When I heard the new theme song for Big Love this season, it was like a punch in the gut. In general, I’m not much of a fan of repurposing already-written songs as themes (with exceptions; it worked for The Wire). But I cannot possibly see what Earthly good one can expect it to do to change a show’s theme in its fourth season, especially when that theme was The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” which is objectively the greatest pop song ever written. (I don’t have time to look up the research, but you’ll just have to trust me that it is simply scientific fact.) Maybe I’d have gotten used to the easy-listening-emo of the new theme, “Home,” if it had been there from the beginning, but no chance of that now.
Which made me wonder: Is it ever a good idea for a show to change its theme music?
It wasn’t for Felicity, which I remember receiving with a similar sense of insult when it swapped themes in its third season. (Above, you can see the work of a fan who collected every title sequence the show did over its four years.) I’m not even sure its original theme was that great; it gave the show an unctuous, shampoo-commercial scene-setting, and made it seem much more of a melodrama than the excellent romantic comedy that the show became. But it was its theme, and I was used to it.
I think I always loved Felicity more than a lot of other TV critics did. It debuted with an ungodly amount of hype in 1998 and—unfairly I think—spent the rest of its four seasons with the reputation of a show that failed to live up to its billing. What bothered me about the new theme song was that it seemed like a capitulation to that criticism, an admission of defeat, an attempt for a do-over. The new theme song, on its surface, was a thematic fit for the show; creating a “new version of you” was, after all, the essence of a show about going to college and changing your still-pliable identity. But in the context of the show’s publicity, it sounded more like an apology: We’re creating a new version of the show! You’ll like it better! We promise we will never let Keri Russell cut her hair again!
I can think of better examples, but I don’t know if there’s a case where a new theme song was an out-and-out improvement. When I think of the show Happy Days now, I inevitably think about the catchy theme song, “Happy Days,” but was it actually a better and more fitting song than the classic “Rock Around the Clock”? I don’t think so.
Changing title sequences, of course, is different: I have no problem with updating the images and clips in a title to reflect the passage of time. And I’ll make an exception for shows in which changing the theme song is, or becomes, a standard feature. The Wire, as I mentioned above, used a different version of Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” to reflect each season’s themes. And The Drew Carey Show made a kind of game of playing with different theme songs and wildly inventive title sequences. For my money, “Five O’Clock World” beat “Moon Over Parma” or even “Cleveland Rocks”:
But that’s the exception, not the rule. Are there any replacement theme songs you like better than the original? Any shows on the air now that you’d like to see ditch their own themes?
