Marcus Welby, M.D.
A family doctor in Santa Monica, and the first ABC series to finish a season as the most-watched programme in America.
Marcus Welby, M.D. opens with a main title sequence of 72 seconds.
At 72 seconds, it opens well above the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1969, when One Life to Live, The Bugs Bunny Show and ABC's Wide World of Sports were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
72sThe opening, from a Brazilian channel that archives series titles. No burnt-in Portuguese on the picture, and the closing credits that had been the only result are still what ranks first in English.
More drama opening titles from the 1960s
2 sequences
Coronation Street
The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.
- Season 1
- Season 31
1 sequenceDays of Our Lives
"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.
- 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 sequenceThe Virginian
The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.
- Season 1
2 sequences
One Life to Live
Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.
- Season 21
- Season 44