The Cosby Show
A family dancing to a new arrangement of the same theme every season — jazz, big band, calypso — which makes it one of the earliest American sitcoms to treat its opening as something to redo annually.
The Cosby Show opens with a main title sequence of 66 seconds.
At 66 seconds, it opens well above the 38-second median for comedy sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on NBC in 1984, when Truth or Consequences, Another World and Search for Tomorrow were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
66sOne season's version. The theme was re-arranged and the dance restaged for each of the eight.
More comedy opening titles from the 1980s
1 sequence
The Golden Girls
'Thank You for Being a Friend' over four women and a Miami kitchen — a theme so tied to the show that the original songwriter's version is now the obscure one.
- Season 7
1 sequence
Seinfeld
A slap bass figure and a stand-up set — an opening that is literally the comedian's act, which is what the show was sold as.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCheers
A minute of hand-tinted engravings and old photographs of strangers drinking, none of them from the show and none of them the cast. The bar you are about to spend eleven years in is introduced as the latest in a very long line of them.
- Seasons 1–11
1 sequenceMarried... with Children
Sinatra's 'Love and Marriage' over a Chicago family who demonstrably have neither — one of television's earliest deliberately sarcastic openings.
- Season 1
1 sequenceOnly Fools and Horses
A theme sung by the show's own writer, explaining the premise in verse — and one of the very few British sitcom openings to have charted.
- Season 1
2 sequences
Roseanne
A family at a kitchen table, laughing at something you cannot hear, rebuilt for every season across twenty years and a thirty-year gap.
- Season 1
- Season 10