W
The letter W accounts for 106 of the 2,618 shows here, with 121 opening title sequences from 1957 to the present.
28 of them are filed here rather than under their first word, because an index ignores a leading "The" or "A" — The White Lotus, The Witcher and The Walking Dead among them.
Eight rebuilt their opening titles mid-run, The Wire most of all with five sequences.
106 shows121 sequences
1 sequence
Wacky Races
Eleven cars introduced one at a time by a narrator, which is a title sequence that is also the entire premise.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Wagon Train
A wagon company crossing to California, and the series Gene Roddenberry pitched Star Trek against.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWalker
Walker, Texas Ranger remade for the CW with the ranger's family moved into the foreground.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Walker, Texas Ranger
Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.
- Season 3
1 sequence
The Walking Dead
Rust, decay and abandoned objects, cut to a string figure that never resolves — a sequence about entropy rather than the dead.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
The franchise moved to France, with a title sequence built out of religious iconography rather than decay.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Walking Dead: Dead City
Maggie and Negan in a cut-off Manhattan, in the first of the spin-offs to give its pairing the whole hour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live
Rick and Michonne given the ending the parent series never got round to.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Walking with Dinosaurs
A natural history series about animals nobody has filmed, shot as though somebody had.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWallander
Henning Mankell's Ystad detective, filmed twice — in Swedish with Krister Henriksson, and in English with Kenneth Branagh.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Waltons
A Virginia mountain homestead in the Depression, introduced with a warmth the decade's other dramas had no interest in.
- Season 1
1 sequence
WandaVision
A different decade's sitcom opening every week — hand-drawn fifties, animated sixties, video-tape seventies, saccharine eighties, mockumentary two-thousands — each one a faithful pastiche of a real show's titles, and each one a little more wrong than the last.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWander Over Yonder
Craig McCracken's relentlessly cheerful nomad and the villain he will not stop befriending.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWar of the Worlds
A sequel to the 1953 film in which the aliens were never defeated, only dormant.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWarehouse 13
Artefacts on shelves, filmed like a museum inventory that has started moving on its own.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWarrior
Ink-brush figures fighting across parchment, for a series built from a Bruce Lee treatment that took fifty years to reach air.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWataha
Border guards in the Bieszczady mountains, and the first Polish drama HBO made for itself.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Watcher
A house filmed from outside, at the distance a neighbour would stand — which is the entire threat.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWatchmen
Damon Lindelof's sequel to the comic, scored by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, and the hardest entry in this catalogue to find footage of.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWaterloo Road
A failing comprehensive in Rochdale, and the successor to Grange Hill as British television's school of record.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The Wayans Bros.
Two brothers running a Harlem newsstand, made by the family whose name is over the door.
- Season 1
- Season 3
1 sequenceWayward Pines
An Idaho town nobody can leave, from the Blake Crouch novels.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWCW Monday Nitro
The programme that made Monday nights a ratings war, and lost it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Are Who We Are
Luca Guadagnino's only television series, on an American army base in Veneto, opened in ten seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Bare Bears
Three bears stacked in a trenchcoat trying to fit into the Bay Area.
- Season 1
1 sequence
We Can Be Heroes
Chris Lilley playing all six finalists for Australian of the Year, in his first series.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Own This City
Baltimore again, from the makers of The Wire, but shot as surveillance and body-camera footage rather than drama.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWe Were Liars
A summer on a private island off Massachusetts, and the accident nobody in the family will describe.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWeak Hero Class
A top student fighting his way through school violence, from the webtoon.
- Season 2
1 sequenceWeb Therapy
Lisa Kudrow's improvised therapist, conducting three-minute sessions by video call.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWebster
A boy adopted by his late father's team-mate, in the sitcom ABC ran in Diff'rent Strokes' shadow.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWeCrashed
Startup iconography inflating and bursting — open-plan glass, beanbags and valuation charts, treated as one continuous bubble.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Wednesday
Gothic paper-cut animation and a harpsichord, doing in seventy-nine seconds what the Addams Family finger-snap did in eight.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequenceWeeds
'Little Boxes' over identical suburban houses — and from the third season the song is re-recorded by a different artist every episode, which makes this one of the most varied openings in television.
