Carrie Bradshaw is walking down a New York sidewalk in a sleeveless top and tulle skirt when she is flooded with water from a passing bus. Tony Soprano drives around New Jersey with a cigarette in his mouth. A group of faceless businessmen fall from the sky past skyscrapers and billboards. Huge map showing all of Westeros. These are some of the opening scenes of popular television series from the past decades to today that have made an impression on viewers and small screen people alike.

Great television is remembered, as are the opening credits of television programs. And while there aren’t many people who take a minute and a half to introduce all the cast and crew before each episode, shows like Season 2″White Lotus‘, with its 90-second opening sequence, is full of metaphor and little foreshadowing of the plot’s development. This event, along with the theme music, became the subject of discussion and helped to popularize the award-winning American project.

In the award-winning HBO series Legacy, we watch a montage of photos and videos of the Roy family as the Emmy-winning theme song by Nicholas Britel plays. In the dystopian drama Apple + “Severance”, we see psychedelic animation, which in itself is a work of art.

Despite having a “skip intro” button that subscribers click 136 million times a day, according to Netflix, viewers are starting to skip the opening credits.

With the number of series growing at a rapid pace, creators and networks want their products to stand out. The 60 seconds at the beginning of an episode sets the tone and usually sets us up for the world we’re about to “enter”.

Case of The Last of Us

About the seriesLast of us, which premiered last month, this world concerns a post-apocalyptic landscape devastated by a fungal infection that turns the population into zombie-like creatures. The setting is familiar from the video game of the same name, but for those who’ve never played it, the opening credits provide a few clues as to what’s to come.

For example, on the screen are shots of different types of fungus, a microcosm of our natural world that accepts everything that comes – beautiful and destructive. If you look closely, you can see that mushrooms turn into a map of America, a screaming face or two human figures: signs of hope in the dark.

The opening clip uses the same music as the game created by Gustavo Santaolala, but other than the music, the logo remains the same. Hours after the first episode aired, fans took to social media and the Reddit platform to analyze the opening credits.

The Last of Us opening credits video has already reached almost 1 million views on YouTube, but it still has a long way to go before it hits 42 million views for the Game of Thrones intro. The company that created the intros for the two series is the same company that has won acclaim for programs such as The Crown, Westworld, His Dark Materials, True Detective, and Pachinko.

Creativity and re-watching

As television became more powerful as a medium than cinema, the creativity in the opening sequences became more cinematic. The Sopranos ushered in an era of prestige television (with globally recognized, quality shows, top-notch stars, and, of course, correspondingly high budgets).

However, as technically impressive as this sequence is, it’s the number of times we’ve watched it that makes it indelible in memory. As for example, this happened to many with the series “Gilmore Girls”, “Baywatch” and “Friends”.

A well-crafted intro to the series provides a sense of comfort as well as anticipation of what’s to come. As the BBC Television Graphics Designers put it: “The content of the show is constantly changing, with characters coming and going. But the opening credits are a safe haven that the viewer can always return to when the waters of the story turn cloudy.

According to the BBC