I’m a fan of Apple TV+. It’s not for viewers looking for a big library to muck around in, with episodes of oldies like “Seinfeld” and “Suits” to keep you busy for the rest of forever. But, at $6.99 a month, it’s the least expensive of the big streamers, and it offers a bunch of fine original series that will keep you entertained for a month or two.
I’ve been noticing that the Apple TV+ shows are also outstanding when it comes to title sequences, those opening salvos meant to usher you into the world and the vibe of the material. Their openers tend to be little pieces of art, not unlike HBO’s similarly sophisticated openers for many of their classic shows, from the deathly elegant intro of “Six Feet Under” to the gothic visual tone poem that led into “True Blood.” The Apple TV+ clips, though, are almost of a piece; many of them feel linked somehow, in the saturation of the images, in the evolving figures, and in the elliptical yet intelligible storytelling.
At times, the Apple openers look almost like super-sophisticated screen-savers, which, this being Apple, makes sense. Many of them don’t focus on literal imagery, or photographs, as they set up their particular show, relying more on the kinds of flights of imagination that involve colors, shapes, and digital play. They’re artful in the way MTV videos were in the early days and in the way book jackets continue to be — promotional and supportive, yes, but also self-contained, imaginative statements made with plenty of craft and wit.
The sequence on “The Morning Show,” which just returned for season three, got me thinking about this, because it’s such a simple and simultaneously emotive and dramatic short. Set to an edited version of Benjamin Clementine’s striking “Nemesis,” with its “March on” refrain, it gives us groups of colored dots, including one black dot, in what looks like a giddy, bouncing effort to mix together and/or exclude. It’s a dynamic pool table, a metaphor for society, a microcosm of office politics like those on the series, and then some.
The “Severance” opener is a mysterious journey that, on one level, vaguely illustrates the plot of the show, with the “severed” hero played by Adam Scott facing tensions between his personal and corporate lives after he has his brain surgically divided between work and home. At the same time, it brings us on a murky, haunting tour of a troubled subconscious, with a crush of little bodies coming out of a coffee mug, floating on string like a bunch of balloons, and getting pulled up into a vacuum cleaner. It’s mind-boggling, as it should be. And yes, since I know you are wondering: There is a Lego reboot on YouTube.
The sequence for the recent miniseries “The Crowded Room” is a dark beauty, a painting that’s forever evolving, a gorgeous and yet terrifying dream that keeps moving forward with inexplicable turns. It’s a visit into the complex mind of Tom Holland’s lead character, Danny, a man with a serious and undiagnosed mental illness who is arrested for firing a gun into a crowd in New York City in the late 1970s. In some ways, the show is a procedural mystery, as an expert played by Amanda Seyfried works to figure out what’s happening inside Danny — and the clip reflects that querying tone. It doesn’t make sense, and yet there it is before us, revealing itself.
I love the title sequence of “Bad Sisters.” It is clever and stunning, and it’s driven by a penetrating cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Who by Fire” by PJ Harvey. Essentially, it gives us an activated Rube Goldberg-like contraption, where one motion leads to another in a chain reaction, all of them tinged with menace. The eye of a stuffed badger — and not a marble — rolls along, starting a giant game of Mousetrap that contains family photos of the show’s characters and miniatures of items from the story. Those objects include an ax, lighter fuel, and matches — like those used by the murder victim’s sisters-in-laws in their attempts to kill him. Watching the 10 episodes of the show, I didn’t think about skipping the opening even once.
The opening for “The Afterparty” changes each season, in the same way the whodunit story line and the cast do. But the two we’ve seen so far are a matching pair, with retro stylings that recall the classic Alfred Hitchcock work of title-design legend Saul Bass. Since the show is, among many things, a spoof of Hitchcock-like mysteries, the title sequence takes the Bass allusions and turns them on their heads. Since the series cycles through a variety of movie and TV styles, including noir, rom-com, and high melodrama, it’s fitting to open it all with a classic look.
Billy Crudup’s “Hello Tomorrow!” — about “Glengarry Glen Ross”-like salesmen getting people to buy condos on the moon — is nothing if not visually compelling. It’s a retro-futurist series: The characters have the innocent, stiff manner from 1950s movies, but then the action is set in a future when humans are living on the moon. People drive boxy 1950s cars, but those cars are wheel-less, suspended above roads. The title sequence sets up this world with a montage of midcentury modern gizmos moving hypnotically, as if on a mobile, as if, like the people buying on the moon, up in the air. It is, like the show, a portrait in motion of the American Dream.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at matthew.gilbert@globe.com. Follow him @MatthewGilbert.