The Unit
Delta Force at work and their wives at home on the base, developed for television by David Mamet.
The Unit rebuilt its titles: two distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1 and 3, running between 19 and 21 seconds.
At 21 seconds at its longest, it opens well under the 50-second median for drama sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on CBS in 2006, when Candid Camera, Guiding Light and As the World Turns were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; The Unit did so once.
All 2 opening title sequences
Season 1
21sFan upload of the first season's opening.
Season 3
19sThe third season's. The same uploader has a second version from later in that same season, which one sequence per season cannot hold.
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