Don’t Skip Intro: The Endangered Tradition of TV Theme Songs

Liz Shannon Miller
·11 min read
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The post Don’t Skip Intro: The Endangered Tradition of TV Theme Songs appeared first on Consequence.

Time to light the lights, get yourself a gun, and go where everybody knows your name: Musically, the most important part of any series is the TV theme song, so this week, Consequence will explore just why that is with TV Theme Song Week, celebrating this proud tradition with features, interviews, and lists.

In 2023, composer Holly Amber Church got an Emmy nomination for her very first TV theme song, for Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. And she knows how special that is: Not the recognition, the fact that she was able to write a piece of music that’s 60 seconds long. “The fact that I got a whole minute, that was luxurious,” she tells Consequence. “I feel like they’re all 30 seconds or less now. Sometimes they’re like ten seconds.”

That’s not an exaggeration — that’s the literal amount of time composers are often asked to work with today, when crafting original music that will serve not just as an introduction to a TV show, but establish its identity. This is a tough request, especially given the importance of the TV theme song, which stretches back to the earliest days of television and has been a fundamental part of the format for decades now.

Church observes that “compared to where it was in, say, the ’50s and ’60s, where I feel like every show absolutely had a theme… I don’t know if I would say it’s on the decline, because there are just so many more shows now, but I feel like it’s all over the place.”

Ron Wasserman, whose credits as a composer of TV theme songs include countless series including the Power Rangers franchise and X-Men: The Animated Series, says he noticed the push towards shorter themes around 2009, while working with the producers on the TV Land series Hot in Cleveland.

“They said, ‘We want what you do. We want a theme that people can hear from the other room and they know it’s the show, they know to come back in. Something hooky, something that speaks to the show.’ All the talking points,” Wasserman says. “And then they said, ‘And we’d like it to be ten seconds. It’s okay if it rings out to ten and a half, 11 seconds.’ So I think we ended up at 12, but there’s no time to build. Within two seconds, you’ve gotta establish that this is the show, and then come up with a memorable little earworm hook and then you’re out.”

What about six seconds? “You can’t establish any kind of sound or hook in that short of time,” he says.

Yet that’s exactly what Jason Miller (Til Death, The Odd Couple revival) recently had to tackle while working on a project. “It started out as 30, and then I think 15. And then by the time they settled, it was six seconds,” he says. “The whole thing I’ve learned as a composer is that it’s not up to me. I can offer my tastes and suggestions, but it’s pleasing the people in charge. So when you have six seconds, especially coming from a longer version… okay, well, let’s pick the best part.”

It could be worse: For many of the shows the Emmy-nominated Kris Bowers (Bridgerton, For the People, Dear White People) has worked on, including both broadcast and streaming, he hasn’t even had to write a theme — instead, it’s just been a title card, and “the music that played on the card was just the cue that rang out right before the card, or that was incoming right after the card.” Even for shows like Netflix’s Inventing Anna, for which Bowers did write a theme, the full track is only heard in the first episode; subsequent episodes only include a card.

The crunching of theme song lengths is attributable to a number of factors, such as a conception of the audience’s attention span, or a network’s need to squeeze extra ad time into a series. Composer Jason Miller maybe wonders if bingeing has a role in this, noting that while streaming series do often have themes, the binge experience makes people less inclined to sit through them. “When somebody sits down to watch three episodes of a show in under an hour and a half, I wonder if part of that is like, ‘Ugh, the theme, get through it.’ Whereas when something is on weekly, it’s a little more like ‘Oh, I love this song.'” he says.

Jason’s father, Bruce Miller, laughs through the Zoom screen as Jason says that. “Well, you just made it so that our themes will always be five seconds long,” he says. “All you producers out there that are hearing that…”

Jason is a second-generation writer of TV theme songs. Veteran composer Bruce Miller (Designing Women, Wings) notably collaborated with Darryl Phinnesse on the original theme for Frasier, and father and son recently worked together on an updated version of “Tossed Salads & Scrambled Eggs” for the show’s upcoming Paramount+ revival.

Bruce Miller observes that over the years, the best producers he’s worked with were the ones who “gave the theme music a little bit more credence.” It spoke, he says, to how the producers cared about every facet of the show, “where everything was important.”

It’s a theory that Brian Tyler (Yellowstone, the Fast and Furious films) agrees with. “All the shows that I have loved over the last few years, they tend to have themes,” Tyler says. “Not necessarily because there’s a slot for a theme, but I’ve seen the fight many times [over TV themes]. And I think the energy and the mindset of a team that says to the network, or whoever’s paying for it, that they have to have a theme… Those are going to be the types of shows that really bring you in.”

Tyler thinks the perfect length for a theme is “a minute, which is longer than most. That’s where Yellowstone is.” But he also writes much longer versions for each show, in a way he compares to how a novelist will write a full, unseen, backstory for a supporting character in their book.

