Enlarge / Our picks for the decade's best TV main title sequences include Jessica Jones, Star Trek: Discovery, Manhattan, and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. (credit: Collage by Sean Carroll)
The era of peak TV has brought with it a veritable Golden Age of distinctive, innovative main title sequences. So much so, in fact, that there is an entire website, The Art of the Title, devoted to this burgeoning art form, featuring in-depth interviews with the creative people behind all those stunning title sequences. (Fair warning: it's way too easy to lose yourself down the rabbit hole on that site.)
We made a list of our favorite opening credits over the last decade and quickly noticed that two production houses in particular dominated our selections: Imaginary Forces—which produced the main titles for Counterpart, Stranger Things, and Jessica Jones, among others—and Elastic, the creative minds behind the title sequences for Halt and Catch Fire, Masters of Sex, Game of Thrones, and so forth. Along with Prologue (Star Trek: Discovery, Elementary), it's fair to say that these houses have played a major role in shaping the art form over the last ten years.
HBO had already flirted with an artier approach to opening credits with its Emmy-award winning sequence for Six Feet Under in 2001 (produced by Digital Kitchen) and the main title sequence for The Sopranos. "It was the premium networks, like HBO in the late 1990s, that began to set a higher standard for viewer expectations," Alan Williams, a director with Imaginary Forces, told Ars. "TV could be more than just TV. It could be more like film. That type of thinking translated over into other networks."
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