Crazy Ex-Girlfriend might’ve lost out on the Emmy for Outstanding Original Title Theme Music this past weekend at the Creative Arts Emmys, but don’t worry—they’ll get a second chance in 2017. “Every season of this show will have a new theme song,” says executive producer, co-creator, and star Rachel Bloom. The way the show’s characters describe its premise in Season 1’s theme is called a “saga sell”—think The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Nanny. The latter series opener—which also features animation—was an early inspiration for Bloom. “As [Rachel] often does, she sang it into her iPhone and sent me a scratch version of what she was thinking,” says composer and songwriter Adam Schlesinger. (Fans may be interested to know that he also played the sun in season one’s opener.)
These days, TV themes seem optional—acclaimed series like Mr. Robot and Jane The Virgin simply kick off with title cards, while other shows, like Superstore and Blindspot, have blink-and-you’ll-miss-it intros. All the better to binge watch—who wants to sit through a minute of music that doesn’t change from episode to episode? But it’s no coincidence that at the Emmys this year, three out of six nominees in the outstanding title theme music category were Netflix shows. When a series has the time to go big with its opener, TV themes and title sequences can be beautiful, fascinating earworms, the kind that rev up one’s anticipation rather than dampening it. Even after Sean P. Callery won this past weekend for Marvel’s Jessica Jones, it’s still worth examining all the nominated themes to look at the intensive, complex process of theme music design, a collaborative effort between each show’s composers, directors, and executive producers.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s old theme song described the premise of the show—Bloom’s character moves cross-country in order to reconnect with a man she dated, briefly, as a teenager—so succinctly that in one episode, two characters had a conversation made up entirely of lyrics from the theme. But Season 2 picks up right after the game-changing cliffhanger that ended Season 1, so making a whole new theme song just made sense. “In Season 2, Rebecca has been very open that she moved for Josh, to herself and to other people,” says Bloom. “She’s not in that kind of self denial anymore, so the whole opening that says ‘it happens to be where Josh is, but that’s not why I’m here’ doesn’t really apply anymore. I really like the idea [that] we’re doing a comedy, but it’s not a sitcom that spits out copies of itself. We wanted to acknowledge that and create an emotional thesis statement for the season.
Crazy Ex’s fellow nominee The Whispers got cancelled after one season, but its theme—which alternates between a dark, electronic pulse and a tinkling melody—has real staying power. It fits perfectly with a show about a group of children who compulsively and collectively blame their trouble-making on a mysterious imaginary friend—whom their parents gradually realize is real. “There’s two basic elements” at play here, says show composer Robert Duncan, who will be working on NBC’s Timeless this TV season. The first is a sound “that conveys the innocence, the childlike element.” And secondly, “there’s the malevolent element of the invisible presence of the alien.” The plucky melody of a music box supplies the innocence; to offset that, Duncan continues, “I pulled out distortion pedals and put everything I could through it. Electric cellos, sound-effect noises, slamming different things in the studio—trying to make a little bit of sonic mayhem in the undercurrents.” Duncan worked in tandem with the artists who created the opener’s visuals, each working to match and complement the other’s work.
Duncan says that he wants to get himself to feel a certain way when he’s composing—here, it was figuring out what “gives [him] the heebie-jeebies”—and channeling that into his piece. He calls back to an old composing lesson: “You have to be accountable for every emotional interpretation that your audience can take away [from your work] in order to be successful at this job.”
This was particularly tricky for Victor Reyes when working on The Night Manager. The mini-series is a multilayered spy story, based on a novel by John Le Carré, the master of espionage. But Reyes and the show’s director, Susanne Bier, worked hard to “hide away from the genre, from making music for the genre,” as he says in a phone interview. That is, they wanted to keep the audience guessing—so they had to make sure not to give anything away in the score. Putting together a theme, though, was a little simpler for Reyes.
