D
The letter D accounts for 148 of the 2,618 shows here, with 167 opening title sequences from 1951 to the present.
22 of them are filed here rather than under their first word, because an index ignores a leading "The" or "A" — The Day of the Jackal, The Daily Show and The Dick Van Dyke Show among them.
Four rebuilt their opening titles mid-run, Doctor Who most of all with ten sequences.
148 shows167 sequences
1 sequence
D.P.
Military police chasing deserters, and the conscription system that produces them.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Da Ali G Show
Sacha Baron Cohen's three characters interviewing people who did not know.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDa Vinci's Demons
David Goyer's young Leonardo, opened by a sequence built entirely from his own notebook drawings.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Da Vinci's Inquest
A Vancouver coroner written from the real one, who later became the city's mayor.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDad's Army
The Walmington-on-Sea Home Guard, opened by animated arrows advancing and retreating across a map of Europe.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDahaad
A Rajasthan sub-inspector connecting a series of deaths nobody has treated as murders.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Daily Show
A news-graphics package rebuilt for each of its four hosts, and the programme that made the fake-news desk a form.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaisy Jones & The Six
A fictional 1970s band told as a rockumentary, with the songs written for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDallas
A three-panel split screen over the Dallas skyline, and the theme that defined what a primetime soap was allowed to sound like.
- Season 10
1 sequenceDamages
Legal documents, blood and Manhattan glass, cut in the same non-linear fashion the series tells its story.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dance Moms
A Pittsburgh dance studio, the children in it, and the mothers watching from behind the glass.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDancing on Ice
Celebrities skating in pairs, judged by Torvill and Dean, who had won the thing for real.
- Season 7
1 sequence
Dancing with the Stars
The American Strictly, which runs two seasons a year and rebuilds its titles for most of them.
- Season 10
1 sequence
Dandadan
Aliens and ghosts arguing over the same two teenagers, opened by Creepy Nuts at a sprint.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDanger Man
Patrick McGoohan as John Drake, the series he left to make The Prisoner.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDanger Mouse
A one-eyed secret-agent mouse under a Mayfair pillar box, and the most exported British cartoon of its decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDanny Phantom
A narrated origin sung over the transformation, in the tradition the network had been running since Doug.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Danny Thomas Show
Eleven years of a nightclub comedian's home life, and the series The Andy Griffith Show was spun out of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaredevil
Blood-red liquid pouring upward into the shapes of New York — the courthouse, the church, the skyline — then the scales of justice and a man who cannot see any of it.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequence
Daredevil: Born Again
The revival, which rebuilds the Netflix series' red-liquid city rather than replacing it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDaria
The cast doing ordinary things badly while the lead refuses to participate, over Splendora's 'You're Standing on My Neck'.
- Season 1
3 sequences
Dark
Faces split and mirrored against themselves, reflected into a second image that is never quite the same person — a show about the same people at four ages, saying so before a word is spoken.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequence
Dark Angel
Post-collapse Seattle in thirty-five seconds, from James Cameron's only substantial television project.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance
The Henson prequel built with real puppets, opened by a sequence that shows you the crystal breaking before the story reaches it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDark Matter
One man's life branching into every version it could have taken, rendered by Imaginary Forces as a structure that will not stop dividing.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dark Shadows
Waves against a cliff and a theremin-adjacent wail, broadcast live on weekday afternoons — a gothic soap that ran over twelve hundred episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dark Winds
Tony Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police novels, opened across the same high desert the cases cross.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Darling Buds of May
H. E. Bates's Kent farming family, and the series that made Catherine Zeta-Jones a household name inside a fortnight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDateline NBC
NBC's newsmagazine, which outlasted every other network attempt at the form by turning into a true-crime hour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDave's World
Dave Barry's columns turned into a sitcom, with the household drawn rather than filmed in the titles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDavey and Goliath
A boy and his talking dog, stop-motion, funded by the Lutheran church and animated by the Gumby studio.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dawson's Creek
Paula Cole over a Massachusetts creek — a theme so tied to the show that its absence from the streaming release became a story in itself.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Day of the Jackal
Celeste singing over a European manhunt — a series that opens like a Bond film and then declines to behave like one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Day Today
