The Untouchables
Walter Winchell narrating over Prohibition Chicago at a clip that makes the whole thing sound like a news bulletin — which was the intention.
The Untouchables opens with a main title sequence of 110 seconds.
At 110 seconds, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on ABC in 1959, when American Bandstand, The Lawrence Welk Show and The Edge of Night were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
110sThe opening, with Winchell's narration.
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 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
2 sequences
Twin Peaks
A bird, a sawmill blade and a waterfall, over Angelo Badalamenti at a tempo no network would approve today — ninety seconds of a town being described before anyone in it speaks.
- Seasons 1–2
- Season 3