B

229 shows257 sequences

1 sequence

Babar

1989–1991HBOAnimation

De Brunhof's elephant king animated in Canada, and told mostly in flashback to his own children.

Season 1

1 sequence

Baby Reindeer

2024NetflixDrama

Eighteen seconds and almost nothing in them, which for a series this claustrophobic is the correct amount of air.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Baby-Sitters Club

2020–2021NetflixComedy

The Ann M. Martin books adapted with a hand-lettered, sticker-book title sequence.

Season 1

5 sequences

Babylon 5

1993–1998Syndication / TNTSci-Fi

Five seasons, five openings, and each one changes who is allowed to speak. The monologue passes from the station's first commander to his successor to his second-in-command, then splinters across the whole cast, then stops being a monologue at all.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 2 more

1 sequence

Babylon Berlin

2017–Sky 1 / Das ErsteCrime

Weimar Berlin as a cabaret poster — Bauhaus type, jazz and a city that already knows how this ends.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bachelor

2002–ABCDocumentary

The format that turned courtship into an elimination bracket, and gave the rose its own verb.

Season 1

1 sequence

Back at the Barnyard

2007–2011NickelodeonAnimation

Farm animals who behave like people the moment the farmer leaves.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Backyardigans

2004–2013Nick Jr.Animation

Five animals whose garden becomes a different world every episode, with a full musical score in a different genre each time.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bad Banks

2018–2020ZDF / ArteDrama

Frankfurt and London investment banking, made as a European co-production and shot in three languages.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bad Education

2012–BBC ThreeComedy

Jack Whitehall as a teacher less mature than his pupils.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bad Girls

1999–2006ITVDrama

A women's prison wing written by two of Prisoner Cell Block H's admirers, and ITV's answer to it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bad Girls Club

2006–2017OxygenDocumentary

Seven women in a house chosen for how badly they were expected to get on.

Season 2

1 sequence

Bad Monkey

2024–Apple TV+Crime

Florida Keys sunshine playing over things that should not be in it — a comic crime series that keeps its tone in the titles.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bad Sisters

2022–Apple TV+Comedy

Five sisters and the man they intend to kill, arranged like a family portrait that keeps rearranging itself.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bagpuss

1974BBC OneAnimation

Thirteen episodes, and a sepia photograph opening that colours in when the cat wakes up — Smallfilms doing the whole premise in the titles.

Season 1

1 sequence

Balamory

2002–2005CBeebiesComedy

A Scottish island village painted in primary colours, with a theme that asks what the story is in it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Ballers

2015–2019HBOComedy

Miami, money and slow motion, cut to Big K.R.I.T. — an opening entirely comfortable with what the show is selling.

Season 1

2 sequences

Ballykissangel

1996–2001BBC OneDrama

An English priest posted to a village in Wicklow, and the BBC's most watched Sunday drama of the late nineties.

Season 1
Season 6

1 sequence

The Banana Splits Adventure Hour

1968–1970NBCComedy

Four costumed animals in a rock band, wrapped around cartoons and serials, with a theme that has outlived all of it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bananaman

1983–1986BBC OneAnimation

The Beano strip animated with the Goodies doing the voices, and a narrator who explains the transformation every week.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bananas in Pyjamas

1992–2001ABC (Australia)Comedy

Two bananas, three teddy bears and a rat, made by the ABC and sold to eighty countries.

Season 1

1 sequence

Band of Brothers

2001HBODrama

Michael Kamen's theme over pencil sketches of soldiers dissolving into photographs — two and a half minutes, and among the most imitated title sequences ever made for television.

Season 1

1 sequence

Banshee

2013–2016CinemaxCrime

Amish country and violence intercut at the same speed, from the network's short-lived attempt at prestige action.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bar Rescue

2011–2017SpikeDocumentary

A consultant shouting a failing bar back into business over three days.

Season 1

1 sequence

Barbarians

2020–2022NetflixDrama

Fifteen seconds of iron and forest — a card rather than a sequence, for a series about an ambush.

Seasons 1–2

1 sequence

Baretta

1975–1978ABCCrime

An undercover detective and a cockatoo, with a Sammy Davis Jr. theme.

Season 1

1 sequence

Barnaby Jones

1973–1980CBSCrime

Buddy Ebsen as a retired investigator who comes back to work after his son is killed.

