S
The letter S accounts for 265 of the 2,618 shows here, with 297 opening title sequences from 1951 to the present.
31 of them are filed here rather than under their first word, because an index ignores a leading "The" or "A" — The Sopranos, The Simpsons and The Strain among them.
23 rebuilt their opening titles mid-run, Silicon Valley most of all with five sequences.
265 shows297 sequences
1 sequence
S.W.A.T.
The original, cancelled after two seasons over its violence, and remembered mostly for a theme that reached number one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceS.W.A.T. (2017)
The reboot, which ran eight seasons to the original's two and rebuilt the theme rather than dropping it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sabrina the Teenage Witch
The Archie Comics witch as a TGIF sitcom, seven seasons across two networks.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSacred Games
Mumbai rendered as a mandala of crime and religion, with the city's iconography arranged into something closer to a devotional image.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sailor Moon
The series that built the magical-girl template, opened by "Moonlight Densetsu" across five separate runs.
- Season 4
1 sequenceSakamoto Days
A retired hitman running a corner shop, and everyone from the old life who keeps turning up.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Salem
The witch trials with actual witches, and the series that turned a superstation into a scripted network.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSalute Your Shorts
Camp Anawanna, and a theme song the campers sing badly on purpose.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Salvation
An asteroid six months from Earth and a government that would rather not say so.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSam & Cat
A crossover spin-off pairing characters from iCarly and Victorious.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSamurai Champloo
Nujabes and Shing02 over Edo-period swordplay — hip-hop and historical drama treated as obviously compatible, which nobody had assumed before.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSamurai Jack
A villain narrating his own defeat of the hero, over graphic-design animation that owes more to UPA than to Saturday morning.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSamurai Pizza Cats
Kyatto Ninden Teyandee rewritten wholesale in English by writers working without translated scripts.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSanctuary
A refuge for cryptids run by a 150-year-old doctor, shot almost entirely on green screen.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Sandbaggers
British intelligence run as an office job, with the operations mostly discussed rather than shown.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Sandman
Seventeen seconds of sand and a card. For a series adapted from a comic famous for its lettering, the titles are almost aggressively plain.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceSanford and Son
Quincy Jones writing a harmonica blues for a junkyard — one of the few sitcom themes composed by someone of that stature.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSanjay and Craig
A boy and his talking snake, drawn in the loosest line Nickelodeon has ever put on air.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSapphire & Steel
Two operatives who are not people, sent to repair breaks in time, explained to the audience only by a narrated list of elements.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSarah & Duck
A girl, her duck, and a narrator who talks to both of them, in fifteen seconds of open.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sarah Jane Adventures
The Doctor Who spin-off built for children, giving a companion from 1973 her own series thirty-four years later.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Saturday Night Live
A new cast montage every single season for fifty years — New York at night, the current company photographed in it, and a band playing over the top. The longest-running rotating title sequence on television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSaved by the Bell
Freeze-frames of six teenagers over a theme about being late — Saturday morning television's most durable export.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSaved by the Bell: The College Years
The Bayside cast moved to a university for one season, in prime time rather than Saturday morning.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Saved by the Bell: The New Class
Bayside kept and the pupils replaced, for seven seasons rather more than anyone had expected.
- Season 1
- Seasons 6–7
1 sequenceScam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story
The Bombay securities scandal, and one of the most imitated Indian title sequences of the streaming era.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScandal
Shonda Rhimes's Washington fixer series, and the show that made the phrase 'it's handled' a network brand.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScarecrow and Mrs. King
A divorced housewife recruited into intelligence work by accident.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScavengers Reign
Alien biology drawn with botanical-illustration patience — organisms doing something to each other that the show will spend an episode explaining.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Schitt's Creek
A motel sign and a town crest, in the register of a place that has never once considered how its name reads.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSchmigadoon!
A couple trapped inside a Golden Age musical that will not let them leave until they find true love.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSchool 2017
The seventh entry in a school series running since 1999, each with a new cast and year in the title.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSchoolhouse Rock!
Three-minute songs about grammar and arithmetic dropped between Saturday morning cartoons, and remembered longer than the cartoons.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScooby-Doo, Where Are You!
