TMC
12-01-2004, 03:01 PM
Out of tunes
Once an essential part of the prime-time experience, sitcom theme songs are disappearing fast. (http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/bal-to.theme30nov30.story)
_
By Stephen Kiehl, Sun Staff
About a decade ago, after Ted Harbert had been accused (wrongly, he says) of killing the television theme song, he put together a tape he called Ted's All-Time Favorite Theme Songs. He still has a few copies left, with the full-length tracks of such classic themes from Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mission: Impossible.
Harbert hasn't updated the cassette in the last 10 years. He hasn't had to.
"Theme songs are not a top priority for people" in television, says Harbert, the former president of NBC Studios and chairman of ABC Entertainment. It was during his tenure at ABC that he issued his infamous "No more theme songs" memo. But Harbert says he only intended to get rid of bad theme songs.
"I love music, but I'm not going to have crappy music on the network," he said in an interview last week. "I'd rather have the 25 or 30 seconds go back to the program."
Of course, not all shows have given up on themes. And tonight, in fact, one of the classic (or most annoying) theme songs in TV history will be heard again in prime time when The Real Gilligan's Island makes its two-hour debut at 8 on TBS. That song, which served to introduce the cast ("With Gilligan, the skipper too, the millionaire and his wife ... ") and outline the premise of the original Gilligan's Island back in the mid-1960s, is being updated for the new reality show by Grammy-nominated recording artists Bowling for Soup.
But despite such attempts at revival, the theme song is dying. Once a siren's call that heralded the beginning of a show and drew people to the TV set from all over the house, the theme song is fast going the way of Harbert's cassette tapes. Sitcoms, in particular, have ditched theme songs in favor of a few bars of music that play while the title flashes on the screen. The magic is gone, and the shows are diminished.
Network executives point to several causes of death: There are more commercials per half hour of TV, leaving less time for programs. The first thing to go is often the theme song. It's costly to hire a good composer to write a song and pay the residuals due with each airing. Viewers have shorter attention spans and won't sit through theme songs. And they can seem unsophisticated in this era of savvy audiences.
But the loss is significant. Anyone who has clapped along to the Friends theme or sat through a middle school music class rendition of The Greatest American Hero song can feel it. Good TV shows are made better by good theme songs and remembered more fondly for them. Think of Cheers with its "Where Everybody Knows Your Name." Or The Golden Girls and "Thank You for Being a Friend." Or the jazzy themes of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law.
"The best of them really did capture the essence of the show," says Gary Portnoy, who co-wrote and sang the Cheers theme (which can be heard on his Web site, garyportnoy.com). "It was a constant, and it was a familiar friend. I think it's sadly missing nowadays."
TV nostalgia
Portnoy was a full-time theme song writer for much of the '80s, writing the title music for Mr. Belvedere and Punky Brewster, among others. Part of the reason he stopped is that the time allotted to the songs kept shrinking.
"They went from asking for 60 seconds to 40 seconds to 20 seconds, and then Seinfeld came along and it was bada-bip, bada-bip," he says. "Nowadays, I truly believe they are looking to get the TV theme over with so they can sell more advertising. As an art form - if you want to say it ever was one - I think it has all but disappeared."
And yet, as fewer TV shows have signature songs, the nostalgia for them only seems to grow. Portnoy included the Cheers theme on his new album of soft rock music, and fans have complained to him for not including his other themes as well. He said he was once hesitant about revealing that he wrote the Punky Brewster song. Now everyone wants to hear it.
"There's a genuine affection that I never had communicated to me before," he says. He says he still gets a warm, fuzzy feeling when he hears the Mary Tyler Moore theme. "You watch these shows with your family and friends, and you move on in life and you're not with them anymore, so it harkens you back to some very warm times.
"When you're 10 or 15 watching a TV theme with your family, you're not thinking, This is a really warm moment. But many years later, you may."
Naturally, those pining for old TV themes have found each other on the Internet, where scores of Web sites collect great theme songs. One of them, 80stvthemes.com, was started by Brian Karimzad when he was a student at Stanford in 1996. He began by copying the songs off videotapes in his own collection, but he was quickly swamped with contributions.
