The Honourable Woman: a great show let down by dated opening credits?
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Version 0 of 1. We’re not yet halfway through The Honourable Woman but it’s clear writer/director/producer Hugo Blick has assembled his political thriller with rare confidence and control. Dense, deliberate, harrowing and opaque, it already feels comparable to the most-admired US dramas of recent years while retaining its own unique UK flavour, possibly due to Blick’s instinct to surprise and subvert. It’s just a shame the title sequence feels both over-egged and second-hand, like it was found down the back of the sofa in the Homeland writing room. From a technical perspective, it’s state-of-the-art stuff: a herky-jerky montage of ominous images, snatches of isolated dialogue and classified documents being redacted before your eyes, soundtracked by unsettling strings and a squelchy heartbeat. It’s intended to invoke the confusion of the Middle East, intimating shadowy meddling and calculated misdirection. (Check it out on iPlayer, usually around three minutes in.) But The Honourable Woman is already so rich, it doesn’t need a tiramisu of a title sequence. It makes me nostalgic for the minimalist opening to Blick’s The Shadow Line, where it looks like 90% of the budget went on buying a laser pointer. Though it comes in for a lot of flak, Homeland’s jazz-maze jumble of F-bombs and upside-down Obama is the most influential TV title sequence in years, and impactful enough to inspire a Muppets parody. As well as The Honourable Woman, The Americans takes a considerable steer from it. Deploying a turbocharged photo-collage to throw your audience off-balance seems to especially suit espionage stories, where political and personal loyalties are always shifting. Similarly, the relationship between viewer and title sequence can change over time. Even if you initially hated Regina Spektor’s perky theme to Orange is the New Black, two seasons of binge-watching has probably created a more positive association: now it’s a precursor to pleasure. The enforced Westeros geography lesson of Game of Thrones’s titles initially felt like a drag but by the second season, I had come to appreciate the narrative clues encoded within the quasi-medieval Sim City visuals and Ramin Djawadi’s emphatic, addictive theme. In the US, they hand out Emmys for Outstanding Main Title Design, which doesn’t take into account any accrued Pavlovian responses, suggesting it’s possible to assess these sequences on their own merits. That’s fair – opening titles are often farmed out to an entirely separate creative team. If there’s any justice, this year’s Emmy will go to Black Sails, a title sequence that looks and sounds so evocative, it is almost certainly best enjoyed in isolation from the deeply mediocre pirate soap to which it is lashed. The award-winning title sequence I could never get behind, despite loyally watching it for eight seasons, was Dexter’s wink-wink murder-breakfast. Two seemingly endless minutes of Michael C Hall maiming a blood orange and putting his T-shirt on in a weird way to calypso muzak always seemed like an artistic misstep, a curdled joke made worse by the fact that Daniel Licht’s closing theme was so much more unsettling. But now the show is gone, I’ve come to appreciate there is some artistry in its title sequence, especially when compared to an earlier edit that, clever logo design aside, suggests it could have been a lot worse. I’ve also found it impossible to maintain the hate after seeing how thrilled creative director Eric Anderson was when he bagged his Emmy. Blick has confirmed that The Honourable Woman will only run for one series, so perhaps I’ll regard its title sequence more fondly in years to come. Maybe one day I’ll even stop distractedly wondering how many takes it must have taken to get that dropped chess piece to land so unexpectedly upright. What are your favourite or least favourite TV title sequences? Have you changed your opinion over time? Let us know in the comments below |