C
The letter C accounts for 177 of the 2,618 shows here, with 193 opening title sequences from 1950 to the present.
32 of them are filed here rather than under their first word, because an index ignores a leading "The" or "A" — The Chair Company, The Crown and The Closer among them.
Eight rebuilt their opening titles mid-run, Charmed most of all with eight sequences.
177 shows193 sequences
1 sequence
Cabinet of Curiosities
A physical cabinet opened drawer by drawer, each one holding the object that episode is about — an anthology that indexes itself.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Cable Girls
Four switchboard operators in 1928 Madrid, Netflix's first Spanish original.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Cagney & Lacey
Two detectives introduced as colleagues rather than as a novelty, which in 1981 was itself the statement.
- Season 2
1 sequence
Caillou
A four-year-old with no hair and very little patience, adapted from Quebec picture books.
- Season 1
2 sequences
California Dreams
A Californian high school band, made by the Saved by the Bell producers for the same Saturday morning block.
- Season 1
- Seasons 3–5
1 sequence
Californication
Los Angeles from a convertible, with a writer who has not written anything in some years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaliphate
A Stockholm schoolgirl recruited online, and the officer who cannot get anyone to listen. Swedish title Kalifat.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCall My Agent!
Paris and a jazz figure, in the register of a film the agency's clients would be too grand to appear in.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Call the Midwife
Poplar's district nurses through the fifties and sixties, opened the same way for well over a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCamberwick Green
A musical box that opens to reveal whichever character the episode is about — a title sequence that is also the casting.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCamelot
The Arthur legend with Eva Green as Morgan, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCamp Lazlo
A Brazilian spider monkey at a scout camp run by a humourless beetle.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCannon
William Conrad as a private investigator, the first Quinn Martin series built around a heavy-set lead.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Caprica
The Battlestar Galactica prequel, fifty years earlier, about the invention of the Cylons rather than the war with them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaptain Power and the Soldiers of the Future
Live action against computer animation, built so that a toy could shoot at the screen.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCaptain Scarlet and the Mysterons
Anderson's darkest supermarionation series, opened by two rings of light moving across a wall.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCar 54, Where Are You?
Two Bronx patrolmen, with a theme that lists everything going wrong in New York and then asks where the car is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCardcaptor Sakura
CLAMP's magical girl, with a new costume every episode and three separate openings across the run.
- Season 3
1 sequenceThe Care Bears Family
The greetings-card bears given a series, with a stare that resolves every plot.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCarmen Sandiego
The game-show thief given an origin, animated in flat colour and a lot of red.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCarnival Row
Victorian illustration of wings, horns and hooves, catalogued like a natural history plate of a population being policed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCarnivàle
Tarot cards dissolving into Depression-era photographs and newsreel, so the reading and the history become the same footage. Another Emmy winner, and still one of the strangest things a network put in front of a drama.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Carol Burnett Show
Twenty-three seconds and a Bob Mackie gown, from the variety show that taught American television how a sketch ensemble should work.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Caroline in the City
A Manhattan cartoonist drawing a strip about her own life, and the colourist who is in love with her.
- Season 1
- Season 3
1 sequenceThe Casagrandes
The Loud House spin-off, following the Mexican American family next door into the city.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCasi Ángeles
Cris Morena's Buenos Aires teen musical, which exported across Latin America and Israel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCastle
Typewriter keys and New York, for a series about a novelist who follows a detective around.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCastle Rock
A Maine town assembled out of forty years of Stephen King, with a main title that keeps rebuilding the same house.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCastlevania
Gothic architecture and stained glass rendered as a slow climb, refusing the game series' rock score for something closer to a requiem.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceCasualty
Holby City Hospital's emergency department, and the longest-running primetime medical drama in the world.