- Season 2
1 sequenceWeird Science
The film turned into a series, with the computer-made woman staying on as a regular.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWelcome to the Wayne
An apartment building with a secret in every corridor, and children who map it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWelcome to Wrexham
Two American actors buying a Welsh football club, and a title sequence that treats the town as the subject rather than them.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWentworth
An Australian prison drama with a thirty-second opening that gets colder as the series goes on.
- Season 8
1 sequenceWerewolf
One of the four series Fox launched its network with, and the first weekly werewolf on American television.
- Season 1
2 sequences
The West Wing
Oil portraits, flags and W.G. Snuffy Walden's brass — an opening that treats the executive branch as a cathedral, which is the show's entire register.
- Season 1
- Season 5
1 sequenceThe Westies
The Hell's Kitchen Irish mob, opened by Digital Kitchen in the grain of 1970s New York.
- Season 1
4 sequences
Westworld
Things being manufactured, filmed as though it were tender: a horse and rider printed strand by strand, hands assembled out of white thread, a player piano working the theme out by itself. Rebuilt every season as the show's idea of what is being made changes.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequenceWhat I Like About You
Two sisters sharing a New York flat, named for the Romantics single it opens on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhat If...?
The Watcher narrating alternative versions of the films, with a sequence that assembles and dismantles itself every week.
- Season 1
1 sequence
What We Do in the Shadows
Gothic engraving and Norma Tanega's 'You're Dead' — a vampire mockumentary whose titles are the only part of it played completely straight.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhat's Happening Now!!
The seventies sitcom revived with the same cast grown up and running the diner.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
The sequel to the 1964 series, about two friends who have grown in opposite directions.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wheel of Time
A tapestry weaving itself, unpicking, and starting again — the series' cosmology of cycles, stated as a loom.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWheeler Dealers
One man buys a car badly, the other repairs it, and the profit is announced at the end whether there is any or not.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhen Calls the Heart
A city teacher posted to a frontier coal town, and the longest-running scripted series Hallmark has made.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere in the World Is Carmen Sandiego?
A geography quiz whose house band sang the answers, and which taught a generation of children where Ouagadougou is.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere on Earth Is Carmen Sandiego?
The geography game animated, with Rita Moreno as the thief and a jazz score to chase her with.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhere the Heart Is
District nurses in a Yorkshire town, which ran nine years on almost no incident.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhite Collar
Nine seconds. A fedora, a card, and straight into it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhite House Plumbers
Eleven seconds of period government typography, played as though the men behind it were competent.
- Season 1
3 sequences
The White Lotus
Colonial wallpaper that will not behave — painted paradise curdling into something predatory while the resort's guests are nowhere in it. Rebuilt from scratch for each new location, with a new theme every time.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequenceThe White Princess
The sequel to The White Queen, following Elizabeth of York into the Tudor marriage.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe White Queen
Roses, water and heraldry — the Wars of the Roses introduced through the emblems both sides died for.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe White Shadow
A white ex-professional coaching basketball at a mostly black Los Angeles high school.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhitechapel
Modern police work in the streets the Ripper murders happened in, with each series restaging an old case.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Whitest Kids U' Know
A New York sketch troupe who filmed their own pilot and sold it, opening on a theme they perform themselves.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWho Do You Think You Are?
One celebrity's ancestry per episode, opening on photographs that dissolve into each other backwards.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWho Killed Sara?
Photographs, parachute rigging and water — the single incident the whole series circles, restaged in the titles every season.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceWho Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Keith and Matthew Strachan's music, which unusually runs continuously under the questions rather than only over the titles — one of the few game shows scored like a thriller.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWho's the Boss?
A theme called 'Brand New Life' over a move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, which is the entire premise sung aloud.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhose Line Is It Anyway?
Improv games where the points don't matter, opened by a scramble of the cast in freeze-frame.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWhy Women Kill
Marc Cherry's anthology, three eras in the same house in the first season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWife Swap
Two households exchanged for a fortnight, in ten seconds of titles that give away the whole premise.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wiggles
Four early-childhood teachers from Sydney who worked out that a children's band could tour like a rock one.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWild 'n Out
Improvised comedy played as a team sport, and the longest-running programme MTV has.
