leather, chrome and a reaper patch, over a theme re-recorded by a different artist as the club's situation deteriorates.

Season 1
Season 7

Sooty & Co

1993–1998ITVComedy

The Sooty puppets moved to a shop, in the ITV series Matthew Corbett handed over at the end of.

Season 1

The Sopranos

1999–2007HBODrama

Ninety seconds of a man driving home from the Lincoln Tunnel to North Caldwell. No cast montage, no highlights — just the commute, which turns out to be the whole show.

Seasons 1–6

Soul Train

1971–2006SyndicationDocumentary

An animated locomotive pulling into a city drawn in airbrush — the longest-running first-run syndicated show in American history opens like a record sleeve.

Season 1

South Park

1997–Comedy CentralAnimation

A banjo, a cut-paper Colorado town and four boys at a bus stop — re-recorded and re-animated repeatedly across nearly thirty years while staying recognisably the same twenty-nine seconds.

Season 1
Season 15

Southland

2009–2013NBC / TNTCrime

Los Angeles patrol work shot like documentary, dropped by NBC and picked up by TNT.

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

Space Dandy

2014Tokyo MXAnimation

Shinichiro Watanabe again, and again the opening is a music cue with a visual identity of its own — surf rock, neon and a pompadour.

Season 1

Space Ghost Coast to Coast

1994–2008Cartoon Network / Adult SwimComedy

A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero repurposed as a chat-show host, and the programme every Adult Swim series descends from.

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

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

Spaced

1999–2001Channel 4Comedy

Freeze-frames and film-reference visual gags, cut at the speed the show quotes at — which is constant.

Season 2

The Spanish Princess

2019–2020StarzDrama

Catherine of Aragon's arrival in England, third in the same Philippa Gregory sequence.

Season 1

Spartacus

2010–2013StarzDrama

Starz's gladiator series, and one of the last major shows to use blood as a graphic element in its titles.

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 Spectacular Spider-Man

2008–2009The CW / Disney XDAnimation

Web-line geometry and a surf-rock horn chart, widely held to be the best Spider-Man adaptation in any medium.

Season 1

Speed Racer

1967–1968SyndicationAnimation

Mach GoGoGo dubbed into English at speed, and the anime that got there before anyone called it that.

Season 1

Spenser: For Hire

1985–1988ABCCrime

Robert B. Parker's Boston detective, with Avery Brooks as Hawk in the part that made him.

Season 1

Spicks and Specks

2005–ABC (Australia)Comedy

A music quiz named after a Bee Gees single, and one of the ABC's most watched programmes for a decade.

Season 1

Spider-Man

1994–1998Fox KidsAnimation

The nineties adaptation, with a guitar theme that a generation can still produce on request.

Season 1

Spider-Man: The Animated Series

1994–1998Fox KidsAnimation

The Fox Kids Marvel block's other pillar, alongside X-Men, with a guitar theme that does the same job.

Season 1

Spider-Man: The New Animated Series

2003MTV / YTVAnimation

MTV's computer-animated Spider-Man, set between the first two films and cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Spin City

1996–2002ABCComedy

New York City Hall in twenty-two seconds, rebuilt partway through the run when the show changed its lead.

Season 5

Spiral

2005–2020Canal+Crime

Paris police, courts and lawyers in thirty-one seconds, with none of the city that appears on postcards.

Season 1

Spitting Image

1984–1996ITVComedy

Latex puppets of everyone in public life, opening on the workshop that built them.

Season 1

SpongeBob SquarePants

1999–NickelodeonAnimation

A sea shanty led by a painted pirate head, in call and response with children — one of the most universally known pieces of television music written this century.

Season 1

Spooks

2002–2011BBC OneDrama

Fast-cut surveillance imagery and a clock, from a series that made a habit of killing its leads without warning.

Season 1

Sportsnight

1968–1997BBC OneDocumentary

The midweek sports programme, and the strand most of British sports broadcasting learned its trade on.

Season 26

Spy × Family

2022–TV TokyoAnimation

Sixties spy-film design applied to a fake family — the parents' cover story rendered as the title sequence they would want.

Season 1

Square One TV

1987–1994PBSComedy

Mathematics taught as sketch comedy, including a police procedural parody called Mathnet.

Season 1

Square Pegs

1982–1983CBSComedy

Two girls trying to be popular at a Californian high school, one season long and much imitated since.

Season 1

Squid Game

2021–2025NetflixDrama

Childhood playground shapes — circle, triangle, square — turned into a brand so completely that the symbols now read as threat before they read as games.

Season 3

Squidbillies

2005–2021Adult SwimAnimation

Appalachian squids, with a theme song rerecorded by a different artist almost every season — one of the longest-running rotating title sequences on American television.

Season 1

St. Denis Medical

2024–NBCComedy

A short-staffed Oregon hospital, filmed as though a documentary crew had turned up and stayed.

Season 1

St. Elsewhere

1982–1988NBCDrama

A Boston hospital and another Dave Grusin-adjacent piano theme, from the network and era that produced Hill Street Blues and shared its restraint.

Season 1

The Staircase

2022HBO MaxCrime

The dramatisation of the Michael Peterson case, made about the documentary crew as much as the trial.

Season 1

Star Search

1983–1995SyndicationDocumentary

The syndicated talent contest that ran twelve years and handed the singing-competition format almost everything Idol later inherited.

Season 1

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

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

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

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

Star Trek: Lower Decks

2020–2024Paramount+Animation

The joke is in the structure: it opens exactly like a heroic Trek title sequence, and then the ship spends the entire minute getting wrecked by everything it meets. The Cerritos never wins a single shot of its own opening.

Seasons 1–5

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

Star Trek: Prodigy

2021–2024Nickelodeon / NetflixAnimation

Made for viewers who had never seen a Star Trek before, and it shows in the best way — the Protostar streaks through bright, candy-coloured space on a theme with more wonder in it than most of the grown-up entries.

Seasons 1–2

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

Star Trek: The Animated Series

1973–1974NBCAnimation

Filmation's Saturday-morning continuation, with most of the original cast back on microphone duty. The theme is Courage's melody rescored for a cartoon orchestra, brighter and quicker than the live-action original.

Seasons 1–2

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

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

Star vs. the Forces of Evil

2015–2019Disney XD / Disney ChannelAnimation

A magical princess sent to Earth for remedial schooling, with a wand she does not control.

Season 1

Star Wars Rebels

2014–2018Disney XDAnimation

Kevin Kiner rewriting John Williams for a series about the Rebellion before it was one.

Season 1

Star Wars: Droids

1985–1986ABCAnimation

The two droids between the trilogies, in the first Star Wars television made for children.

Season 1

Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

2024–2025Disney+Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Star Wars: The Bad Batch

2021–2024Disney+Animation

The Clone Wars continued with a squad of defective clones, and a title card that keeps the parent series' logo shape.

Season 1

Star Wars: The Clone Wars

2008–2020Cartoon Network / Disney+Animation

A newsreel rather than a title sequence — a narrator reporting the state of the war, rewritten every episode, preceded by a different aphorism each week.

Season 1

Star Wars: Visions

2021–Disney+Animation

Ten seconds and a card, deliberately — an anthology handing each episode to a different studio to open however it likes.

Season 1

Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures

2023–Disney+Animation

The franchise's first series for preschoolers, set in the High Republic.

Season 1

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

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

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

Stargirl

2020–2022DC Universe / The CWSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Starsky & Hutch

1975–1979ABCCrime

Two Bay City detectives and a red Ford Torino with a white stripe.

Season 1

Stath Lets Flats

2018–2021Channel 4Comedy

Jamie Demetriou as a lettings agent with no aptitude for letting flats.

