Stranger Things
Red letters assembling out of the dark in ITC Benguiat, glowing at the edges like a paperback cover left in the sun. An argument that a title sequence can be nothing but type and still do all the work.
Stranger Things kept one opening title sequence, 54 seconds long, across seasons 1–4.
It arrived on Netflix in 2016, when Mystery Science Theater 3000, Arrested Development and Top Boy were also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–4
54sHeld across the run — the letters slide together, the synth arpeggio resolves, and that is the entire sequence. No footage, no faces.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 2010s
1 sequence
3%
Netflix's first Brazilian original: a selection process that lets three in a hundred cross to the other side.
- Season 1
1 sequence
For All Mankind
Archive footage of the space race, doctored — real newsreel edited so that the alternate history it depicts appears to have actually been filmed.
- Season 1
3 sequences
Dark
Faces split and mirrored against themselves, reflected into a second image that is never quite the same person — a show about the same people at four ages, saying so before a word is spoken.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
1 sequence
The Man in the High Castle
Dick's occupied America, opened by newsreel light thrown across a map that has the wrong flags on it.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Black Mirror
A screen cracking, and that is the whole thing. Eighteen seconds of glitch and a fracture spreading across black glass — an anthology refusing to introduce anything, because each episode is a different show.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequence
Person of Interest
Surveillance footage narrated by the machine watching it — an opening delivered from the point of view of the software, years before that was a common idea.
- Season 1