- Season 16
1 sequenceThe Wild Thornberrys
A wildlife-documentary family whose daughter can talk to the animals they are filming.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wild Wild West
An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWilfred
A man who sees his neighbour's dog as an Australian in a dog suit, which the series never explains.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Will & Grace
Thirteen seconds and a piano vamp, from a sitcom confident enough not to explain itself.
- Season 1
- Season 9
1 sequenceWillo the Wisp
Kenneth Williams voicing every character, in five-minute films made to fill the gap before the news.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWind Breaker
A delinquent school whose students defend the town rather than terrorise it.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Winds of War
Wouk's novel as eighteen hours across a single week, and the most expensive thing American television had made.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWings
A Nantucket airline run by two brothers, opened by Schubert.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWinning Time
Grainy 16mm, video tape and film stock shuffled together so the show looks like footage of the era rather than a reconstruction of it, over a disco horn line.
- Season 1
5 sequences
The Wire
The same song recorded five different ways. Every season re-cuts the images and hands 'Way Down in the Hole' to a new artist, matching the institution that season is about.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 2 more
1 sequenceWiseguy
An undercover agent left inside one organisation for a whole arc at a time, which is roughly where American television learned to serialise.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWishbone
A Jack Russell terrier imagining himself into classic literature, one novel per episode.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWitchblade
A New York detective bonded to a sentient gauntlet, from the Top Cow comic.
- Season 1
3 sequences
The Witcher
No sequence in the usual sense. Each episode opens on its own sigil, drawn together out of liquid silver and shards over black, with the theme beneath it.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequenceWitches of East End
A mother who has kept from her two daughters that all three of them are witches.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWithout a Trace
Missing-person photographs and a clock, in thirty-two seconds that state the format precisely.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWizards Beyond Waverly Place
Wizards of Waverly Place continued a generation on, with the original lead handing the family over.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWKRP in Cincinnati
A radio-station sitcom whose theme was written to sound like a record the station would actually play.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWolfblood
Teenagers who are not werewolves but something older, in a children's series that took the mythology seriously.
- Season 1
1 sequenceA Woman of Substance
Barbara Taylor Bradford's servant girl who builds a department store empire, across three nights.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wombles
Litter-collecting creatures under Wimbledon Common, whose fictional band had six top-twenty singles in one year.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWonder Woman
An animated comic-book opening with a disco theme that names the character and tells her what to do, repeatedly.
- Season 2
1 sequenceThe Wonder Years
Home-movie footage and Joe Cocker singing 'With a Little Help from My Friends' — an opening that establishes the entire retrospective frame before a word of narration.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWonderfalls
Souvenir figurines that talk, in a Niagara Falls gift shop — Bryan Fuller's first series and a direct ancestor of Pushing Daisies.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Wonderful World of Mickey Mouse
The Paul Rudish shorts continued, drawn in the 1930s line and paced like it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Woods
Harlan Coben adapted into Polish, with a prosecutor reopening the summer camp his sister vanished from.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWorkaholics
Three telemarketers who share a house and a job and never leave either, in thirteen seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWorking
A graduate's first office job, narrated by him straight to camera.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe World at War
Thames Television's twenty-six part history of the Second World War, still the benchmark for the form.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWorld of Sport
ITV's answer to Grandstand, which is remembered now almost entirely for the wrestling at four o'clock.
- Season 20
1 sequenceWormwood
Errol Morris on Frank Olson's death, told half as interview and half as drama, with titles for both halves at once.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Worst Witch
Jill Murphy's boarding school for witches, filmed a year before the first Harry Potter book was published in America.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWorzel Gummidge
A scarecrow who swaps heads for different moods, played by a former Doctor Who.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWould I Lie to You?
A panel show built on whether a story about a guest is true, which turns out to be an unusually durable format.
- Season 4
1 sequenceWycliffe
A detective superintendent working Cornwall, filmed largely on the coast it is set on.
- Season 1
1 sequenceWynonna Earp
Twenty-one seconds of western iconography and a revolver, for a show about Wyatt Earp's great-great-granddaughter.
- Season 1