News-graphics bombast pushed just past the point of sense — a parody so accurate that actual bulletins caught up with it within a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDays of Our Lives
"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDC Super Hero Girls
The DC heroines at high school, from the Powerpuff Girls' creative lineage.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDe Twaalf
A Belgian trial told from the jury box rather than the bench. Remade in Australia as The Twelve.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead Boy Detectives
Two dead schoolboys who refuse to move on and open a detective agency instead, out of the Sandman comics.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead Like Me
Reapers, toast and small municipal death — an opening that treats the afterlife as clerical work, which is the joke the series runs on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead Ringers
The Cronenberg film remade with Rachel Weisz as both twins.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead Set
A zombie outbreak that the Big Brother house does not notice, written by Charlie Brooker before Black Mirror.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDead to Me
A widow and the woman she meets at grief counselling, who knows rather more about the death than she says.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dead Zone
The Stephen King adaptation as a weekly series, with a man who reads futures by touch.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeadliest Catch
Bering Sea crab boats, opening on the sea doing the thing that makes the programme's title literal.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeadly Class
A boarding school for assassins in 1987, from the Rick Remender comic.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeadly Women
Murders committed by women, reconstructed by actors and narrated flat, across fourteen seasons of the Investigation Discovery house style.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeadwind
A Helsinki homicide detective returning to work after her husband's death. Known at home as Karppi.
- Season 2
1 sequenceDeadwood
A horse, mud, and a camp being built out of both. The sequence is almost entirely animals and construction — the town assembling itself while nobody is watching.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceDear John
A divorced man at a support group of the similarly abandoned, written by John Sullivan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeath and Other Details
A murder on an ocean liner, opened in the manner of a Saul Bass film title.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Death by Lightning
Garfield's presidency and Guiteau's pursuit of it, told as the collision it was.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Death in Paradise
Caribbean colour and a calypso theme, for a murder series that has never once let its setting look threatening.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Defenders
A father-and-son legal practice taking cases the era's networks were not supposed to broadcast — abortion, blacklisting, euthanasia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDefending Jacob
New England woods and suburban windows, filmed at the distance a parent stands from a child they no longer recognise.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDefiance
A terraformed St. Louis shared by seven alien species, launched alongside a video game set in the same world.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDegrassi High
The Degrassi cast moved up to secondary school, and the point the series stopped softening anything.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDegrassi Junior High
The Canadian schools series that cast actual teenagers and let them look like it, and the start of a franchise still running.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDegrassi: The Next Generation
A cast montage rebuilt every season across fourteen years, tracking a school through several complete changes of pupil.
- Season 14
1 sequenceDelhi Crime
Delhi at night from a moving vehicle, with none of the stylisation the subject would normally attract.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Demon Headmaster
A headmaster who hypnotises through his spectacles, from the Gillian Cross books, and the most frightening thing CBBC put out in the 1990s.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDempsey and Makepeace
An American detective seconded to London and the aristocrat he is partnered with, who married in real life.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDennis the Menace and Gnasher
The Beano strip animated for CBBC, with the comic's line kept largely intact.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDepartment S
An Interpol unit for cases nobody else can explain, which gave Jason King his own spin-off.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDepartures
Two friends travelling for a year with a cameraman, shot with more care than the format usually gets.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dept. Q
Edinburgh stone and basement strip-lighting — a cold-case unit introduced by the room it was exiled to.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDescendants of the Sun
A special forces captain and a surgeon in a fictional war zone, and the series that started the Hallyu streaming wave.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDesignated Survivor
The housing secretary kept away from the State of the Union, and therefore president by the end of it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDesigning Women
Georgia On My Mind over an Atlanta design firm, with the cast photographed like a society page.
- Season 6
1 sequence
Desperate Housewives
Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDetention
Nine children in permanent after-school detention, animated in a flat 1950s style that nothing else on the block used.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Detour
A family road trip that goes wrong in a different way every season, written by a married couple about themselves.
