One Life to Live

Name: One Life to Live
Genre: Drama

1968–2012ABCDrama

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Llanview, and the first American daytime serial written around class and ethnicity rather than around a hospital.

One Life to Live rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 21 and 44, running between 31 and 37 seconds.

At 37 seconds at its longest, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.

It arrived on ABC in 1968, when The Bugs Bunny Show, ABC's Wide World of Sports and American Bandstand were also on the network.

Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; One Life to Live did so once.

All 2 opening title sequences

37s

Fan upload dated 1988; counting a season per year from the July 1968 launch, that is the twenty-first.

31s

Fan upload dated 2011, the final year; counting a season per year from the July 1968 launch, that is the forty-fourth.

1960–ITVDrama

The longest-running television soap in the world, opening on rooftops and a cornet ever since 1960.

1965–NBCDrama

"Like sands through the hourglass" — the same sentence, over the same hourglass, for sixty years.

1964–1968NBCDrama

Sixties spy graphics and a brass chart, in the register every subsequent spy show either copied or reacted against.

1965–1969CBSDrama

An animated frontier vignette that pauses on four panels of a comic strip — a western opening built like a title card for a serial.

1962–1971NBCDrama

The first ninety-minute western on American television, and the third longest-running of them all.

1964–1999NBCDrama

The first American serial to run an hour, and the first to spin off another serial from itself.