- Season 27
1 sequence
Catchphrase
Say what you see, and a golden robot called Mr Chips who was the reason anyone watched.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCatDog
A cat and a dog sharing one body, and a theme song that spends its whole length asking how.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCatherine the Great
Helen Mirren as the empress in her last decades, in four parts.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCelebrity Deathmatch
Claymation celebrities fighting to the death in a wrestling ring, with commentary played completely straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChad Powers
A disgraced quarterback who returns to college football in prosthetics under an assumed name.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChainsaw Man
An opening built almost entirely out of film references — a different movie restaged in nearly every shot, at a speed that makes spotting them a second viewing's work.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Chair Company
Tim Robinson on a man who will not let a collapsing office chair go.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChalkZone
A world made of everything ever erased from a blackboard.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChapelwaite
Jerusalem's Lot filmed as a nineteenth-century gothic, from the King short story the vampire novel grew out of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChappelle's Show
Twenty-two seconds of animation and a beat, for the sketch show that defined a decade of American comedy in two and a half seasons.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCharles in Charge
A student paying his rent by minding somebody else's children, in a sitcom CBS cancelled and syndication brought back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCharlie and Lola
Lauren Child's collage illustration animated as collage, with children rather than actors doing the voices.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCharlie's Angels
Three detectives working for a voice on a speakerphone, and a title sequence that explains the entire premise in narration before a scene is played.
- Season 1
8 sequences
Charmed
Love Spit Love's cover of 'How Soon Is Now?' over the Book of Shadows and three sisters, re-cut every season. It goes further than that, though: the credits were rebuilt whenever the cast of an episode changed, so a season carries several versions rather than one — eight of them in the second year alone.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 5 more
1 sequenceCheer
A Texas junior college cheerleading squad, filmed as a sport rather than as a sideline to one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCheers
A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.
- Seasons 1–11
1 sequenceChef's Table
Food shot in extreme close-up to classical strings — a cookery series that opens like a perfume advertisement and means it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Chernobyl
No montage and no metaphor — the camera simply moves through the plant's corridors and control rooms while Hildur Guðnadóttir's score, built from recordings made inside a power station, does the rest.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChesapeake Shores
A daughter called home to a Maryland inn, in the series that showed Hallmark could run a returning drama rather than only films.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceChewing Gum
Michaela Coel's Tower Hamlets comedy, made three years before I May Destroy You.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Chi
Lena Waithe's South Side, following several lives that keep intersecting.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequence
Chicago Fire
The first of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the other two were built out from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChicago Hope
The medical drama that premiered the same week as ER and spent six years being the other one.
- Season 5
1 sequenceChicago Justice
The fourth Chicago series, cancelled after thirteen episodes — the only one Dick Wolf could not make stick.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChicago Med
The third Chicago series, sharing a city and a crossover schedule with the other two.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChicago P.D.
The second of Dick Wolf's Chicago series, and the one the crossovers usually run through.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChief of War
Hawaiian carving, cloth and volcanic landscape, filmed as artefacts of a nation rather than scenery.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChildhood's End
The Arthur C. Clarke novel adapted across three nights.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChildrens Hospital
A hospital soap parody that changed its own premise whenever it got bored, Rob Corddry's first series.
- Season 3
1 sequenceChilling Adventures of Sabrina
The Archie witch as horror rather than sitcom, from the Riverdale producers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChina Beach
An evacuation hospital on the Vietnamese coast, told from the women posted to it rather than the men passing through.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChip 'n' Dale: Park Life
The chipmunks in a city park, dialogue-free, animated in France.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCHiPs
California Highway Patrol motorcycle officers, filmed almost entirely on freeways.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChorlton and the Wheelies
A happiness dragon in Wheelie World, from the studio that went on to make Danger Mouse.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Chosen
The crowdfunded life of Christ, with a title sequence that deliberately does not look like a Bible show.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceChowder
An apprentice cook in Marzipan City, animated over patterned backgrounds that never stop moving.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChozen
An animated rapper released from prison, from the Archer production team.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Chris Isaak Show
The musician playing himself and his band playing themselves, in a series about their own touring.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Chronicles of Narnia
Lewis adapted across four serials, with costumes and matte paintings doing what the budget could not.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChuck
Consumer electronics and spy hardware cut together at the same speed, for a show that could never decide which it was about — correctly.