Season 1

Static Shock

2000–2004The WBAnimation

A hip-hop theme over a Black teenage superhero in Dakota — from the same DC animation house as Batman and Superman, and tonally nothing like either.

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

Step by Step

1991–1998ABC / CBSComedy

Two single parents merging their families, in the middle of the TGIF block.

Season 1

Steptoe and Son

1962–1974BBC OneComedy

Two rag-and-bone men who cannot leave each other, and the series Sanford and Son was remade from.

Season 1

The Steve Harvey Show

1996–2002The WBComedy

A funk musician turned high school teacher, in the sitcom that carried The WB's Monday nights for six years.

Season 1
Seasons 4–6

Steven Universe

2013–2019Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A theme sung by the characters about themselves, rewritten as the line-up of those characters changes — which for this show is the plot.

Season 5

Stick

2025–Apple TV+Comedy

A washed-up golfer coaching a teenager, and one of the few 2025 series whose service posted its own titles.

Season 1

Stig of the Dump

1981ITVDrama

Clive King's boy in a chalk pit and the person living at the bottom of it, adapted by Thames.

Season 1

Still Game

2002–2019BBC Scotland / BBC OneComedy

Two Glasgow pensioners and the Craiglang high-rises, with titles built entirely from the scheme itself.

Season 1

Stingray

1964–1965ITVSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Storage Wars

2010–A&EDocumentary

Abandoned storage lockers auctioned unseen, with the bidders introduced like a heist crew.

Season 1

The Storyteller

1987–1988NBC / Channel 4Drama

European folk tales retold by John Hurt beside a fire, with Henson's creature shop doing the rest.

Season 1
Season 2

The Strain

2014–2017FXHorror

Guillermo del Toro's vampire plague, opened by a sequence of things going wrong at cellular scale.

Season 1

Strange Angel

2018–2019CBS All AccessDrama

Jack Parsons, rocket engineer and occultist, in 1930s Pasadena.

Season 1

Stranger

2017–2020tvNCrime

A prosecutor without emotional affect and the detective who trusts him anyway. Known at home as 비밀의 숲, Secret Forest.

Season 1
Season 2

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

Strangers with Candy

1999–2000Comedy CentralComedy

An after-school special inverted: a forty-six-year-old ex-convict returning to high school as a freshman.

Season 1

The Streets of San Francisco

1972–1977ABCCrime

Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas, shot on location throughout.

Season 1

Strictly Come Dancing

2004–BBC OneDocumentary

The BBC's ballroom format, sold to fifty-odd countries as Dancing with the Stars and kept at home under its own name.

Season 1

Strike

2017–BBC OneCrime

Galbraith's one-legged private detective and the assistant who turns out to be better at it than he expected.

Season 1

Strike Back

2010–2020Sky1 / CinemaxDrama

A British special-forces unit shot like an action franchise, in one of Sky's first co-productions with an American premium channel.

Season 1

Strong Medicine

2000–2006LifetimeDrama

Two doctors from opposite ends of the system sharing a women's clinic in Philadelphia.

Season 1

Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip

2006–2007NBCDrama

Sorkin backstage at a sketch show, cancelled after one season while another series took the same premise and survived.

Season 1

Suburgatory

2011–2014ABCComedy

A Manhattan teenager relocated to the suburbs by a father who found a box of condoms in her drawer.

Season 1

Succession

2018–2023HBODrama

Home video of rich children, degraded and half-legible, cut against helicopter shots of towers they will inherit. Nicholas Britell's piano stumbles deliberately, like something played badly on purpose.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

Suddenly Susan

1996–2000NBCComedy

A columnist who leaves her fiancé at the altar and then has to write about it every week.

Season 1

Sugar

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Classic Hollywood noir imagery cut against modern Los Angeles — a detective series that keeps quoting the films it is standing inside.

Season 1

The Suite Life of Zack & Cody

2005–2008Disney ChannelComedy

Twins living in a Boston hotel their mother sings in.

Season 1

The Suite Life on Deck

2008–2011Disney ChannelComedy

The Suite Life moved onto a cruise ship that is also a school.

Season 1

Suits

2011–2019USA NetworkDrama

Tailoring, cufflinks and Manhattan glass over Ima Robot's 'Greenback Boogie' — a law firm sold entirely on wardrobe.

Season 1

Sullivan's Crossing

2023–CTVDrama

A neurosurgeon who goes back to her father's campground in Nova Scotia and stays.

Season 1

Summer Camp Island

2018–2021Cartoon Network / HBO MaxAnimation

A camp where the counsellors are witches and the moon is a person, drawn in chalk pastel.

Season 1

Summer Heights High

2007ABC (Australia)Comedy

Chris Lilley playing three pupils and staff at the same school, shot as a documentary.

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

Sunset Beach

1997–1999NBCDrama

Aaron Spelling's daytime serial, which NBC ran for three years and then replaced with Passions.

Season 1

Super Mario World

1991NBCAnimation

The last of the Mario cartoons, made for one autumn after the game of the same name.

Season 1

Super Pumped

2022ShowtimeDrama

The Uber story as the first season of an intended anthology about companies.

Season 1

Super Why!

2007–2016PBS KidsAnimation

Four children who solve their problems by climbing into storybooks and changing the spelling.

Season 1

Superbook

1981–1983CBNAnimation

A Japanese-animated series in which a book sends two children into Bible stories, made for an American religious broadcaster.

Season 1

Superboy

1988–1992SyndicationSci-Fi

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

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

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

Superjail!

2007–2014Adult SwimAnimation

A prison inside a volcano inside another volcano, animated with more detail per frame than the slot required.

Season 1

Superman: The Animated Series

1996–2000The WBAnimation

The companion to Batman: The Animated Series, and the same trick — a full orchestral score over a sequence that names nothing.

Season 1

Supernanny

2004–Channel 4Documentary

Jo Frost arriving by taxi to reorganise a household, every week, for twenty years.

Season 4

Supernatural

2005–2020The WB / The CWHorror

Fifteen years without an opening title sequence, and fifteen distinct title cards instead — a few seconds of the show's name, restyled from scratch every season to match what that year was about. The shortest main titles on this site, and the ones that changed the most.

Seasons 1–15

Superstore

2015–2021NBCComedy

Big-box retail signage and shelving, shot with the flatness of the fluorescent light the whole show is lit by.

Season 1

SuperTed

1983–1986S4C / BBCAnimation

A discarded teddy bear given powers by a spotty alien, made in Wales and sold to Disney.

Season 1

Survivor

2000–CBSDocumentary

The competition format that rebuilt American primetime, and rebuilds its titles for every location.

Season 1
Season 50

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

Swamp Thing

2019DC UniverseHorror

Cancelled after one episode aired and finished anyway, which is why all ten exist.

Season 1

The Sweeney

1975–1978ITVCrime

The Flying Squad in a Ford Granada, and the series that made British police drama violent.

Season 1

Sweet Home

2020–2024NetflixHorror

The apartment block as a cross-section, with something wrong in every unit — the show's premise drawn as a floor plan.

Season 1

Sweet Magnolias

2020–NetflixDrama

Three friends in a small South Carolina town, adapted from Sherryl Woods's novels.

Seasons 1–2

Sweet Valley High

1994–1997Syndication / UPNDrama

The paperback series about twin sisters, adapted for television with real twins.

Season 1

Switched at Birth

2011–2017ABC Family / FreeformDrama

Two teenagers swapped as babies, in a family drama that plays whole scenes in sign language.

Season 1

The Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries

1995–2000Kids' WBAnimation

The chase reframed as a detective series, with Granny solving cases and the cat still not catching the bird.

Season 1

Sym-Bionic Titan

2010–2011Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Genndy Tartakovsky's mecha series, cancelled after one season for having no toy line.

