I’m talking about that bit at the start which is the same every show.
The shortest I’ve seen is the intro to Good Eats which clocks in at about 8 seconds. The longest is the ridiculously drawn out intro to Iron Chef which is 1:48 before the little bio about the challenger and then goes on for ANOTHER 50 seconds after the bio leading to a 2:38 intro.
Is there any longer/shorter?
Some shows have no intro at all, e.g. many episodes of sitcoms. The version of ‘Everybody Loves Raymond’ as syndicated here in the UK often has no intro at all. (BTW, over here ELR is used as early-morning filler for a station that had to axe its breakfast show).
The standard opening sequence for ‘Six Feet Under’ clocks at 1 min 50 seconds. Again, I’m referring to the most recent season as shown here in the UK. YMMV.
All the episodes of ELR I’ve seen have had the intro where Raymond spots his parents walking up the driveway so he does a mad dash to pretend hes not home cumulating in his mother poking her hand through the mail slot. Obviously some stations will chose to cut out the intros to cram in more ad time but I think that doesn’t count.
“Seinfeld” had no intro at all; they’d just play one of those slappy bass-riffs as the show began. Well, at first they had Jerry doing his standup, but even that wasn’t really an intro, since it was different every week and related to that episode’s topic.
Alias, definitely has the longest intro. It sometimes goes nearly 15 minutes before playing the theme and running the credits.
One of the few episodes of “Raymond” I’ve ever seen featured the main characters groovin’ in the living room to the sounds of Steve Miller’s “Jungle Love.” Special occasion, I presume?
The Shield’s intro is about 7 or 8 seconds. Just long enough to put the title and the name of the show’s creator on the screen. No stars names, no scenes from previous episodes, nuthin’.
The Six Feet Under one is way too long. I always thought the intro for OZ was too long as well, but maybe that’s because I hated the theme song.
thwartme
Karen Sisco had a really long intro. Sometimes the opening song didn’t start till 7 minutes into the hour.
Alias doesn’t have a long intro sequence, it has a long teaser.
The Office seems to have a very short intro, IIRC. Just that shot of the building.
I’m talking only about the intro sequence bits, not the stuff before it. ie: the bit that never changes or changes very little between shows.
Smakfu All the office intro sequences I have seen start off with a shot of a bus leaving the slough bus terminal and clocks in at around 28 seconds all together.
The intro to scrubs is pretty short - just that one song lyric. Maybe not as short as Good Eats, though.
Scrubs clocks in at 12 seconds. Close but no dice.