“It all started when…”: 13 TV shows with chatty spoken-word intros

Most opening credits voice-overs exist to explain a show’s high concept, but The Mary Tyler Moore Show spinoff Rhoda was a pretty straightforward sitcom, with Mary’s outspoken best friend navigating a not-always-happy marriage. Despite this, the first-season credits had the title character give her entire life story in voice-over, touching on birth, puberty, college, and a stint in Minneapolis (the character’s years with Mary). It finally ends with a succinct explanation of the spinoff’s premise: “Now I’m back in Manhattan. New York, this is your last chance!” [Mike Vago]

The short-lived black family sitcom That’s My Mama endures through infrequent but hilarious pop-culture references, as in the mention of the fictional “What’s Going Down” episode in Coming To America and Peter Griffin quoting the show’s wordy, spoken introduction on Family Guy. The opening sequence provides a rundown of the characters from Clifton Curtis (Clifton Davis), a Washington, D.C. barbershop owner surrounded by the family and friends he reintroduces in each episode, as if the audience might forget who they are. In the show’s defense, Clifton’s intro was pared down by nearly a third following the pilot, and amended to include Clifton’s sister and brother-in-law. The abbreviation was a smart move, but it was one of many changes to a show that clearly suffered from having too many cooks. In its second and final season, That’s My Mama replaced the spoken intro with a more traditional opening theme, thereby forfeiting one of its few distinctive elements. [Joshua Alston]

The only slow part of The CW’s otherwise riveting The Flash comes in the kickoff. Barry Allen himself (Grant Guston) tells the story of his mother’s violent death, and the wrongful imprisonment of his father (John Wesley Shipp, in a nice nod to ), who gets blamed for the murder. Barry also helpfully throws in details about his job, and how he got his powers, although nobody with a passing familiarity with the concept of superheroes will be surprised to learn that he uses his super-speed to “fight crime.” Although Barry accomplishes all of this in about 30 seconds like the speedster he is, at some point, The Flash is going to have to trust that its viewers have seen the show before. And now that Barry is getting closer to discovering the real culprit behind his family’s destruction, this intro makes less and less sense. An abbreviated version would be a great way to kick off The Flash’s already-confirmed second season. [Gwen Ihnat]

Neil Simon’s timeless tale of mismatched roommates had already been a popular stage play and an Academy Award-nominated film, but the introduction to Garry Marshall’s 1970 TV adaptation still went to extreme lengths to explain the situation in which one divorced man might move in with another—right down to the date of Felix Unger’s estrangement. (It’s November 13, which also happens to be Garry Marshall’s birthday.) With the same stentorian authority he later gave the phrase “”, veteran voice-over man Bill Woodson told Felix’s fall from marital grace in bruising detail, tempering the character’s optimism with a mean gut punch of introductory phrasing for Oscar Madison: “Several years earlier…” Though the voice-over was retired in later seasons, The Odd Couple was forever defined by the rhetorical question that caps Woodson’s intro: “Can two divorced men share an apartment without driving each other crazy?” If the answer was ever a flat “Yes,” there’d be no show. [Erik Adams]

Hoping to cash in on the success of Star Wars, Universal ordered an adaptation of a well-known comic strip and movie-serial character from Battlestar Galactica creator Glen A. Larson. Buck Rogers In The 25th Century followed a NASA astronaut who was accidentally frozen in space, and revived 500 years later on an Earth rebuilt after nuclear war. But like sci-fi stories from The Postman to (which could still be on the air when that show’s 2020 near-extinction takes place), Buck simply didn’t set its post-apocalyptic scenario far enough into the future. The opening narration starts with an overly optimistic, “In the year 1987, NASA launched the last of America’s deep space probes”—and it’s revealed that the nuclear war that devastated the planet took place later that same year. Probably just as well that Buck Rogers was canceled in 1981, because season eight would have had some explaining to do when neither deep space probes nor nuclear annihilation materialized. [Mike Vago]

Like a Vietnam vet forced to relive the horrors of war via flashbacks, every episode of The A-Team began with producer John Ashley rehashing a past its mercenaries would have loved to forget. “In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn’t commit,” he said, with Hannibal and company surely thanking him for spending yet another week telling everyone all about how they’re ex-cons wanted by the government. Never mind that, save Ashley, no one seemed overly concerned about that whole overarching plotline, as every episode practically depended on hitting the reset button. (Until the last season, that is, when The A-Team was finally apprehended by the military—.) Ashley also probably didn’t help by ending their introduction with the world’s worst Craigslist ad: “If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them, maybe you can hire The A-Team,” he said, no doubt prompting The A-Team to ask themselves who the hell hired him to do their marketing. [Sean O’Neal]

It isn’t that Lionel Stander spends too much time introducing the Reagan era to its very own Nick and Nora Charles. Spoken in-character as Max, faithful manservant to amateur sleuths Jonathan and Jennifer Hart, Hart To Hart’s opening voice-over is relatively terse: To paraphrase, “Here’s Mr. Hart, there’s Mrs. Hart, I’m Max—I take care of them, they solve murders.” But it’s the spaces between those introductions where Max says more than he needs to, like when he punctuates a few words about Jennifer’s looks with an enthusiastic “She’s gorgeous!” But the best, strangest tangent of all arrives right before the killer tagline “When they met, it was murder!”: Max, having put his employers ahead of himself, suddenly realizes the viewers have been listening to a man they haven’t met. “By the way, my name is Max,” he adds, as if it was a recording-booth ad lib. It’s the afterthought that counts, as Max—who isn’t always on the ball, but isn’t absent-minded—slips a little filler into what’s otherwise a succinct statement of purpose. [Erik Adams]

Aware that the strongest fear is that of the unknown, the ’80s horror anthology Tales From The Darkside began and ended every episode with a thorough explanation of what nighttime is, so viewers were then free to concentrate on the show’s comparably lesser fears. “Man lives… in the sunlit world… of what he believes to be reality,” narrator Paul Sparer slowly croaked over shots of a peaceful, sunlit countryside, before unveiling the terrors of his big “but.” “But… There is, unseen by most, an underworld, a place that is just as real, but not as brightly lit,” he growled, pausing to add—just in case you didn’t pick up all the evil he’s laying down—“a dark side.” Over the end credits, Sparer returned to continue his goth poetry slam, dramatically intoning, “The dark side is always there, waiting for us to enter—waiting to enter us. Until next time, try to enjoy the daylight.” You see, the “dark side” is the opposite of light. It’s dark. Like, really dark. [Sean O’Neal]

Law & Order is such a storied franchise, it feels like it’s always been with us. But in 1990, a show that was both a cop show and a lawyer show was unheard of. Producer Dick Wolf decided that TV audiences in that more innocent time needed a wordy explanation about the workings of the criminal justice system, namely that, “the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups.” It not only establishes audience expectations about the hybrid drama to come, it also firmly places the actors from each half of the show and their characters on equal footing. After 25 years, five series, and more than a thousand total episodes, most Americans can recite at least one of the L&O intros from memory. Apparently that still doesn’t eliminate the need to tell us which crimes are considered especially heinous, who pursues the worst criminal offenders, and that these are their stories. [Mike Vago]