Midsomer Murders
A theremin over English villages — the single most incongruous pairing of instrument and setting in television, and the reason the show is recognisable in four notes.
Midsomer Murders opens with a main title sequence of 46 seconds.
It arrived on ITV in 1997, when Thomas & Friends, Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends and Birds of a Feather were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
46sThe opening theme.
More crime opening titles from the 1990s
2 sequences
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
2 sequences
Law & Order
The original, and the source of the two-note sting that half of American television has been quoting ever since.
- Season 1
- Season 20
2 sequences
Oz
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
1 sequence
Silent 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
1 sequenceWalker, Texas Ranger
Chuck Norris as a Ranger, with a theme song he sings himself from the third season on.
- Season 3
1 sequenceNYPD Blue
Mike Post's theme over a New York shot with the handheld looseness that got the show its reputation before anyone had seen an episode.
- Season 1