Welcome to the first installment of Five Things Friday, in which I combine two of my favorite things: a weekly blog feature, and lists! What can I say? I don’t get out much.

Five Things Friday is pretty much what it says on the tin: a list of five things, related in some way to each other. Sometimes it’ll be funny, sometimes it’ll be serious, sometimes I’ll try to be funny and fall flat (c’est la vie). So buckle up and enjoy the ride!
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An (unfortunate) trend in today’s TV show is the title card. Many shows–such as Castle, Supernatural or The Vampire Diaries–use a title card, which is essentially a graphic with title of the TV show, often accompanied by a simple animation and a short theme song or… theme “noise,” I suppose. A jingle, if you will. Commercially speaking it makes sense–why spend 60 seconds of precious ad time on what could be taken up in 10 seconds? (With 60 seconds of lower third text during the actual show).

A title card is a clean and simple choice, but sometimes I miss the familiarity that comes with watching a title sequence. For instance, during the first three seasons of Buffy there’s a “scream” in the theme song–a scream my sister and I faithfully imitate, even in the later seasons when it was removed. Even when shows like Psych occasionally switch up the song or the style of the opening credits, it’s fun–like an Easter Egg for devoted fans.

So for the first episode of Five Things Friday, I’d like to present five truly amazing title sequences. And I’d like to say that, for a TV addict like myself, it was incredibly difficult to narrow this list down to five and it took an extreme act of will to branch out from just HBO shows, because their title sequences are awesome.

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