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.
Silent Witness kept one opening title sequence, 39 seconds long, across season 21.
It arrived on BBC One in 1996, when A Question of Sport, Grandstand and This Is Your Life were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 21
39sThe 2018 redesign, from the twenty-first series.
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 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