HBO’s new Band of Brothers-inspired miniseries The Pacific premiered last night, and although I will be watching it, I probably won’t be blogging about it until the end. (This, by the way, is one of the biggest differences between the miniseries and standard American television productions: miniseries are written with an end in mind, and usually, the whole thing is produced at once. Writing about it without seeing the whole thing is like writing a paper about the first half of a novel. In contrast, television series are a piecemeal business, and the final episode mostly likely isn’t even written by the time the first episode is filmed. They’re built over a very long period of time, often with no definite end in sight, so writing about them while in progress makes much more sense.)

Phew, where did that come from? In any event, although I’m pretty sure The Pacific is going to be amazing and make me weep and cover my eyes, I don’t want to think about it critically until the end. I do want to talk a little about its opening credits, though. (Note: this is the director’s cut version, so it is slightly longer than the one on the air. Only slightly, though.)

They’re gorgeous. The dominating images are super close-up sequences of someone drawing with charcoal – so zoomed in that the dust from the charcoal piles up like dirt, and the textures of the pencil, the paper, and the charcoal lines resemble a rocky, uneven landscape. The lines are stark, but occasionally zoom out into soft, shaded images of soldiers’ pensive faces, and restrained red tinting illustrates violence with more emotional nuance than actual gore. As the pencil moves across paper, fragmenting pieces of dust and charcoal are visually linked to images of battle, so that debris from a drawing looks much like shrapnel. It’s a lovely, persuasive sequence.

There’ve been two diverging trends in opening title sequences. For many network shows, they’ve all but disappeared, led no doubt by the influence of shows like Lost, with its minimalist, two second long, slowly spinning black and white title. The once longer version of the Grey’s Anatomy title sequence has been reduced to a clean, brief appearance of the title, and newer shows like The Good Wife , FlashForward, and Castle never even had a longer versions of their very short opening sequences. 24 has always had its succinct timer BEEP….BEEP… title, and even some sitcoms, once the bastion of the TV theme song, have abandoned traditional opening credits for an abbreviated animation and a creator credit (How I Met Your Mother, Community).

The reverse has also been true, largely for high-brow cable and premium cable programming. Over the past decade, it’s become the norm for HBO shows to come stamped with trademark artsy title sequences, sometimes nearly two minutes long. The best of these are completely gorgeous little films that tap into the show’s thematic content and organizing aesthetics – Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Rome and True Blood all have powerful opening sequences that go a long way toward establishing the shows’ tone. True Blood in particular has an opening sequence that does an immense amount of atmospheric work. Those ninety seconds build an entire fantasy world, connect it with the politics, racial history, and cultural battles of our real world, and then anchor it all in a detailed, distinct American South. (The best embedded version I could find has an HBO watermark on it.) Showtime’s Dexter also must go on this list: never, ever have I seen creepier footage of food, and a jaunty, devil-may-care music that accompanies images of coffee beans being pulverized, a knife cutting into a runny egg yolk, and fingers clenched to pull shoelaces tight sells the show’s juxtaposition of quotidian horror as effectively as Michael C. Hall’s performance.

Oddly, these opposing methods of building framing devices for television shows are seeking to address the same realities of TV viewership. The supershort title credit builds a show’s brand while also making it far too short to skip – there’s no point in reaching for the fast-forward button on the TiVo if you know it’ll only be five seconds long. You may not get a whole lot of establishing information about the cast, characters, or tone, but at least you can’t skip over what little there is. On Community, for example, the thirty second sequence often gets clipped into a pithy title bit that blasts you with a brief melodic phrase, one line of a song, and a nice animation of a cootie catcher with funny doodles in it. The word “Community” appears in block, collegiate text, annnnnnd we’re done. You get a hefty dose of COLLEGE, a whiff of snark, and you’re launched into the episode. Conversely, the ultralong HBO-style credits open themselves up to skipping because they are so long, but if you do sit through them, you’re rewarded with a surprisingly rich little meditation on what you’re about to watch.