A theme that asks the title as a question, over a van and five characters who have been drawn the same way for fifty-five years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScorpion
A team of geniuses contracted by Homeland Security, very loosely based on a real consultant's account of himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScott Pilgrim Takes Off
The O'Malley books animated by Science SARU, with an opening in the full Japanese OP tradition.
- Season 1
1 sequenceScream Queens
Ryan Murphy's sorority slasher, with a title sequence longer than most of the deaths.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Scrubs
Twelve seconds, an X-ray and a guitar — a medical comedy that spends less time on titles than most shows spend on a network ident.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSCTV
A sketch show shaped as a fictional television station, which let it parody the whole schedule rather than one programme at a time.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSea Hunt
Lloyd Bridges as a freelance diver, and the most successful syndicated series of its decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSeaChange
A city lawyer moving to a coastal town, and the series that put the phrase into Australian English.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSealab 2021
A 1972 Hanna-Barbera series redubbed into something else entirely, keeping the original's animation and none of its intentions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceseaQuest DSV
A submarine, an orchestral fanfare and a narrated mission statement — Spielberg's answer to Star Trek, set downwards.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSearch for Tomorrow
Thirty-five years of American daytime, and the serial that was on air before most of the networks carrying it were.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSearch Party
A missing-person search taken up by four Brooklynites who mostly want something to be part of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSecret Army
An escape line moving Allied airmen out of occupied Belgium, played without any of the adventure the premise invites.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSecret Diary of a Call Girl
Billie Piper addressing the camera between clients, adapted from the Belle de Jour blog.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSecret Garden
A department store heir and a stuntwoman who wake up in each other's bodies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSecret Invasion
The first main-title sequence a major studio made with generative AI, and the argument about it drowned out the series underneath.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Secret Life of the American Teenager
A teen pregnancy drama that ran five seasons on the channel that had spent the decade before avoiding the subject.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Secret World of Alex Mack
A girl doused in a chemical spill who can turn into a puddle of silver.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSee
Texture rather than image — rope, bark, cloth and skin filmed close enough to be read by hand, for a world that lost its sight generations ago.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Seinfeld
A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSense and Sensibility
Andrew Davies adapting Austen across three parts, a decade after he did Pride and Prejudice.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSense8
Two minutes of documentary footage from eight cities — festivals, protests, traffic, dancing — cut so fast the places stop being separable. The longest opening on this site, and it earns it.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceThe Sentinel
A detective whose five senses were permanently heightened by eighteen months alone in the jungle.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Series of Unfortunate Events
Lemony Snicket adapted with a title sequence whose lyrics are rewritten for every book — the song spends every verse telling you to stop watching.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceThe Serpent Queen
Catherine de' Medici narrating her own rise directly to camera.
- Season 1
1 sequenceServant
A doll's house filmed as an actual house — a brownstone rendered in miniature, with something wrong in one of the rooms.
- Season 1
1 sequenceServant of the People
A history teacher accidentally elected president of Ukraine, played by a comedian who was then elected president of Ukraine.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Sesame Street
Children running through a New York street to a song asking how to get there — an opening that has been remade every decade for over fifty years.
- Season 1
- Seasons 24–25
1 sequenceSeven Days
A government project that can send one man back exactly seven days, once, to undo a disaster.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Severance
A man walking through his own head, drawn as a corporate-training diagram that keeps folding back into itself. Oliver Latta's animation, and the best argument in years that a title sequence can be the thesis.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceSex & Drugs & Rock & Roll
Denis Leary as a failed rock singer reforming his band around his own daughter.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sex and the City
A tutu, a bus and a splash of dirty water — an opening whose entire joke is that New York does not care who you think you are.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sex Education
Twenty seconds of hand-drawn scrawl and pop, pitched exactly at the notebook margins the show is set among.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Sex Lives of College Girls
Four roommates at a Vermont university, from Mindy Kaling, who has made this arrangement work before.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShadow and Bone
A sequence that changes with the episode — the imagery inside the letterforms is recut each week to match what is about to happen.
