True Detective

Name: True Detective
Genre: Crime

2014–HBOCrime

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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.

True Detective rebuilt its titles: four distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1–4, running between 73 and 106 seconds.

At 106 seconds at its longest, it opens well above the 47-second median for crime sequences in this catalogue.

It arrived on HBO in 2014, when Curb Your Enthusiasm, In Treatment and The Comeback were also on the network.

Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; True Detective did so three times.

4 sequences28th most looked up of 760 in the 2010sIMDb ↗

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All 4 opening title sequences

Season 1

106s

Elastic's own cut, hosted by the Cooper Hewitt design museum. Louisiana refineries and pipelines burned into the actors, cut to The Handsome Family's 'Far From Any Road'. Replaced a fan upload.

Season 2

105s

Elastic again, via Cooper Hewitt. Remade for California — freeway interchanges replace the refineries, with Leonard Cohen's 'Nevermind'. Replaced a fan upload.

Season 3

92s

Posted by Antibody, Patrick Clair's studio, who made every version of this sequence. The Ozarks season — the double exposures fill with woodland and cave rather than industry. This filled the one gap in the run.

Season 4

73s

Night Country moves the double exposures into permanent darkness — ice, aurora and breath projected onto the cast instead of landscape and industry.

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1 sequence

Peaky Blinders

2013–2022BBC Two / BBC OneCrime

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

2018–ABCCrime

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

2015–2022AMCCrime

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.