Narcos
Archive photographs, surveillance stills and evidence shots of the real Medellín cartel, cut to Rodrigo Amarante's 'Tuyo' — a bolero written to sound like something Escobar's father would have played.
Narcos kept one opening title sequence, 90 seconds long, across seasons 1–3.
At 90 seconds, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Netflix in 2015, when Mystery Science Theater 3000, Arrested Development and Top Boy were also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–3
90sHeld across three seasons, mixing the show's own footage with genuine archive.
More crime opening titles from the 2010s
1 sequencePeaky 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.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe 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.
- Season 1
1 sequenceBetter 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.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequenceFargo
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.
- Season 1
4 sequencesTrue 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
- and 1 more
1 sequenceThe Blacklist
Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.
- Season 1