- Season 1
2 sequences
ChuckleVision
Two brothers and a slapstick format that ran for twenty-one series on the strength of one exchange.
- Season 1
- Seasons 17–20
1 sequenceChuno
Slave hunters in late Joseon, shot handheld in the mountains and unusually violent for its slot.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCidade dos Homens
Two boys growing up in a Rio favela, made by the City of God team either side of the film.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCigarette Girl
The Indonesian kretek industry in the 1960s, and a woman who is not allowed near the part of it she is best at. Original title Gadis Kretek.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCircle of Fear
An anthology that began as Ghost Story with a host and a hotel, then dropped both and renamed itself halfway through.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cisco Kid
The first television series filmed in colour, three years before anyone in America could receive it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCitadel
The Russo brothers' spy franchise, built to spawn local-language series in several countries at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCitizen Smith
John Sullivan's first series, a Tooting revolutionary with no revolution, written five years before Only Fools and Horses.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCity on a Hill
Boston in the early nineties, a corrupt FBI agent and the prosecutor trying to use him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCity on Fire
New York in the year of the blackout, burning at the edges of the frame — another Imaginary Forces main title, and a much colder one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Clangers
Knitted creatures on a small planet who speak in swanee whistles, narrated as though it were a nature programme.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClannad
A Kyoto Animation adaptation that spends a full season setting up what the second season does to you.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClarence
A relentlessly cheerful boy and two friends, drawn in a loose line that never tidied itself up.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClarissa Explains It All
The first Nickelodeon live-action series built around a girl, addressed straight to camera.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClarkson's Farm
Jeremy Clarkson farming a thousand Cotswold acres badly, and the year-shaped structure the titles borrow from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClass of 3000
André 3000's series about an Atlanta music class, with a theme he wrote and performed himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClaws
A Florida nail salon laundering money for a pill mill, staged in saturated colour throughout.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cleaning Lady
A Filipino doctor in Las Vegas cleaning for organised crime to pay for her son's treatment.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCleopatra 2525
Half-hour science fiction from the Hercules and Xena producers, paired with Jack of All Trades in one hour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cleveland Show
The Family Guy spin-off, moving Cleveland Brown to Virginia and giving him a theme song about it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCloak & Dagger
Two New Orleans teenagers whose powers only work near each other, which the titles make the whole design out of.
- Season 2
1 sequenceClone High
A theme that introduces the entire premise as a shouted list of historical figures, which remains the fastest exposition in animation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Closer
Kyra Sedgwick's LAPD deputy chief, and the most-watched drama basic cable had at the time.
- Season 1
1 sequenceClub de Cuervos
Netflix's first Spanish-language original, about two siblings inheriting a football club.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Clueless
The film continued at Bronson Alcott High, with most of the cast replaced and Dionne kept.
- Season 1
- Season 3
1 sequenceCoach
A Minnesota football program run by three men who are markedly better at the game than at the rest of their lives.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCobra Kai
The Karate Kid continued forty years on, with a title card that has been restaged in several different styles across the run.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCode Black
The busiest emergency room in America, named for the state it spends most of its time in.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCode Geass
Mecha and monarchy over a rock track, with the aristocratic cast posed like a fashion shoot.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCodename: Kids Next Door
A spy-thriller opening for five children fighting adults, played with the seriousness of a much larger programme.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Colbert Report
An eagle, a flag and a barrage of adjectives flying at the camera — a parody of cable-news branding so precise that cable news started copying it back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCold Case
Evidence boxes and faded photographs, for a procedural whose whole method is that the past is filed somewhere.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Colgate Comedy Hour
A live variety hour with a different star each week, made to take the audience off Ed Sullivan.
