Whatever Happened To TV Theme Songs?

“Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip
That started that from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship.”

“Come and listen to my story about a man named Jed
A poor mountaineer barely kept his family fed.
And then one day he was shooting at some food
When up from the ground come a bubblin’-crude.”

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady,
Who was bringing up three very lovely girls.”

“I’ll be there for you
When the rain starts to pour
I’ll be there for you
Like I’ve been there before.”

If you’ve ever watched even a few second of “Gilligan’s Island”, “The Beverly Hillbillies”, “The Brady Bunch” or “Friends” you’re familiar with those lines.

They’re the show’s theme songs and by dint of repetition, have become some of the most well known tunes in modern history.

But times and television have both changed and like black and white, the TV theme is an endangered species.

In a world of short attention spans, rising rights and royalty payouts and where every advertising minute is valuable, producers of your favourite shows just don’t have time for the songs anymore. And a vast majority of them simply leave them out.

“It’s a rarity today,” agrees TV historian Tim Brooks. “It’s kind of like the Broadway musical producing hit songs – it just doesn’t do that anymore.”

The old songs explained the plot of each show and became their hallmark. In some cases, they even sold the show itself.

Sherwood Schwartz once recalled how CBS executives were balking at his “Gilligan’s Island” idea, warning they’d have to explain the concept to viewers every week and it would take too long.

The wily creator took five minutes, composed the now legendary tune, and the show got the go-ahead.

That would never happen today.

Programs like “Ugly Betty”, seen on Citytv Thursday nights, now simply dive right into the action and any music is mostly peripheral, while aging series like Bravo’s “Law & Order” are among the few that have kept their familiar tune going for years.

“Almost all shows have music, but it’s generic, it’s scene-setting, it’s short,” notes Brooks, who believes fewer than 10 percent of programs on the air now have traditional theme songs.

“Producers feel, rightly or wrongly, that that interruption, if you will, is going to lose viewers. I think one of the things that has squeezed themes out is this relentless kind of move toward tightening everything, making it go right from joke to joke, from action to action, from shootout to shootout, so that you won’t press the dreaded remote control.”

Other shows use familiar songs from the pop charts to hook you in instead of composing something new.

And while many feel it’s a sad trend and that pop culture is being forever lost, others don’t mind the cut-to-the-chase idea. 

“Full-on opening credit (and) theme song is kind of a waste, from a business perspective,” notes TV blog writer Tara Ariano. “The networks sort of assume we watch the show, so we don’t need to have the premise explained to us each week  … 

“In the era of the DVR, half the people watching the show are just fast-forwarding that anyway.”

So the next time your favourite rerun comes on, consider how its opening tune may actually be a TV closure and a thing of the past.

Or as Archie Bunker might have noted on “All In The Family’s” famous theme song, “those were the days”.