The death of the long intros for TV shows

These days intros for TV shows are normally so brief that they are almost not even there. While I am sure it happened with other shows, the first one I recall being truly and wonderfully short was Breaking Bad

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This intro was so short that it wasn't even a song or a part of a song. It was just a few chords played on what sounds like a stand up bass or something similar, followed by a short sound like smoke. It was around 5 seconds long and then instead of doing a long-drawn out intro where they show everyone's faces and introduce actors' names, they would show the names on the screen after the show already started. I'm sure they weren't the first to do this but they were the first ones that I really noticed that it was done fantastically.

This basically never happened in the 80's and 90's where intros would routinely be near entire songs. One that sticks out is Friends and while everyone knows that song the intro is annoyingly long especially when you consider that it is a sitcom of 20 minutes in length.

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I don't know how much time was spent filming this, but you can tell by some of the things the actors and actresses do while it is going on that it likely took a long time and a bunch of ad-lib went into it. It was fine the first 27 times I saw it, but later on I just felt like it was 2 minutes put in there so that they didn't have to make a real episode. Other shows are much worse.

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The Wire is one of those shoes that almost anyone over the age of 35 or so will insist is one of the greatest shows ever made. I thought it was a well-made show as well but good lawd! the intro on that damn thing. It plays an entire song and goes through basically every single character on the show's name getting put on screen. When I was watching this, I didn't have the ability to skip the intro like many people would have on some streaming services and because I was forced to sit through it so many times, I have grown to absolutely loathe that damn song.

I didn't ever finish watching this legendary TV show largely because of the excessively long intro.

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Other intros are very long but we accept it and to me there are two main reasons why that is the case for both GOT and House of the Dragon. This is because the song that is playing is absolutely epic and gets you hyped for what you are about to watch afterwards. The other reason is because at least for GOT they changed what happened in the animation of the intro based on what was happening in the storyline. This kind of served as a recap or "previously on" without them actually needing to do that. I never minded sitting through either one of these intros and do so even though I have watched both series (except for season 8 of "Game") many times.

They did a long intro right. Most other people do it wrong.

It is worth mentioning that Seinfeld never had an intro. Instead they had Jerry doing some stand up comedy in a small club while the names of the actors came up on screen.

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The stand-up routine never repeated that I am aware of even though they had 180 total episodes. This was a very long time before Breaking Bad so I take back what I said before. The point still stands though, almost every single TV show had a long and drawn out intro the point of boredom and I don't really know why.

Which brings me to something I recently noticed after rewatching Scrubs because Scrubs is awesome and one of the best sitcoms of all time in my opinion.

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"I cant do this alll on my own, oh no no, I'm no Superman.... I'm no Superman". The song that is in that intro is 3:38 long but in the intro they only use around 8 seconds of it and this was in the first season when you would think that whoever was involved in the show would want as much credit as possible.

I loved this short intro and apparently so did everyone else. In season 2 they briefly expanded the into to be just slightly longer at around 15 seconds so they had more time to put the names of additional characters on screen. The fan backlash to this mere additional 7 seconds of intro was so intense that the producers reverted back to the original short intro. I find this very funny that we are so fickle that we get annoyed with an additional seven damn seconds be added to something.

I did agree with the angry fanbase though. Screw that. You'll get enough recognition from the internet and anyone who sticks around for the end credits. We don't need that crap.

One show that certain friends of mine love but I simply cannot endure because of the length of the intro is Twin Peaks. I don't know who thought that 2 minutes and 38 seconds is a good length to opening credits that never change but they were wrong.

Some shows manage to pull it off with long intros such as Severance but others, such as Peacemaker and that Rings of Power BS fail miserably at this. While I enjoyed all of these intros the first time I saw them, they mostly just get in the way of what I am there for these days. On a lot of streaming services, including Netflix, there is an option to "skip intro" on them and well, if intros hadn't been too long to begin with, this wouldn't be necessary.

Whether you like to admit it or not, people are more fussy with how much time things take these days. We live in an age of instant gratification and same day drone shipping from the warehouse. The days of 2 minute intros are behind us and creators of new shows would be wise to keep this in mind.

I consider myself a pretty level-headed person but I will completely abandon a series (such as I did with The Wire) if their intro is too self-promoting. I'm already watching the show, you don't have to sell it to me.