"It's the collection of dozens of people who share the sentiment that what they hear today isn't up to what they're used to and what they remember," says Karimzad, 26, now a student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
An evolution
Ted Frank, senior vice president for current programming at NBC, traces the decline of the theme song to 1990, when Wings debuted in the time slot following Cheers on Thursday nights. The Wings theme sequence had beautiful shots of a plane flying over water to Nantucket, Mass., set to classical music.
But NBC executives were concerned that Wings wasn't holding a large enough share of Cheers' lead-in audience. So the network asked the Wings producers to ditch the theme song and go straight into the action of the show.
"Remarkably, it made a real difference in the ratings," Frank said. "You could see Wings began to hold the audience better. So it was a much more seamless entry into the show, and that seemed to work, and that became a model for us in working with comedies that were coming on."
Now, he says, the network doesn't have a specific policy on theme songs. Some shows have one. Some don't. It depends on the tone of the show and how the producers choose to use their time. Scrubs, for instance, moved to a longer theme for its second season but quickly abandoned it because the writers found they needed more time for their stories.
The typical amount of time given to programming in a half-hour of network prime time has shrunk from 23 minutes, 30 seconds, to 20 minutes, 30 seconds, over the last few decades, said Harbert, the alleged theme-song killer.
The producers of Scrubs grew up on the TV of the '70s and '80s and have plenty of respect and nostalgia for the theme songs of that era. But they found it difficult to re-create that feeling with their own show.
"They were so cool because they encapsulated the theme of the show and told the audience what the show was about," said Scrubs co-executive producer Neil Goldman. "We got away from it a little bit because it's always on the verge of being nostalgic or cheesy. And in trying to create a new aesthetic or be hipper, they got abbreviated."
Harbert thinks theme songs could make a comeback if someone out there writes a great one and it becomes a big hit. Then everyone would try to follow suit. He remains stung by the accusation, still believed by some in the industry, that he's anti-theme song because of his 1994 memo.
The truth, he says, is that the memo said: "No more theme songs unless you really work on it and come up with something interesting and new and appealing." The unless part, he complains, is never remembered.
"A well-done theme song," he says, "is a reason to watch a show. It sets the tone, sets the spirit, creates the mood. A good theme song really just says, 'OK, you're going to have a good time now.'"
Once an essential part of the prime-time experience, sitcom theme songs are disappearing fast. (http://www.latimes.com/news/custom/showcase/bal-to.theme30nov30.story)
_
By Stephen Kiehl, Sun Staff
About a decade ago, after Ted Harbert had been accused (wrongly, he says) of killing the television theme song, he put together a tape he called Ted's All-Time Favorite Theme Songs. He still has a few copies left, with the full-length tracks of such classic themes from Taxi, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Mission: Impossible.
Harbert hasn't updated the cassette in the last 10 years. He hasn't had to.
"Theme songs are not a top priority for people" in television, says Harbert, the former president of NBC Studios and chairman of ABC Entertainment. It was during his tenure at ABC that he issued his infamous "No more theme songs" memo. But Harbert says he only intended to get rid of bad theme songs.
"I love music, but I'm not going to have crappy music on the network," he said in an interview last week. "I'd rather have the 25 or 30 seconds go back to the program."
Of course, not all shows have given up on themes. And tonight, in fact, one of the classic (or most annoying) theme songs in TV history will be heard again in prime time when The Real Gilligan's Island makes its two-hour debut at 8 on TBS. That song, which served to introduce the cast ("With Gilligan, the skipper too, the millionaire and his wife ... ") and outline the premise of the original Gilligan's Island back in the mid-1960s, is being updated for the new reality show by Grammy-nominated recording artists Bowling for Soup.
But despite such attempts at revival, the theme song is dying. Once a siren's call that heralded the beginning of a show and drew people to the TV set from all over the house, the theme song is fast going the way of Harbert's cassette tapes. Sitcoms, in particular, have ditched theme songs in favor of a few bars of music that play while the title flashes on the screen. The magic is gone, and the shows are diminished.
Network executives point to several causes of death: There are more commercials per half hour of TV, leaving less time for programs. The first thing to go is often the theme song. It's costly to hire a good composer to write a song and pay the residuals due with each airing. Viewers have shorter attention spans and won't sit through theme songs. And they can seem unsophisticated in this era of savvy audiences.