Season 1

The Sympathizer

2024HBODrama

Propaganda poster art, film leader and Saigon footage cut together so that the two sides' imagery becomes one reel — which is the narrator's problem exactly.

Season 1

T

T. J. Hooker

1982–1986ABC / CBSCrime

William Shatner back in uniform between Star Trek films.

Season 1

T.U.F.F. Puppy

2010–2015NickelodeonAnimation

A dog secret agent, from the creator of The Fairly OddParents.

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

Takeshi's Castle

1986–1990TBSDocumentary

A hundred contestants a week storming a fortress, and the origin of every obstacle-course format that came after it.

Season 1

Tales from the Crypt

1989–1996HBOHorror

A crawl through a derelict house towards a coffin, which opens — Danny Elfman's theme, and a host who was a puppet.

Season 1

Tales from the Darkside

1983–1988SyndicationHorror

George Romero's anthology, opened by pastoral countryside that turns to negative while a narrator explains why.

Season 1

Tales of the City

2019NetflixDrama

Armistead Maupin's Barbary Lane, returned to thirty years after the first adaptation.

Season 1

Tales of the Unexpected

1979–1988ITVHorror

A dancing silhouette, a spinning roulette wheel and Ron Grainer's theme — an anthology opening far more unsettling than most of the stories that follow it.

Season 1

Task

2025HBOCrime

An FBI task force in the Philadelphia suburbs, from the writer of Mare of Easttown.

Season 1

Taskmaster

2015–Dave / Channel 4Comedy

A bust of the host's head and a fanfare, in the register of a much grander programme than the one that follows.

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

Taxi

1978–1983ABC / NBCComedy

A single cab crossing the Queensboro Bridge to Bob James's electric piano — no cast, no jokes, and an unusually melancholy opening for a comedy.

Season 1

Taxi Driver

2021–2023SBSCrime

A taxi company that takes revenge on behalf of crime victims, from the webtoon.

Season 1

Teachers

2001–2004Channel 4Comedy

A Bristol comprehensive from the staff room's side, with Andrew Lincoln before The Walking Dead.

Season 1

The Team

2015–2018ZDF / DR1Crime

A Europol task force built out of three countries' police, and shot in all three languages.

Season 2

Ted

2024–2026PeacockComedy

The talking bear from the films as a 1990s teen sitcom, with everyone recast younger.

Season 1

Ted Lasso

2020–Apple TV+Comedy

Twenty-three seconds of illustrated football club iconography and a brass hook — brisk, warm, and gone before it can outstay itself.

Season 1

Teen Titans

2003–2006Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A J-pop theme by Puffy AmiYumi, recorded in both Japanese and English and alternated between episodes.

Season 1

Teen Wolf

2011–2017MTVHorror

Transformation rendered as anatomy — claws, teeth and eyes, in a sequence rebuilt several times across six seasons.

Season 6

Teenage Euthanasia

2021–2023Adult SwimAnimation

A Florida funeral home, and a mother resurrected by embalming fluid.

Season 1

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012)

2012–2017NickelodeonAnimation

The CG revival, which kept the 1987 theme's shape and rebuilt everything around it.

Season 1

Tehran

2020–Apple TV+Drama

Surveillance imagery and city geometry, cut so that watching and being watched look like the same activity.

Season 2

Teletubbies

1997–2001BBC TwoComedy

A baby's face in the sun, four aerials and a narrator counting them in — over two minutes of titles for a programme aimed at people under three.

Season 1

Temptation Island

2001–2003FoxDocumentary

Unmarried couples separated onto an island of singles, and the format that drew the first serious wave of complaints about American reality television.

Season 1

Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales

1963–1966CBSAnimation

A zoo penguin with a walrus and a professor who explains how things work, which made it educational enough to keep.

Season 1

The Terminal List

2022–Amazon Prime VideoDrama

A Navy SEAL who comes home to work out that the ambush was arranged, from Jack Carr's novel.

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

Terra Nova

2011FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Terriers

2010FXCrime

An unlicensed private investigator in Ocean Beach, cancelled after thirteen episodes and mourned ever since.

Season 1

The Terror

2018–2019AMCHorror

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

Season 1

Terry and June

1979–1987BBC OneComedy

Suburban misunderstanding for eight years, and the programme most often used as shorthand for what alternative comedy rebelled against.

Season 1

That '70s Show

1998–2006FoxComedy

The cast singing 'In the Street' from the back of a Vista Cruiser, re-recorded and reshot every season — plus one-off Halloween and Christmas versions.

Seasons 1–8

That '80s Show

2002FoxComedy

The follow-up to That '70s Show with none of the same characters, gone in thirteen episodes.

Season 1

That Mitchell and Webb Look

2006–2010BBC TwoComedy

The sketch show out of the radio series That Mitchell and Webb Sound, and the home of Numberwang.

Season 1

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime

2018–Tokyo MXAnimation

A salaryman reincarnated as the weakest monster in the game, who builds a country anyway.

Season 1

That's So Raven

2003–2007Disney ChannelComedy

A girl who sees the future and misreads it every week.

Season 1

Theodore Tugboat

1993–2001CBCAnimation

Model tugboats in Halifax harbour, narrated for years by Denny Doherty of the Mamas and the Papas.

Season 1

The Third Day

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticHorror

An island off the Essex coast with its own rules, told in two halves and a live broadcast between them.

Season 1

Third Watch

1999–2005NBCDrama

Police, paramedics and firefighters on the same New York shift, from the ER producers.

Season 5

thirtysomething

1987–1991ABCDrama

The series that invented the domestic-anxiety drama, and gave a generation of television writers their register.

Season 1

This Is Us

2016–2022NBCDrama

A family photograph and a card, over in nine seconds — restraint from a show that is otherwise not remotely restrained.

Season 1

This Life

1996–2007BBC TwoDrama

Five law graduates sharing a house in Southwark, shot handheld and stopped after two series while it was still growing.

Season 1

This Morning

1988–ITVDocumentary

Daytime television broadcast from the Albert Dock, with a weather map floated in the water outside.

Season 1

Thomas & Friends

1984–2021ITVAnimation

Model locomotives shot a frame at a time on a table in Britain, narrated for the first two series by Ringo Starr.

Season 1

Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends

1984–2021ITVAnimation

Model railway engines shot at eye level and narrated by Ringo Starr, from the Awdry books.

Season 1

The Thorn Birds

1983ABCDrama

The second most-watched miniseries in American television history, after Roots.

Season 1

Three's Company

1976–1984ABCComedy

A theme that explains the premise, the address and the invitation in about forty seconds, then hands you a farce.

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

Thriller (1973)

1973–1976ITVHorror

Brian Clemens' anthology of feature-length suspense plays, sold to America as a late-night staple.

Season 1

Thundarr the Barbarian

1980–1982ABCAnimation

A post-apocalyptic Earth designed by Jack Kirby, with a narrated prologue doing all the world-building in twenty seconds.

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

ThunderCats

1985–1989SyndicationAnimation

A sword extending, a cat's eye opening, and a shout — eighties syndication at its most confident.

Season 1

The Tick

2016–2019AmazonComedy

The live-action Tick, whose main title is a full superhero sequence played entirely straight.

Season 1

Tiger King

2020–2021NetflixDocumentary

Airbrushed big-cat portraiture and rhinestone lettering, executed with total sincerity — the subject's own aesthetic, borrowed wholesale.

Season 1

Till Death Us Do Part

1965–1975BBC OneComedy

Alf Garnett shouting at his family, and the series All in the Family was remade from.

Season 1

Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job!

2007–2010Adult SwimComedy

Public-access video aesthetics reproduced exactly and then broken — twenty-two seconds that set the terms for a decade of internet comedy.

