Night Gallery
Rod Serling walking through a gallery of paintings, each one introducing that week's story — a title sequence rebuilt around new artwork every episode.
Night Gallery opens with a main title sequence of 32 seconds.
At 32 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for horror sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 1969, when Truth or Consequences, Another World and Search for Tomorrow were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
32sThe gallery framing. The paintings change each week, so the sequence is a format rather than a fixed film.
More horror opening titles from the 1960s
1 sequenceDark Shadows
Waves against a cliff and a theremin-adjacent wail, broadcast live on weekday afternoons — a gothic soap that ran over twelve hundred episodes.
- Season 1
1 sequence
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
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
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