“The one that I wrote for 1883 originally was like 13 minutes, and so what I do is I distill it to any amount of time it needs to be,” Tyler says. “But I think when you go too short, it can feel like you’re losing scale. If you do things that feel rushed, it reminds people that it’s not real. It’s just a TV show. The more you lean into something and give it some breathing room, it lets your brain settle in.”

Plus, as Bowers says, “That piece of music also becomes like another reminder of the show outside of the context of watching the show. Like, I could sing the Game of Thrones theme song and people will immediately get excited about the idea of Game of Thrones. It’s like an indelible connection between a theme and the show, and when both of those things are very strong, it just creates another way for that show to be remembered.”

Continues Bowers, with a laugh: “My dad had the Succession ringtone for whenever his dad called. It just becomes this other way of bringing the show world into your own world.”

Because it’s more than just a piece of music — it’s a true art form of its own. When Bowers wants to make sure that a theme he’s working on will be catchy, he’ll walk away from his computer or piano and try to recall it on his own, even singing it to himself. Sometimes, he might remember what he just wrote, but somewhat differently, and the version from his memory is “a bit more easily identifiable — there’s something that is so authentic about the human voice that if I sing my own melody and I happen to have a natural inclination towards singing in a certain way, I tend to trust that. Those are often the biggest tests for me.”

It’s reverse engineering how to get a song stuck in your head, and Bowers says that “that process doesn’t tend to lie, in terms of what’s catchy.”

Catchiness is just one service the TV theme can provide, as Tyler explains: “Even in a world where there are short attention spans and everyone’s clamoring for every second of advertising space, to kind of sacrifice that time to music, to tell the story of what’s to come, I think is well worth its weight. There is a reason why it’s been there from the beginning, and I think it’s shortsighted to try to cram in one more ad or whatever it might be. Maybe someone with a calculator will go, ‘Hey, if we lose this, we’ll gain this over a season.’ Well, you’re not going to have a season, necessarily. You have a better chance at a season if you have a really good theme.”

There’s room for pessimism about the TV theme song’s future, especially in the era of the Skip Intro button on streaming services. However, there’s also hope, because one area where the importance of the theme song hasn’t diminished is children’s television.

That’s according to Jay Stutler, Senior Vice President of Music for Disney Television Animation. “On Disney Junior, obviously, main title theme songs for us are the most important piece of musical business that we work on, on any particular show, because they give us 60 seconds to establish a musical identity for each one of our shows,” he tells Consequence.

A strong theme song, one that can stand the test of time, can also drive ancillary business for the company across various divisions, from theme parks to cruise ships to live national tours: Right now, Disney Junior Live On Tour tour features theme songs from Disney series including Doc McStuffins, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, Sofia the First, Superkitties, and Spidey and His Amazing Friends.

Kids are definitely still engaging with theme songs these days, Stutler confirms. “All you have to do is look at the success of Sofia the First, as an example — we haven’t made new episodes of that series for a while, and yet that theme song is consumed by our audience around the world. It’s become the centerpiece for TikTok memes, and lots of other variations, you know, depending on the medium.”

For kids, Wasserman says, “The only constant is that theme. So it draws them to the show, and if they love it, they get addicted to it, then they sing it, then a friend goes, ‘Oh, what’s that?’ And it’s kind of their way of building the audience. And they don’t get bored as fast as we’ve become as adults.”

Just because it’s for kids doesn’t mean dumbing things down, of course. Wasserman, over the years, has kept producing music for the Power Rangers franchise. While sometimes his music is in competition against other submissions, his themes often are the ones picked after being tested on actual kids. “I know how to write for kids because I don’t write for kids,” he says (an approach any fan of the X-Men theme’s adult bombast will recognize).

It’s a habit that begins when we’re young but then continues into adulthood. Stutler, one of many who grew up on classic themes like Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, says that “one of my favorite parts of any series was singing the theme song. And I still feel like kids love to sing along. It so musically connects them to every franchise that they get to watch and experience. And for their parents, who also grew up on theme songs, it becomes that kind of shared experience.”

Continues Stutler, “To start off every episode with a theme song that both the parent and the kid can sing along together — to me, I don’t think there’s anything better than that connection. When that becomes a shared experience between caregiver and and child, I feel like we’ve done our job.”

Hopefully, today’s kids are able to keep the tradition alive as adults. If only because, as Tyler observes, “All the important moments in life tend to have music. There are many reasons why we’ve naturally selected into being a species that’s privileged enough to even understand what music is, and to underestimate the power of what a theme can do is to subvert the very thing that we are.”

Continues Tyler, “We are a species that holds music in high regard, and we mark our lives with it. So even if at a corporate level, there is pressure to get rid of [themes], the very fact that we as human beings prefer it is something that’s here to stay.”

Don’t Skip Intro: The Endangered Tradition of TV Theme Songs
Liz Shannon Miller

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