Season 1

Time Bandits

2024Apple TV+Comedy

The Gilliam film as a series, made by the Flight of the Conchords and What We Do in the Shadows writers.

Season 1

Time Squad

2001–2003Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Time police correcting history, which keeps going wrong in ways they caused.

Season 1

Time Team

1994–2014Channel 4Documentary

Three days to excavate a site, with the clock running in the titles before anyone picks up a trowel.

Season 1

The Time Traveler's Wife

2022HBODrama

Steven Moffat's adaptation of the Niffenegger novel, cancelled after one season.

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

Timeless

2016–2018NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Tin Star

2017–2020Sky AtlanticCrime

A British policeman running a small Alberta force, and the refinery that follows him there.

Season 1

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

1979BBC TwoDrama

A Russian nesting doll opening onto a blank face, over Geoffrey Burgon's setting of the Nunc Dimittis — the most quietly devastating title sequence the BBC has made.

Season 1

Tiny Toon Adventures

1990–1995Syndication / Fox KidsAnimation

A patter song naming the entire cast, which the series' successor Animaniacs would take further still.

Season 1

Titans

2018–2023DC Universe / HBO MaxDrama

Thirteen seconds and a card, in the register of a comic that would prefer you did not call it a comic.

Season 1

Titus

2000–2002FoxComedy

Christopher Titus narrating his own childhood from a white void between scenes.

Season 1

To Tell the Truth

1956–CBSDocumentary

Three people claiming to be the same person, and the line that ends it — will the real one please stand up.

Season 1

To the Manor Born

1979–1981BBC OneComedy

A widow forced to sell the manor and move into the lodge at the end of its drive.

Season 1

A to Z

2014NBCComedy

A romantic comedy that told you in the pilot exactly how many months it would last, and lasted thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Toast of London

2012–2015Channel 4Comedy

Matt Berry as a voiceover actor with an unshakeable opinion of himself.

Season 1

Todd McFarlane's Spawn

1997–1999HBOAnimation

The comic adapted as adult animation, and among the first American cartoons made explicitly for an adult slot.

Season 1
Season 2

Tokyo Ghoul

2014–2018Tokyo MXHorror

A student turned half-ghoul, opened by "Unravel" — one of the few anime openings better known than the series.

Season 1

Tokyo Mew Mew

2002TV TokyoAnimation

Five girls infused with the DNA of endangered animals, in the magical girl series that made cat ears a convention.

Season 1

Tokyo Vice

2022–2024HBO MaxCrime

Neon reflected in wet Shinjuku streets, shot from a car — a foreign correspondent's view of a city he does not yet read.

Seasons 1–2

Tom Goes to the Mayor

2004–2006Adult SwimAnimation

Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim's first series, animated from photographs of the cast with almost no motion.

Season 1

The Tomorrow People

1973–1979ITVSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Tomorrow's World

1965–2003BBC OneDocumentary

Live demonstrations of things that did not work yet, opening on graphics that promised they would.

Season 29

The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson

1962–1992NBCComedy

A curtain, a rainbow arch and an announcer saying the two words — thirty years of the same entrance.

Season 18

Too Close

2021ITVDrama

A forensic psychiatrist and the patient who will not stay on her side of the table.

Season 1

Too Close for Comfort

1980–1987ABC / SyndicationComedy

A cartoonist whose grown daughters move into the flat downstairs, which is the entire problem.

Season 1

Top Boy

2011–2023Channel 4 / NetflixCrime

A Hackney estate shot from within rather than above, over Brian Eno's score — which is not the collaboration anyone predicted.

Season 1

Top Cat

1961–1962ABCAnimation

Hanna-Barbera doing Sgt. Bilko with alley cats, in the primetime slot the studio kept trying to hold.

Season 1

Top Chef

2006–BravoDocumentary

Knives on a board and a countdown, in the cooking competition that took itself seriously first.

Season 1

Top Gear

2002–BBC TwoDocumentary

Twenty-one seconds of engine noise and a rock riff — a motoring programme that opens like a trailer for itself.

Season 1
Season 23

Top of the Lake

2013–2017BBC Two / SundanceTVCrime

Jane Campion's missing-girl series, opened across the South Island lake it is named for.

Season 1

Top of the Pops

1964–2006BBC OneDocumentary

Forty-two years of the chart, and a Phil Lynott instrumental called Yellow Pearl for a theme.

Season 1
Seasons 18–20

Toradora!

2008–2009TV TokyoAnimation

Two students agreeing to help each other with the wrong crushes, which goes exactly as expected.

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

The Tortellis

1987NBCComedy

Carla's ex-husband and his family moved to Las Vegas, and the shortest-lived thing Cheers produced.

Season 1

Total Drama Island

2007–2008TeletoonAnimation

Survivor animated for children, with confessional booths and eliminations played entirely straight.

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

Total Request Live

1998–2008MTVDocumentary

MTV's daily video countdown, broadcast from a studio above Times Square with the crowd outside kept in shot.

Season 5

Totally Spies!

2001–2014TF1 / Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Three Beverly Hills schoolgirls working for a spy agency, made in France and drawn in a style borrowed from anime.

Season 7

Tots TV

1993–1998ITVComedy

Three rag dolls with a bag, one of whom only speaks French, from the studio that went on to make Teletubbies.

Season 1

A Touch of Frost

1992–2010ITVCrime

David Jason as a Denton detective who is right and insubordinate in roughly equal measure.

Season 1

Touched by an Angel

1994–2003CBSDrama

Angels sent to intervene in ordinary American lives, nine seasons long.

Season 1

Tour of Duty

1987–1990CBSDrama

An infantry platoon in Vietnam, and the first American drama series to be set there.

Season 1

The Tracey Ullman Show

1987–1990FoxComedy

The sketch show Fox launched its network with, and the one that carried the Simpsons as thirty-second interstitials before they left.

Season 1

Transparent

2014–2019AmazonDrama

Joey Soloway's family series, opened by home-movie footage of the Pfeffermans that turns out to be the whole thesis.

Season 1

The Trap Door

1984–1986ITVAnimation

Plasticine creatures in a castle basement, with a theme built from a voice going "don't you open that trap door".

Season 1

Trapped

2015–2022RÚVCrime

Icelandic weather as an antagonist — ice, sea and a town nobody can leave, which is both the plot and the title.

Season 1

Trapper John, M.D.

1979–1986CBSDrama

The MASH surgeon twenty-eight years later, running a San Francisco hospital.

Season 6

Travelers

2016–2018NetflixSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Treadstone

2019–2020USA NetworkDrama

The Bourne programme as a series, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Treme

2010–2013HBODrama

Water stains, peeling paint and brass — post-Katrina New Orleans read off its own damaged walls, over John Boutté's title song.

Season 1

The Tribe

1999–2003Channel 5Drama

A virus kills every adult and the children left over form tribes, made in New Zealand for a British channel.

Season 1

Tribes of Europa

2021Netflix (Germany)Sci-Fi

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

Season 1

Trigun

1998TV TokyoAnimation

A desert western scored like a spy thriller, with a gunman who refuses to kill anyone.

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

Trollhunters

2016–2018NetflixAnimation

Guillermo del Toro's trolls under a Californian town, opened in fifteen seconds.

Season 1

Tron: Uprising

2012–2013Disney XDAnimation

The Grid between the two films, animated with a design sense far beyond its slot.

Season 1

Tru Calling

2003–2005FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

True Blood

2008–2014HBOHorror

Digital Kitchen again, and their nastiest work: swamp water, roadkill, a revival tent, a child in a Klan hood, all cut to Jace Everett's 'Bad Things'. It promises a show about the South rather than a show about vampires.

Seasons 1–7

True Detective

2014–HBOCrime

Double-exposure portraits where the landscape is projected onto the people. Every season is reshot from scratch, so the titles change as completely as the cast does.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

Trumpton

1967BBC OneAnimation

The Camberwick Green sequel, opening on a town clock and a fire brigade roll-call people still recite.

