The Great Disappearing TV Theme Song: Iconic Ditties are a Dying Art

[Zoneboy]

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Like the rings inside a tree trunk, television theme songs used to be a sure indicator of a person's age.

If you knew all the words to the "Have Gun, Will Travel" or "Gilligan's Island" theme, you were from one generation. All the words to the "Brady Bunch" theme, another generation. If you could sing along with Joey Scarbury's "Greatest American Hero" theme, still another generation.

And TV themes could still do that – except that a lot of prime-time network television shows today have discarded theme songs, or squeezed them down so far they've almost become subliminal.

Largely gone are the days when Mary Tyler Moore opened her show by walking buoyantly down a crowded street for almost a full minute to a bright, perky tune.

Gone too, then, are the days when the line "you're going to make it after all" from that theme would make viewers remember whole favorite scenes from the show: Mary exasperating Lou Grant, or rolling her eyes at Ted Knight, or hearing about the latest bad turn in Rhoda's love life.

Music today still has that same power to evoke. TV has just lost some of its will to use music that way.

"There is theme music for 'Lost,' you know," says Steve Gelfand, a theme music expert who 25 years ago founded the Television Music Archives to help preserve and promote theme music. "But we only hear about two seconds of it. So we're not likely to remember it very well."

Still, says Gelfand, all is not lost. His problem with TV theme music over the last decade, he says, hasn't been too little. It's been too much. With cable, satellite and the Internet expanding the TV universe like a bag of microwave popcorn, we have a lot more music of all kinds on TV today than we did in the days of "I Love Lucy."

Until about 10 years ago, the Television Music Archives gave out annual awards for theme music. In 1994 Gelfand compiled a reference book, "Television Theme Recordings," that is still regarded as the definitive work in the field and today fetches big bucks from collectors.

But finally he threw up his hands.

"I kind of let the archive go inactive," he says. "With cable, there's just too much for one person to catalog. I still keep files for myself, but there are so many shows that even if you tape them, you can't get to all of them."

In the broader picture, he calls today's theme music situation "mixed. . . . You don't hear it on network shows the way you used to, but you hear more of it in other places – on cable shows like 'True Blood' or 'Mad Men.' The 'Sopranos' theme ['Woke Up this Morning,' popularly known as 'Got Yourself a Gun'] probably ran two minutes. You hear good theme music on cartoons like 'The Simpsons' or 'Family Guy,' and on kids' shows.

"So in a way it's really just moved to different places."

Still, for those who define a classic television theme as original music with lyrics, it is harder to find today. It's not likely that today's prime-time shows will yield anything like the cache of memorable past themes that still echo in millions of minds, from the "Jeffersons" theme "Movin' On Up" to the theme from "Friends" – which some call the last great prime-time TV theme.

"There are good ones today," says Gelfand. "I like 'The Big Bang Theory' theme a lot, or the theme to 'How I Met Your Mother.' But even the good ones are short, less than 30 seconds. That gives us a lot less time to get to know them."

This truncation is hardly an accident. It reflects the fact that TV shows are structured much differently these days, and theme music is often collateral damage from that shift.

Once upon a time, TV networks were relatively confident that if you had your TV set on their channel at, say, 9 p.m., you were there to watch the 9 p.m. show.

So it introduced that show with a flourish. Theme music would come up and there might be a graphic with the title. The stars would be introduced. It only took a minute or so, but the whole carefully choreographed production was like a ringmaster announcing the next act, building expectation and anticipation before declaring it was time to go on with the show.

These days, TV networks have no such confidence that we will stay with whatever channel we have on the screen.

Now that most of us have dozens or hundreds of channels to surf through, and a remote to do it with, the networks are terrified that the minute one show ends, we will start looking around.

That's why, when a show ends today, we get rushed through microscopic credits even as we're being teased about "scenes from next week" or other network shows or the nightly news.

The ads are tucked in before the previews and as often as not, the next show begins the minute the previews end. The idea is that we shouldn't have time to even think about picking up the remote before we're seeing action from the next show.

Or, in other words, the old opening segment with theme music, graphics and character introductions is now seen a dangerous window during which we might change our minds.

Those who miss theme music find this frustrating and point out that once we knew the theme from "Cheers," "Northern Exposure" or "Leave It To Beaver," just the first three notes of that theme were enough to tell us we were where we needed to be.

But first we had to get to know the music, and today's truncated openings don't let that happen. Even a show like "Desperate Housewives," which lends itself perfectly to an old-style opening flourish and knows it, has snipped the music back to almost nothing.

Millions of TV viewers know "Law & Order" instantly from 19 seasons of Mike Post's music – a series of staccato notes that are as effective today on television as they were 75 years ago when the concept was first developed on radio shows.

In a real sense, then, those "Law & Order" notes are music. But they're integrated into the show much differently than, say, the "Family Ties" theme.

"A lot of broadcast producers and networks feel they can't afford the time for theme music," suggests Gelfand. "That's probably why you hear more music on cable, where producers have a little more time."

Cases in point there range from "Dexter" to "SpongeBob SquarePants."

Further complicating the whole music issue, notes Gelfand, is that more shows today simply rent established pop songs to set the mood and tone for specific scenes, rather than using their own theme to frame the whole show.

"Cold Case," "Fringe" and "Grey's Anatomy" use pop songs all the time. So do cable shows like "Mad Men." It's an extension of an idea that surfaced 50 years ago when Ricky Nelson often closed "The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet" with his latest pop hit, though some say it didn't really take off until "Miami Vice" made it cool and trendy in the early 1980s.

Still, in the end, the greatest factor in the downshifting of TV theme music is the general dilution of pop culture – the same broader palette of choices that means there are fewer and fewer pop songs, or movies, or books, that "everyone" knows.

Once upon a time, up to half the country was watching the No. 1 show on television. "American Idol," the No. 1 show these days, is on its best weeks watched by less than one in 10. So no matter how memorable its content, it isn't going to have the viral spread that top TV programs and their music once enjoyed.

We still watch television. We just collectively watch hundreds of shows, not a few dozen. When some percentage of us turn away from prime-time hits like "CSI" to history or food or movies or X-game shows, the inevitable result is less commonality the next morning at the water cooler.

Heck, in these days of individual water bottles, how many offices even have water coolers?

Still, music will never disappear from television. Television needs it, because it's a valuable and universal part of the entertainment package television is selling.

"Theme music is in kind of a slump now," says Gelfand. "But these things are sometimes cyclical.

"It's hard to see how we'll ever get something like the 'Friends' theme again. But we could. It might take just one hit song, one hit album, and every producer would be saying, 'Hey, we should get a theme song, too.' Stranger things have happened."

[comedyfreak]

IMO, as long as the networks are going to cut back to make room for more commercials we'll never have good themes again. It's the fans who get cheated in the end.