John Adams
The thirteen colonies' flags and founding documents animated into a single banner, over a fife-and-drum theme.
John Adams opens with a main title sequence of 143 seconds.
At 143 seconds, it opens well above the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on HBO in 2008, when Curb Your Enthusiasm, In Treatment and The Comeback were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
143sThe miniseries' opening.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequenceBreaking Bad
Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.
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1 sequenceGrey'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.
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1 sequenceMad 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.
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1 sequenceGilmore Girls
Carole King's 'Where You Lead' rewritten as a mother-and-daughter duet, over a small Connecticut town in every season at once.
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2 sequencesHouse
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1 sequenceDesperate Housewives
Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.
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