Season 1

Trust

2018FXDrama

The Getty kidnapping told across ten hours by Danny Boyle and Simon Beaufoy.

Season 1

Truth Be Told

2019–2023Apple TV+Crime

Recording equipment and case material, for a series about a true-crime podcast reopening its own mistake.

Season 1

Truth or Consequences

1950–1988CBS / NBC / SyndicationDocumentary

A radio stunt show that reached television in 1950 and persuaded a New Mexico town to rename itself after it.

Season 1

Tuca & Bertie

2019–2022Netflix / Adult SwimAnimation

Buildings with faces and plants with opinions — a city drawn as though everything in it is slightly alive, which in this show it is.

Season 1

The Tudors

2007–2010ShowtimeDrama

Henry VIII played young and handsome for four seasons, opened by a montage of everything the reign would cost.

Season 1

TUGS

1989ITVAnimation

Model tugboats in a 1920s harbour, made by the Thomas the Tank Engine team and considerably darker.

Season 1

Tunnel

2017OCNCrime

A 1986 detective stepping through a tunnel into 2017, still chasing the same killer.

Season 1

Turn: Washington's Spies

2014–2017AMCDrama

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

Seasons 1–4

Twenty-Five Twenty-One

2022tvNDrama

A fencer and a reporter across the 1997 financial crisis and after.

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

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

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

Twin Peaks

1990–1991, 2017ABC / ShowtimeDrama

A bird, a sawmill blade and a waterfall, over Angelo Badalamenti at a tempo no network would approve today — ninety seconds of a town being described before anyone in it speaks.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

Twinkling Watermelon

2023tvNDrama

The hearing son of deaf parents sent back to 1995, where he meets his father at nineteen.

Season 1

Two and a Half Men

2003–2015CBSComedy

Twelve seasons on a Malibu beach house, opened by four sung syllables.

Season 6

Two Guys and a Girl

1998–2001ABCComedy

A Boston pizza place the series was named after for two seasons and then quietly dropped from the title.

Season 1
Seasons 3–4

Two Pints of Lager and a Packet of Crisps

2001–2011BBC ThreeComedy

Six friends in a Runcorn pub, and the sitcom BBC Three ran for nine series while the critics ignored it.

Season 9

The Two Ronnies

1971–1987BBC OneComedy

Barker and Corbett behind a news desk, with a pair of spectacles as the logo for sixteen years.

Season 1

Tyler Perry's House of Payne

2006–SyndicationComedy

A Georgia fire chief with the rest of his family in the house, and the series that proved syndication could still start a hit.

Season 1
Seasons 2–8

Tyrant

2014–2016FXDrama

The younger son of a Middle Eastern dictator dragged back from a Californian suburb.

Season 1

U

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

Ugly Betty

2006–2010ABCComedy

Fashion-magazine collage and a poncho, in twelve seconds.

Season 1

Ultimate Spider-Man

2012–2017Disney XDAnimation

Spider-Man trained by S.H.I.E.L.D., opened in eleven seconds flat.

Season 1

Umbre

2014–2019HBO RomaniaCrime

A Bucharest debt collector holding two lives apart, in HBO Europe's Romanian production. The title means Shadows.

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

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

2015–2019NetflixComedy

A woman released after fifteen years in a bunker, who moves to New York on the strength of it.

Season 1

The Uncanny Counter

2020–2023OCNSci-Fi

Demon hunters working out of a noodle restaurant.

Season 1

Uncle Grandpa

2013–2017Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Everyone's uncle and everyone's grandpa, travelling in an RV that is also a tiger.

Season 1

Undeclared

2001–2002FoxComedy

Judd Apatow's college follow-up to Freaks and Geeks, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Under the Banner of Heaven

2022FX on HuluCrime

A Utah detective losing his own faith while investigating a killing committed inside it.

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

Underbelly

2008–2013Nine NetworkCrime

Australian organised crime, a different true story each season.

Season 1

Underdog

1964–1967NBC / CBSAnimation

A superhero who rhymes, and one of the last title sequences built around its sponsor's product.

Season 1

The Underground Railroad

2021Prime VideoDrama

Barry Jenkins's miniseries, opened with portraiture that holds on faces long enough to become uncomfortable.

Season 1

The Undoing

2020HBOCrime

A child's drawing of a family, animated and slowly disassembled, over Nicole Kidman singing 'Dream a Little Dream of Me'.

Season 1

Unforgettable

2011–2016CBSCrime

A detective who remembers every day of her life except the one that matters.

Season 1

Unforgotten

2015–ITVCrime

Two detectives working cold cases old enough that the suspects have built whole lives since.

Season 1

Unhappily Ever After

1995–1999The WBComedy

Married… with Children's writers doing it again, with a talking stuffed rabbit only the father can hear.

Season 1

Unicorn: Warriors Eternal

2023Adult SwimAnimation

Genndy Tartakovsky's reincarnated heroes in an alternate nineteenth century, animated on a hand-painted look.

Season 1

Unikitty!

2017–2020Cartoon NetworkAnimation

The Lego Movie character given her own kingdom and a great deal more sugar.

Season 1

Union Square

1997–1998NBCComedy

A New York diner and the people in it, taken off after fifteen episodes.

Season 1

The Unit

2006–2009CBSDrama

Delta Force at work and their wives at home on the base, developed for television by David Mamet.

Season 1
Season 3

United States of Tara

2009–2011ShowtimeComedy

Diablo Cody's series about a woman with dissociative identity disorder, whose titles introduce every alter.

Season 1

University Challenge

1962–ITV / BBC TwoDocumentary

College Boy by Derek New, and a split screen that has stacked two teams on top of each other since 1962.

Season 1

Unorthodox

2020NetflixDrama

A young woman leaving a Satmar community in Williamsburg for Berlin.

Season 1

UnREAL

2015–2018LifetimeDrama

The production office of a dating format, written by someone who had worked in one.

Seasons 1–2

Unsolved Mysteries

1987–2002NBCDocumentary

Robert Stack in a trench coat, a synthesiser and a fog machine — the most frightening thing on American television that was not fiction.

Season 1

Unsolved Mysteries (2020)

2020–NetflixDocumentary

The revival, which keeps the original's silhouette and drops its host.

Season 1

The Untouchables

1959–1963ABCCrime

Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.

Season 1

The Upper Hand

1990–1996ITVComedy

Who's the Boss? remade for ITV, and one of the few American formats that worked coming the other way.

Season 1

Upstairs, Downstairs

1971–1975ITVDrama

The Edwardian household drama that Downton Abbey is, by its own creator's admission, a direct descendant of.

Season 1

Upstart Crow

2016–2020BBC TwoComedy

Ben Elton's Shakespeare sitcom, written in the shape of the plays it mocks.

Season 1

Urban Gothic

2000–2001Channel 5Horror

A British horror anthology made for late night on a channel three years old, and nastier than anything the BBC would have run.

Season 1

V

V

1984–1985NBCSci-Fi

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

Season 1

V Wars

2019NetflixHorror

A thawing glacier releasing a pathogen that turns some of the infected into vampires, from the Jonathan Maberry comics.

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

V.I.P.

1998–2002SyndicationCrime

Pamela Anderson fronting a celebrity protection agency she is unqualified to run, played for the joke.

Season 1

Valkyrien

2017NRK1Drama

A doctor running an illegal clinic in a disused Oslo underground station.

Season 1

The Vampire Diaries

2009–2017The CWHorror

Forty-eight seconds of Mystic Falls in fog, with the cast cards rebuilt every season around a body count that never stopped rising.

