Why are sitcom theme songs dying? - Sitcoms Online Message Boards

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.
_
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.'"

EmoJoe · 12-01-2004, 04:04 PM

Theyre dying because the networks want to show more commericals, so a shorter theme song can get more commericials, which is why many shows' theme songs are now cut in syndication

barwars · 12-01-2004, 10:40 PM

I was never fond of the Wings themesong, and apparently -- neither was NBC.

Cheers however -- is king, and this article proves that.

spunkygirl · 12-02-2004, 12:26 AM

I loved Wings' longer theme song. I hated the shorter one.

I agree with Rurry, more commercial time is what it boils down too

gOoSe · 12-02-2004, 01:26 AM

isnt funny though that in syndication, if a series had more than 1 theme they will pick the longest ones to use? lol

spunkygirl · 12-02-2004, 01:30 AM

Quote:

Originally posted by gOoSe
isnt funny though that in syndication, if a series had more than 1 theme they will pick the longest ones to use? lol

The thing I don't get is Disney uses the BMW S4 opener for Seasons 1-4, yet the Seasons 2 and 3 openers are much shorter than the S4 opener

db108108 · 12-02-2004, 10:57 AM

What the producers need to do is create themesongs which cannot be cut down. Roseanne is a great example of this. Even in syndication, the theme song is still the same length it was when it originally aired just because it can't be chopped up.

I'm always surprized that it gets left off the best opening themes list. It really was classic, fit the tone of the series perfectly, and was held consistant over 9 seasons.

Impressions · 12-02-2004, 06:54 PM

I'm not trying to prove you wrong that sitcoms themes are dying and I know this wasn't the point of the thread, but Hope & Faith is an example of one of the only (if not the only) shows that has a (long) theme song that is currently running on TV, there could be some others, but that is one that I know of.

tylerjjj · 12-04-2004, 02:08 PM

They didn't have a problem with Roseanne's theme. It was usually 40 to 42 seconds. season 5's long version was 68 to 70 seconds. Why can't they stick to the old ways.

EmoJoe · 12-04-2004, 04:13 PM

The thing I dont get is the WTB? theme song is only about 70 seconds long and yet they sometimes they cut it down to 10 seconds in syndication

db108108 · 12-04-2004, 04:18 PM

The thing with Roseanne's theme song is that they can't really cut it down because it's not clips from the series. If you start cutting things out, it's extremely noticeable and jarring. The problem with themes like Who's The Boss is that they are clips from the series and they can easily be cut out without a dramatic efect.

As for Hope & Faith, the reason for the long theme song is perhaps that the writers can't fill a full 20 minutes. God only knows, I have a hard time paying attention to that show for just 5 minutes.

spunkygirl · 12-04-2004, 04:41 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by db108108
The thing with Roseanne's theme song is that they can't really cut it down because it's not clips from the series. If you start cutting things out, it's extremely noticeable and jarring. The problem with themes like Who's The Boss is that they are clips from the series and they can easily be cut out without a dramatic efect.

As for Hope & Faith, the reason for the long theme song is perhaps that the writers can't fill a full 20 minutes. God only knows, I have a hard time paying attention to that show for just 5 minutes.

I never thought Hope and Faith's was that long really, I thought H & F and the Complete Savages theme songs were about the same length really

spunkygirl · 12-04-2004, 04:46 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by RurryJoeMicelli
The thing I dont get is the WTB? theme song is only about 70 seconds long and yet they sometimes they cut it down to 10 seconds in syndication

Home Improvement's theme song is about 70 seconds but they use a syndicated version instead.

Wings is one of the few show that networks haven't used a syndicated version for, cause the theme song in the early seasons was fairly long.

barwars · 12-04-2004, 06:29 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by RurryJoeMicelli
The thing I dont get is the WTB? theme song is only about 70 seconds long and yet they sometimes they cut it down to 10 seconds in syndication

Because that's a whole minute of commercials they can add.

slackermonkey · 12-04-2004, 06:34 PM

Look at it this way: wouldn't you rather have the theme song cut than the actual episode? I would.

(Of course, I'm strictly talking syndication. My DVDs better be uncut all the way around.)

12-01-2004, 03:01 PM	#1
TMC Member Forum Idol Join Date: Jan 09, 2001 Posts: 126,548	Why are sitcom theme songs dying? Out of tunes Once an essential part of the prime-time experience, sitcom theme songs are disappearing fast. _ 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.'"

