The Punisher
A skull assembling out of gun smoke and muzzle flash, with the ordnance doing the drawing. Blunter than its siblings, deliberately.
The Punisher kept one opening title sequence, 72 seconds long, across seasons 1–2.
At 72 seconds, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Netflix in 2017, when Mystery Science Theater 3000, Arrested Development and Top Boy were also on the network.
The opening titles
Seasons 1–2
72sHeld across both seasons.
More crime opening titles from the 2010s
1 sequence
Peaky Blinders
Nick Cave's 'Red Right Hand' over Birmingham furnaces and a man walking away from a fire — a period drama scored entirely out of period.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Rookie
A five-second card: THE ROOKIE in tall white capitals over a row of Los Angeles palms against a hazy blue sky, and the episode is under way.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Better Call Saul
A title card that gets worse every year on purpose: tracking errors, colour bleed and tape damage accumulating season by season, so the picture degrades at roughly the rate its subject does.
- Seasons 1–6
1 sequence
Fargo
Snow, and the claim that this is a true story, which it is not — an anthology that opens every season by lying to you in a title card.
- Season 1
4 sequences
True Detective
Double-exposure portraits where the landscape is projected onto the people. Every season is reshot from scratch, so the titles change as completely as the cast does.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 1 more
1 sequence
The Blacklist
Nine seconds and a card. A ten-season network procedural that never once made you wait to get into an episode.
- Season 1