Every TV show has opening credits – some are flashy, some are entertaining and most are downright boring. Watching the new Aussie comedy/drama Offspring the other week (which I am enjoying by the way), I was struck by how much I didn’t like their opening credit sequence. As a cutesy bubble-pop song plays, the main actors jerkily spin in a myriad of poses as if they are characters seen through a viewfinder. The whole thing just seemed a bit too twee. To me, a good opening credit sequence is one that does more than just slap-bang a few clips of the show together with a current pop music fave – it’s a gilded invitation to join the show’s universe. It’s one where no matter how many episodes I watch in a row while DVD marathoning the show – I will always watch the opening credits.
These are a few of my favourites:
An awesome homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Mad Men’s opening credits are almost dreamlike – the slow, languid pace of the businessman falling surrounded by skyscrapers with reflections of period advertising posters and billboards. We can all relate to those dreams of falling which are meant to express our suppressed anxieties, our feelings of being out of control and overwhelmed. This is what Mad Men is all about – that loss of control and identity – and in a decade where everything about the world was changing. Plus they can’t go wrong with a final image of dreamy Jon Hamm’s shoulders casually slung across the back of a couch can they!
Definitely the best set of credits for a currently running program; True Blood’s have even been nominated for an Emmy. Created by Digital Kitchen, the production studio also responsible for the awesome credits for Six Feet Under and Dexter, True Blood’s opening sequence is steeped in Deep South imagery and plays around with the contradictory ideas of innocence and menace that go hand in hand with the themes of the show. The whole thing really just leaves you with a feeling that things just ain’t right – sex, violence, horror, life, and death all wrapped into one. And those maggots! Shudder!