Guess the TV Show
One second of a theme tune, sound only. The screen shows a small television with an equaliser on it and nothing else, which is not a stylistic decision — almost every opening title sequence prints the name of the show across the frame within a few seconds, and there is no crop or blur that survives the answer being written in the middle of the picture.
Theme tunes are the most over-learned music most people own. That is why this ladder can start meaner than the film game's: one second of a title sequence is a drum fill and a key, and for a dozen shows in the deck that is already plenty.
Name the series from the first second of its theme tune.
Play Guess the TV ShowDating a theme by its instruments
Instrumentation places a theme in a decade faster than the melody does. A gated snare, a DX7 electric piano and a saxophone put you in the mid-1980s. A live band playing a major-key hook with a walking bass line under it is a 1980s or early-1990s sitcom. A full orchestra recorded with real air around it belongs to prestige drama from the late 1990s onward, and a lone cold synth arpeggio with no drums is a modern prestige title sequence.
Cartoons are their own category: fast, brass-led, often with a choir of children, and frequently the show's name is sung in the first bar, which is why some rounds end at one second and others take twenty.
Anime themes in the deck sound nothing like the Western ones — J-pop or J-rock, a full band, and a vocal that enters early. If the first second is a distorted guitar chord followed by a snare roll, you can eliminate most of the sitcoms outright.
The ladder
One second, two, five, ten, twenty. Five seconds is usually a full phrase of the melody. Twenty seconds is a verse of almost any title sequence ever written, and by then the round is worth 150 points instead of 1000.
Once the round is over the theme plays out for 30 seconds, which is the small reward for having sat through a game that hides its own pictures.
How the audio is served
The player is a real YouTube embed — the only keyless way to get this audio — moved off-screen rather than hidden. That distinction matters more than it sounds: six ways of hiding it were measured against a live embed, and while today's Chrome keeps the sound on through all of them, zero-sized and display:none media have been throttled or refused before on both engines, and the failure mode is a round that simply makes no sound. Parked off the left edge of the page, the element is fully laid out and composited, and cannot be seen, hovered, focused or read.
The embed also names its own iframe after the video it is playing, which is to say after the answer, sitting in the accessibility tree. That title is rewritten the instant the element appears, and again if it ever comes back.
The deck
153 series, from I Love Lucy in 1951 to The Last of Us in 2023. Shows whose opening is a silent title card or pure ambience were left out however famous they are, because there is nothing to guess.
Getting to 153 took some work: 977 candidate uploads were scraped and scored, and the best few per show were put through two gates — YouTube's keyless oEmbed endpoint, which fails for anything private or deleted, and then a real embedded player watched to confirm playback actually advances, because oEmbed will happily bless a video whose owner has turned embedding off. Of 165 series researched, twelve had no theme worth guessing and thirty more had the machine's pick overruled by hand for being a prequel, a spin-off, a parody or a fan edit.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380, 240 and 150 points per rung, plus up to 160 for speed and a streak multiplier that tops out at 2×. Wrong guesses cost a rung, and in this game they are cheap to make, because a great many themes share the same four-bar shape. Naming the genre in your head before you name the show is worth doing.