NYPD 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.
NYPD Blue opens with a main title sequence of 64 seconds.
At 64 seconds, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1993, when One Life to Live, All My Children and The Bugs Bunny Show were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
64sThe first season's 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
1 sequence
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.
- Season 1
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 sequenceSilent 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