- Season 4
1 sequenceDetroiters
Two advertising men making local commercials in Detroit, played by two friends who grew up there.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Deuce
Forty-second Street as a marquee — neon, peep-show signage and the traffic of a block being monetised, assembled from the era's own advertising.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeutschland 83
Cold War East and West cut together over eighties pop, with the period's own graphic design doing the work.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDeutschland 86
The Deutschland 83 spy sent to Angola and South Africa three years on, in the middle chapter of the trilogy.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Devil Judge
A televised trial system in a near-future Korea, run by a judge with his own plan for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDevil May Cry
The Capcom games animated by the Castlevania team, with an opening cut to match.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDevious Maids
Beverly Hills housekeepers investigating a murder in one of the houses, from the Desperate Housewives creator.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDevs
Alex Garland on determinism inside a quantum computing division, with two minutes of titles that behave like the machine.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dexter
Breakfast filmed as though it were a murder. A mosquito swatted, a blood orange crushed, a shaving nick, a steak sliced, floss drawn tight — every shot of an ordinary morning framed exactly as the violence the show never puts on screen this early.
- Seasons 1–8
1 sequenceDexter: Original Sin
The prequel, which restages the breakfast routine of the original's titles for a younger version of the same man.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dexter: Resurrection
The continuation that throws away the two-minute breakfast ritual the original was famous for and replaces it with a six-second card.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDexter's Laboratory
Thirty seconds of a boy genius and the sister who ruins everything, in the flat graphic style that defined a decade of the network.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDharma & Greg
A free spirit and a lawyer who marry on their first date.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDiagnosis: Murder
Dick Van Dyke as a doctor who solves murders, spun off from Jake and the Fatman.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Dick Van Dyke Show
A man walking into his own living room and either tripping over the ottoman or stepping neatly around it — two versions shot, and the network alternated them.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceDickinson
Nineteenth-century Amherst scored with modern pop, and a title card restaged for each episode's poem.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDicte
A crime reporter back in Aarhus after a divorce, from the Elsebeth Egholm novels.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDiff'rent Strokes
Two boys from Harlem adopted by a Park Avenue widower, in the sitcom that turned a nine-year-old's disbelief into a catchphrase.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Different World
A historically Black college rendered in bold graphic design, with the theme re-recorded by a different artist across the run — Aretha Franklin among them.
- Season 2
1 sequenceDigimon Adventure
Seven children pulled into a digital world, opened by "Butter-Fly" — a song that has outlived every reboot.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDinosaur Train
A Tyrannosaurus raised by Pteranodons, riding a train between geological periods.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDinosaurs
A Henson animatronic sitcom about a working family in the Mesozoic, which finished by freezing the world over.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency
Douglas Adams's holistic detective remade in Seattle, still working on the principle that everything is connected.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDirt
Courteney Cox as the editor of a celebrity tabloid, cancelled during the writers' strike.
- Season 2
1 sequenceDirty Money
One corporate fraud an episode, opening on money being counted by a machine that never stops.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Discovery of Witches
A historian who finds an enchanted manuscript in the Bodleian and cannot put it back.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDisenchantment
A fantasy kingdom introduced with the same long pan Groening's other shows use, and the same willingness to hide jokes in the background.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDispatches from Elsewhere
Jason Segel's series about an alternate-reality game that may not be a game, opened in eleven seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe District
A police chief running Washington on statistics, loosely modelled on the man who did it in New York.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoc Martin
A London surgeon with a blood phobia relocated to a Cornish village that will not leave him alone.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoctor Foster
A GP who works out that her husband is having an affair, and then takes it apart methodically.
- Season 1
10 sequences
Doctor Who
Rebuilt for almost every Doctor, and each rebuild invented its own technique — a camera filming its own monitor, light photographed through moving slots, and finally the first computer-generated titles on British television.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–6
- Seasons 7–10
- and 7 more
8 sequences
Doctor Who (2005)
The revival kept the tunnel and the logo and threw out everything else, then carried on rebuilding — clouds, fire, clockwork — with a new arrangement of the same 1963 melody every few years.
- Season 1
- Seasons 2–4
- Seasons 5–6
- and 5 more
1 sequenceDoctors
A Midlands surgery, twenty-four years of daytime, and one self-contained story an episode.
- Season 7
1 sequenceDog the Bounty Hunter
A Hawaii bail bondsman and his family, in the series that made A&E a reality network.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDog with a Blog
A stepfamily's dog who can talk, and keeps a blog about them that none of them know exists.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDollhouse
Bodies wiped and rewritten, shown as blank figures being dressed — a premise stated without a word.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDominion
Archangels at war over a walled Las Vegas, twenty-five years after the film it follows.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDon't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23
A Midwesterner sharing a New York flat with the worst possible person, and James Van Der Beek playing himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Donna Reed Show
A sitcom its star produced herself, which is why the mother in it has a job the plot takes seriously.