- Seasons 1–2
2 sequences
Shadowhunters
Runes burning into skin, and a New York rendered as a warded city.
- Season 1
- Season 3
1 sequenceShake It Up
Two Chicago dancers on a local television show, with Zendaya in her first series.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Shameless
A bathroom door opening on each member of the family in turn — an entire household characterised through one room.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShantaram
Nine seconds and a card. One of the shortest openings in the catalogue, for one of its longest-gestating adaptations.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Shark Tank
The American Dragons' Den, with the same format's Japanese parent behind both.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sharp Objects
Wind Gap seen at speed from a car window, with words hidden in the frame — the same trick the show plays for eight episodes, put in the titles from the first minute.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSharpe
A rifleman commissioned out of the ranks in the Peninsular War, filmed for its first runs in Crimea.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShe-Hulk: Attorney at Law
A lawyer who is also a Hulk, in the one Marvel series that opens like a network sitcom and means it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShe-Ra and the Princesses of Power
The 1985 toy line rebuilt by Noelle Stevenson into something the original could not have carried.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Sherlock
London shot as data — maps, magnification and chemical traces, cut to a violin figure that never quite settles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSherlock Holmes (1984)
Granada's adaptation, played on a Baker Street built outdoors in Manchester and continued until Jeremy Brett could no longer work.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShetland
North Atlantic weather over islands where everyone already knows everyone, which is the constraint the series runs on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Shining (1997)
King's own remake for television, made largely because he disliked what Kubrick had done with the book.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShining Time Station
The American frame built around the Thomas films, with a foot-tall conductor living inside the station wall.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Shōgun
Ink and weather. Landscapes, ships and figures resolve out of washes of black and grey as though the frame is being painted while you watch, then dissolve before any of it settles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShōgun (1980)
The Clavell miniseries that ran five nights and made a genre out of the Western sailor in feudal Japan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceShortland Street
New Zealand's nightly hospital serial, running since 1992 and re-cut its titles roughly once a decade.
- Seasons 10–13
1 sequenceShow Me a Hero
David Simon on a Yonkers housing desegregation fight, opened by one of the longest title sequences on premium television.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Shrinking
Hand-drawn scribbles over domestic footage, in the register of a therapist's notebook margin.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSigmund and the Sea Monsters
A sea monster thrown out by his family for being unable to frighten anyone, hidden in a beach clubhouse.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSignal
A walkie-talkie connecting a present-day profiler to a detective in 1989.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilent Witness
Forensic pathology rendered as abstraction — a thirty-year-old series whose titles have been redesigned repeatedly while the eye at the centre of them stayed.
- Season 21
5 sequences
Silicon Valley
An animated Bay Area skyline of tech-company headquarters, rebuilt every season to match who was winning that year. The joke only works because it kept being updated — logos appear, get acquired, and vanish between seasons.
- Season 1
- Season 3
- Season 4
- and 2 more
1 sequenceSilk Stalkings
Palm Beach sex-crimes detectives, and the show that effectively invented USA Network's original programming.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Silo
A cross-section of the silo, descending. The camera falls the length of a buried structure the characters spend the series failing to understand, which tells you the shape of the thing before the plot does.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilver Spoon
A Russian oligarch's son forced to work as a policeman, and the most exported Russian drama of its decade. Original title Мажор.
- Season 3
1 sequenceSilver Spoons
A boy sent to live with the father who never grew up, and the model train he rides through the house.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSilverHawks
ThunderCats moved into space by the same studio, with the same narrator shouting the same way.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSimon & Simon
Two brothers running a San Diego detective agency with opposite methods.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Simpsons
The only main title in television built to be different every week: the chalkboard, the saxophone solo and the couch gag all change, so the sequence is a format rather than a film.
- Seasons 1–20
- Season 21
1 sequenceThe Singing Detective
Dennis Potter's serial, in which a hospitalised writer's hallucinations arrive as 1940s dance numbers — and the titles set that up without explaining it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Single Guy
A novelist whose friends are all married, scheduled by NBC between Friends and Seinfeld and never forgiven for it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sinner
An anthology that begins with the crime and spends the season on why.