But the loss is significant. Anyone who has clapped along to the Friends theme or sat through a middle school music class rendition of The Greatest American Hero song can feel it. Good TV shows are made better by good theme songs and remembered more fondly for them. Think of Cheers with its "Where Everybody Knows Your Name." Or The Golden Girls and "Thank You for Being a Friend." Or the jazzy themes of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law.
"The best of them really did capture the essence of the show," says Gary Portnoy, who co-wrote and sang the Cheers theme (which can be heard on his Web site, garyportnoy.com). "It was a constant, and it was a familiar friend. I think it's sadly missing nowadays."
TV nostalgia
Portnoy was a full-time theme song writer for much of the '80s, writing the title music for Mr. Belvedere and Punky Brewster, among others. Part of the reason he stopped is that the time allotted to the songs kept shrinking.
"They went from asking for 60 seconds to 40 seconds to 20 seconds, and then Seinfeld came along and it was bada-bip, bada-bip," he says. "Nowadays, I truly believe they are looking to get the TV theme over with so they can sell more advertising. As an art form - if you want to say it ever was one - I think it has all but disappeared."
And yet, as fewer TV shows have signature songs, the nostalgia for them only seems to grow. Portnoy included the Cheers theme on his new album of soft rock music, and fans have complained to him for not including his other themes as well. He said he was once hesitant about revealing that he wrote the Punky Brewster song. Now everyone wants to hear it.
"There's a genuine affection that I never had communicated to me before," he says. He says he still gets a warm, fuzzy feeling when he hears the Mary Tyler Moore theme. "You watch these shows with your family and friends, and you move on in life and you're not with them anymore, so it harkens you back to some very warm times.
"When you're 10 or 15 watching a TV theme with your family, you're not thinking, This is a really warm moment. But many years later, you may."
Naturally, those pining for old TV themes have found each other on the Internet, where scores of Web sites collect great theme songs. One of them, 80stvthemes.com, was started by Brian Karimzad when he was a student at Stanford in 1996. He began by copying the songs off videotapes in his own collection, but he was quickly swamped with contributions.
"It's the collection of dozens of people who share the sentiment that what they hear today isn't up to what they're used to and what they remember," says Karimzad, 26, now a student at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania.
An evolution
Ted Frank, senior vice president for current programming at NBC, traces the decline of the theme song to 1990, when Wings debuted in the time slot following Cheers on Thursday nights. The Wings theme sequence had beautiful shots of a plane flying over water to Nantucket, Mass., set to classical music.
But NBC executives were concerned that Wings wasn't holding a large enough share of Cheers' lead-in audience. So the network asked the Wings producers to ditch the theme song and go straight into the action of the show.
"Remarkably, it made a real difference in the ratings," Frank said. "You could see Wings began to hold the audience better. So it was a much more seamless entry into the show, and that seemed to work, and that became a model for us in working with comedies that were coming on."
Now, he says, the network doesn't have a specific policy on theme songs. Some shows have one. Some don't. It depends on the tone of the show and how the producers choose to use their time. Scrubs, for instance, moved to a longer theme for its second season but quickly abandoned it because the writers found they needed more time for their stories.
The typical amount of time given to programming in a half-hour of network prime time has shrunk from 23 minutes, 30 seconds, to 20 minutes, 30 seconds, over the last few decades, said Harbert, the alleged theme-song killer.
The producers of Scrubs grew up on the TV of the '70s and '80s and have plenty of respect and nostalgia for the theme songs of that era. But they found it difficult to re-create that feeling with their own show.
"They were so cool because they encapsulated the theme of the show and told the audience what the show was about," said Scrubs co-executive producer Neil Goldman. "We got away from it a little bit because it's always on the verge of being nostalgic or cheesy. And in trying to create a new aesthetic or be hipper, they got abbreviated."
Harbert thinks theme songs could make a comeback if someone out there writes a great one and it becomes a big hit. Then everyone would try to follow suit. He remains stung by the accusation, still believed by some in the industry, that he's anti-theme song because of his 1994 memo.
The truth, he says, is that the memo said: "No more theme songs unless you really work on it and come up with something interesting and new and appealing." The unless part, he complains, is never remembered.
"A well-done theme song," he says, "is a reason to watch a show. It sets the tone, sets the spirit, creates the mood. A good theme song really just says, 'OK, you're going to have a good time now.'"