With the season finale of Mad Men a couple of weeks ago, I lamented to my wife about the fact that many of my favorite shows — shows I would essentially make appointment to watch — either have extremely short seasons, or they are off the air. It’s odd, but shows like Big Love, Lost, Mad Men, and a whole host of others aren’t on the air for very long. It seems I’m just getting into a groove with these shows, and then … it’s over. Or, like Lost, the season is truncated in such a weird way that I have to wonder if the programming geniuses at ABC are playing some meta-programming game with the viewers by making the show, like the island, disappear and reappear at odd times. Or maybe the demise of good TV programming is all because of that creature from Hell: the reality show.
Well, let’s bracket my gripes for a moment and concentrate on the music for six shows that have pretty cool theme songs, shall we? As I was assembling these songs, I realized that, like the soundtrack scores I tend to gravitate toward, these theme songs are much more atmospheric and less symphonic. Also, as standalone pieces of music, they’re pretty frickin’ awesome! (more…)



First things first: Buffy the Vampire Slayer — the movie with Luke Perry and Kristy Swanson — had its moments, but ultimately sucked. When Buffy the Vampire Slayer made its debut as a TV series in 1997, it was the best thing to happen to TV until, well, Ronald Moore and David Eick’s “reimagined” version of Battlestar Galactica in 2003. It’s not hard to see why. Both series took stock fantasy/sci-fi narratives (i.e., vampires wreaking havoc on a community or humans trying to escape a relentless robotic enemy in space) and turned them on their heads to spotlight characters and stories where identity, morality, sexuality, gender, race and class were in flux. In the case of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the growth of the main characters was often spurred by the introduction of someone new. For the bookish Willow Rosenberg (as played by 