- Season 2
1 sequenceSister, Sister
Twins separated at birth and reunited in a shopping mall, played by twins.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSisters
Four sisters in Illinois, in a network drama that let all four of them be difficult.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSix Feet Under
Digital Kitchen's procession of small deaths: hands letting go, a crow on a wire, a hearse, feet on a mortuary table. It won the Emmy and set the template most prestige-drama openings still follow.
- Seasons 1–5
1 sequenceThe Six Million Dollar Man
A crash, a countdown and the promise that they can rebuild him — narration that entered the language more thoroughly than the show did.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSki Sunday
A downhill run cut to Pop Looks Bach, and a theme that in Britain means winter rather than skiing.
- Season 43
1 sequenceSkins
A new cast every two series, and a new title sequence with them — the show rebuilt itself from scratch twice and the openings track it.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceThe Sky at Night
The longest-running programme with the same presenter in television history, opening on Sibelius' At the Castle Gate.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSky Castle
Four families in a gated Seoul compound competing over university admissions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSky King
An Arizona rancher who catches criminals from a twin-engined aeroplane, out of the radio serial.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSkysurfer Strike Force
Five pilots on energy surfboards, from the syndication block that ran opposite the Saban shows.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSlam Dunk
A delinquent who joins the basketball team to impress a girl and stays for the game.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSledge Hammer!
A detective who holds conversations with his revolver, in a parody ABC scheduled directly against the police shows it was mocking.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSleeper Cell
An FBI agent undercover in a Los Angeles terrorist cell, two seasons long.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSleepy Hollow
Ichabod Crane woken in the present day, with the Horseman following him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSliders
A wormhole opening in a San Francisco street, and four people falling into it — the same shot every week for a show about never seeing the same world twice.
- Season 2
1 sequenceSlings and Arrows
A Canadian series about a Shakespearean festival, with a different theatrical opening for each of its three seasons.
- Season 2
1 sequence
Slow Horses
London surveillance imagery over a theme Mick Jagger wrote for the show — a spy series whose titles are as shabby and unglamorous as its office.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmack the Pony
A sketch show written and performed by women, at a point when British television had decided that was a format rather than a fact.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmall Island
Andrea Levy's Windrush novel in two parts, moving between Jamaica and a Earls Court boarding house.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmall Wonder
A robot girl passed off as a daughter, in a syndicated sitcom that few people quite believe existed.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequence
Smallville
Remy Zero's 'Save Me' over a cast that changed almost completely across ten years, with the credits rebuilt around each departure.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmart Guy
A ten-year-old skipped ahead to high school, and the two older siblings who have to sit next to him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSMILF
A single mother in South Boston, cancelled after two seasons.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Smiling Friends
A tiny company whose job is making people happy, with a title card that is over almost before it starts.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceSmoke
Fire filmed close enough to lose its shape — an arson series whose titles are almost entirely texture.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSmother
A death on a Clare beach and the family who all have a reason to have wanted it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSnabba Cash
The Stockholm crime films continued as a series, following the money rather than the men.
- Season 2
1 sequenceSneaky Pete
A con man hiding inside his cellmate's identity, from Bryan Cranston and David Shore.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSnowpiercer
The Bong Joon-ho film continued as a series on a train that cannot stop, opened in fourteen seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSo Weird
A girl touring with her mother's band and investigating what she finds on the road, made darker than the channel usually allowed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSo You Think You Can Dance
The dance contest built to the Idol template by Idol's own producer, and one of the few competition formats to run its production credits over the performance rather than after it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSoap
A narrator recapping a plot that has already become unmanageable, ending every week on the same weary question about what will happen next.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSoldier Soldier
A fictional infantry regiment and the families attached to it, which made two of its cast into pop stars.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSolid Gold
The weekly chart countdown as a dance routine, with its own troupe named after it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSolo Leveling
Hiroyuki Sawano scoring a power fantasy at exactly the scale it wants to be taken at.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSome Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em
Frank Spencer in a beret, and stunts Michael Crawford performed himself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSomebody Feed Phil
Phil Rosenthal eating his way around the world, with a theme song written and sung about him by his friends.
