Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip
Sorkin backstage at a sketch show, cancelled after one season while another series took the same premise and survived.
Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip opens with a main title sequence of 17 seconds.
At 17 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 2006, when Mad About You, Will & Grace and Late Night with Conan O'Brien were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
17sFan upload of the title sequence. The two better-ranked results are the programme's cold open rather than its titles.
More drama opening titles from the 2000s
1 sequence
Breaking 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 sequence
Grey'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 sequence
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.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequence
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.
- Season 1
2 sequences
House
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 sequence
Desperate 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