The Edge of Night
A daytime serial built as a crime drama rather than a romance, which is why it ran in the afternoon for twenty-eight years without a hospital in it.
One opening sequence is catalogued for The Edge of Night, covering season 1.
It arrived on CBS in 1956, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
No usable clip kept. The one upload runs nearly four minutes and collects the whole 1956 to 1984 run into a montage.
More crime opening titles from the 1950s
1 sequencePerry Mason (1957)
'Park Avenue Beat' — a jazz chart with a walking bass, over a courtroom drama that ran for nine years on almost nothing else.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Untouchables
Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.
- Season 1
1 sequenceHighway Patrol
Broderick Crawford saying "Ten-four" into a car radio, which entered the language from here.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAlfred Hitchcock Presents
Nine strokes of a pen, and then the man himself walks in from the right and stands inside his own outline. A director who had spent thirty years staying behind the camera made his silhouette the most recognisable thing on American television.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequenceDragnet
Four notes, a badge, and "the story you are about to see is true" — the opening that set the shape of the American police procedural.
- Season 1
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