- Season 5
1 sequenceSomebody Somewhere
Kansas roads and grain elevators, filmed without a trace of irony — a small show that declines to make its setting a joke.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSomething So Right
A remarried couple with children from three previous marriages between them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Son
Pierce Brosnan across two Texas timelines, from the Philipp Meyer novel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSon of the Beach
A Baywatch parody produced by Howard Stern, and one of FX's first originals.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSonic Prime
A shattered multiverse of Sonics, opened in twelve seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour
A married double act insulting each other between songs, in the variety hour that made Cher a television star.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Sons of Anarchy
Leather, chrome and a reaper patch, over a theme re-recorded by a different artist as the club's situation deteriorates.
- Season 1
- Season 7
1 sequenceSooty & Co
The Sooty puppets moved to a shop, in the ITV series Matthew Corbett handed over at the end of.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Sopranos
Ninety seconds of a man driving home from the Lincoln Tunnel to North Caldwell. No cast montage, no highlights — just the commute, which turns out to be the whole show.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequenceSoul Train
An animated locomotive pulling into a city drawn in airbrush — the longest-running first-run syndicated show in American history opens like a record sleeve.
- Season 1
2 sequences
South Park
A banjo, a cut-paper Colorado town and four boys at a bus stop — re-recorded and re-animated repeatedly across nearly thirty years while staying recognisably the same twenty-nine seconds.
- Season 1
- Season 15
1 sequenceSouthland
Los Angeles patrol work shot like documentary, dropped by NBC and picked up by TNT.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpace Cases
Children lost on an alien ship, co-created by Peter David and Bill Mumy of Lost in Space.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpace Dandy
Shinichiro Watanabe again, and again the opening is a music cue with a visual identity of its own — surf rock, neon and a pompadour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpace Ghost Coast to Coast
A 1960s Hanna-Barbera superhero repurposed as a chat-show host, and the programme every Adult Swim series descends from.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Space: 1999
The most confident opening Gerry Anderson ever made: a burst of brass, then a rapid-fire montage of clips from the episode you are about to watch, so no two broadcasts were identical.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceSpace: Above and Beyond
Marines fighting an interstellar war, written by two X-Files producers and cancelled after the one season they had planned five of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpaced
Freeze-frames and film-reference visual gags, cut at the speed the show quotes at — which is constant.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Spanish Princess
Catherine of Aragon's arrival in England, third in the same Philippa Gregory sequence.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Spartacus
Starz's gladiator series, and one of the last major shows to use blood as a graphic element in its titles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpecial Unit 2
A Chicago police unit whose caseload is entirely mythological, and which nobody else in the department believes exists.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Spectacular Spider-Man
Web-line geometry and a surf-rock horn chart, widely held to be the best Spider-Man adaptation in any medium.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpeed Racer
Mach GoGoGo dubbed into English at speed, and the anime that got there before anyone called it that.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpenser: For Hire
Robert B. Parker's Boston detective, with Avery Brooks as Hawk in the part that made him.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpicks and Specks
A music quiz named after a Bee Gees single, and one of the ABC's most watched programmes for a decade.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpider-Man
The nineties adaptation, with a guitar theme that a generation can still produce on request.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpider-Man: The Animated Series
The Fox Kids Marvel block's other pillar, alongside X-Men, with a guitar theme that does the same job.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpider-Man: The New Animated Series
MTV's computer-animated Spider-Man, set between the first two films and cancelled after thirteen episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpin City
New York City Hall in twenty-two seconds, rebuilt partway through the run when the show changed its lead.
- Season 5
1 sequenceSpiral
Paris police, courts and lawyers in thirty-one seconds, with none of the city that appears on postcards.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpitting Image
Latex puppets of everyone in public life, opening on the workshop that built them.
- Season 1
1 sequence
SpongeBob SquarePants
A sea shanty led by a painted pirate head, in call and response with children — one of the most universally known pieces of television music written this century.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSpooks
Fast-cut surveillance imagery and a clock, from a series that made a habit of killing its leads without warning.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSportsnight
The midweek sports programme, and the strand most of British sports broadcasting learned its trade on.
