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It’s really important for a TV show to get its theme song right. This is the tune that viewers will hear at the beginning of every single episode, and if it’s not a banger, they’ll be reaching for that “Skip Intro” button. Your Friends and Neighbors is a show I love, but it has a theme song I hate.
A TV show’s theme has to sonically capture its tone, and that’s not easy to do. But the best themes in television history, from The Sopranos to Game of Thrones, have pulled it off.
Game Of Thrones
Ramin Djawadi is the go-to guy for epic music — he composed the scores for Iron Man, Pacific Rim, Westworld, Clash of the Titans, Warcraft, and Medal of Honor — and the crowning achievement of his career is the Game of Thrones theme. This theme has become so synonymous with Westeros that the Game of Thrones spinoffs haven’t even bothered trying to come up with a new one; they’ve just reused Djawadi’s theme.
As a digital camera swoops across an animated map of Westeros, Djawadi’s grand, sweeping orchestrations really capture the scale of this massive saga. It sets us up for a sprawling tale spanning different continents, where the fate of the entire world will be decided.
Succession
Nicholas Britell’s Succession theme captures the Shakespearean heft of this modern-day King Lear story. The bleak piano melodies reflect the high stakes of the business world these characters inhabit, and the deep, underlying sadness that they’re all living with.
This show is all about a bitter patriarch who’s impossible to please — who holds his kids to an impossibly high standard, and always has them pining for his love and approval — and the angry, apathetic theme tune suits that vibe perfectly. I don’t know how to describe it, but this tune sounds like a disappointed dad.
Bob's Burgers
The theme for Bob’s Burgers, composed by the show’s own creator Loren Bouchard, captures the wholesome whimsy of the series beautifully. Whereas Family Guy and South Park have a very dark, cynical sensibility, Bob’s Burgers is about a family that genuinely loves each other, and tries to make the most out of every day.
This series looks at the world with an affectionate smile, and its bubbly, upbeat theme tune puts that exact same smile on your face. The use of unconventional instruments lines up with the unorthodox soundtrack that Gene provides for the show with his SFX-laden keyboard.
Mad Men
Mad Men strikes a very specific tone — it’s a smart, brooding, adult drama, but it’s also quirky and offbeat, with a tongue-in-cheek sense of humor — and it can’t have been easy to lock that tone down with a piece of music. But they ended up nailing it with hip-hop producer RJD2’s instrumental track “A Beautiful Mine.”
It has a modern sound, setting up the show’s modern approach to ‘60s ideas, but it doesn’t feel anachronistic enough to take you out of the period setting. The song is cool, classy, and sophisticated, but it also captures the messiness of Don Draper’s life, and the sense that he’s barely holding it together, and it’s all falling apart.
South Park
Trey Parker and Matt Stone are the comedy equivalent of a punk rock band. They’re the provocateurs challenging the establishment; the equal-opportunities offenders that defined modern satire; the rambunctious, rebellious artists who don’t care whose feathers they ruffle on the way to a laugh.
Primus’ theme song sets the right anarchic, punk-rock tone for every episode. That song leaves you so charged up that you’re ready for whatever sick, twisted mayhem Parker and Stone have cooked up.
The X-Files
Ah, the TV theme that launched a thousand ringtones. The theme tune from The X-Files captures the vibe so perfectly that it’s transcended The X-Files to become the theme tune of all UFO conspiracies and paranormal activity.
Mark Snow’s theme nails that creeping, suspicious feeling that all is not what it seems, and maybe something supernatural is at play. As you go into each new episode of The X-Files, neither you nor Mulder nor Scully has any idea what horrors they’ll encounter, and Snow’s theme tune plays on that impending sense of dread.
The Wire
David Simon’s HBO crime drama The Wire just might be the single greatest TV series ever made. It’s a journalistic, almost documentary-like study of institutional corruption in the American city, and the gospel-and-blues-inspired pain of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” was perfectly matched with those issues. Since each season tackles a different part of Baltimore’s seedy underbelly, and effectively feels like a different show, each season uses a different recording of “Way Down in the Hole” as its theme.
Season 1 used the Blind Boys of Alabama version, season 2 used the original Waits version, and seasons 3, 4, and 5 were covered by the Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, and Steve Earle, respectively. Each cover suits the specific vibe of that season: Waits is paired with the working-class grit of season 2’s dock storyline; the theme for season 4, the season following a bunch of troubled kids at an inner-city public school, was recorded by five Baltimore teenagers. The music lends the same authenticity to The Wire as its writing and its acting and its fly-on-the-wall filming style.
Curb Your Enthusiasm
According to Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book, Larry David heard “Frolic” by Luciano Michelini in a bank commercial, years before he created Curb, and he liked the song so much that he made sure to make a note of it. Much later, when he was following up Seinfeld with his own self-effacing sitcom, David used “Frolic” as the theme.
That whimsical old tune has since become synonymous with Larry’s antics. It’s become a popular meme to play that tune over real-life Curb moments like news bloopers and public gaffes. “Frolic” is so sonically in line with David’s wry, pessimistic outlook on the world that it feels as though it was written specifically for Curb.
Twin Peaks
David Lynch brought his peculiar cinematic vision to the small screen with his groundbreaking creation of Twin Peaks. Twin Peaks presents as a typical small-town soap opera, with a quirky ensemble of colorful characters getting into messy personal drama in the heart of Americana, but it slowly draws us into a sinister, supernatural, Lynchian underworld.
The theme tune, composed by Lynch’s go-to guy Angelo Badalamenti, captures the facade of a small-town soap perfectly. The soft, gentle melodies lull you into a false sense of security before the series itself bombards you with demons and monsters.
The Sopranos
The all-time most perfect pairing of TV show and theme song is The Sopranos and Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning.” At the beginning of every episode of The Sopranos, we watch Tony drive from New York back to New Jersey, seeing all the sights along the way, all set to the tune of “Woke Up This Morning.”
This is one of the only intros I never skip, even though it goes on for a while. It’s partly because “Woke Up This Morning” is a certifiable banger, but it’s also because its unique mix of musical genres — a propulsive hip-hop beat, a soothing gospel choir, a couple of Howlin’ Wolf samples — reflects The Sopranos’ own unique mix of genres: it’s a gangster show, an Italian-American family drama, and a pitch-black comedy all rolled into one.
