We Don’t Need Opening Credits Anymore

We’ve got to cut it with opening credits for television shows. Some of them were nice while they lasted, but we live in a binge-watching world and they are simply a waste of time now. Please cease production on them immediately, and let’s reclaim those precious minutes of our lives back.

I understand that this might sound harsh. In fact, many of my Decider colleagues seemed to disagree with my passionate plea. But what you’re thinking of now is probably 6 friends splashing around in a fountain to The Rembrandts one-hit wonder, or Will Smith rapping his way in a cab across the country. Sure, those are lovely, fun opening credits. But if you sit down to watch 10 seasons of Friends, you don’t need to hear that song over 200 times, do you? No one does.

We don’t watch TV shows the way we used to: we watch a whole bunch of episodes at a time and we don’t wait a week to continue diving into storylines. It’s beyond unnecessary to take a minute or more out of our viewing time, just so we can watch some artsy animations tell us the names of the actors on the show. Yes, actors should be credited for their work. But you can run those names as the episode is playing, or, even better, adopt technology similar to Amazon’s X-ray feature, where one swift movement of your mouse will tell you every actor on screen at that moment, as well as a fun fact. Facts!

Opening credits were designed to be a way to set a mood for a show. From plunky music and cheesy smiles from actors to brooding tunes over even darker cityscapes, they served as a way to almost warn viewers what they would be in for. But today, it takes no more than 30 seconds into The Night Of or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to know what you’re about to experience, rendering the credits utterly useless.

Even Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, a show with lovely credits that essentially recap the main storyline of the show, just prove to be unnecessary. It’s a cute song, but if I’ve made it past the first episode, I know what the show is about. If I want a reminder about how Rebecca moved to West Covina, CA to be near Josh, I can go on YouTube and watch that video 100 times in a row. But that’s on my own time, not when I’m trying to power through an entire season of hour-long episodes and find out if they end up together or not!

The same holds true for credits that change from week to week à la The Simpsons, or even BoJack Horseman, a show that is makes sure that the credits reflect any updates to the story. Instead of putting energy into making slight changes to the opening credits, those moments can be added as a button to the end of the show. Leave them on the laugh!

Now, while the opening credits are unnecessary, a Previously On, is not. It might seem like you don’t need scenes you watched within the hour replayed back to you again, but you do. A lot of times, these montages will include clips from episodes much earlier in the season or even from previous seasons. They are telling you which storylines are going to be explored in the current episode and bring you up to speed on how the characters arrived there. So, still very much in favor of dedicating a minute to letting us know what will be important, just in case we forgot or snoozed a little bit during a marathon viewing session. Netflix has been known to chop these off of some of the most binge-able shows to keep your stream extra smooth, but they need to recognize that the Previously On’s stay, and it’s the credits that have got to go.

It’s no surprise that shows like Breaking Bad and Lost, two of the most important TV shows of our time, and extremely binge-able, knew to keep their opening credits short — each under 20 seconds! While the Breaking Bad titles aren’t quite necessary, the brevity is appreciated. I will say that the Lost titles are acceptable, not only due to the very short amount of time they take up, but because viewers did need those few seconds to get a “What?!” out of their system, before jumping right into the rest of the mystery. Time is too precious to be displaying photos of polar bears and numbers and crashed planes while Matthew Fox’s name scrolls across the screen. No. That time is to be spent watching the island or a flashback or a flashforward or whatever the hell else that show was presenting us with. They hardly had enough time to fit in all the ridiculous scenarios within the 40-ish minutes they were allotted in each episode — it would be absolutely silly to waste any more than 15 seconds on some over-stylized title sequence. Let’s all take this moment to just appreciate something we can all agree that Lost did right.

And now it’s time for other shows to follow in their footsteps, especially looking at you, streaming originals. While the intention of opening credits are to establish a show’s identity and buckle you in, they currently serve the exact opposite purpose. When we’re breezing through a handful of episodes at a time, opening credits are merely a minute that we waste either begrudgingly sitting through them, or trying to scan past them to the moment where the show actually starts. We know what we’re watching, we know what it’s about, and we know who’s in it. Please spend all the time you possibly can telling that story, not throwing a binge-watching speed bump our way in the form of quirky/moody music over images of the actors we’re already committed to spending hours watching.

All the editors, animators and countless other creative minds who work hard to create credits should still use their skills to make wonderful pieces of art. We’ll probably share them all over the internet! We want to be able to appreciate and cherish your work, and we’re less likely to do so when they are stuck in between pivotal scenes of a TV show. You wouldn’t want to know that we’re fast forwarding through your work, or even worse, using that time as a bathroom break?

So to all the opening credits we’ve known before: thank you for your service. We will be nostalgic for you to years to come and will watch you on YouTube all the time. But we’ll do it when we want, and not when we’re trying to get our binge on. Now, get lost.