- Season 26
1 sequenceSpy × Family
Sixties spy-film design applied to a fake family — the parents' cover story rendered as the title sequence they would want.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSquare One TV
Mathematics taught as sketch comedy, including a police procedural parody called Mathnet.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSquare Pegs
Two girls trying to be popular at a Californian high school, one season long and much imitated since.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSquid Game
Childhood playground shapes — circle, triangle, square — turned into a brand so completely that the symbols now read as threat before they read as games.
- Season 3
1 sequenceSquidbillies
Appalachian squids, with a theme song rerecorded by a different artist almost every season — one of the longest-running rotating title sequences on American television.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSt. Denis Medical
A short-staffed Oregon hospital, filmed as though a documentary crew had turned up and stayed.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSt. Elsewhere
A Boston hospital and another Dave Grusin-adjacent piano theme, from the network and era that produced Hill Street Blues and shared its restraint.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Staircase
The dramatisation of the Michael Peterson case, made about the documentary crew as much as the trial.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Search
The syndicated talent contest that ran twelve years and handed the singing-competition format almost everything Idol later inherited.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Star Trek
The one that set the shape of every space-opera opening since: a ship crossing the frame, a captain narrating a mission statement, and a melody built to be hummed. Alexander Courage wrote it as a fanfare and a lounge tune at the same time.
- Season 1
- Seasons 2–3
2 sequences
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
A title sequence that starts still and learns to move. The station hangs motionless in the early years; by the war it is surrounded by traffic, which is the whole arc of the show in ninety seconds.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7
2 sequences
Star Trek: Discovery
A complete break from every Trek opening before it — no ship, no narration, just schematic drafting-table renderings of Starfleet hardware assembling and dissolving in empty space, with a pair of hands reaching through it all.
- Seasons 1–2
- Seasons 3–5
2 sequences
Star Trek: Enterprise
The franchise's most argued-over opening: no orchestra, no starfield, but a montage of real human exploration — sailing ships, biplanes, spacesuits — under a soft-rock ballad. Half the audience never forgave it, which is its own kind of achievement.
- Seasons 1–2
- Seasons 3–4
1 sequenceStar Trek: Lower Decks
The joke is in the structure: it opens exactly like a heroic Trek title sequence, and then the ship spends the entire minute getting wrecked by everything it meets. The Cerritos never wins a single shot of its own opening.
- Seasons 1–5
2 sequences
Star Trek: Picard
An opening about memory rather than exploration. Fragments of a life — a vineyard, a Borg cube, a face — resolve out of swirling particles, and only at the very end does it admit it is a Star Trek show.
- Seasons 1–2
- Season 3
1 sequenceStar Trek: Prodigy
Made for viewers who had never seen a Star Trek before, and it shows in the best way — the Protostar streaks through bright, candy-coloured space on a theme with more wonder in it than most of the grown-up entries.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequence
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
A deliberate return to the old shape after two shows that avoided it — the Enterprise sweeping past ringed planets and ice moons, Pike narrating, and a theme that keeps reaching for Courage's original without ever quite quoting it.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceStar Trek: The Animated Series
Filmation's Saturday-morning continuation, with most of the original cast back on microphone duty. The theme is Courage's melody rescored for a cartoon orchestra, brighter and quicker than the live-action original.
- Seasons 1–2
3 sequences
Star Trek: The Next Generation
The Enterprise-D passing the camera at warp while Patrick Stewart reads the mission statement. Stately, slow and completely confident — it takes almost a minute and a half before anything happens, and it never once feels the need to hurry.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Seasons 3–7
2 sequences
Star Trek: Voyager
The most purely beautiful of the Trek openings — Voyager skimming a comet, threading a nebula and sliding past a gas giant while Jerry Goldsmith writes the loneliest theme in the franchise. Nothing about it is in a hurry to get home.
