Don't Touch That Skip Button: The Unsung Art of the TV Intro Is Having a Moment

There was a time, not long ago, when the opening credits of a TV show were basically a bathroom break. Netflix rolled out the 'Skip Intro' button in 2017, and honestly, it felt like a public service. Why sit through ninety seconds of theme music when the algorithm had already queued up your next episode before the last one finished fading out?

And yet. Scroll through TikTok or Reddit's television corners today and you'll find something nobody predicted: people ranking title sequences. Frame-by-frame breakdowns. Essay-length tributes to theme songs. Grown adults admitting they cried when a network trimmed an intro down to save eight seconds of runtime. The opening credits — the thing we spent a decade training ourselves to skip — are suddenly cool again.

The Button That Changed Everything (and Then Didn't)

Here's the irony: the 'Skip Intro' button may have actually saved the TV intro. Before streaming, networks treated credits as filler to be cut or compressed. But once skipping became an option, showrunners realized the intros that survived had to earn their watch. If viewers were going to sit through your title sequence, it couldn't just be a cast list over stock footage of a city skyline. It had to be art.

And in the streaming era, it often is. Think about the ones that stopped you cold the first time you saw them. The eerie, slow-burn dread of the Severance opening — a tiny office worker descending into a corporate void, all sterile light and unsettling calm. The neon-soaked, retro-futuristic glow of Stranger Things, which turned a simple title card into a full-blown cultural reset. The gorgeous, painterly animation of Arcane. The White Lotus theme, which got a full remix treatment every single season like it was a Beyoncé single.

These aren't intros. They're short films. And audiences have noticed.

The Internet Turned Credits Into Content

Part of the revival is pure internet culture. Ranking videos — 'Top 10 TV intros of the streaming era,' 'Title sequences that go harder than the show itself' — reliably rack up millions of views. There are YouTube channels devoted entirely to analyzing title design. The Emmy Awards even added an Outstanding Main Title Design category decades ago, but it took social media to make design nerds of us all.

There's also a nostalgia engine running underneath it all. Millennials who grew up on Friends and Fresh Prince theme songs — the kind you had to sit through whether you liked it or not — are now old enough to be nostalgic for the ritual of an intro. That little musical cue that said, 'okay, we're here now, settle in.' Streaming flattened the viewing experience into an endless scroll of content, and the opening credits became one of the last remaining markers of 'this is a show, with a beginning, made on purpose.'

When Cutting Credits Became a Crime

The revival got its most passionate moment a couple of years back, when Apple TV+ quietly trimmed the opening credits of Severance for certain episodes and fans revolted like the studio had defaced a national monument. Think pieces were written. Petitions were floated. People genuinely mourned.

That reaction said something bigger: viewers aren't just tolerating intros anymore — they're protective of them. In an entertainment landscape where everything is skippable, customizable, and optimized for speed, the unskippable-feeling intro became a small act of resistance. Sitting through the Succession theme, all jagged strings and dynastic menace, is a choice. It sets a mood no cold open can replicate.

What Makes a Great Intro in 2025?

Ask around and you'll hear the same ingredients: a theme song that becomes shorthand for the show itself (you hear two notes of The Last of Us theme and you're already bracing for heartbreak), visuals that tell you what kind of story you're in for, and a little bit of mystery — the best intros reveal something new on the tenth watch that you missed the first nine.

The shows getting it right right now — from the hypnotic titles of Shōgun to the retro charm of Only Murders in the Building — understand that an intro is a promise. It's thirty to ninety seconds where the show gets to say: this is who we are, this is what we care about, trust us.

So the next time that 'Skip Intro' button pops up in the corner of your screen, consider ignoring it. Let the theme play. Watch the credits roll. You might be surprised what the show's been trying to tell you all along — and you might just understand why millions of Americans decided the fastest way to watch TV wasn't the best way after all.