The ultralong title sequence also serves an important purpose for weekly viewing – certainly this is not always the case, but over the past decade, the cable shows with super long credits have often also been narratively complex, multi-plotted shows. Sitting down to a new episode of The Sopranos a week later, a minute and a half of Tony driving through the Holland tunnel may not remind you of precisely what was happening in the episode last week, but it helps pull your mind back into the show’s aesthetic, its tone, its atmosphere. It also establishes the episode as an event, something that requires some introduction and unpacking. It’s cinematic – this hour of your life is a separate experience, encapsulated from whatever you were just doing, and you need this title sequence as a bridge between the two spaces. Conversely, the long credits have the opposite effect in DVD viewing. I am much more likely to skip one of those long title sequences when watching several episodes at a time (which, ahem, happens not infrequently), because they interrupt the rhythm and immersion of the storytelling. I don’t need a ninety second reminder of what the show’s like if the thing I was doing two minutes ago was watching the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good title sequence. But I wonder if their presence at the beginning of every episode in the DVD format makes the rhythms of the show a little too pat, and the endings and beginnings of each segment super conscious reminders of time passing. A title song that’s familiar quickly becomes canned, and then annoying, and then it breaks you out of the duration of the show when you hit fast forward – the equivalent of skipping that one paragraph that’s repeated in every Nancy Drew novel (oh Bess, you always were a little plump). If nothing else, the title sequences are enduring markers of one way television will always be different than a novel, even when it’s at its most literary. The methods of production are much closer to the surface.

Among its many varied uses, fiction often provides us with a means to analyze the world, either in a philosophical, abstract way (The Stranger, Anna Karenina), or in far more concrete, practical ways (think Pride and Prejudice and its useful lessons in conversation etiquette). We can also use it to think about and understand topical issues; it’s hard to think of a more appropriate text for the Madoff scandal than Little Dorrit.

Particularly for current events, though, our accompanying fictional works can sometimes be more effective as visual rather than written stories. This is the case for two shows now on in the primetime slots – CBS’s new program The Good Wife and FOX’s procedural Lie to Me, now entering its sophomore season. The Good Wife follows a fairly standard weekly episodic law firm plotline, where each episode introduces us to a new innocent victim who our heroine tries to defend. The premise and surrounding context of the show, however, is a little more involved. The main character, Alicia Florrick, is married to the former State Attorney of Cook County, who has recently admitted to occasional sexual encounters with young prostitutes and is fighting charges of political corruption. While her imprisoned husband waits for trial, Alicia goes back to work in a law firm after years as a stay-at-home mother, and has uncomfortable encounters with her husbands’ former colleagues.

It’s a fun premise – relatable for women who struggle with work/life balance and there’s a hefty dollop of scandal to keep things exciting. But it works especially well as a television show rather than a novel, because all our cues for interpreting Alicia as a beleaguered political wife are visual ones. In the beginning of the first episode, Alicia and her husband walk out into a crowd of reporters, and while Peter informs the crowd that he has resigned as State’s Attorney, Alicia stands silently off to the side, looking shocked and pale. This is an image we know, television we know. This is Eliot Spitzer’s wife, standing up next to him while he admits to having sex with prostitutes. For most Americans, this is an event that happened visually, something they watched on the news or saw clips of on the internet, and so this fictionalized representation of that event can give us a jolt of visual recognition that text is unlikely to achieve.

On FOX’s Lie to Me, the premise grapples with current events more abstractly, and rather than using jabs of visual reminders, the show provides retroactive interpretation of significant images. Cal Lightman, the show’s protagonist, works as a lie detector, using the examination of physical signs like heart rate, gestures, and most importantly, micro-expressions, to determine whether someone is being deceptive. In the season two premiere, the Lightman Group interviews a possible Supreme Court nominee, attempting to determine whether he has secrets that will hold up his confirmation. After learning that he feels fear and anger about one of his early cases, they uncover a hidden sexual relationship between the nominee and the daughter of a woman he once acquitted. A picture of the judge and the young woman reveals her feelings for him – she looks at him with love and hidden knowledge. As corroboration for the image’s interpretation, the investigator pulls up several other images: Mel Gibson’s mistress looking at him, Hailey Glassman looking at Jon Gosselin, and of course, Monica Lewinsky looking up at President Clinton. Their expressions are the same, and the inference is clear. As in the fictional plot, the expressions of famous and infamous people are available for further interpretation, and the fictional storylines of Lie to Me can act as a decoder ring for real life.

Of course it’s dubious that you could sit watching Lie to Me and then re-watch Dave Letterman’s fumbling attempts to apologize for his indiscretions with new insight. Still, the idea stands: television is uniquely suited as a fictional medium to respond to and provide interpretation for current events in our visual world. That doesn’t mean it happens often, or that it frequently happens thoughtfully, cleverly, or effectively. But The Good Wife and Lie to Me are not bad places to start.