- Seasons 1–3
- Seasons 4–7
1 sequenceStar vs. the Forces of Evil
A magical princess sent to Earth for remedial schooling, with a wand she does not control.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars Rebels
Kevin Kiner rewriting John Williams for a series about the Rebellion before it was one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: Droids
The two droids between the trilogies, in the first Star Wars television made for children.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: Skeleton Crew
Four children lost in the galaxy, played as an eighties Amblin adventure.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: The Bad Batch
The Clone Wars continued with a squad of defective clones, and a title card that keeps the parent series' logo shape.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: The Clone Wars
A newsreel rather than a title sequence — a narrator reporting the state of the war, rewritten every episode, preceded by a different aphorism each week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: Visions
Ten seconds and a card, deliberately — an anthology handing each episode to a different studio to open however it likes.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStar Wars: Young Jedi Adventures
The franchise's first series for preschoolers, set in the High Republic.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Stargate Atlantis
The same franchise moved to another galaxy, and the titles say so — a city rather than a gate, rising out of water instead of standing in a mountain.
- Season 1
- Seasons 2–3
- Season 4
- and 1 more
4 sequences
Stargate SG-1
The gate opening, every week, for ten years — David Arnold's film theme rearranged for television and a sequence that never stopped being about one piece of hardware.
- Season 1
- Season 6
- Season 9
- and 1 more
1 sequenceStargate Universe
The franchise's darkest entry, and its plainest opening — no fanfare, no gate, just a ship going somewhere nobody chose.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStargirl
The Justice Society rebuilt by a teenager in small-town Nebraska.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStarsky & Hutch
Two Bay City detectives and a red Ford Torino with a white stripe.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStath Lets Flats
Jamie Demetriou as a lettings agent with no aptitude for letting flats.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStatic Shock
A hip-hop theme over a Black teenage superhero in Dakota — from the same DC animation house as Batman and Superman, and tonally nothing like either.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStation Eleven
Hand-drawn comic panels from the book within the book, animated just enough to move — the artefact the survivors carry, doing the introducing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStep by Step
Two single parents merging their families, in the middle of the TGIF block.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSteptoe and Son
Two rag-and-bone men who cannot leave each other, and the series Sanford and Son was remade from.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Steve Harvey Show
A funk musician turned high school teacher, in the sitcom that carried The WB's Monday nights for six years.
- Season 1
- Seasons 4–6
1 sequenceSteven Universe
A theme sung by the characters about themselves, rewritten as the line-up of those characters changes — which for this show is the plot.
- Season 5
1 sequenceStick
A washed-up golfer coaching a teenager, and one of the few 2025 series whose service posted its own titles.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStig of the Dump
Clive King's boy in a chalk pit and the person living at the bottom of it, adapted by Thames.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStill Game
Two Glasgow pensioners and the Craiglang high-rises, with titles built entirely from the scheme itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStingray
"Stand by for action!" — the first British series filmed entirely in colour, and it opens by saying so.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStorage Wars
Abandoned storage lockers auctioned unseen, with the bidders introduced like a heist crew.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Storyteller
European folk tales retold by John Hurt beside a fire, with Henson's creature shop doing the rest.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Strain
Guillermo del Toro's vampire plague, opened by a sequence of things going wrong at cellular scale.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStrange Angel
Jack Parsons, rocket engineer and occultist, in 1930s Pasadena.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Stranger
A prosecutor without emotional affect and the detective who trusts him anyway. Known at home as 비밀의 숲, Secret Forest.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequence
Stranger Things
Red letters assembling out of the dark in ITC Benguiat, glowing at the edges like a paperback cover left in the sun. An argument that a title sequence can be nothing but type and still do all the work.
- Seasons 1–4
1 sequenceStrangers with Candy
An after-school special inverted: a forty-six-year-old ex-convict returning to high school as a freshman.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Streets of San Francisco
Karl Malden and a young Michael Douglas, shot on location throughout.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Strictly Come Dancing
The BBC's ballroom format, sold to fifty-odd countries as Dancing with the Stars and kept at home under its own name.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStrike
Galbraith's one-legged private detective and the assistant who turns out to be better at it than he expected.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStrike Back
A British special-forces unit shot like an action franchise, in one of Sky's first co-productions with an American premium channel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStrong Medicine
Two doctors from opposite ends of the system sharing a women's clinic in Philadelphia.
- Season 1
1 sequenceStudio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Sorkin backstage at a sketch show, cancelled after one season while another series took the same premise and survived.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuburgatory
A Manhattan teenager relocated to the suburbs by a father who found a box of condoms in her drawer.
