The Magicians
Magic treated as postgraduate study, opened with the seriousness of a university prospectus.
The Magicians opens with a main title sequence of 11 seconds.
At 11 seconds, it opens well under the 58-second median for sci-fi sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Syfy in 2015, when The Expanse, Lost Girl and Haven were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
11sEleven seconds: a carved stone relief across a wall, the name surfacing out of it, and the Syfy bug in the corner.
More sci-fi opening titles from the 2010s
1 sequence
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.
- Seasons 1–4
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 sequenceThe 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