Lengths

How long is a television title sequence?

Long enough to be skipped, which is the only thing most people know about it. This catalogue has timed 2,768 of them, from the 1950s to the 2020s, so the question has an actual answer rather than an impression.

The short version: openings were at their longest in the 1980s, at a median of 60 seconds, and fell to 40 by the 2000s. And then they came back — the 2020s run a median of 54 seconds, longer than any decade since the 1980s.

By decade

Median seconds per opening, by the decade the show premiered in. The median rather than the average, because a handful of three-minute miniseries openings drag a mean around and say nothing about the ordinary case.

The rise into the 1980s is the era of the theme song as a piece of publishing in its own right — a minute of it, with a cast roll and a chorus. What follows is the cable drama trading the song for a mood piece, and then the streaming era doing what everyone assumes it did: cutting the opening to a card and a sting.

What is less expected is the turn. The skip button was supposed to have finished the title sequence off, and instead the 2020s are running longer than anything since the 1980s. Prestige streaming rebuilt the long opening as a signature — the thing you are meant to sit through, and the thing the show is quoted by.

By genre

Animation openings run 58 seconds at the median and documentary ones 37 — a gap of 21 seconds between the top and the bottom of the same medium.

Median title sequence runtime by genre

Genre	Median	Timed
Animation	58s	472
Sci-Fi	58s	315
Drama	50s	601
Horror	50s	154
Crime	47s	345
Comedy	38s	683
Documentary	37s	198

Animation and science fiction take the longest, and for the same reason: both build a world before the episode starts, and both have a theme somebody wants to hear. Comedy and documentary are the quickest — a half-hour has less to spare, and a documentary tends to open on the thing it is about rather than on itself.

The longest and the shortest

One entry per show, so a series whose every season is timed cannot fill the table with itself.

North and South opens with 201 seconds of titles. After Life opens with 3. You could run the second one 67 times inside the first and still have time left. Both are television deciding what the form is for.

How often titles change

Almost never. Of the 2,618 shows in this catalogue, 139 ever rebuilt their opening — 5%. A title sequence is commissioned once and then runs untouched for a decade, which is why the ones that do change are worth a page of their own.

How this was measured

Browse the catalogue by decade, genre or network, or read what counts as a title sequence here.