O
62 shows66 sequences
1 sequenceThe O.C.
2003–2007FoxDrama
Phantom Planet's 'California' over Newport Beach, in thirty-two seconds that sold an entire idea of southern California to a generation.
- Season 1
1 sequenceO.J.: Made in America
2016ESPNDocumentary
Nearly eight hours on one trial and a century of Los Angeles, opened in sixteen seconds because there is no time to spare.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe OA
2016–2019NetflixSci-Fi
Famously withheld — the first season put its title card nearly an hour into the first episode, so most viewers met the opening long after the show had started.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Oath
2018–2019CrackleCrime
A gang made up of serving police officers, opened by Imaginary Forces.
- Season 1
1 sequenceObi-Wan Kenobi
2022Disney+Sci-Fi
Ten years into the exile on Tatooine, with the character and the actor both back after seventeen years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOccupation
2009BBC OneDrama
Three soldiers from one Manchester regiment and the years after Basra.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOccupied
2015–2020TV2 NorgeDrama
A Norwegian political thriller about a soft occupation, opened with the calm of a corporate annual report.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOctober Faction
2020NetflixHorror
Two monster hunters whose teenage children do not know what the family business is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOctonauts
2010–CBeebiesAnimation
A crew of animals working out of an underwater base, each episode built around a real marine species.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Odd Couple
1970–1975ABCComedy
A narrated premise about two divorced men sharing an apartment, delivered in the tone of a public information film.
- Season 2
1 sequenceOdd Squad
2014–PBS KidsComedy
Child agents investigating mathematical strangeness, played entirely deadpan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOdyssey 5
2002ShowtimeSci-Fi
Five astronauts sent back five years to prevent the destruction of Earth, cancelled after one season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Offer
2022Paramount+Drama
The making of The Godfather, opened in the visual language of the film it is about.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Office
2005–2013NBCComedy
Scranton, a car park and a filing cabinet, shot like stock footage for a regional business — twenty-two seconds that promise nothing will happen.
- Season 1
2 sequencesOggy and the Cockroaches
1998–France 3Animation
A French cartoon with almost no dialogue in it, which is the reason it sold to nearly every country there is.
- Season 1
- Season 6
1 sequenceOh, Doctor Beeching!
1995–1997BBC OneComedy
A branch-line station waiting to be closed by the Beeching cuts, from the writers of Hi-de-Hi!
- Season 1
1 sequenceOK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes
2017–2019Cartoon NetworkAnimation
A hero-supply plaza run as a beat-em-up, with the video game's grammar kept in the titles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOktoberfest 1900
2020ARDDrama
A Nuremberg brewer trying to force his way into Munich's festival, and the family he spends to do it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Old Grey Whistle Test
1971–1988BBC TwoDocumentary
The serious music programme to Top of the Pops' singles chart, with a harmonica riff and a star-kicker cartoon.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOlive Kitteridge
2014HBODrama
Coastal Maine in muted colour, at the pace of a woman who has decided not to be pleased about anything.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOn Becoming a God in Central Florida
2019ShowtimeDrama
Kirsten Dunst working her way up a pyramid scheme that destroyed her family.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnce Upon a Time
2011–2018ABCDrama
A card hidden inside the episode's own imagery — the title appears somewhere in the opening scene rather than over a sequence, in a different place every week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Day at a Time
2017–2020Netflix / PopComedy
The Norman Lear sitcom remade around a Cuban American family, with the 1975 theme rerecorded by Gloria Estefan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Foot in the Grave
1990–2000BBC OneComedy
Victor Meldrew, forcibly retired at sixty and furious about everything since.
- Season 1
2 sequencesOne Life to Live
1968–2012ABCDrama
Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.
- Season 21
- Season 44
1 sequenceOne on One
2001–2006UPNComedy
A Baltimore sports broadcaster whose teenage daughter moves in with him, and the spine of UPN's comedy block for five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Piece
1999–Fuji TVAnimation
The longest-running opening rotation in television — more than twenty distinct sequences over a quarter of a century, each announcing a new arc.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Piece (2023)
2023–NetflixDrama
The live-action adaptation builds its opening from the crew's own belongings — maps, hats, weapons — rather than restaging the anime's.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Punch Man
2015–TV TokyoAnimation
A screaming rock track and animation of enormous ambition, for a hero who wins every fight in one hit and is bored by it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Step Beyond
1959–1961ABCHorror
An anthology that claimed every story was true, a year before The Twilight Zone said the opposite.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOne Tree Hill
2003–2012The WB / The CWDrama
Gavin DeGraw's 'I Don't Want to Be' over a small North Carolina town, re-cut every season until the show dropped the sequence entirely.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceOnly Connect
2008–BBC Four / BBC TwoDocumentary
A quiz whose easiest round asks what four things have in common, and whose hardest does not admit there is a connection at all.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnly Fools and Horses
1981–2003BBC OneComedy
A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnly Murders in the Building
2021–HuluComedy
The Arconia drawn as a cutaway illustration with the residents inside it, redrawn each season as the building's secrets change.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Only Way Is Essex
2010–ITV2Documentary
Structured reality built around a group of Essex friends, and the format most British television copied afterwards.
