24
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.
24 opens with a main title sequence of 12 seconds.
At 12 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Fox in 2001, when America's Most Wanted, The X-Files and MADtv were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
12sTwelve seconds — the clock, the logo, and back to the hour.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequence
Breaking Bad
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
1 sequence
Grey's Anatomy
Twenty-six seconds of surgical instruments and a guitar figure, from a series that has now outlived most of the shows that copied it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Mad Men
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
1 sequence
Gilmore Girls
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
2 sequences
House
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
1 sequence
Desperate Housewives
Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.
- Season 1