- Season 4
1 sequenceColin From Accounts
An Australian comedy that begins with a hit dog and is named after him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceColony
Occupied Los Angeles under an alien administration nobody has seen, opened in ten seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceColumbo
Twenty-four seconds, and for much of the run no sequence at all — a series confident enough to open on the murder and let the detective arrive late.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCome Outside
Auntie Mabel and her dog Pippin flying a spotted aeroplane to find out where one ordinary thing comes from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Commish
A police commissioner who solves things by talking, in a series built against the action shows around it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCommon Side Effects
A mushroom that cures anything, and everyone who would rather it did not exist.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Community
Study-group detritus on a table, in a show that spent six seasons abandoning its own format for whatever genre it fancied that week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceConan
The show Conan O'Brien built after losing The Tonight Show, opening on a cartoon of himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceConnections
James Burke tracing one invention to another across centuries, in a structure the titles set up before he says a word.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Conners
Roseanne continued without her, after the network cancelled the revival it had just recommissioned.
- Season 1
- Season 5
1 sequenceConstantine
The Hellblazer comic adapted, cancelled after thirteen episodes and continued in animation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceConstellation
Doubled and inverted imagery over ice and orbit — two versions of the same events, laid on top of one another.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Continental: From the World of John Wick
The hotel's origin in 1970s New York, three episodes long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceContinuum
Vancouver rendered as a surveillance grid, with the future arriving as an overlay on the present.
- Season 1
1 sequenceControl Z
A Mexican school where a hacker exposes every student's secrets, opened in nine seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Corner
David Simon and David Mills's West Baltimore miniseries, made three years before The Wire took the same corner.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Coronation Street
The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.
- Season 1
- Season 31
1 sequenceCory in the House
That's So Raven's brother moved into the White House as the chef's son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cosby Show
A family dancing to a new arrangement of the same theme every season — jazz, big band, calypso — which makes it one of the earliest American sitcoms to treat its opening as something to redo annually.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCount Arthur Strong
Steve Delaney's radio character given a sitcom around him, co-written by Graham Linehan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCount Duckula
The Danger Mouse villain spun off into his own castle, a vegetarian vampire duck.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCountdown
The first programme Channel 4 ever broadcast, and a clock sequence that has been recognisable to British afternoons for forty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCounterpart
Imaginary Forces splitting everything in two — figures, corridors, the type itself — for a show about a man meeting the version of himself from the other side of a crossing.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceA Country Practice
A rural New South Wales medical practice, and one of Australian television's defining serials.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCountryfile
Sunday evening rural affairs, and one of the most watched factual programmes in Britain.
- Season 24
1 sequenceThe Couple Next Door
Two couples in a Leeds cul-de-sac, and what starts once one of them looks over the fence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCoupling
Six friends in a bar, structured as farce rather than warmth — the British sitcom most often, and most unfairly, compared to Friends.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCourage the Cowardly Dog
Twenty-nine seconds establishing a farmhouse in the middle of Nowhere and a dog who is right to be frightened.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCousin Skeeter
A boy and the puppet cousin who moves in with him, which nobody in the series treats as unusual.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCover Up
A fashion photographer and her model working as agents, and the series remembered for how its lead died.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCovert Affairs
A CIA trainee promoted early for reasons she is not told.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCow and Chicken
A cow and a chicken with human parents whose faces are never shown above the waist.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCowboy Bebop
A jazz record given ninety seconds of animation. Silhouettes and hard-edged colour panels cut on the beat of a big band, borrowing the grammar of 1960s film titles so completely that the show it opens looks like a rediscovery rather than a debut.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCowboy Bebop (2021)
A live-action restaging of one of the most admired title sequences in animation, shot-for-shot against Yoko Kanno's original arrangement.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCracker
Nineteen seconds, and no attempt to make its criminal psychologist look like someone you would want to meet.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCraig of the Creek
A wooded creek run entirely by the children who play in it, mapped like a country.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCranford
