Secret Diary of a Call Girl
Billie Piper addressing the camera between clients, adapted from the Belle de Jour blog.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl opens with a main title sequence of 37 seconds.
At 37 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ITV2 in 2007, when Twin Peaks, Stargate SG-1 and Californication were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
37sFan upload.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequence
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Twenty seconds of chemistry-set smoke and floating element symbols. Almost aggressively short, which leaves the cold open to do the work.
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Twenty-six seconds of surgical instruments and a guitar figure, from a series that has now outlived most of the shows that copied it.
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Mad 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.
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Gilmore Girls
Carole King's 'Where You Lead' rewritten as a mother-and-daughter duet, over a small Connecticut town in every season at once.
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2 sequences
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Anatomical illustration and MRI imagery over Massive Attack's 'Teardrop' — a diagnostic show that opens by looking inside a body rather than at one.
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Art history restaged as domestic comedy — Cranach's Eve, Egyptian tomb painting, American Gothic — each one collapsing under a woman's exasperation.
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