- Season 8
1 sequenceDoogie Howser, M.D.
A sixteen-year-old physician, and a synth theme that became shorthand for the entire decade.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceDoogie Kameāloha, M.D.
The Doogie premise moved to Oʻahu, with a title sequence built as a scrapbook rather than a montage.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceDoom Patrol
Collage and cut-out animation with the wrongness left in — a superhero opening that looks assembled from a scrapbook by someone unwell.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoomwatch
A government department investigating the science that is about to go wrong, from two Doctor Who writers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDope Thief
Philadelphia rowhouses and police insignia, degraded until the badge and the disguise become hard to tell apart.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDora the Explorer
A bilingual preschool series built on asking the audience questions and leaving room for the answer.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoraemon (2005)
The robot cat from the twenty-second century, remade in 2005 with an entirely new voice cast after twenty-six years of the old one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDoug
A mouth-percussion theme over a boy walking to school — an opening performed almost entirely with a human voice.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDown Cemetery Road
Mick Herron before Slough House: a missing girl and an accountant who will not stop looking for her.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Downton Abbey
A dog's back, a bell board and a house — thirty-one seconds establishing an entire social order without showing a single face.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDr. Quinn, Medicine Woman
A Boston doctor practising in 1860s Colorado Springs.
- Seasons 2–3
1 sequenceDracula
Moffat and Gatiss after Sherlock, with three feature-length episodes and a different idea in each.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragnet
Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragon Ball
Toriyama's Journey to the West, from before the series turned into the one everyone remembers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dragon Prince
Twenty-seven seconds of moving illustration, closer to a book being opened than a montage.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragon Tales
Two children who reach a dragon world by reciting a rhyme over a scale they find in a toy box.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDragons' Den
The Japanese format Britain took and exported again, opening on money stacked in front of five people who are not going to give you any.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDrake & Josh
Two stepbrothers in San Diego, from the All That writers' room.
- Season 4
1 sequenceDrawn Together
A reality-house parody whose cast are each drawn in a different studio's style.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceDream On
A man whose inner life is old black-and-white television clips, which the titles establish before a word is said.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dresden Files
Jim Butcher's wizard private investigator in Chicago, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Drew Carey Show
A Cleveland department-store personnel manager, opened for two seasons by a cartoon of his own face.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceDrop Dead Diva
A model who dies and wakes up in the body of a lawyer, which is a body-swap comedy and a legal procedural at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDrop the Dead Donkey
A television newsroom recorded days before broadcast so that real headlines could be written in.
- Season 5
1 sequenceThe Dropout
Silicon Valley branding assembled and then quietly taken apart, for a company that was never anything but branding.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDrunk History
History retold by someone too drunk to tell it, lip-synced straight-faced by actors in costume.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDTF St. Louis
A local weatherman in slow motion for a minute and a half, gold serif credits laid over him, to the back half of the Fifth Dimension's 'Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In'.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDublin Murders
Tana French's first two novels braided into one eight-part case.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDuck Dynasty
A Louisiana family who got rich making duck calls, and then considerably richer being filmed doing it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDuckTales
One of the most durable theme songs ever written for television, over a minute of ducks solving problems with money.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDuckTales (2017)
The reboot, which rerecorded the 1987 theme rather than replacing it — the rare remake that understood the song was the asset.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDue South
A Mountie seconded to Chicago, playing the politeness entirely straight against the city around him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Dukes of Hazzard
A Georgia county run by the man who owns it, and a car that spends a good part of every hour off the ground.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Dune: Prophecy
The Bene Gesserit ten thousand years before the films, with a title sequence built from spice and sand.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDungeons & Dragons
Six children pulled off a fairground ride into the game, with the ride itself doing the work of the title sequence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDurarara!!
Ikebukuro told through a dozen viewpoints that only connect in the last act.
- Season 1
1 sequenceDynasty
Gold lettering, oil money and an orchestral theme played with no irony whatsoever — the decade's idea of wealth, stated in ninety seconds.
- Season 1