Season 1

Van Helsing

2016–2021SyfyHorror

A descendant of the vampire hunter waking into an America the vampires already hold.

Season 1

Vanderpump Rules

2013–BravoDocumentary

The staff of a Los Angeles restaurant, most of whom would rather be famous than employed.

Season 12

Veep

2012–2019HBOComedy

Fourteen seconds of seal, fanfare and a card. The brevity is the joke — an office with all the pomp of the presidency and none of the power.

Seasons 1–7

VeggieTales

1993–2015SyndicationAnimation

Bible stories told by vegetables, made on desktop computers in Chicago before any studio would have paid for it.

Season 1

Velvet

2014–2016Antena 3Drama

A 1950s Madrid couture house, and the seamstress and the heir who grew up in it together.

Season 1

Velvet Colección

2017–2019Movistar+Drama

The Velvet sequel, moving the fashion house from Madrid to Barcelona in 1967.

Season 1

The Venture Bros.

2003–2018Adult SwimAnimation

Jonny Quest's adventure-cartoon grammar played straight and then left to rot for fifteen years.

Season 1

Vera

2011–ITVCrime

Northumberland coast and moorland in twenty seconds, with no detective visible in any of it.

Season 1

Veronica Mars

2004–2019UPN / The CW / HuluCrime

The Dandy Warhols over surveillance photographs and a Californian beach town that is much worse than it looks.

Season 1

Veronica's Closet

1997–2000NBCComedy

A lingerie magnate whose marriage collapses in public, in one of NBC's Thursday night bets after Seinfeld.

Season 1
Season 3

A Very English Scandal

2018BBC OneDrama

Russell T Davies and Stephen Frears on the Thorpe affair, opened in the graphic register of a 1970s political cartoon.

Season 1

A Very Peculiar Practice

1986–1992BBC TwoDrama

A campus medical practice used as a way of writing about what was happening to universities.

Season 1

The Vicar of Dibley

1994–2020BBC OneComedy

Dawn French as the first woman priest in a village that expected a man.

Season 2

Vice Principals

2016–2017HBOComedy

A school crest and a sting, over in twelve seconds — the institutional dignity the two leads spend the series destroying.

Season 2

Vicious

2013–2016ITVComedy

Two actors who have lived together for fifty years, insulting each other in front of a studio audience.

Season 1

Victor and Valentino

2019–2022Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Two half-brothers in a Mesoamerican village where the folklore is real and mostly annoyed with them.

Season 1

Victoria

2016–2019ITVDrama

The young queen's first years, opened by a jewelled monogram assembling itself.

Season 1

Victoria Wood: As Seen on TV

1985–1987BBC TwoComedy

Sketches, songs at a piano, and the soap parody Acorn Antiques, which outlived the programme around it.

Season 1

Victorious

2010–2013NickelodeonComedy

A performing-arts high school, and the series that made Ariana Grande's name.

Season 1

The Vietnam War

2017PBSDocumentary

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part account, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross.

Season 1

Vigil

2021–2023BBC OneCrime

A death aboard a Trident submarine, investigated by a detective who cannot leave the boat.

Season 1

Vikings

2013–2020HistoryDrama

Bodies sinking through water over Fever Ray's 'If I Had a Heart' — a history-channel drama with a title sequence better than its remit.

Season 1

Vikings: Valhalla

2022–2024NetflixDrama

The Vikings sequel, set a century later, and made for a different service than the one that cancelled the parent.

Season 1

Vincenzo

2021tvNCrime

An Italian-Korean consigliere returning to Seoul, opened in the grammar of a mafia film.

Season 1

Vinland Saga

2019–NHK General TVAnimation

Norse violence scored with post-hardcore, and an opening that gets quieter as the series abandons the war it started with.

Season 1
Season 2

Vinyl

2016HBODrama

Record sleeves, needles and 1970s New York cut at the speed of the drug the show is about. One season only, so the titles outlived the series by a fortnight.

Season 1

Viper

1994–1999NBC / SyndicationCrime

A car that converts into an armoured attack vehicle, cancelled by NBC and revived for syndication.

Season 1

Virgin River

2019–NetflixDrama

A nurse practitioner who answers an advertisement for a job in a Californian mountain town.

Season 1

The Virginian

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

Season 1

The Vision of Escaflowne

1996TV TokyoAnimation

A schoolgirl pulled into a war between a hidden planet and an empire, scored throughout for full orchestra.

Season 1

Viva La Bam

2003–2005MTVComedy

Bam Margera staging elaborate stunts against his own parents, in the Jackass spin-off MTV built around a single house in Pennsylvania.

Season 1

Vlad

2019–2021Pro TVCrime

A Romanian crime series about a man returning to Bucharest to find who killed his brother.

Season 1

Voltron: Defender of the Universe

1984–1985SyndicationAnimation

Five lions forming a robot, explained by narration because the animation alone could not carry it — and the sequence is better for the commitment.

Season 1

The Vow

2020–2022HBODocumentary

NXIVM told largely through footage its own members shot while they were still inside it.

Season 1

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

W

Wacky Races

1968–1969CBSAnimation

Eleven cars introduced one at a time by a narrator, which is a title sequence that is also the entire premise.

Season 1

Wagon Train

1957–1965NBC / ABCDrama

A wagon company crossing to California, and the series Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek against.

Season 1

Walker

2021–2024The CWDrama

Walker, Texas Ranger remade for the CW with the ranger's family moved into the foreground.

Season 1

Walker, Texas Ranger

1993–2001CBSCrime

Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.

Season 3

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

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

Walking with Dinosaurs

1999BBC OneDocumentary

A natural history series about animals nobody has filmed, shot as though somebody had.

Season 1

Wallander

2005–2016SVT / BBC OneCrime

Henning Mankell's Ystad detective, filmed twice — in Swedish with Krister Henriksson, and in English with Kenneth Branagh.

Season 1

The Waltons

1972–1981CBSDrama

A Virginia mountain homestead in the Depression, introduced with a warmth the decade's other dramas had no interest in.

Season 1

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

Wander Over Yonder

2013–2016Disney Channel / Disney XDAnimation

Craig McCracken's relentlessly cheerful nomad and the villain he will not stop befriending.

Season 1

War of the Worlds

1988–1990SyndicationSci-Fi

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

Season 1

Warehouse 13

2009–2014SyfySci-Fi

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

Season 1

Warrior

2019–2023Cinemax / HBO MaxDrama

Ink-brush figures fighting across parchment, for a series built from a Bruce Lee treatment that took fifty years to reach air.

Season 1

Wataha

2014–2019HBO EuropeCrime

Border guards in the Bieszczady mountains, and the first Polish drama HBO made for itself.

Season 1

The Watcher

2022–NetflixHorror

A house filmed from outside, at the distance a neighbour would stand — which is the entire threat.

Season 1

Watchmen

2019HBODrama

Damon Lindelof's sequel to the comic, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the hardest entry in this catalogue to find footage of.

Season 1

Waterloo Road

2006–BBC OneDrama

A failing comprehensive in Rochdale, and the successor to Grange Hill as British television's school of record.

Season 1

The Wayans Bros.

1995–1999The WBComedy

Two brothers running a Harlem newsstand, made by the family whose name is over the door.

Season 1
Season 3

Wayward Pines

2015–2016FoxSci-Fi

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

Season 1

WCW Monday Nitro

1995–2001TNTDocumentary

The programme that made Monday nights a ratings war, and lost it.

Season 1

We Are Who We Are

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Luca Guadagnino's only television series, on an American army base in Veneto, opened in ten seconds.

Season 1

We Bare Bears

2015–2019Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Three bears stacked in a trenchcoat trying to fit into the Bay Area.

Season 1

We Can Be Heroes

2005ABC (Australia)Comedy

Chris Lilley playing all six finalists for Australian of the Year, in his first series.

