Queer as Folk (US)
The Russell T Davies series remade in Pittsburgh and run for five seasons — four more than the original managed.
Queer as Folk (US) opens with a main title sequence of 49 seconds.
It arrived on Showtime in 2000, when Twin Peaks, Stargate SG-1 and The Outer Limits (1995) were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
49sFan upload of the American version. The British original is catalogued separately; both are now here, which was flagged as an outstanding gap when the Channel 4 sweep added the original alone.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequenceBreaking Bad
Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.
- Seasons 1–5
1 sequenceGrey's Anatomy
Twenty-six seconds of surgical instruments and a guitar figure, from a series that has now outlived most of the shows that copied it.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMad Men
A silhouetted adman falls past skyscrapers built out of his own advertising — smiling wives, stockinged legs, a hand holding a drink — and then, at the bottom, is sitting comfortably with a cigarette. Nobody lands. That is the joke and the thesis.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequenceGilmore Girls
Carole King's 'Where You Lead' rewritten as a mother-and-daughter duet, over a small Connecticut town in every season at once.
- Season 1
2 sequencesHouse
Anatomical illustration and MRI imagery over Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' — a diagnostic show that opens by looking inside a body rather than at one.
- Season 8
- Season 1
1 sequenceDesperate Housewives
Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.
- Season 1