How Radiohead became the soundtrack of great TV

If you watched the trailer for Netflix’s 3 Body Problem earlier this year, you might have noticed a familiar tune playing in the background. While the sci-fi epic from David Benioff and D.B. Weiss employed a (gorgeous) cover of the song rather than the original, it was still unmistakably Radiohead’s “Everything In Its Right Place,” the opener to the band’s legendary Kid A.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a fan of the band (apparently they’re pretentious now?), you’ve almost certainly heard this particular track before. Maybe it was in 2019’s The Goldfinch or the 2021 Netflix film The Unforgivable. It could have been in For All Mankindseason three or even a season five episode of iZombie. Even if you haven’t heard “Everything In Its Right Place” at all, it might have reminded you of “Motion Picture Soundtrack” from the same album, which played during an episode of Nine Perfect Strangers in 2021, or the record’s title track, which scored the end credits of a season four episode of The Sopranos in 2002. And we haven’t even addressed the “Creep” of it all. (That would require its own essay.)

The point is, Radiohead—specifically, old Radiohead—is everywhere on TV these days. Yellowjackets needle-dropped the band twice in its recently-aired second season—once when the girls, er, snack for the first time (“Climbing Up The Walls”), and again in the finale (“Street Spirit [Fade Out]”). They’ve popped up in dark shows like Black Mirror and light ones like Community and Superstore. The Bear granted them—rather beautifully, we should add—the final scene of its first season with “Let Down,” and Invincible played them during the first episode of their second (“Karma Police”). Westworld gave them the entire damn show. In fact, the band was so prevalent on the dearly departed robot series that co-creators Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy’s seeming obsession came up in multiple interviews. “Well, the album is called Paranoid Android, so it felt natural,” Nolan once said erroneously in explanation. The album is actually called OK Computer—which would have made his point just fine—but the actual truth is just as fitting: “I just love Radiohead.”

Somehow, Thom Yorke & Co. conquered an entire era of television. Now, if a showrunner wants their work to immediately signal “prestige” and “high-budget”—regardless of whether the show actually possesses these qualities—all they need to do is put a Radiohead song somewhere in the score. Or even just in the trailer! It’s like a cheat code. Bonus points if it’s a slowed-down cover, as in 3 Body Problem, or—even better—one with no lyrics at all. (See: Apple TV+’s Silo.)

Even more impressively, Radiohead somehow did all of this without writing a single original song—for the small screen that is. In many ways, all it took was one perfect track for the big screen to make this whole jigsaw fall into place.

Enter: “Exit Music (For A Film)”

In 1996, Baz Luhrmann had a little proposition for the outfit. “I’d already been introduced to this young band called Radiohead. I was talking to this young musician called Thom Yorke. He was on tour and I wanted him to write this last piece of music,” the director said on a 2018 episode of The J Files podcast. That piece was for Romeo + Juliet, and was to be played in the film’s final scene.

At what was apparently the last possible minute, Yorke delivered the untitled recording that would become one of his single most well-loved songs. Later, it showed up on OK Computer as the appropriately titled “Exit Music (For A Film),” a song that has since scored key moments in Westworld, Black Mirror, Bates Motel, The Umbrella Academy, The 100, and other shows.

“Exit Music,” with its reserved opening melody and stirring crescendo, immediately invokes a sort of capital-C cinema networks like HBO have been striving for for decades. Or, to put it slightly more cynically, in the words of music critic Winston Cook-Wilson for Spin, it implies an “untoward combination of ‘Only HBO can sell this kind of shit to you’ and ‘Only HBO can afford this.’” That attitude goes all the way back to The Sopranos and Six Feet Under, by the way. Now, even though some other streamers have more than caught up to their competitor, the principle still seems to remain: If you want your show to have that real “it’s not TV” punch, you’ve got to get Radiohead.

An intertwined legacy

“Exit Music (For A Film)” didn’t just change the sound of television; it changed the trajectory of the band and deeply impacted the art of film scoring as well. “I did not know it at the time, but I was told years later that that song brought Johnny Greenwood and Thom Yorke together after they’d had a bit of a fight,” Luhrmann also shared on the podcast. “Because they had to write that song they immediately went on to the next song and the next song, and that became OK Computer.”

While 1993’s “Creep” obviously saw massive—Yorke would likely say outsized—success, it was really the 1997 masterpiece that indelibly cemented the band in music history. From there, Yorke would go on to write for Luca Guadagnino’s Suspiria and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Anima, while Johnny Greenwood would lend his considerable compositional talent to Licorice Pizza, The Power Of The Dog, Phantom Thread, and many more projects.

Thom Yorke may not have written a song specifically for television, but he is writing for the screen. And while it can be easy to scoff at the streaming wars’ Radiohead arms race as some sort of easy ploy or derivative emotional trick, when it works, it really, really works. As Luhrmann said, “I feel privileged that… film—not me—forces artists to get outside themselves and do something they wouldn’t normally do. We’re all in service to the story.” Which is all to say: When a show is able to adopt the perfect Radiohead song in service of their own story, the result is—almost always—so fucking special.