Dallas
A three-panel split screen over the Dallas skyline, and the theme that defined what a primetime soap was allowed to sound like.
Dallas kept one opening title sequence, 86 seconds long, across season 10.
At 86 seconds, it opens well above the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on CBS in 1978, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 10
86sThe version broadcast in 1986, opening titles only. The split-screen panels were recut repeatedly across thirteen years, so this is one arrangement of many.
More drama opening titles from the 1970s
1 sequenceThe Waltons
A Virginia mountain homestead in the Depression, introduced with a warmth the decade's other dramas had no interest in.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Young and the Restless
Genoa City, and the daytime ratings leader in America for more than thirty-five consecutive years.
- Season 16
- Season 45
2 sequences
Emmerdale
A Yorkshire Dales farming serial that dropped Farm from its name in 1989 and kept the landscape.
- Season 27
- Season 49
1 sequenceEmergency!
Los Angeles County paramedics, made with the fire department's cooperation and credited with popularising the profession.
- Season 1
1 sequenceRoots
The miniseries that changed what American television believed it was allowed to broadcast, opened with Quincy Jones and a slave ship.
- Season 1
2 sequences
All My Children
Pine Valley, Agnes Nixon's serial, and the first American soap to put issue storylines in daytime.
- Season 23
- Season 41