“What I made is a kind of mixture, of classical romantic music played with classical instruments [but] backed with a lot of electronic stuff,” says Reyes. Those synthesizers, combined with an orchestra, give the score of The Night Manager its power. Traditional instruments alone won’t do the trick, she says: “You have to help with your electronic stuff, to make sequences, noises, percussions, electronic percussion.”
While The Night Manager’s theme reflects the show’s many layers of secrecy, the teamwork behind Tom Tykwer and Johnny Klimek’s Sense8 theme reflects the show’s “sensate” characters, who can read each others’ minds. Both Tykwer and Klimek had a very involved relationship with Lana and Lilly Wachowski when they created the theme for their Netflix show. In fact, they wrote the theme for the show before the Wachowskis had even shot it. “We would often just do a one-week mad writing session,” says Klimek. “It’s a very collaborative process, and there’s no ego involved.”
The Wachowskis picked the theme—originally seven or eight minutes long—from two hours of original music Klimek and Tykwer had composed. They added a choir and electronic elements at the Wachowskis’ behest. “They loved the basic theme, but they said ‘this section here, we need it to go really big . . . and electro-y.’ So there’s one section where we take off with the electronic stuff.”
Rodrigo Amarante used a totally different creative exercise to capture Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar’s story for the theme of Narcos. “I had to find this monster’s heart—leaning on facts, but [also] inventing it, of course—to give people a hint that this heart exists. I wanted to hint at it before they watched each chapter, to counterbalance what they have already been told—[about] Pablo’s insanity and ruthlessness—and not unjustly.” He did this by “imagining Pablo as a child, inventing the Pablo we know.” Amarante describes a scene he envisioned between a young Pablo and his mother, Hermilda, in which Hermilda advised her son on life matters while listening wistfully to a song on the radio. Amarante thought perhaps it would be a song by Carlos Gardel, the Argentinian tango superstar of the 30s—on whose work he based his theme. The result “appears to be another passionate Latin love song, but carries an extremely violent and narcissistic tone,” he explained. “To my astonishment, I later found out that Pablo in fact had a cassette tape with a song by Carlos Gardel that was said to be his favorite song, a gangster song! That was a thrill. I felt like I was on the right track, like one of the bounty hunters chasing Pablo and getting very close—but most often never quite there.”
Sean P. Callery likely had the most security hurdles to go through when working on the theme for Marvel’s Jessica Jones. His studio had to be upgraded to meet Marvel’s security needs; in order to actually see images of the series, he had to travel to Marvel’s own offices.
“Because it was so early in the process, they couldn’t show me a director’s cut or anything because the director’s cut has to be viewed by the director first. I could not legally look at any of the moving images. I couldn’t look at any actual running pictures,” he remembered. Instead Marvel showed him a slideshow containing somewhere between 75 and 100 still shots of the series. That was enough for Callery to get a strong sense of the show’s “noir energy.” He told executive producer Melissa Rosenberg that he wanted to come up with an suitably neo-noir sound; when Rosenberg asked what that would be, Callery said, “Hell if I know.”
Despite this—and the fact that he couldn’t take any of those images home—Callery got back to his newly secure studio and got to work. He relied mainly on the emotions he felt when looking at those images. “You don’t manufacture feelings,” he said by way of explanation. “You just feel them.”
Once he saw finished episodes of Jessica Jones, Callery saw that “the show has a kind of intimacy to it.” He tried to reflect that with his theme: “I never thought it was going to be a super huge textile score. The fundamental elements of the theme are acoustic bass, piano, electric guitar, some strings, and then vibraphone, vibes. It gets more driving towards the middle, because she’s a very powerful character. I’m not talking superhero power; I’m talking about just personal,” he said. “There’s a lot of courage and determination and drive, and that charging middle section was my way of acknowledging that component of her character.”
Callery also said that when it comes to composing for a TV show, “you don’t really want the music or any other component of the show to stand out unnaturally, because then it takes you out of the story.” And that’s exactly what he and these other nominated composers strove for—not a space in the spotlight, but the means to evoke a powerful reaction, one that compels viewers to continue watching their co-workers’ creations.
