Fringe
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.
Fringe rebuilt its titles: three distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1, 4 and 5, running between 21 and 23 seconds.
At 23 seconds at its longest, it opens well under the 58-second median for sci-fi sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Fox in 2008, when America's Most Wanted, The X-Files and MADtv were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Fringe did so two times.
All 3 opening title sequences
Season 1
22sThe first season's blue version. Later episodes recoloured the same sequence — amber, red, silver — to signal a different reality, which makes this one variant of several.
Season 4
21sThe amber version. Same sequence, same terms, different palette — and the colour is doing the exposition, telling you which timeline the episode belongs to.
Season 5
23sThe final season jumps to 2036, and the floating terms change with it — the vocabulary of the opening tracks what the show is now about.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequence
Smallville
Remy Zero's 'Save Me' over a cast that changed almost completely across ten years, with the credits rebuilt around each departure.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Firefly
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
1 sequence
Heroes
An eclipse and a card, in twelve seconds. The restraint is the point — a superhero show refusing to open like one.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Star Trek: Enterprise
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
4 sequences
Stargate Atlantis
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
1 sequence
Misfits
Community-service orange and a storm, with superpowers treated as one more thing happening to people who already had enough going on.
- Season 1