Season 1

1 sequence

Barney & Friends

1992–2010PBSComedy

A purple dinosaur who appears when children imagine him, and a closing song that became a schoolyard parody format.

Season 1

1 sequence

Barney Miller

1975–1982ABCComedy

A bass line so good it outlived the show entirely — a police-station sitcom remembered chiefly for forty seconds of funk.

Season 3

1 sequence

Baroness von Sketch Show

2016–2021CBCComedy

Four women writing and performing every sketch, with no host, no studio audience and no linking material.

Season 1

1 sequence

Barry

2018–2023HBOComedy

A plain card and a held shot, gone in under half a minute. The show's whole comic method — refusing to signal what kind of scene you are in — starts with its titles refusing to signal anything at all.

Season 2

1 sequence

The Basil Brush Show

2002–2007CBBCComedy

The fox puppet given a sitcom of his own, forty years after he first turned up on somebody else's.

Seasons 1–4

1 sequence

The Bastard Executioner

2015FXDrama

Kurt Sutter's fourteenth-century Wales, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bates Motel

2013–2017A&EHorror

Norman Bates before Psycho, in eleven seconds of a neon sign that everyone already knows the ending of.

Season 1

2 sequences

Batman

1966–1968ABCCrime

Cartoon versions of the cast run at the camera and fight their way through the rogues' gallery, because the budget for that in live action did not exist and the animation is funnier anyway. Neal Hefti's twelve-bar riff has an eight-voice chorus whose entire lyric is the word Batman.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3

1 sequence

The Batman

2004–2008Kids' WBAnimation

The series that had to follow Batman: The Animated Series and chose to look nothing like it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Batman Beyond

1999–2001The WBAnimation

The same animation house forty years on, trading the orchestral score for industrial percussion and a Gotham that has kept getting worse.

Season 1

1 sequence

Batman: Caped Crusader

2024–Prime VideoAnimation

The Animated Series team returning to a 1940s Gotham, with titles that quote their own 1992 sequence without repeating it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Batman: The Animated Series

1992–1995Fox KidsAnimation

No dialogue, no narration, and the character's name never appears — a full orchestral score over a robbery, a rooftop and a silhouette, and the audience is trusted to work it out.

Season 1

1 sequence

Batman: The Brave and the Bold

2008–2011Cartoon NetworkAnimation

Batman team-ups in the Silver Age idiom, opened with a straight-faced superhero fanfare.

Season 1

1 sequence

Battle Creek

2015CBSCrime

Vince Gilligan's script from a decade earlier, finally made, and cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

1 sequence

Battle of the Planets

1978–1980SyndicationAnimation

Gatchaman recut for America with a robot added to explain away the footage that was cut.

Season 1

1 sequence

BattleBots

2000–2002Comedy CentralDocumentary

Home-built robots destroying each other inside a perspex box, and the reason a good many engineers exist.

Season 1

3 sequences

Battlestar Galactica

2004–2009Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi

The only title sequence on this site that reports the plot. Under the Gayatri Mantra and the Cylon text, the American version ends on a count of the surviving human population — a figure recalculated for each episode, so the titles get worse as the show goes on.

Seasons 1–2
Season 3
Season 4

1 sequence

Battlestar Galactica (1978)

1978–1979ABCSci-Fi

Stu Phillips's fanfare over Colonial Vipers and a narrated prologue about a lost tribe of humanity — the version the 2004 series would later strip of every ounce of that grandeur.

Season 1

1 sequence

Batwoman

2019–2022The CWSci-Fi

Gotham without Batman, with the cowl passing twice across three seasons.

Season 1

1 sequence

Baywatch

1989–2001NBC / SyndicationDrama

Los Angeles County lifeguards, and at its peak the most-watched television programme on Earth.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Beachcombers

1972–1990CBCDrama

Log salvage on the British Columbia coast, and the longest-running dramatic series Canadian television has made.

Season 14

1 sequence

Beakman's World

1992–1998TLC / CBSDocumentary

Science explained by a man in a green coat and a person in a rat suit, which is more rigorous than it sounds.

