My Instagram feed/algorithm is pretty ponderous; it’s a steady diet of old baseball cards, great music clips, and things like the opening credits to “Love, American Style.”
What does that tell us, besides how shallow my social media experience is?
I think the interesting thing is that this genuinely crappy-to-mediocre show is fondly remembered by people who haven’t watched it for 40 or 50 years. And there’s only one reason: A great theme song in the opening credits.
Obviously, TV has changed a lot in the past 40-50 years. This is not a “things were better back then” post. Obviously, everything changed over the years, for good or for bad, or both.
When it comes to television … yes, we lost some charm while we gained sharper storytelling. We traded a comfortable start to our favorite shows for a lot more content in 30 minutes of viewing now.
Spoiler alert: things are different now than they were in 1982.
Emotional Connection
Some older TV fans might wax nostalgic for theme songs that had some emotional weight. This sounds absurd to somebody under 25 now, but older people are actually fond of Laverne & Shirley. (I dated a girl who cried when Richie left Happy Days.)
In retrospect, it’s hard to appreciate the monoculture of just having three channels on television. I would argue that 1950-2000 was the only time in human history that most of society was on the same page culturally. Everybody saw the Star Wars movie. Kids would share their excitement in their 4th grade cloak room about a Mork & Mindy joke. We all watched the same thing.
But there was something more that inveterate TV watchers were connecting to. It’s a cliche to say that viewers welcomed shows into their living room, but it’s kind of true.
Watching these shows and listening to a theme song once a week like clockwork let those songs crawl into people’s heads as much or more than any pop radio earworm.
Some of these dopey songs really stuck with people. Even something as dumb as singing along to “The Flintstones” theme is evidence of a character connecting with others in Planes, Trains & Automobiles:
Theme songs were emotional conditioning about the show that viewers were about to watch. Cheers writer/producer Ken Levine credits the beloved “Cheers Theme” for establishing the mood of the show. Audiences felt comfortable well before Norm walked into the bar.
Different themes served different purposes. The opening songs for Gilligan’s Island or Land of the Lost basically were 90-second pieces of exposition for the shows’ premises. The Frasier theme told us what Frazier Crane was all about. Kicking Friends off with “I’ll Be There for You” created a bed for escapist laughs watching our attractive celebrity “friends.” The theme from Quincy, M.E. …. I don’t know what the hell that cop show musical gumbo was.
Killing Time
TV used to kill a lot of time. First off, network sitcoms and dramas typically had 26 episodes in a season. That’s a lot of programming to fill.
If you take an hourlong cop show and subtract the commercials, producers needed to fill 44 to 46 minutes. The credits and end theme could chew up another 2 minutes. And this seems impossible with modern pacing but honest to God, a typical episode of Mannix, Banacek, or The Rockford Files would show their protagonists literally just driving from one place to another for about 4 of those minutes.
The longer a theme song that a show would have could mean less show that producers had to fill. Get a 2-minute theme song in a 30-minute sitcom, and now you only have to write 18 minutes of successful television. To paraphrase what they say of middling starting pitchers in baseball, TV theme songs could “eat innings.”
Now that cable shows are having 8- or 10-episode seasons, there’s no need for filler anymore.
Modern Viewing
Watch any old show to see how quaint everything about the pacing was. The modern era has a multitude of factors that have effectively erased the long opening sequence.
When you stream a show in an app now, you get the option to Skip Intro. That’s a godsend for people in a hurry. It’s also a ridiculous exercise for shows that don’t have a long intro. By the time you find your remote to skip the opening of Lost or Modern Family, it’s already over.
Also, if you’re binging an old sitcom that uses the same theme as its ending, every 22 minutes of viewing you’re going to hear that music twice. And you’ll hear it consecutively at the end of the first one you watch then right into the opening of the next episode. As clever as The Simpsons theme is, it’s relentless in a binge format.
Themey Awards
I was so tempted to make the embedded clip fest that we all want here with the premise of some fake awards. But let’s leave some meat on that bone for a future article with categories like “Most Misleading Theme Song (Wrong Mood, Right Show)” and “Too Much Crammed in One Piece of Music.”
But the clip I need to show you now features Albert Brooks and Dan Ackroyd playing guess the theme game like so many of us have done on long road trips; although without the Twilight Zone twist at the end:
Lessons Learned
The disappearance of the television theme song represents a broader fragmentation of shared cultural ritual in an increasingly atomized media ecosystem …
Sorry, I’m just effing with you. Sure, this trend does indeed say some things about where TV is now vs. 30 or 40 years ago. But this isn’t a “think piece”, it’s a “feel piece.” Theme songs were just plain fun.
Yet these songs endured in fans’ minds, much more than the actual shows they were introducing. Can your friends quote any line of dialogue from Gilligan’s Island? But I’ll bet that they can sing the theme song, word perfect.
What is future nostalgia in 20 years gonna be like about the cultural artifacts of 2026? There’s nothing to sing along to.
Without iconic songs that everybody knows because we were all once part of a monoculture, what are people gonna do? Hum the opening from The Bear, Pluribus or The White Lotus? Good luck.
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