Season 1

We Own This City

2022HBOCrime

Baltimore again, from the makers of The Wire, but shot as surveillance and body-camera footage rather than drama.

Season 1

We Were Liars

2025–Amazon Prime VideoDrama

A summer on a private island off Massachusetts, and the accident nobody in the family will describe.

Season 1

Weak Hero Class

2022–2025Wavve / NetflixDrama

A top student fighting his way through school violence, from the webtoon.

Season 2

Web Therapy

2011–2015ShowtimeComedy

Lisa Kudrow's improvised therapist, conducting three-minute sessions by video call.

Season 1

Webster

1983–1989ABC / SyndicationComedy

A boy adopted by his late father's team-mate, in the sitcom ABC ran in Diff'rent Strokes' shadow.

Season 1

WeCrashed

2022Apple TV+Drama

Startup iconography inflating and bursting — open-plan glass, beanbags and valuation charts, treated as one continuous bubble.

Season 1

Wednesday

2022–NetflixHorror

Gothic paper-cut animation and a harpsichord, doing in seventy-nine seconds what the Addams Family finger-snap did in eight.

Season 1
Season 2

Weeds

2005–2012ShowtimeComedy

'Little Boxes' over identical suburban houses — and from the third season the song is re-recorded by a different artist every episode, which makes this one of the most varied openings in television.

Season 2

Weird Science

1994–1998USA NetworkComedy

The film turned into a series, with the computer-made woman staying on as a regular.

Season 1

Welcome to the Wayne

2017–2019NickelodeonAnimation

An apartment building with a secret in every corridor, and children who map it.

Season 1

Welcome to Wrexham

2022–FXDocumentary

Two American actors buying a Welsh football club, and a title sequence that treats the town as the subject rather than them.

Season 1

Wentworth

2013–2021SoHo / Fox ShowcaseDrama

An Australian prison drama with a thirty-second opening that gets colder as the series goes on.

Season 8

Werewolf

1987–1988FoxHorror

One of the four series Fox launched its network with, and the first weekly werewolf on American television.

Season 1

The West Wing

1999–2006NBCDrama

Oil portraits, flags and W.G. Snuffy Walden's brass — an opening that treats the executive branch as a cathedral, which is the show's entire register.

Season 1
Season 5

The Westies

2025MGM+Crime

The Hell's Kitchen Irish mob, opened by Digital Kitchen in the grain of 1970s New York.

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

What I Like About You

2002–2006The WBComedy

Two sisters sharing a New York flat, named for the Romantics single it opens on.

Season 1

What If...?

2021–2024Disney+Animation

The Watcher narrating alternative versions of the films, with a sequence that assembles and dismantles itself every week.

Season 1

What We Do in the Shadows

2019–2024FXComedy

Gothic engraving and Norma Tanega's 'You're Dead' — a vampire mockumentary whose titles are the only part of it played completely straight.

Season 1

What's Happening Now!!

1985–1988SyndicationComedy

The seventies sitcom revived with the same cast grown up and running the diner.

Season 1

Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?

1973–1974BBC OneComedy

The sequel to the 1964 series, about two friends who have grown in opposite directions.

Season 1

The Wheel of Time

2021–Prime VideoDrama

A tapestry weaving itself, unpicking, and starting again — the series' cosmology of cycles, stated as a loom.

Season 1

Wheeler Dealers

2003–2023Discovery Real Time / Discovery ChannelDocumentary

One man buys a car badly, the other repairs it, and the profit is announced at the end whether there is any or not.

Season 1

When Calls the Heart

2014–Hallmark ChannelDrama

A city teacher posted to a frontier coal town, and the longest-running scripted series Hallmark has made.

Season 1

Where 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

Where on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?

1994–1999Fox KidsAnimation

The geography game animated, with Rita Moreno as the thief and a jazz score to chase her with.

Season 1

Where the Heart Is

1997–2006ITVDrama

District nurses in a Yorkshire town, which ran nine years on almost no incident.

Season 1

White Collar

2009–2014USA NetworkCrime

Nine seconds. A fedora, a card, and straight into it.

Season 1

White House Plumbers

2023HBOComedy

Eleven seconds of period government typography, played as though the men behind it were competent.

Season 1

The White Lotus

2021–HBODrama

Colonial wallpaper that will not behave — painted paradise curdling into something predatory while the resort's guests are nowhere in it. Rebuilt from scratch for each new location, with a new theme every time.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

The White Princess

2017StarzDrama

The sequel to The White Queen, following Elizabeth of York into the Tudor marriage.

Season 1

The White Queen

2013Starz / BBC OneDrama

Roses, water and heraldry — the Wars of the Roses introduced through the emblems both sides died for.

Season 1

The White Shadow

1978–1981CBSDrama

A white ex-professional coaching basketball at a mostly black Los Angeles high school.

Season 1

Whitechapel

2009–2013ITVCrime

Modern police work in the streets the Ripper murders happened in, with each series restaging an old case.

Season 1

The Whitest Kids U' Know

2007–2011IFCComedy

A New York sketch troupe who filmed their own pilot and sold it, opening on a theme they perform themselves.

Season 1

Who Do You Think You Are?

2004–BBC OneDocumentary

One celebrity's ancestry per episode, opening on photographs that dissolve into each other backwards.

Season 1

Who Killed Sara?

2021–2022NetflixCrime

Photographs, parachute rigging and water — the single incident the whole series circles, restaged in the titles every season.

Seasons 1–3

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?

1998–ITVDocumentary

Keith and Matthew Strachan's music, which unusually runs continuously under the questions rather than only over the titles — one of the few game shows scored like a thriller.

Season 1

Who's the Boss?

1984–1992ABCComedy

A theme called 'Brand New Life' over a move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, which is the entire premise sung aloud.

Season 1

Whose Line Is It Anyway?

1998–ABC / The CWComedy

Improv games where the points don't matter, opened by a scramble of the cast in freeze-frame.

Season 1

Why Women Kill

2019–2021CBS All Access / Paramount+Drama

Marc Cherry's anthology, three eras in the same house in the first season.

Season 1

Wife Swap

2003–2009Channel 4Documentary

Two households exchanged for a fortnight, in ten seconds of titles that give away the whole premise.

Season 1

The Wiggles

1998–ABC (Australia)Comedy

Four early-childhood teachers from Sydney who worked out that a children's band could tour like a rock one.

Season 1

Wild 'n Out

2005–MTVComedy

Improvised comedy played as a team sport, and the longest-running programme MTV has.

Season 16

The Wild Thornberrys

1998–2004NickelodeonAnimation

A wildlife-documentary family whose daughter can talk to the animals they are filming.

Season 1

The Wild Wild West

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

Season 1

Wilfred

2011–2014FX / FXXComedy

A man who sees his neighbour's dog as an Australian in a dog suit, which the series never explains.

Season 1

Will & Grace

1998–2020NBCComedy

Thirteen seconds and a piano vamp, from a sitcom confident enough not to explain itself.

Season 1
Season 9

Willo the Wisp

1981BBC OneAnimation

Kenneth Williams voicing every character, in five-minute films made to fill the gap before the news.

Season 1

Wind Breaker

2024–MBSAnimation

A delinquent school whose students defend the town rather than terrorise it.

Season 2

The Winds of War

1983ABCDrama

Wouk's novel as eighteen hours across a single week, and the most expensive thing American television had made.

Season 1

Wings

1990–1997NBCComedy

A Nantucket airline run by two brothers, opened by Schubert.

Season 1

Winning Time

2022–2023HBODrama

Grainy 16mm, video tape and film stock shuffled together so the show looks like footage of the era rather than a reconstruction of it, over a disco horn line.

