Westworld
Things being manufactured, filmed as though it were tender: a horse and rider printed strand by strand, hands assembled out of white thread, a player piano working the theme out by itself. Rebuilt every season as the show's idea of what is being made changes.
Westworld rebuilt its titles: four distinct opening sequences are catalogued here across seasons 1–4, running between 99 and 115 seconds.
At 115 seconds at its longest, it opens well above the 58-second median for sci-fi sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on HBO in 2016, when Curb Your Enthusiasm, In Treatment and The Jinx were also on the network.
Only 139 of the 2,618 shows catalogued here changed their titles at all; Westworld did so three times.
All 4 opening title sequences
Season 1
109sPatrick Clair's original — the player piano, the printing arm laying down a horse, and a human form coming together in white filament while Ramin Djawadi's theme plays itself on the piano in shot.
Season 2
108sRebuilt with the season's own imagery while keeping the fabrication idea and the piano intact.
Season 3
115sThe largest break of the four, made when the show left the park — the pastoral fabrication imagery gives way to something colder and more mechanical.
Season 4
99sReworked once more for the final season.
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 sequence
The 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