12-01-2004, 04:04 PM	#2
EmoJoe Cool cool cool Forum Addict Join Date: Apr 23, 2004 Location: New Jersey Posts: 71,478	Theyre dying because the networks want to show more commericals, so a shorter theme song can get more commericials, which is why many shows' theme songs are now cut in syndication
	__________________ "I know the difference between TV and reality, Jeff. TV has structure, it makes sense, there are likable leading men. In real life, we have this. We have you." - Abed Nadir, Community www.sitcomsarestupid.blogspot.com

12-04-2004, 06:34 PM	#15
slackermonkey the big yellow joint Senior Member Join Date: Oct 05, 2004 Location: Earth Posts: 1,779	Look at it this way: wouldn't you rather have the theme song cut than the actual episode? I would. (Of course, I'm strictly talking syndication. My DVDs better be uncut all the way around.)
	__________________ ...Derek TV on DVD Checklist: 05/09 - Scrubs: The Complete Third Season 05/30 - Joey: The Complete First Season 06/13 - Cheers: The Complete Eighth Season 06/13 - Frasier: The Complete Eighth Season 06/20 - Justice League: Season 2 07/25 - Animaniacs: Volume 1 10/?? - Scrubs: The Complete Fourth Season 12/06 - Animaniacs: Volume 2

12-01-2004, 10:40 PM	#3
barwars .. Forum Star Join Date: May 04, 2002 Posts: 13,273	I was never fond of the Wings themesong, and apparently -- neither was NBC. Cheers however -- is king, and this article proves that.

12-02-2004, 12:26 AM	#4
spunkygirl Member Moderator Forum Celebrity Join Date: Apr 26, 2003 Posts: 21,563	I loved Wings' longer theme song. I hated the shorter one. I agree with Rurry, more commercial time is what it boils down too

12-02-2004, 01:26 AM	#5
gOoSe Member Frequent Poster Join Date: Aug 12, 2002 Posts: 297	isnt funny though that in syndication, if a series had more than 1 theme they will pick the longest ones to use? lol

12-02-2004, 10:57 AM	#7
db108108 Teacher (for now) Senior Member Join Date: Mar 20, 2003 Location: 2 hours north of Detroit, 2 hours south of Toronto Posts: 1,023	What the producers need to do is create themesongs which cannot be cut down. Roseanne is a great example of this. Even in syndication, the theme song is still the same length it was when it originally aired just because it can't be chopped up. I'm always surprized that it gets left off the best opening themes list. It really was classic, fit the tone of the series perfectly, and was held consistant over 9 seasons.

12-02-2004, 06:54 PM	#8
Impressions She died the way she lived Forum 4000 Club Member Join Date: May 08, 2002 Posts: 4,640	I'm not trying to prove you wrong that sitcoms themes are dying and I know this wasn't the point of the thread, but Hope & Faith is an example of one of the only (if not the only) shows that has a (long) theme song that is currently running on TV, there could be some others, but that is one that I know of.

12-04-2004, 02:08 PM	#9
tylerjjj Member Forum Regular Join Date: Sep 17, 2004 Posts: 570	They didn't have a problem with Roseanne's theme. It was usually 40 to 42 seconds. season 5's long version was 68 to 70 seconds. Why can't they stick to the old ways.

12-04-2004, 04:13 PM	#10
EmoJoe Cool cool cool Forum Addict Join Date: Apr 23, 2004 Location: New Jersey Posts: 71,478	The thing I dont get is the WTB? theme song is only about 70 seconds long and yet they sometimes they cut it down to 10 seconds in syndication

12-04-2004, 04:18 PM	#11
db108108 Teacher (for now) Senior Member Join Date: Mar 20, 2003 Location: 2 hours north of Detroit, 2 hours south of Toronto Posts: 1,023	The thing with Roseanne's theme song is that they can't really cut it down because it's not clips from the series. If you start cutting things out, it's extremely noticeable and jarring. The problem with themes like Who's The Boss is that they are clips from the series and they can easily be cut out without a dramatic efect. As for Hope & Faith, the reason for the long theme song is perhaps that the writers can't fill a full 20 minutes. God only knows, I have a hard time paying attention to that show for just 5 minutes.