Season 4

1 sequence

Bear in the Big Blue House

1997–2006Playhouse DisneyComedy

A seven-foot bear who greets the camera by smelling it, and a moon in the window who sings the goodbye song.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beast King GoLion

1981–1982TV TokyoAnimation

Five lions that combine into one robot, later recut in America as Voltron.

Season 1

3 sequences

Beast Wars: Transformers

1996–1999Syndication / YTVAnimation

Transformers rebuilt in computer graphics on a fraction of the budget, which is why everybody is an animal.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3

1 sequence

Beastars

2019–2021Fuji TVAnimation

A boarding school of carnivores and herbivores, opened by a stop-motion sequence unlike the series it introduces.

Season 1

1 sequence

BeastMaster

1999–2002SyndicationDrama

The 1982 film continued as a series, made in Australia.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Beatles Anthology

1995ABCDocumentary

The band's own account of itself, assembled with the three surviving members.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beau Séjour

2017–2021VRTCrime

A murdered girl who can be seen by five people, investigating her own death in a Flemish hotel.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beavis and Butt-Head

1993–MTVAnimation

Two teenagers on a sofa, and a guitar riff played about as well as they would play it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beck

1997–TV4 (Sweden)Crime

Martin Beck, adapted from the Sjöwall and Wahlöö novels that invented Nordic crime fiction, and still running after thirty years.

Season 27

1 sequence

Becker

1998–2004CBSComedy

A Bronx doctor with no patience for his patients, and a diner where nobody is much happier.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beef

2023–NetflixDrama

A different David Choe painting behind the title card of every episode, so the opening is a gallery hung one canvas at a time across the season.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beetlejuice

1989–1991ABC / Fox KidsAnimation

The Burton film animated with Danny Elfman's theme intact, and Lydia and the ghost as friends rather than adversaries.

Season 1

1 sequence

Before

2024Apple TV+Horror

Billy Crystal as a child psychiatrist and a boy who knows things he should not.

Season 1

1 sequence

Behind Her Eyes

2021NetflixDrama

A secretary having an affair with her employer and befriending his wife, in a thriller with an ending people argued about for weeks.

Season 1

1 sequence

Being Erica

2009–2011CBCDrama

A therapist sending his patient back to her own regrets, one per session.

Season 1

1 sequence

Being Human

2008–2013BBC ThreeHorror

A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a Bristol rental, introduced with the flatness of a house-share advert.

Season 1

1 sequence

Belfer

2016–2018Canal+ PolandCrime

A teacher arriving in a small Polish town where a pupil has been murdered, and finding the town would rather he did not ask.

Season 1

1 sequence

Ben & Holly's Little Kingdom

2009–2013Channel 5 / Nick Jr.Animation

Elves and fairies from the people who made Peppa Pig, drawn in the same flat two dimensions.

Season 1

1 sequence

Ben 10

2005–2008Cartoon NetworkAnimation

A theme that lists the premise as a countdown, over a boy who becomes ten different aliens.

Seasons 1–2

1 sequence

The Ben Stiller Show

1992–1993FoxComedy

Thirteen episodes, cancelled, then given an Emmy — the writers' room that produced most of the next decade's American comedy.

Season 1

1 sequence

Benidorm

2007–2018ITVComedy

An all-inclusive Spanish resort and the same British families returning to it for ten series.

Season 1

1 sequence

Benson

1979–1986ABCComedy

The Soap butler promoted into his own series and eventually into the lieutenant governorship.

Season 2

1 sequence

Bergerac (2025)

2025–U&DramaCrime

Jersey's detective revived forty-four years after the BBC original, with the island doing the same work it always did.

Season 1

1 sequence

Berlin

2023–NetflixCrime

The Money Heist prequel, giving the character who died in the second season a heist of his own.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bernie Mac Show

2001–2006FoxComedy

A comedian raising his sister's three children and turning to camera to explain himself about it.

Seasons 3–5

1 sequence

Berserk

1997–1998Nippon TVAnimation

'Tell Me Why' — an English-language pop song with almost no relationship to the series it introduces, which has become part of the show's reputation.

Season 1

1 sequence

Better Call Saul

2015–2022AMCCrime

A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.

Seasons 1–6

1 sequence

Better Things

2016–2022FXComedy

Twenty-nine seconds of domestic clutter, filmed with the affection of someone who lives in it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Betty

2020–2021HBOComedy

A group of women skateboarding in New York, expanded from the film Skate Kitchen.