- Season 1
3 sequences
Succession
Home video of rich children, degraded and half-legible, cut against helicopter shots of towers they will inherit. Nicholas Britell's piano stumbles deliberately, like something played badly on purpose.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequenceSuddenly Susan
A columnist who leaves her fiancé at the altar and then has to write about it every week.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSugar
Classic Hollywood noir imagery cut against modern Los Angeles — a detective series that keeps quoting the films it is standing inside.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Suite Life of Zack & Cody
Twins living in a Boston hotel their mother sings in.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Suite Life on Deck
The Suite Life moved onto a cruise ship that is also a school.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Suits
Tailoring, cufflinks and Manhattan glass over Ima Robot's 'Greenback Boogie' — a law firm sold entirely on wardrobe.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSullivan's Crossing
A neurosurgeon who goes back to her father's campground in Nova Scotia and stays.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSummer Camp Island
A camp where the counsellors are witches and the moon is a person, drawn in chalk pastel.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSummer Heights High
Chris Lilley playing three pupils and staff at the same school, shot as a documentary.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSunny
Domestic robotics rendered as cheerful product design, in exactly the register that makes a helpful machine frightening.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSunset Beach
Aaron Spelling's daytime serial, which NBC ran for three years and then replaced with Passions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuper Mario World
The last of the Mario cartoons, made for one autumn after the game of the same name.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuper Pumped
The Uber story as the first season of an intended anthology about companies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuper Why!
Four children who solve their problems by climbing into storybooks and changing the spelling.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperbook
A Japanese-animated series in which a book sends two children into Bible stories, made for an American religious broadcaster.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperboy
Clark Kent at university in Florida, made for syndication while the films were between instalments.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSupergirl
The narrated-premise formula again, this time with a first-person introduction that ran for six seasons.
- Season 3
1 sequenceSuperhuman Samurai Syber-Squad
A garage band's keyboard player digitised into a computer to fight what lives there, adapted from Denkou Choujin Gridman.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperjail!
A prison inside a volcano inside another volcano, animated with more detail per frame than the slot required.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperman: The Animated Series
The companion to Batman: The Animated Series, and the same trick — a full orchestral score over a sequence that names nothing.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSupernanny
Jo Frost arriving by taxi to reorganise a household, every week, for twenty years.
- Season 4
1 sequence
Supernatural
Fifteen years without an opening title sequence, and fifteen distinct title cards instead — a few seconds of the show's name, restyled from scratch every season to match what that year was about. The shortest main titles on this site, and the ones that changed the most.
- Seasons 1–15
1 sequenceSuperstore
Big-box retail signage and shelving, shot with the flatness of the fluorescent light the whole show is lit by.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSuperTed
A discarded teddy bear given powers by a spotty alien, made in Wales and sold to Disney.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Survivor
The competition format that rebuilt American primetime, and rebuilds its titles for every location.
- Season 1
- Season 50
1 sequenceSurvivors
Terry Nation's plague series, in which the titles kill the world in forty seconds using nothing but a broken test tube and a series of passport stamps.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSwamp Thing
Cancelled after one episode aired and finished anyway, which is why all ten exist.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sweeney
The Flying Squad in a Ford Granada, and the series that made British police drama violent.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSweet Home
The apartment block as a cross-section, with something wrong in every unit — the show's premise drawn as a floor plan.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSweet Magnolias
Three friends in a small South Carolina town, adapted from Sherryl Woods's novels.
- Seasons 1–2
1 sequenceSweet Valley High
The paperback series about twin sisters, adapted for television with real twins.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSwitched at Birth
Two teenagers swapped as babies, in a family drama that plays whole scenes in sign language.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sylvester & Tweety Mysteries
The chase reframed as a detective series, with Granny solving cases and the cat still not catching the bird.
- Season 1
1 sequenceSym-Bionic Titan
Genndy Tartakovsky's mecha series, cancelled after one season for having no toy line.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Sympathizer
Propaganda poster art, film leader and Saigon footage cut together so that the two sides' imagery becomes one reel — which is the narrator's problem exactly.
- Season 1