- Season 2
1 sequenceOnly When I Laugh
1979–1982ITVComedy
Three men in a hospital ward who are not especially ill, and the registrar who cannot discharge them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOpen All Hours
1976–1985BBC OneComedy
Ronnie Barker again, this time behind a corner-shop till with a faulty cash register.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOrange Is the New Black
2013–2019NetflixDrama
Extreme close-ups of real formerly incarcerated women's faces — eyes, mouths, tattoos — cut to Regina Spektor. Not one of them is a cast member, which is the point.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequenceThe Order
2019–2020NetflixHorror
A university secret society of magicians and the werewolves who police them, which is two shows at once and knows it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Originals
2013–2018The CWHorror
The Vampire Diaries spinoff, moving the family to New Orleans and giving them a title sequence the parent show never had.
- Season 2
1 sequenceOrphan Black
2013–2017Space / BBC AmericaSci-Fi
One face fracturing into many, which is both the premise and a fair description of what Tatiana Maslany was asked to do every week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Orville
2017–2022Fox / HuluSci-Fi
A ship passing the camera to a full orchestral fanfare, played entirely straight — a comedy whose titles are a sincere love letter to the ones this catalogue opens with.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOs Normais
2001–2003TV GloboComedy
A Rio couple narrating their own relationship to camera, in the sitcom that reset Brazilian television comedy.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Osbournes
2002–2005MTVDocumentary
Ozzy Osbourne singing Crazy Train as a lounge number over a title card done in gold leaf, which is the joke the whole series runs on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOswald
2001–2003NickelodeonAnimation
A blue octopus and his dachshund in a town drawn without a straight line in it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOur Girl
2013–2020BBC OneDrama
An army medic on tour, in a drama that recast its lead and kept going.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOur Miss Brooks
1952–1956CBSComedy
Eve Arden as a high-school English teacher, in a radio transfer that ran on both media at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOuran High School Host Club
2006Nippon TVAnimation
A scholarship student mistaken for a boy and conscripted into the school's host club.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOut of This World
1987–1991SyndicationComedy
A girl with an alien father who can stop time by touching her fingertips together.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutcasts
2011BBC OneSci-Fi
A human settlement on Carpathia five years after Earth stopped answering.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Outer Limits
1963–1965ABCSci-Fi
The control-voice narration that takes over your television set — a premise so effective that the sequence is better remembered than most of the episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Outer Limits (1995)
1995–2002Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelSci-Fi
The revival, which keeps the control-voice conceit and rebuilds the imagery around nineties computer graphics.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutlander
2014–StarzDrama
'The Skye Boat Song' rewritten for a woman instead of a prince, over standing stones and Highland weather — and re-recorded in a new style each season to match wherever the story has been dragged.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutnumbered
2007–2016BBC OneComedy
Two parents and three children, with the children's dialogue largely improvised.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOutrageous Fortune
2005–2010TV3Comedy
A West Auckland crime family whose matriarch decides, when her husband goes to prison, that the rest of them will go straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Outsider
2020HBOHorror
Twenty seconds of smeared, doubled imagery — a face that will not resolve into one face, which is the entire mystery stated up front.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOver the Garden Wall
2014Cartoon NetworkAnimation
Nineteenth-century American illustration and a wax-cylinder recording, for a miniseries that spends ten episodes pretending to be much older than it is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOverlord
2015–AT-XAnimation
A player left inside a shut-down game as his own undead avatar, playing the villain straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Owl House
2020–2023Disney ChannelAnimation
A human girl apprenticed to a witch on the Boiling Isles.
- Season 1
2 sequencesOz
1997–2003HBOCrime
HBO's first hour-long drama, and the opening that established what the network's title sequences would be for the next twenty years — narrated, tattooed, and entirely unwilling to reassure you.
- Season 1
- Season 4
2 sequencesOzark
2017–2022NetflixCrime
Five glyphs inside the letter O — a boat, a gun, a cross, a bird, a body of water — chosen for the episode they introduce. The title card is a table of contents.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceOzzy & Drix
2002–2004Kids' WBAnimation
The film Osmosis Jones continued as a series, with a white blood cell and a cold pill policing a teenager's body.
- Season 1