Season 1

1 sequence

Between the Lions

2000–2010PBSAnimation

A family of lions running a library, in a reading programme built by the people who made Sesame Street.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Beverly Hillbillies

1962–1971CBSComedy

"The Ballad of Jed Clampett" — a bluegrass number that reached number one on the country chart while the series was running.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beverly Hills, 90210

1990–2000FoxDrama

Freeze-frames of a cast grinning at the camera over a synth-brass hook — the template every teen drama of the decade copied.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bewitched

1964–1972ABCComedy

Animated witches and a swing arrangement — a live-action sitcom that opens as a cartoon, which was the only way to show the magic on a 1964 budget.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beyond Evil

2021JTBCCrime

Two detectives in a small town, each convinced the other is the killer.

Season 1

1 sequence

Beyond Paradise

2023–BBC One / BritBoxCrime

Death in Paradise's detective moved to Devon, where the weather is the joke.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bibleman

1995–2010TBNSci-Fi

A superhero with a lightsaber and scripture, made straight to video and then broadcast.

Season 1

2 sequences

Big Bad Beetleborgs

1996–1998Fox KidsSci-Fi

Three children granted the powers of their favourite comic by a phasm they let out of a haunted house.

Season 1
Season 2

1 sequence

The Big Bang Theory

2007–2019CBSComedy

Fourteen billion years of natural history in twenty-three seconds, flashing past at one image per beat.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big Boys

2022–2025Channel 4Comedy

Jack Rooke's university comedy, which uses short animated stings rather than one fixed opening.

Season 1

2 sequences

Big Brother (UK)

2000–Channel 4 / ITVDocumentary

The eye, and a theme built out of the sound of the house — the format that made surveillance into a light entertainment brand.

Season 1
Season 8

1 sequence

The Big C

2010–2013ShowtimeComedy

Laura Linney given a terminal diagnosis and deciding to stop being polite about anything.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big City Greens

2018–Disney ChannelAnimation

A country family relocated to the city, opened at the speed of a banjo run.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Big Comfy Couch

1992–2006YTVComedy

A clown and her doll on a couch, with a clock-stretch exercise that gave the programme its shape.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Big Fat Quiz of the Year

2004–Channel 4Comedy

An annual quiz about the year just gone, running long past midnight and rebuilt from scratch each December.

Season 10

1 sequence

Big Hero 6: The Series

2017–2021Disney XD / Disney ChannelAnimation

The film's team continued in 2D, in a San Fransokyo drawn rather than modelled.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big Little Lies

2017–2019HBODrama

The school run, filmed like a threat. Mothers driving the coast road to Monterey with children in the back seat, over Michael Kiwanuka's 'Cold Little Heart'.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big Love

2006–2011HBODrama

A family skating on ice that ends, over 'God Only Knows' — a marriage held up by something visibly about to give way.

Seasons 1–3

1 sequence

Big Mouth

2017–2025NetflixAnimation

Puberty rendered as a marching band of anxieties, with the hormone monsters given equal billing to the children.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big Time Rush

2009–2013NickelodeonComedy

A manufactured boy band playing a manufactured boy band, which then toured as one.

Season 1

1 sequence

Big Train

1998–2002BBC TwoComedy

Graham Linehan and Arthur Mathews' sketch show, which opens on nothing explaining itself and never does.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Big Valley

1965–1969ABCDrama

Barbara Stanwyck running a Stockton ranch, in the western that gave a woman the top billing.

Seasons 1–4

1 sequence

The Biggest Loser

2004–2020NBCDocumentary

A weight-loss competition whose titles were rebuilt around whichever pairing the season had chosen.

Season 5

3 sequences

The Bill

1983–2010ITVCrime

A London police station shot at ground level, under a rule the programme kept for twenty-seven years: no scene an officer is not present for.

Season 1
Season 4
Season 5

1 sequence

Bill Nye the Science Guy

1993–1998PBS / SyndicationDocumentary

Science for children at the speed of a music video, with a theme that shouts the presenter's name.

Season 1

1 sequence

Billions

2016–2023ShowtimeDrama

Manhattan money photographed like weather — glass, helicopters and trading floors, with no people in any of it.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bing

2014–2019CBeebiesAnimation

A preschool rabbit and the small woollen carer who manages him, from Ted Dewan's books.

