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.
Oz rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 4, running between 95 and 97 seconds.
At 97 seconds at its longest, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on HBO in 1997, when Arli$$, The Larry Sanders Show and Mr. Show with Bob and David were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Oz did so once.
All 2 opening title sequences
Season 1
95sThe sequence that everything from Six Feet Under to True Blood is downstream of.
Season 4
97sThe fourth season's version.
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
1 sequence
Silent 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
1 sequenceNYPD 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.
- Season 1