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Listen: Hey, Watch This! A Look at the Music Behind TV Theme Songs

Whether it’s the iCarly THEME (Leave It All To Me), the ESPN BASEBALL theme, the themes from Friends, Sponge Bob or the Brady Bunch, if your home, just hanging around the house, there’s a good chance you’ll hear them.  If you’re waiting for something important, you’re glad to hear them.  Over the years, they’ve been some of the most popular songs in the country.  They can be a song you share with your parents, they can be something you sing with your friends on the bus, and even when you can’t sing them, they get you ready for what’s coming up.  They are TV Theme songs, something as old as TV. 

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If you go all the way back to the 1940s, when only a handful of people had television, TV shows have opened with some peppy music – usually with catchy words.  There are lots of reasons why TV shows have theme songs, but in the earliest years, the theme song had only one point according to Robert Thompson, a professor of television and popular culture at Syracuse University.  “In the very earliest days of TV, the purpose of the TV theme song was to actually be the first commercial in the program,” Thompson said.  Back in those early years, one company would sponsor a whole show.  All the commercials would be for that one thing.  The show would even have the company’s name, like The Texaco Star Theater, which was sponsored by Texaco oil and gasoline products. 

At the beginning of the Texaco Star Theater, Thompson said, “The curtain opens and there are four guys dressed as gas station attendants, standing in a chorus line.”  They begin to sing about being the men from Texaco.  “And then,” Thompson said, “they continue to sing a couple of verses that actually enumerate the various levels of gasoline that they have.  This whole song goes by -- maybe 2 / 2½ minutes long a—and the star of the show has not yet been mentioned,” he said. 

As more people got TVs and advertising rates went up, it got too expensive for one company to sponsor a whole show.  So in the 1950s, the theme song stopped being a big commercial.  Instead, Thompson said, it became like an alarm clock.  TV shows were on at specific times back then, and because there were no DVRs, if you missed the show, you just missed it.  The theme song reminded you that the show was coming on.  After all, Professor Thompson says, the TV’s right there in the middle of the house.  “So the TV would often be on, but the phone would ring, somebody would ring the doorbell, the baby you would cry, the timer would ring of the opposition; people were doing all kinds of other things and when a theme song came on, it announced that, ‘Okay, time to come back.  We are starting.’  It was almost like a bell rings to tell you the class is about to start,” he said. 

The theme song also has another role.  While the first TV themes were a commercial for the sponsor, today they’re kind of like a commercial for the show.  Think about the last time you watched a show like iCarly or That’s So Raven.  While the theme song was playing, Thompson said, “It would show a bunch of scenes that would indicate what you are about to see.  It was almost like a promise – almost like, ‘Here is what is in store for you.’”

Of course there are a lot of shows now that don’t have a theme song at all.  Or if they do, it’s only one note.  Shows like “Lost” or “Law and Order” have just one or two notes.  That trend of shorter and shorter theme songs came in the 1980s when people first got TV remotes.  The people who made the shows started to worry: If we spend all that time on a theme song, people will check out what else is on.  And maybe they’ll never come back.

That’s a far cry from the 1960s.  Back then TV theme songs were some of the most popular songs in the country.  One called “Secret Agent Man” went to #1 in the country.  Professor Thompson says that kept up through the 1980s, point out that “There was a series called The Greatest American Hero.  This has lyrics -- not the kind of lyrics that explain what the show was about, but related to it.  That became a big top 10 hit.”  And the trend continued all the way into the 1990s, when the theme from Friends was a big hit. 

Writing a TV theme song requires a person with a particular set of skills.  Scott Schreer is one.  He had had what he called, “sort of a pretty successful career as a composer writing commercials for a lot of major clients,” when in 1993, he wrote one of the best known TV theme songs around today – the theme for the NFL on Fox.  “I'm basically a drummer,” Schreer explained, so, “I always approach things from a very rhythmic and bombastic point of view.”    

So how do you get to the point where you're writing a theme song that might be heard by a billion people during the Super Bowl?  Well it's not like you sit around thinking up theme songs all day and then you send one in.  Scott graduated college in the mid-1970s and for the next 20 years he was writing songs for commercials, from Coca Cola to Miller Beer and Fahrvergnügen for Volkswagen.  “I've had opportunities that, in my wildest dreams growing up as a kid I would never imagine myself being in those situations,” he said.  Other theme song writer choose other paths.  Lenny Williams’ goal, for instance was, “To be this famous classical music composer and win a Pulitzer Prize, get my PhD and teach in college.  I think that was every student’s goal.”  Today, if you watch pretty much anything about animals on the National Geographic Channel, the Smithsonian Channel and Discovery, Lenny wrote the theme music.  And most of the other music too.

Scott Schreer said that when he first got into the business there was a lot of debate about whether the people who did this kind of work were as important as the people who wrote songs you heard on the radio.  In the early 1990s, however, he said that started to change because the same people who were doing one kind of writing during the day were doing the other one at night.  “A lot of guys that were moonlighting during the day or at night doing commercials that were also on tour with really well-known artists and bands,” he said.  “There became a point where the talent and the equipment and the art in creating the music for a commercial and themes for TV required the same ability and talent as writing a hit song.” 

So the people at Fox Sports – two executives named George and David -- knew who to call when they needed a theme song.  Although they really didn't know what they wanted.  “ David had taken his child to an amusement park in LA and loved it the Batman music that they played on the ride,” Schreer explained, “So he told George that he felt the NFL theme should be like a “Batman on steroids” kind of sound to it.”  Getting that kind of vague request, like, “Make it like such-and-such” is, according to Lenny Williams, a pretty common thing with TV themes.  “Sometimes we get things like, ‘I want the score to be very orange,’” he said.  “I have a different boss on every project so I’ve learned how to communicate with bosses that don’t necessarily know how to communicate with me.”  In a situation like that, he said, “When I have a new producer and I feel like ‘Well they don’t communicate well musically’ I’ll try to get them to come out here to the studio.  And I’ll play some stuff and I’ll say ‘Something like this?’  And usually through a couple hours I can discern what they like and what they don’t like.”

In the best situation, when the right people have talked to the write composer and given the right advice, the result can be a song that millions of people sing all over country and all over the world.  In a way, Scott Schreer says, the TV theme song has come full circle because today – just like in the 1940s -- it’s still kind of just a commercial.  “It's supposed to be the signature,” he said.  “It’s supposed to get you in the mood.  The moment you hear that sound, the bell rings and you’re hungry.”