Season 1

1 sequence

Biohackers

2020–2021NetflixSci-Fi

A German medical student who chose her university for the professor she intends to expose.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bionic Woman

1976–1978ABC / NBCSci-Fi

The Six Million Dollar Man's spinoff, with the same narrated-reconstruction structure and a better theme.

Season 1

2 sequences

Birds of a Feather

1989–2020BBC One / ITVComedy

Two sisters in Chigwell whose husbands are both in prison.

Season 1
Season 10

1 sequence

A Bit of Fry & Laurie

1987–1995BBC TwoComedy

Sketches written and performed by two people who had just left Cambridge and sounded like it.

Season 2

1 sequence

Bitten

2014–2016SpaceHorror

The only female werewolf in existence, from the Kelley Armstrong novels, made in Canada.

Season 2

1 sequence

Black Bird

2022Apple TV+Crime

Prison corridors and Midwestern fields intercut, so the confinement and the killing ground read as one landscape.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Books

2000–2004Channel 4Comedy

A bookshop run by a man who does not want customers, from Dylan Moran and Graham Linehan.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Clover

2017–2021TV TokyoAnimation

A boy born without magic in a world made of it, across thirteen different openings.

Season 4

1 sequence

Black Dynamite

2012–2015Adult SwimAnimation

The blaxploitation pastiche film continued as a series, with the seventies title grammar intact.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Jesus

2014–2019Adult SwimComedy

Aaron McGruder's live-action series, with Jesus living in Compton.

Season 2

1 sequence

A Black Lady Sketch Show

2019–2023HBOComedy

Robin Thede's sketch series, opened by a title sequence with more production value than most of the sketches.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Lightning

2018–2021The CWSci-Fi

A retired hero returning to the work as a school principal in his fifties.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Mirror

2011–Channel 4 / NetflixSci-Fi

A screen cracking, and that is the whole thing. Eighteen seconds of glitch and a fracture spreading across black glass — an anthology refusing to introduce anything, because each episode is a different show.

Seasons 1–7

1 sequence

Black Sails

2014–2017StarzDrama

Carved wood and bone — ships, skulls and rigging rendered as scrimshaw, animated as though the carving were happening as you watch.

Season 1

1 sequence

Black Summer

2019–2021NetflixHorror

The Z Nation prequel, played without any of the parent series' jokes and shot in long unbroken takes.

Seasons 1–2

4 sequences

Blackadder

1983–1989BBC OneComedy

Four series, four centuries, and a theme re-orchestrated each time to suit the period — lute, harpsichord, military band.

Season 1
Season 2
Season 3
and 1 more

1 sequence

The Blacklist

2013–2023NBCCrime

Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blade Runner: Black Lotus

2021–2022Adult SwimSci-Fi

The Blade Runner world animated, set between the two films.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blake's 7

1978–1981BBC OneSci-Fi

BBC electronic music and a rotating logo, rebuilt each series as the crew was killed off — which on this show happened often enough to matter.

Seasons 1–4

1 sequence

Blankety Blank

1979–1990BBC OneDocumentary

A panel game with a deliberately worthless prize, and a microphone shaped like a fishing rod.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bleach

2004–TV TokyoAnimation

Fifteen different openings across its original run, each one a complete restyling — a long-running series that treated its titles as a rotating commission rather than a fixed asset.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bleach: Thousand-Year Blood War

2022–TV TokyoAnimation

The final arc animated a decade after the original series ended, with a new opening for each cour in the tradition the show established.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bleak House

2005BBC OneDrama

Dickens serialised the way he was published — half-hour instalments, twice a week — with a title sequence cut to match.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bless the Harts

2019–2021FoxAnimation

A North Carolina family whose matriarch talks to a Jesus only she can see.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bletchley Circle

2012–2014ITVCrime

Four women who broke codes during the war, using the same habits on a murder afterwards.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blinded

2019–2021TV4Drama

A financial journalist sleeping with the bank chief she is investigating. Swedish title Fartblinda — speed-blind.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blindspot

2015–2020NBCCrime

A woman found in Times Square covered in tattoos that are each a case.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blood & Water

2020–2023NetflixDrama

A Cape Town teenager who believes a swimming champion at her new school is the sister abducted at birth.

