Mr. Mercedes
King's retired detective and the man who drove a car into a queue of people looking for work.
Mr. Mercedes rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 3, running between 58 and 81 seconds.
At 81 seconds at its longest, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Mr. Mercedes did so once.
All 2 opening title sequences
Season 1
81sThe first season's, from a channel that collects opening credits.
Season 3
58sThe third season's, twenty-three seconds shorter than the first.
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1 sequence
Peaky Blinders
Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' over Birmingham furnaces and a man walking away from a fire — a period drama scored entirely out of period.
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1 sequence
The Rookie
A five-second card: THE ROOKIE in tall white capitals over a row of Los Angeles palms against a hazy blue sky, and the episode is under way.
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Better Call Saul
A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.
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Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.
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4 sequences
True Detective
Double-exposure portraits where the landscape is projected onto the people. Every season is reshot from scratch, so the titles change as completely as the cast does.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
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1 sequence
The Blacklist
Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.
- Season 1