Boardwalk Empire
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.
Boardwalk Empire kept one opening title sequence, 93 seconds long, across seasons 1–5.
At 93 seconds, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on HBO in 2010, when Curb Your Enthusiasm, In Treatment and The Comeback were also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–5
93sUnchanged across the run. The anachronistic guitar under a 1920s image is the whole trick.
More crime opening titles from the 2010s
1 sequence
Peaky Blinders
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
1 sequence
The Rookie
A five-second card: THE ROOKIE in tall white capitals over a row of Los Angeles palms against a hazy blue sky, and the episode is under way.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Better Call Saul
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
1 sequence
Fargo
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
4 sequences
True Detective
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
1 sequence
The Blacklist
Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.
- Season 1