Breaking Bad
Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.
Breaking Bad kept one opening title sequence, 21 seconds long, across seasons 1–5.
At 21 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on AMC in 2008, when Mad Men was also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–5
21sOne sequence for the whole series — only the credited names change.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
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
1 sequence
Lost
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