F
The letter F accounts for 105 of the 2,618 shows here, with 115 opening title sequences from 1954 to the present.
19 of them are filed here rather than under their first word, because an index ignores a leading "The" or "A" — The Family Man, The Flash and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air among them.
Six rebuilt their opening titles mid-run, Farscape most of all with four sequences.
105 shows115 sequences
1 sequence
F Is for Family
A 1970s sitcom opening built out of wood panelling, cigarette smoke and a father arriving home — the era's own title design, with the warmth removed.
- Season 1
1 sequence
F Troop
A frontier cavalry post run badly, opened by a sung account of how badly.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The F.B.I.
Nine seasons made with the Bureau's cooperation and its approval of every script, from the Quinn Martin production line.
- Season 1
3 sequences
The Facts of Life
A girls' boarding school in Peekskill, spun off from Diff'rent Strokes and running three years longer than it.
- Season 1
- Season 7
- Season 8
1 sequence
The Fades
The unburied dead accumulating in the air above a British town, and a teenager who can see them.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Faerie Tale Theatre
Shelley Duvall's anthology of fairy tales, each directed by a different film-maker and cast from Hollywood.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fairly OddParents
A theme that runs through the entire premise as a checklist, revised several times across sixteen years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFaking It
Two friends mistaken for a couple who decide not to correct anyone.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Falcon and the Winter Soldier
Two supporting characters given the shield to argue over, and a title sequence built out of torn paper and news footage.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFalcon Crest
Napa vineyards filmed like an estate agent's brochure, for a family who spend nine seasons trying to take it from each other.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fall
Belfast, and a series that shows you the killer in the first episode and spends three series on the pursuit anyway.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin
A middle manager who fakes his own death by leaving his clothes on a beach, weekly.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fall Guy
A Hollywood stuntman working as a bounty hunter, with a theme song about being unknown.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fall of the House of Usher
Corporate portraiture rotting in place — a pharmaceutical dynasty photographed like old money and left to decay in frame.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFalling Skies
A resistance militia in occupied Boston, produced by Steven Spielberg, opened in eleven seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Fallout
Retro-futurist advertising for a world that ended — the games' Vault-Tec aesthetic reproduced exactly, and varied per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFame
The film continued at the High School of Performing Arts, with a cast who did their own dancing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFamily Affairs
The soap Channel 5 launched with, and the one that had to build an audience from nothing five nights a week.
- Season 3
2 sequences
Family Feud
Survey says — two families, a buzzer, and a theme rearranged for every host since Richard Dawson.
- Season 1
- Season 35
2 sequences
Family Guy
A musical number performed by the family about how television used to have values — a sitcom opening from the 1970s, done straight and then undercut.
- Season 1
- Season 10
1 sequence
The Family Man
A middle-class Mumbai father who is also a National Investigation Agency officer, and cannot tell his family either job is real.