Season 1

The Wire

2002–2008HBOCrime

The same song recorded five different ways. Every season re-cuts the images and hands 'Way Down in the Hole' to a new artist, matching the institution that season is about.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 2 more

Wiseguy

1987–1990CBSCrime

An undercover agent left inside one organisation for a whole arc at a time, which is roughly where American television learned to serialise.

Season 1

Wishbone

1995–1998PBSDrama

A Jack Russell terrier imagining himself into classic literature, one novel per episode.

Season 1

Witchblade

2001–2002TNTSci-Fi

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

Season 1

The Witcher

2019–NetflixDrama

Monsters, coins and continents cut into a woodblock-print style, with the medallion turning at the centre of it.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

Witches of East End

2013–2014LifetimeHorror

A mother who has kept from her two daughters that all three of them are witches.

Season 1

Without a Trace

2002–2009CBSCrime

Missing-person photographs and a clock, in thirty-two seconds that state the format precisely.

Season 1

Wizards Beyond Waverly Place

2024–2026Disney ChannelComedy

Wizards of Waverly Place continued a generation on, with the original lead handing the family over.

Season 1

WKRP in Cincinnati

1978–1982CBSComedy

A radio-station sitcom whose theme was written to sound like a record the station would actually play.

Season 1

Wolfblood

2012–2017CBBCHorror

Teenagers who are not werewolves but something older, in a children's series that took the mythology seriously.

Season 1

A Woman of Substance

1985Channel 4 / SyndicationDrama

Barbara Taylor Bradford's servant girl who builds a department store empire, across three nights.

Season 1

The Wombles

1973–1975BBC OneAnimation

Litter-collecting creatures under Wimbledon Common, whose fictional band had six top-twenty singles in one year.

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

The Wonder Years

1988–1993ABCComedy

Home-movie footage and Joe Cocker singing 'With a Little Help from My Friends' — an opening that establishes the entire retrospective frame before a word of narration.

Season 1

Wonderfalls

2004FoxComedy

Souvenir figurines that talk, in a Niagara Falls gift shop — Bryan Fuller's first series and a direct ancestor of Pushing Daisies.

Season 1

The Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse

2020–2023Disney+Animation

The Paul Rudish shorts continued, drawn in the 1930s line and paced like it.

Season 1

The Woods

2020NetflixCrime

Harlan Coben adapted into Polish, with a prosecutor reopening the summer camp his sister vanished from.

Season 1

Workaholics

2011–2017Comedy CentralComedy

Three telemarketers who share a house and a job and never leave either, in thirteen seconds.

Season 1

Working

1997–1999NBCComedy

A graduate's first office job, narrated by him straight to camera.

Season 1

The World at War

1973–1974ITV (Thames)Documentary

Thames Television's twenty-six part history of the Second World War, still the benchmark for the form.

Season 1

World of Sport

1965–1985ITVDocumentary

ITV's answer to Grandstand, which is remembered now almost entirely for the wrestling at four o'clock.

Season 20

Wormwood

2017NetflixDocumentary

Errol Morris on Frank Olson's death, told half as interview and half as drama, with titles for both halves at once.

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

Worzel Gummidge

1979–1981ITVComedy

A scarecrow who swaps heads for different moods, played by a former Doctor Who.

Season 1

Would I Lie to You?

2007–BBC OneComedy

A panel show built on whether a story about a guest is true, which turns out to be an unusually durable format.

Season 4

Wycliffe

1993–1998ITVCrime

A detective superintendent working Cornwall, filmed largely on the coast it is set on.

Season 1

Wynonna Earp

2016–2021SyfyHorror

Twenty-one seconds of western iconography and a revolver, for a show about Wyatt Earp's great-great-granddaughter.

Season 1

X

The X Factor

2004–2018ITVDocumentary

Simon Cowell's format after Pop Idol, opening on a spotlight sweep and a fanfare rebuilt every few series.

Season 1

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

X-Men '97

2024–Disney+Animation

The 1992 series' opening rebuilt shot for shot in modern animation — a revival that understood the titles were the thing people actually remembered.

Season 1

X-Men: The Animated Series

1992–1997Fox KidsAnimation

A guitar riff, a name card per character, and nothing else — the most efficient superhero roll-call ever animated, and the reason the 2024 revival copied it exactly.

Season 1

Xena: Warrior Princess

1995–2001SyndicationDrama

A narrated mythological premise and a war cry, from the spinoff that comprehensively outgrew Hercules.

Season 1

Xiaolin Showdown

2003–2006Kids' WBAnimation

Four apprentice monks collecting artefacts, in a series that borrows its fight grammar from wuxia rather than from superheroes.

Season 1

Y

Years and Years

2019BBC One / HBODrama

Russell T Davies following one Manchester family fifteen years into a future that arrives faster than they do.

Season 1

Yellowjackets

2021–ShowtimeHorror

Home-video and yearbook imagery cut with things that should not be in a yearbook, and a new needle-drop each season.

Season 2

Yellowstone

2018–2024Paramount NetworkDrama

Montana filmed as a land claim — cattle, mountains and fence line, with the ranch's brand doing the title card.

Season 1

Yes Minister

1980–1984BBC TwoComedy

Whitehall obstructing its own minister, opened by Gerald Scarfe caricatures drawing themselves.

Seasons 1–3

Yes, Dear

2000–2006CBSComedy

Two couples raising children in the same Los Angeles house, one of them anxious about it and one not.

Season 1

Yes, Prime Minister

1986–1988, 2013BBC Two / GoldComedy

The sequel that promotes Hacker to Number Ten, and the 2013 revival that recast the whole thing.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

Yin Yang Yo!

2006–2009Disney XD / Toon DisneyAnimation

Twin rabbits studying woo-foo under a panda, in a series that never once slowed down.

Season 1

Yo soy Betty, la fea

1999–2001RCN (Colombia)Comedy

The most adapted television format in history — remade in more than twenty countries, including as Ugly Betty, which this catalogue also holds.

Season 1

The Yogi Bear Show

1961–1962SyndicationAnimation

The supporting character given his own half hour, and a pic-a-nic basket that outlasted the studio.

Season 1

You

2018–Lifetime / NetflixCrime

A bookshop manager narrating his own stalking in the second person, moved to Netflix after one season.

Season 1

You Can't Do That on Television

1979–1990NickelodeonComedy

The Ottawa-made sketch show that gave Nickelodeon its slime, and its house style for a decade.

Season 1

You Rang, M'Lord?

1988–1993BBC OneComedy

Croft and Perry's between-the-wars house, played at fifty minutes an episode rather than thirty.

Season 1

You're the Worst

2014–2019FX / FXXComedy

Two people who should not be together, opened in twenty-two seconds of exactly that.

Season 1

The Young and the Restless

1973–CBSDrama

Genoa City, and the daytime ratings leader in America for more than thirty-five consecutive years.

Season 16
Season 45

The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles

1992–1996ABCDrama

Indiana Jones tutored by the twentieth century itself, each episode setting him down beside somebody who was really there.

Season 1

Young James Herriot

2011BBC OneDrama

The veterinary student years, three episodes long, from the same books All Creatures Great & Small comes from.

Season 1

Young Justice

2010–2022Cartoon Network / HBO MaxAnimation

Twenty-two seconds and a card, from a superhero series that assumed its audience already knew everyone.

Season 1

The Young Ones

1982–1984BBC TwoComedy

Four students in a condemned house, and the series that ended the British sitcom's post-war manners in one go.

Season 1

The Young Pope

2016HBO / Sky AtlanticDrama

Paolo Sorrentino's American pope, opened by a walk past papal portraits that come apart as he passes.

Season 1

The Young Riders

1989–1992ABCDrama

Pony Express riders in the years before the Civil War, with Billy the Kid among them.

Season 1