Elizabeth Gaskell's Cheshire town, with Judi Dench and most of the British stage.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCrash Landing on You
A South Korean heiress paraglides into North Korea, and the opening treats the border as scenery rather than politics.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCrashing
Pete Holmes sleeping on other comedians' sofas after his marriage ends, opened in eighteen seconds.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend
A musical comedy that threw away its theme song every year and wrote a new one, each arguing with the last about whether the word in the title is fair.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequenceCrazyhead
Two women who can see demons, from the writer of Misfits, and cancelled after six episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCreepshow
The Romero and King film continued as an anthology, with the comic-book panels doing the same work in the titles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCriminal Justice
The BBC series remade in India, running longer than the original did.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Criminal Minds
Case files and profiler jargon in thirty-one seconds, from a procedural that has now run for two decades.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCriminal Minds: Beyond Borders
The spin-off that moved the profiling unit to crimes against Americans abroad.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Critic
Al Jean and Mike Reiss's film critic, made between their Simpsons runs and cancelled by two networks.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCritical Role
A tabletop campaign broadcast live, which by its second campaign had a fully animated title sequence of its own.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Crocodile Hunter
Steve Irwin handling animals at arm's length or closer, for eight years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Crocodile Hunter Diaries
The spin-off following the zoo's staff between expeditions, rather than Irwin in the field.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCross
James Patterson's Alex Cross novels, with a second-season sequence rebuilt from scratch.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCrossing Jordan
A Boston medical examiner who investigates her own cases against instruction.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCrossroads
A Midlands motel, taped so fast that the sets famously wobbled, and watched by fifteen million people anyway.
- Season 7
1 sequenceThe Crowded Room
Tom Holland in a 1979 case built on the Billy Milligan story.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Crown
Molten gold pouring, cooling and assembling itself into a crown, over Hans Zimmer. No faces and no footage — the object outlasts everyone who wears it, which is the show's entire argument.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequenceCruel Summer
Two girls, three summers and one accusation, told from both sides at once and cut between them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCrusade
The Babylon 5 sequel, cancelled after thirteen episodes before any of them aired in order.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Crystal Maze
Four themed zones and a warehouse in Essex, opened with an orchestral fanfare grander than any game show has earned before or since.
- Season 5
1 sequenceCSI: Crime Scene Investigation
The Who over forensic macro photography, and the sequence that turned laboratory work into prime-time spectacle for a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCSI: Cyber
The last CSI, moving the forensics from bodies to hard drives, and the one the franchise ended on.
- Season 2
1 sequenceCSI: Miami
The first CSI spin-off, opened by The Who's "Won't Get Fooled Again".
- Season 1
1 sequenceCSI: NY
The third CSI, opened by "Baba O'Riley".
- Season 1
1 sequenceCSI: Vegas
The franchise returned to the city it started in, with two of the original cast and the same Who song.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCubicles
A first job in an Indian IT firm, from the studio that made Panchayat and Kota Factory.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCuckoo
A daughter returning from a gap year married to an American with no discernible occupation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCulinary Class Wars
A hundred anonymous Korean chefs cooking against twenty famous ones, the unknown half dressed in black throughout.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCunk on Earth
Philomena Cunk presenting human civilisation, opened by a ten-second parody of every documentary open ever made.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cuphead Show!
The game's 1930s rubber-hose style animated properly, which is the whole point of it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Curb Your Enthusiasm
A tuba, a circus march, and nothing else. Twenty-four years and twelve seasons on a piece of production-library music picked because it sounded like a man walking into trouble.
- Seasons 1–12
1 sequenceThe Curse
Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie's series about a house-flipping couple, whose opening credits are different in every single episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Curse of Oak Island
Two brothers digging a Nova Scotian island for treasure, across more than a decade of not finding it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Cursed
A girl who can kill by curse and the reporter who decides to use her.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCyberchase
Three children pulled into a network to stop a villain with mathematics, which is the plot and the curriculum at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCyberpunk: Edgerunners
Franz Ferdinand over Night City, cut by Studio Trigger at a speed that dares you to keep up.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCybill
An actress whose career never quite happened, written closely around the one its star actually had.
- Season 1