A TV mood in 30 seconds

Turning to “Desperate Housewives” on Sunday evenings, the first thing viewers see is Adam and Eve, dressed in fig leaves, standing beneath the apple tree in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 16th century painting. When she picks her apple, a Volkswagen-sized fruit falls, crushing him to the ground, leaving her to contemplate her prize.

Next comes a 3-D hieroglyphic of an Egyptian temple, where a woman in royal dress sinks into a growing pile of children, arms waving helplessly. Then, on to the Renaissance flat of Jan van Eyck’s “Betrothal of the Arnolfinis,” where a pregnant wife sweeps up after her husband throws a banana peel on the floor.

The 30-second opening represents a new, high-concept kind of introductory segment on television.

The old style, called “turn and look,” centered on the show’s stars looking into the camera as their names scrolled underneath. The new openings are sophisticated mini-movies, complete with their own scores, celebrating ideas, metaphors, symbols, even poetry as the credits roll.

It’s a trend, television executives say, that’s being driven by the increasing use of digital technology and a desire to spotlight a show’s concept and brand rather than individual actors.

For “Desperate Housewives,” creator and executive producer Marc Cherry said he wanted to do something different than the standard “turn and look” introduction and make a larger statement “about all women throughout history.”

“We weren’t selling the actors so much as an idea,” he said. “We hold icons of motherhood and housewives on a pedestal. My desire is to look at aspects of suburbia and the quiet desperation going on at its core,” he said.

Cable has led the way in innovation. Some programs, like HBO’s “Carnivale,” which opens with an elaborate 3-D blend of Tarot cards and Depression-era film clips, are more admired for their introductory segments than the shows themselves. While the HBO drama was ignored in series and acting categories at this year’s Emmy Awards, its main title sequence won for that category.

Other segments, like the surreal and symbolic titles for Showtime’s new drama “Huff” -- a dark comedy about a psychiatrist coping with love, death and emotional crises -- are packed with layers of meaning.

Boxes swim across the screen with dreamlike images -- a baby, cigarette smoke, lips that change color, men in suits sitting on chairs on the beach, a faceless man in a hall. A knife cuts a tomato. A razor cuts cocaine. Shoes sit on a ledge. There’s a gun, then splattered blood. Voices of men and women weigh in from a distance: “Oh, Huff” ... “You’re supposed to know what I’m feeling” ... “I can’t go home unless I know where it is.”

The introduction to HBO’s “Six Feet Under” juxtaposes images of the coroner’s trade with symbolic images of finality and separation, all to a jaunty score by Thomas Newman.

“We say it’s like a little piece of haiku that’s supposed to expand the relevancy and meaning of the show that’s going to follow it,” said Paul Matthaeus, chief creative officer of Digital Kitchen, a Seattle-based design firm that created conceptual titles for “Six Feet Under” and FX’s “Nip/Tuck.”

“We try to make our titles stand as a metaphor of the human emotional connection.”

In the “Desperate Housewives” segment, each vignette is a joke, said designer Garson Yu of Los Angeles’ yU+co, which created the title. But, he says, some viewers he knows don’t get the “American Gothic” reference.

“The story behind ‘American Gothic’ is it’s his daughter with him in front of the farmhouse. We wanted to tie into the family aspect of it rather than always show husband and wife,” Yu said.

Given the effort involved, conceptual titles are often more artistically satisfying than profitable for the designers who create them. They cost between $50,000 and $150,000 to make and can take several months to complete.

“We never make money on them in the long run,” said Matthaeus, whose firm also produces more profitable advertising. “It enables us to work in entertainment and advertising simultaneously. It’s a way to keep our creative chops fresh.”

Technology enables art

One reason conceptual titles are flourishing: digital technology. Computer-generated images have matured beyond an expensive novelty and now offer a relatively cheap palette of artistic choices.

By juxtaposing images or digitally morphing one into another, designers can conjure up meaning far beyond Mary Richards tossing her hat.

The “Carnivale” images, for example, juxtapose good and evil, showing tarot cards of angels and a vengeful God, as well as scenes of preaching, politicians and poverty.

“Nip/Tuck” symbolizes the superficial nature of contemporary society. Mannequins are shown marked up, as if for surgery. They appear as immobile as marble except for an eerie moment when one hand twitches involuntarily.

To connect with specific audiences today, main title designers need to know more than graphic design, says Steven J. Scott, a governor at the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which bestows the Emmys. “They almost have to be pop psychologists,” he said.

Designers at the San Diego and New York-based graphics firm Shilo call themselves “directors.”

Their introduction to “Huff” mixes boxes of moving images with other boxes of Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali-inspired paintings. The boxes are all linked by a crackling wire, symbolizing a “neural connector,” said director Andre Stringer. A mysterious-sounding score by Snuffy Walden includes dialogue remixed, as if to sound like a rap song.

Less a metaphor of Huff’s mind, the titles represent the “inside of some space of thought,” said director Jose Gomez.

“In and of itself, it’s a little bit difficult to consume in one sitting,” he said. “Every time you see it, you take something away you didn’t the last time. Some feeling will get invoked that wasn’t there before.”

Typically, arty titles show up on paid cable, where audiences seem to have more patience for the obscure or intangible.

“HBO audiences are more inclined to give shows more time. They know what HBO is up to, something deeper in life,” Matthaeus says. “Channel flipping is more prevalent on some of the bigger networks, so they’re very anxious to get what they see as their big assets up in front of their audiences quickly.”

In some cases, like TNT’s “Law and Order” reruns or ABC’s “Boston Legal,” that means starting the show immediately without a commercial break and postponing the main introduction until after the initial scenes. Or trying something surprising, such as stark white letters on a black background, as in ABC’s “Lost.”Conceptual titles are unlikely to vanquish the “turn and look” style altogether, designers say, because Hollywood remains too attached to stars and star power. Still, they say network executives are growing more open to abstract titles because they’re shifting from star-driven shows to franchises that require “branding.”

At ABC, executives were initially wary of taking a postmodern approach to “Desperate Housewives,” said Yu, the segment’s designer. The original version had no images of the program’s stars. Eventually, a compromise was reached.

At the end of the introductory sequence, each leading cast member holds an apple -- metaphorically ripe, of course, with meaning.

“You notice they never bite the apple,” Yu said. “We wanted to keep the temptation open.”