- Season 3
1 sequenceFamily Matters
A Chicago family and a theme about the tiny things adding up, from a spinoff that was quietly taken over by a neighbour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFamily Ties
A family portrait being drawn and redrawn, over a duet about what would happen without you — sixties parents and a Reagan-voting son.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Famous Jett Jackson
A teenage action star who moves his own production to his grandmother's town in North Carolina.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFanboy & Chum Chum
Two boys in superhero costumes they never take off, in one of Nickelodeon's first CG series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFantasy Island
"De plane! De plane!" — an island where wishes are granted and then examined.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Fargo
Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Farscape
A Henson creature workshop pointed at space opera, and an opening that halves in ambition halfway through the run — the narrated version explaining the premise gives way to one that assumes you already know it.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequenceFarzi
A struggling artist forging banknotes well enough to destabilise the currency.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFat Albert and the Cosby Kids
A North Philadelphia junkyard, with a moral at the end and a live-action introduction at the start.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFatal Attraction
The 1987 film reworked as a series that takes the other side of the story seriously.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFather Brown
Chesterton's priest detective moved to the 1950s Cotswolds, and the most durable daytime drama the BBC has.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFather Dowling Mysteries
A Chicago priest and a nun solving murders, cancelled by NBC and picked up by ABC.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFather Knows Best
The Anderson family of Springfield, and the series the phrase came from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFather Ted
Three priests on a rock in the Atlantic, introduced by a whistle tune and some of the flattest scenery ever put in a title sequence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFauda
An Israeli undercover unit and the Palestinian militants it pursues, played from both sides.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFawlty Towers
A hotel sign whose letters are rearranged into a different rude anagram every episode — the earliest running title gag in this catalogue by two decades.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFBI: International
The franchise's Budapest-based Fly Team, covering American interests across Europe.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFBI: Most Wanted
The first FBI spin-off, following the fugitive task force, in nine seconds of title card.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Fear Factor
The Dutch format that asked contestants to eat things, opening on a montage of them regretting it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFear Itself
Masters of Horror moved to a broadcast network and cut to fit it, which is most of what went wrong.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFear the Walking Dead
Seventeen seconds and a card — the spinoff declining the parent show's decaying montage entirely.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceFelicity
J. J. Abrams and Matt Reeves's college drama, opened by a montage that changed as often as its lead's haircut did.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFerris Bueller
The film adapted for television without its star, and remembered mostly for opening with a joke about that.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFeud
Ryan Murphy's anthology of famous enmities, retitled from scratch for each pair.
- Season 2
1 sequenceFinal Space
A prisoner adrift in space with an alien that everyone in the galaxy wants.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFire Country
A convict on a Northern California firefighting crew, working off his sentence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFired Up
Two women sacked from a public relations firm who start their own out of a spare room.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Firefly
A slide guitar and a weary blues vocal over a spaceship. Sonny Rhodes sings words the show's creator wrote, and the argument of the whole series — that this is a western that happens to be in orbit — is settled before a line of dialogue is spoken.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFireman Sam
A Welsh fire station in stop-motion, made in Welsh first and dubbed into English second.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe First Lady
Eleanor Roosevelt, Betty Ford and Michelle Obama told in parallel across one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFish Hooks
A high school inside a pet-shop fish tank, animated over photographed backgrounds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFive Days at Memorial
A New Orleans hospital across the five days after Katrina, and the decisions taken inside it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Flash
The same narrated formula as Arrow, delivered faster — which is at least appropriate.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFlashForward
Everyone on Earth blacks out for two minutes and seventeen seconds and sees the same day six months ahead.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFlashpoint
A Toronto tactical unit, and the first Canadian drama to air simultaneously on an American network.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFleabag
Phoebe Waller-Bridge's series, which opens by looking directly at you and skips the formality of a title sequence entirely.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Flight Attendant
Saul Bass by way of an in-flight safety card — flat colour, cut paper and a woman falling through all of it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFlight of the Conchords
Cut-paper animation of two New Zealanders failing to make it in New York, assembled with the same handmade cheapness as the band it is about.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Flintstones
The first animated series in American primetime, and the source of a theme that did not arrive until the third season — the first two opened on something else entirely.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFlower of Evil
A detective investigating a case that leads to her own husband's past.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFood Wars! Shokugeki no Soma
Competitive cooking staged as combat, with the reaction shots doing most of the work.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFool Me Once
A widow who sees her dead husband on a nanny camera, from the Harlan Coben deal.
- Season 1
1 sequence
For All Mankind
Archive footage of the space race, doctored — real newsreel edited so that the alternate history it depicts appears to have actually been filmed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceForensic Files
Real cases retold through the laboratory work that closed them, and the programme that made luminol a household word.
