Skip the title credits and you could miss a masterpiece, says the Mail’s TV critic

Bingeing on box sets has become one of the great pleasures of modern life. But don’t be tempted to speed things up by skipping the opening credits. They’re more than a cast list or piece of ingenious scene-setting – they’re proof that this is television’s most confident, opulent era.

Thanks to streaming TV on Netflix, Amazon and US subscription networks such as HBO, title sequences are now sumptuous artworks that can last a minute or more. By contrast, 20 years ago we’d get a short burst of pop music and cartoon graphics. Producers saw long credits as a waste, as the space could have been sold to advertisers. But online video services have no ads or schedules, so episodes can’t over-run and the credits can be as expansive and impressive as possible.

The first show to grasp this was Mad Men, made for the US cable channel AMC. The graphics showed a man’s silhouette entering an office, which dissolved around him. He tumbled down the sides of skyscrapers, past advertising billboards, until he landed with easy grace on a sofa, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers. The sequence summarised the themes of the most psychologically complex TV series ever written. It told us the show was elegant, witty and clever, that it was set in the advertising world, and that it was the story of a man who survived unscathed no matter how often his world fell apart.

It was a challenge to other directors. The HBO crime series True Detective projected nightmarish smoky images on to the silhouettes of its characters. The credits of HBO’s robot western Westworld, which was shown on Sky Atlantic last year, showed 3D printers creating replica human skeletons. Game Of Thrones begins with a thunderous waltz theme as the camera swoops over a map of the mythical Seven Kingdoms to show where the characters will go in that episode.

The main channels are following suit. In the BBC’s sinister Bond-like graphics for The Night Manager last year, bombs fell like pearls and machine guns spat bullets like champagne bubbles. Taboo, the dark BBC1 costume drama starring Tom Hardy, opened with a collage of drowned bodies seen from underwater, intercut with occult patterns tattooed on skin. And Unforgotten, the ITV crime drama tracing investigations into old murder cases, set an eerie tone with images that had faded like photos left in the sun.

But for sheer beauty, the flowing liquid gold of Netflix’s The Crown, with its gorgeous score by Hans Zimmer, can’t be bettered… until an even more stunning opening sequence is created, perhaps. I can’t wait.