Season 2

1 sequence

Blood Drive

2017SyfyHorror

A grindhouse pastiche about cars that run on human blood, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blood of Zeus

2020–NetflixAnimation

Greek vase painting animated into motion, with the title card restaged for each episode's myth.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bloodhounds

2023–2026NetflixCrime

Two young boxers working off a debt for a Seoul loan shark, and trying to stop.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bloodline

2015–2017NetflixDrama

A Florida Keys family whose eldest brother comes home, told across one summer and a confession.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blossom

1990–1995NBCComedy

A teenager narrating her own life to camera in a house otherwise entirely male, opening on a dance she performs herself.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue Bloods

2010–2024CBSCrime

Three generations of one New York police family, fourteen seasons long.

Seasons 10–12

1 sequence

Blue Eye Samurai

2023–NetflixAnimation

Ink, forge-fire and steel — a blade being made, in the same brushwork the series uses for its violence.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue Heelers

1994–2006Seven NetworkCrime

A country police station in the fictional town of Mount Thomas, twelve seasons long.

Season 4

1 sequence

Blue Lock

2022–TV AsahiAnimation

Football shot like a psychological thriller, with the players lit as though they are about to commit something.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue Mountain State

2010–2011SpikeComedy

A football scholarship treated as a licence rather than a job, in Spike's fraternity comedy.

Season 1

2 sequences

Blue Peter

1958–BBC OneDocumentary

The world's longest-running children's programme, opening on a ship in full sail and a hornpipe.

Season 45
Season 64

1 sequence

The Blue Planet

2001BBC OneDocumentary

The first of the BBC's ocean series, and the template its sequel and the Planet Earth films all inherited.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue Planet II

2017BBC OneDocumentary

Hans Zimmer and Radiohead scoring the ocean — the first natural history series to hire a film composer and a rock band for its titles.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue Water High

2005–2008ABC (Australia)Drama

A surf academy on the northern beaches, with the cast chosen partly for whether they could actually surf.

Season 1

1 sequence

Blue's Clues

1996–2006NickelodeonAnimation

A host talking directly to camera and waiting for an answer, which changed how American preschool television was made.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bluestone 42

2013–2015BBC ThreeComedy

A bomb disposal detachment in Helmand, played as a workplace comedy without pretending the work is safe.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bluey

2018–ABC Kids / Disney+Animation

A blue heeler puppy and her family, animated in Brisbane, whose titles introduce the whole household in under half a minute.

Seasons 1–3

1 sequence

Blunt Talk

2015–2016StarzComedy

Patrick Stewart as a British cable news anchor in Los Angeles, from Jonathan Ames.

Season 1

1 sequence

BMF

2021–StarzCrime

The Black Mafia Family out of 1980s Detroit, produced by 50 Cent.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boardwalk Empire

2010–2014HBOCrime

One man on a beach while the tide brings him bottles. No montage, no cast — just Nucky Thompson standing still as Prohibition washes up around his shoes, to The Brian Jonestown Massacre.

Seasons 1–5

1 sequence

The Bob Newhart Show

1972–1978CBSComedy

A psychologist commuting through Chicago, filmed at the pace of a man who is not looking forward to his day.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bob the Builder

1999–2011BBC OneAnimation

Stop-motion construction with a call and response the programme never varies, and a number one Christmas single.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bob's Burgers

2011–FoxAnimation

Three running gags in nineteen seconds — the burger of the day, the shop next door, and the pest-control van — all three rewritten for every single episode.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bobby's World

1990–1998Fox KidsAnimation

Howie Mandel's stand-up child character animated, with Mandel voicing both the boy and his father.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bocchi the Rock!

2022Tokyo MXAnimation

A guitarist too anxious to speak to her own band, animated with more formal invention than almost anything else in its year.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bodies

2023NetflixCrime

One corpse in one Whitechapel alley, found by four detectives in four different centuries.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bodkin

2024NetflixCrime

An Irish coastal town shot as podcast artwork — the true-crime aesthetic the series is making fun of, deployed without a wink.

Season 1

1 sequence

BoJack Horseman

2014–2020NetflixAnimation

A man drifting through his own life on his back while Los Angeles slides past above him, ending in a pool. Six seasons of the same slow fall, with the crowd around him quietly changing.