- Season 1
1 sequenceForever Knight
A vampire working homicide nights in Toronto, introduced with narration explaining the arrangement every week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFortitude
An Arctic settlement where nothing decays and a killing therefore cannot be buried.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFosse/Verdon
Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon's working marriage, opened in eleven seconds because the choreography is the show.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFoster's Home for Imaginary Friends
A boarding house for imaginary friends whose children have outgrown them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fosters
A couple raising biological, adopted and foster children together, on a channel then rebranding around exactly that audience.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Foundation
Mathematics rendered as architecture — the Prime Radiant's equations building and dissolving structures across millennia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFraggle Rock
Jim Henson's series about three societies who cannot see each other properly, made to be co-produced in every country that bought it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFraggle Rock: Back to the Rock
The Henson revival, which rebuilds the 1983 theme shot for shot with new puppets.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Franchise
The crew of a failing superhero film, from Armando Iannucci and Sam Mendes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrankie Drake Mysteries
Toronto's only female private detective in the 1920s, from the Murdoch Mysteries producers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFranklin
Eighteenth-century Paris in ink and gold leaf, assembling the diplomacy the series is about out of correspondence.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrasier
A skyline drawn in simple lines while a man sings about tossed salads and scrambled eggs, and declines to explain either.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFreakazoid!
A superhero theme performed at a volume and speed that make the joke before the show has started.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFreaks and Geeks
School photographs taken one at a time, with each cast member visibly hating the process — Joan Jett over the least flattering portraits anyone would agree to.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFreddy's Nightmares
An anthology hosted by Freddy Krueger, made while the films were still coming out and stranger than any of them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrench and Saunders
Twenty years of film parodies, and the double act that came out of the Comic Strip.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrequency
A ham radio that reaches the operator's dead father twenty years earlier, from the 2000 film.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFresh Meat
Six students sharing a Manchester house, from the Peep Show writers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFresh Off the Boat
A Taiwanese-American family moving to Orlando in 1995, from Eddie Huang's memoir.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fresh Prince of Bel-Air
An entire origin story rapped over an animated title card — the longest opening of its era, cut down substantially after the first season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFriday Night Dinner
The same family, the same meal, every week, for six series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFriday Night Lights
Explosions in the Sky over Texas fields and floodlights — a football show whose titles are almost entirely landscape and weather.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFriday the 13th: The Series
An antiques shop recovering cursed objects, sharing nothing with the films but a title.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFridays
ABC's answer to Saturday Night Live, best remembered for the night Andy Kaufman refused to say his lines.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Friends
A fountain, an umbrella and six people who are not, on any reading of the physics, getting less wet.
- Season 6
3 sequences
Fringe
Pseudo-scientific terms floating in coloured fog — and the colour is the plot: the palette changes to tell you which universe or era the episode is set in.
- Season 1
- Season 4
- Season 5
1 sequence
From
'Que Sera, Sera' over a town nobody can leave — a cheerful standard used as a threat, which is the oldest trick in horror and still works.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrom Dusk till Dawn: The Series
Rodriguez remaking his own film at series length, on the channel he founded to show it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrom the Earth to the Moon
Tom Hanks's twelve-part Apollo history, opened by archive footage cut to Michael Kamen's march.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrontline
A current affairs programme satirised from inside its own newsroom, and the model most workplace mockumentaries since have followed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFrozen Planet
Ice filmed as architecture, and George Fenton again — twenty-six seconds with no animal in them at all.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFruits Basket
The second adaptation, which ran the manga to its end rather than stopping partway.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFull Circle
New York cut into overlapping fragments, so that separate lives keep occupying the same frame before the plot connects them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFull Frontal with Samantha Bee
A weekly satire whose opening graphics were redesigned more often than most dramas change a season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFull House
A San Francisco picnic and a song about everywhere you look — the platonic form of the American family-sitcom opening.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood
Alchemical circles and transmutation, animated at a scale the first adaptation could not afford.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Fungies!
A mushroom child scientist in a prehistoric fungal town.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Futurama
Like The Simpsons, an opening built to differ every week — a new caption under the logo and a different scrap of old cartoon on the screen the ship flies past — wrapped around Christopher Tyng's theme and a crash into a billboard.
- Seasons 1–4
- Seasons 6–7
1 sequenceFuture Man
A janitor recruited by time travellers because he finished a video game nobody else could.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceFuture-Worm!
A time-travelling worm and the boy who built his flask, from Ryan Quincy.
- Season 1