This piece was in yesterday's Guardian positing the future of the theme tune and I wondered what forumers thought.
I have mixed feelings. I get the title card flash on things like Fleabag and Killing Eve which are pretty quirky and unusual shows and it seems to fit. But there are others where I think the titles/theme of a show is as much a part of it as anything - the titles on The Crown really help to get me in the mood for it (helped by the stunning visuals) and I feel the big Saturday night shiny floor programmes like SNT and BGT are poorer for losing their full-length titles.
If anything, longer theme tunes have made a come back of late as streaming is less constrained by precise timings. People play with the structure of TV shows all the time, Ugly Betty's
< 15 second scene - title card - pre-credits scene - full titles - first break
structure being a particularly effective one and that was 15 years ago.
Agree with shiny floor. Noel's House Party's change in theme tune and general decline is a very neat matching graph.
On those kinds of programmes now, you instead get a five minute long explanatory intro ("My name is [Presenter Name] and I'm going on a journey to explore [Subject of Programme]") that gets pasted onto the front of every episode in the series, over some nondescript music with a 5 second title card at the end.
I think some shows suit having a quick title card and others suit long titles. It's a shame when some shows, especially big budget dramas, only have very short titles as they can really get you in the right mood for the show. Take His Dark Materials as example. To me those titles and music are just perfect and a piece of art in their own right. I never skip those and I'm sure others don't either.
I think HBO get this as many of their big drama series have amazing titles sequences.
You mentioned The Crown, and I agree the visuals on these are just beautiful, but for me the music seems like it should build up a lot more than it actually does. It doesn't seem to go anywhere and just seems to trundle on slowly. I'm not meaning it should suddenly get really energetic but it needs more umph.
I do really wish Killing Eve had some proper titles, I love that series and a great intro would just finish it off perfectly.
With things like documentaries, these can vary a lot more as some only have a title card yet it works fine. I think the type of show that deserves decent titles, which unfortunately seems to becoming more uncommon, are travel docs like Joanna Lumley's series. My favourite was her Nile series. I can still hear the music in my head now. They were only about 20 seconds long but really got you in the right mood.
Overall though I think every show deserves some sort of opening titles though, and even more so a great soundtrack to go with it, but I understand not all shows have the budget for that.
Agree with shiny floor. Noel's House Party's change in theme tune and general decline is a very neat matching graph.
Reaching a point where in the final series it couldn't even make up it's mind what it's theme tune was.
Only that NHP dragged out for fewer series than SNT at present...
One of my pet hates is the 2 minute montage of clips used at the start of many documentaries followed by a short title card, this can be seen on numerous programmes from history documentaries to medical fly on the wall shows. It seems to have replaced long title sequences, but the repetition at the start of every episode is frustrating.
As for title sequences, I agree that some shows work without them, but light entertainment series need the build up of titles to create atmosphere to the programme (Saturday night takeaway is a prime example of how changing to a short version takes this away).
I enjoy listening to the theme tune as the titles and credits roll. I will not press "skip intro" or "skip recap" on any streaming service. One show that got it's theme tune cut from 50 seconds to a title card was a Netflix reimagining of the American 80's sitcom One Day at a Time. Netflix axed it and it was picked up by Pop TV in the USA and because of the extra ad breaks they sacrificed the theme tune for a title card.
Did find it a bit strange that article didn't mention the biggest series of the year so far,
WandaVision,
which had about seven different theme tunes.
As VMPhil has already mentioned, one thing that I really dislike is on factual series, particularly BBC Two factual series, where instead of opening titles you get the same long sequence explaining the premise of the programme using the same clips every week. Can sometimes take a few minutes before you know whether it's an episode you've already seen or not.
Contender for one of the longer theme tunes ever made is probably this, the closing version is about 90 seconds on the show:
(this was still in use by the fourth series in 2001, although probably remixed slightly, can you imagine a 90 second credit sequence as late as 2001?)
Some Amazon original programming has credits this long, so the idea of credits that run forever has sort of gone full circle.
Of course theme tune wise there's this:
i cannot, repeat, CANNOT hear the theme to Black Beauty without thinking about Alan Partridge. Thanks @pop_arena for the new Nick Knacks on the series of Black Beauty. As Alan puts it; "It's Brilliant!" pic.twitter.com/uefpF5Ma7O