Seasons 1–6

2 sequences

The Bold and the Beautiful

1987–CBSDrama

Los Angeles fashion houses, and the most widely watched daytime serial in the world.

Season 1
Season 38

1 sequence

Bom Dia, Verônica

2020–2024NetflixCrime

A São Paulo police clerk who starts investigating a case nobody assigned her.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bonanza

1959–1973NBCDrama

A burning map and four men riding out of it — one of the first title sequences designed to show off colour television, which is precisely why it looks like that.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bondi Rescue

2006–Network TenDocumentary

The lifeguards at Bondi Beach, filmed across a summer at a time.

Season 8

1 sequence

Bones

2005–2017FoxCrime

Skeletal reconstruction rendered as clean laboratory graphics — a procedural that opens on anatomy rather than crime.

Season 2

1 sequence

The Book of Boba Fett

2021–2022Disney+Sci-Fi

The bounty hunter taking over a crime syndicate, in a spin-off that hands two of its seven episodes back to The Mandalorian.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boomtown

2002–2003NBCCrime

A Los Angeles crime series that told each case from five points of view, and opened with the device stated up front.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boon

1986–1995ITVCrime

A retired fireman on a motorcycle, in the ITV drama that ran nine years on the strength of Jim Diamond's theme.

Season 5

1 sequence

The Boondocks

2005–2014Adult SwimAnimation

Aaron McGruder's strip animated in an anime register, opened by Asheru's theme over ink-wash stills.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boots

2025NetflixDrama

A closeted teenager enlisting in the Marine Corps in 1990, from Greg Cope White's memoir.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bordertown

2016FoxAnimation

A Seth MacFarlane-produced border comedy, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bored to Death

2009–2011HBOComedy

A pulp-paperback cover come to life — Brooklyn drawn as a detective magazine by Dean Haspiel, panel by panel.

Season 1

1 sequence

Borgen

2010–2022DR1Drama

Danish coalition politics, opened with the restraint the subject demands and none of the urgency an American network would insist on.

Season 4

1 sequence

The Borgias

2011–2013ShowtimeDrama

Neil Jordan's Renaissance papacy, opened in gilt and shadow.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Boroughs

2026NetflixDrama

A 2026 Netflix series — and the reason an earlier attempt at Suburra was rejected, since this is what that search kept returning.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boruto: Naruto Next Generations

2017–2023TV TokyoAnimation

The Naruto sequel, following the son of the boy the first series was about.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bosch

2014–2021Prime VideoCrime

Los Angeles at night from a helicopter, over Caught A Ghost's 'Can't Let Go' — a city filmed the way the detective sees it, from above and at a distance.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bosom Buddies

1980–1982ABCComedy

Two admen who take rooms in a women-only building in drag, and the first thing Tom Hanks was known for.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boss

2011–2012StarzDrama

Kelsey Grammer as a Chicago mayor concealing a degenerative diagnosis, opened to Robert Plant.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boston Blue

2025–CBSCrime

The Blue Bloods spin-off, moving a Reagan to Boston and a different police family's dinner table.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boston Common

1996–1997NBCComedy

A Virginian who follows a woman to Boston and takes a job at the university she attends.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boston Legal

2004–2008ABCComedy

Legal-drama iconography played as farce, from the same producer as Ally McBeal and with the same refusal to take the profession seriously.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boston Public

2000–2004FoxDrama

David E. Kelley's high school, running alongside his legal series on the same network.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bottom

1991–1995BBC TwoComedy

Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson in a Hammersmith flat, hitting each other.

Season 1

1 sequence

Boy Meets World

1993–2000ABCComedy

A cast montage rebuilt every season as its lead grew from eleven to eighteen, which few sitcoms have had to solve.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Boys

2019–Prime VideoDrama

Superhero iconography rendered as corporate branding and then defaced — the show's whole argument, done in graphics.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Boys Presents: Diabolical

2022Prime VideoAnimation

Eight animated shorts in the same universe, each by a different studio, and eleven seconds to introduce all of them.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Brady Bunch

1969–1974ABCComedy

A three-by-three grid of faces all looking at each other — a title sequence so structurally famous that the grid alone is the reference.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bradys

1990CBSDrama

The Brady children as adults, played as an hour-long drama, which lasted six weeks.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Brak Show

2000–2003Adult SwimAnimation

The Space Ghost villain relocated to a 1950s sitcom family, with the sitcom open played completely straight.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brandy & Mr. Whiskers

2004–2006Disney ChannelAnimation

A pampered dog and a manic rabbit stranded together in the Amazon.

