Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The franchise's chung-chung and a narrated premise, held for a quarter of a century — the longest-running opening in this catalogue by some distance.
Law & Order: Special Victims Unit rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 15, running between 45 and 56 seconds.
It arrived on NBC in 1999, when Another World, Columbo and Mad About You were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Law & Order: Special Victims Unit did so once.
All 2 opening title sequences
Season 1
56sThe title sequence from the franchise's own channel.
Season 15
45sThe fifteenth season's version — the same structure, fourteen years of cast changes later.
More crime opening titles from the 1990s
2 sequences
Law & Order
The original, and the source of the two-note sting that half of American television has been quoting ever since.
- Season 1
- Season 20
1 sequence
Midsomer Murders
A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Oz
HBO's first hour-long drama, and the opening that established what the network's title sequences would be for the next twenty years — narrated, tattooed, and entirely unwilling to reassure you.
- Season 1
- Season 4
1 sequence
Silent Witness
Forensic pathology rendered as abstraction — a thirty-year-old series whose titles have been redesigned repeatedly while the eye at the centre of them stayed.
- Season 21
1 sequenceWalker, Texas Ranger
Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.
- Season 3
1 sequenceNYPD Blue
Mike Post's theme over a New York shot with the handheld looseness that got the show its reputation before anyone had seen an episode.
- Season 1