Meet the Press
1947–NBCDocumentary
The longest-running programme in television history, and fifteen seconds of titles to show for seventy-seven years.
Meet the Press kept one opening title sequence, 15 seconds long, across season 77.
At 15 seconds, it opens well under the 37-second median for documentary sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 1947, when Kraft Television Theatre was also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 77
15sFan upload of the 2023 intro; counting a season per year from the November 1947 launch, that is the seventy-seventh.
More documentary opening titles from the 1940s
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Twenty-three years of Sunday nights, and the stage the Beatles and Elvis were introduced to America from.
- Season 1
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The Office
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
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Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
The franchise's chung-chung and a narrated premise, held for a quarter of a century — the longest-running opening in this catalogue by some distance.
- Season 1
- Season 15
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 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 sequence
Friends
A fountain, an umbrella and six people who are not, on any reading of the physics, getting less wet.
- Season 6