Season 1

1 sequence

Braquo

2009–2016Canal+Crime

Olivier Marchal's Paris police series, about four officers who stop pretending to follow the law.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brass Eye

1997–2001Channel 4Comedy

The Day Today's successor, with a new themed opening built for each episode's subject — crime, drugs, science, sex.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brave New World

2020PeacockSci-Fi

Huxley adapted as Peacock's flagship launch drama, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

1 sequence

BraveStarr

1987–1988SyndicationAnimation

Filmation's science-fiction western, and the last series the studio finished before it closed.

Season 1

1 sequence

Bread

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

Carla Lane's Liverpool family, signing on and eating together, in the decade that made both political.

Season 1

1 sequence

Breaking Bad

2008–2013AMCDrama

Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.

Seasons 1–5

1 sequence

Breathe

2018–Prime VideoCrime

A father working his way up a transplant list by removing the people above his son.

Season 1

1 sequence

Briarpatch

2019–2020USA NetworkCrime

A Texas border town where the zoo animals have got out, which the series treats as background.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brickleberry

2012–2015Comedy CentralAnimation

A national park staffed entirely by people who should not be near one, opened in ten seconds.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brideshead Revisited

1981ITVDrama

Geoffrey Burgon's theme over an English country house — eleven hours of television that changed what British drama believed it could spend money on.

Season 1

1 sequence

The Bridge

2011–2018SVT / DR1Crime

The Øresund Bridge at night, and Choir of Young Believers — a border filmed as a character, which is what the show is about.

Season 3

2 sequences

Bridgerton

2020–NetflixDrama

Engraved invitations, wax seals and bees, assembled like a society page being typeset — the gossip sheet that drives the plot, doing the credits.

Season 1
Season 2

1 sequence

Brimstone

1998–1999FoxHorror

A damned detective sent back from hell to recapture a hundred and thirteen escaped souls, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

1 sequence

Britain's Got Talent

2007–ITVDocumentary

The variety format that exported itself to seventy countries, and the theme it kept for its first four series.

Seasons 1–4

1 sequence

The Brittas Empire

1991–1997BBC OneComedy

A leisure centre run by the least suitable manager in British comedy.

Season 1

1 sequence

Broad City

2014–2019Comedy CentralComedy

Abbi and Ilana's New York, opened in ten seconds of hand-drawn scribble.

Season 1

1 sequence

Broadchurch

2013–2017ITVCrime

Dorset cliffs and a beach, filmed as beautifully as a tourist board would want and used for the opposite purpose.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brooklyn Bridge

1991–1993CBSComedy

Gary David Goldberg's memory of a 1950s Jewish family in Bensonhurst.

Season 1

2 sequences

Brooklyn Nine-Nine

2013–2021Fox / NBCComedy

Precinct signage and a horn line in twenty-one seconds — a cop show opening with no sirens in it.

Seasons 1–5
Seasons 6–8

1 sequence

Brookside

1982–2003Channel 4Drama

Channel 4's launch-night serial, shot on a real close of houses the production company had bought.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brothers & Sisters

2006–2011ABCDrama

The Walker family and the business they inherit, with Sally Field and Rachel Griffiths.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brum

1991–2002BBC OneComedy

A small yellow car loose in a city, told without dialogue — a preschool series that is closer to silent film than to television.

Season 1

1 sequence

Brush Strokes

1986–1991BBC OneComedy

A painter and decorator who cannot stop flirting, written by the Birds of a Feather pair.

Season 1

1 sequence

Buck Rogers in the 25th Century

1979–1981NBCSci-Fi

A disco-scored space opera that opens with a shuttle, a starfield and absolutely no embarrassment about either.

Season 1

7 sequences

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997–2003The WB / UPNHorror

An organ sting, a shot of the moon, and then Nerf Herder's surf-punk theme over black-and-white monster-movie footage that bursts into colour. The design never changed in seven years; the fifty seconds behind it were re-cut every one of them.