Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring 0190618302, 9780190618308

Table of contents :
Cover
Music for
Prime
Time
Copyright
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 “Hi-​yo, Silver!”: The Birth of TV Music
2 “Book ’em, Danno”: Cop and Detective Shows
3 “Head ’em up! Move ’em out!”: The Westerns
4 “You are traveling through another dimension”: Fantasy and Science Fiction
5 “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity”: Drama
6 “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale”: Comedy
7 “Your mission, should you decide to accept it”: Action-​Adventure
8 “You are there”: Documentaries, News, and Information Programming
9 “Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!”: Cartoons in Prime Time
10 “My name is Kunta Kinte”: Made-​for-​TV Movies and Miniseries
11 “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed”: British Shows Aired in America
12 “This is the way”: Music for Cable and Streaming Services
Afterword
Photo Credits
Bibliography and Sources
Index

Citation preview

MUSIC FOR PRIME TIME

Music for

PRIME

Time

A History of American Television Themes and Scoring JON BURLINGAME

Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries. Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America. © 2023 Jon Burlingame 2022 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above. You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer. Library of Congress Control Number: 2022941549 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​061830–​8 DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.001.0001

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America

Contents Acknowledgments  vii Introduction  1

1 “Hi-​yo, Silver!”:  The Birth of TV Music  5 2 “Book ’em, Danno”:  Cop and Detective Shows  33 3 “Head ’em up! Move ’em out!”:  The Westerns  84 4 “You are traveling through another dimension”:  Fantasy and Science Fiction  115

5 “Man, woman, birth, death, infinity”:  Drama  159 6 “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale”:  Comedy  197 7 “Your mission, should you decide to accept it”:  Action-​Adventure  253

8 “You are there”:  Documentaries, News, and Information Programming  282

9  “Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!”:  Cartoons in Prime Time  311 10 “My name is Kunta Kinte”:  Made-​for-​TV Movies and Miniseries  325

11 “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed”:  British Shows Aired in America  374 12 “This is the way”:  Music for Cable and Streaming Services  399 Afterword  426 Photo Credits  429 Bibliography and Sources  431 Index  447

Acknowledgments First, my thanks to all of the composers, producers, music editors, and music supervisors who agreed to be interviewed; their memories, and their work, are the backbone of this history (all are cited in the “Sources” section). Special thanks to Richard Carlin, the Schirmer Books editor who agreed to publish this the first time around; and to Norm Hirschy, the Oxford editor who thought there might be merit in a revised, expanded edition with a better title. Then, my sincere gratitude to the dozens of friends and colleagues who helped, both with the 1996 edition and this new one: Bruce Babcock, Lori Barth, Joel Beckerman, Stacey Behlmer, Richard Bellis, David Bianculli, Robin Bilinkoff, Larry Blank, Jeff Bond, Bill Boston, Stephen Bowie, Lance Bowling, Gareth Bramley, Neil S. Bulk, Ron Burbella, Dan Carlin, Tom Cavanaugh, Andie Childs, Ned Comstock, Stephen Cox, Michael Crepezzi, Mark Dawidziak, Sandy DeCrescent, Frank DeWald, Ian Dickerson, Jim DiGiovanni, Jim DiPasquale, Dennis Dreith, Timothy Edwards, Jeff Eldridge, Laura Engel, John Fitzpatrick, M.V. Gerhard, Maria Giacchino, Lee Goldberg, Dan Goldwasser, Mike Gorfaine, Heather Guibert, Gina Handy, Steve Hanson, Jennifer Harmon, Michael Hill, Mark Eden Horowitz, Ashley Irwin, Preston Neal Jones, Camara Kambon, Lukas Kendall, and Bruce Kimmel. Also, Julie Kirgo, Maria Kleinman, Mike Knobloch, Nancy Knutsen, Richard Kraft, Randall Larson, Shawn LeMone, Geoff Leonard, Stephane Lerouge, Michael Levine, Mike Matessino, Michael McGehee, Mark McKenzie, Robert Messinger, Steve Mitchell, Yavar Moradi, Dave Norris, Abby North, Bobbi Page, Forrest Patten, Phyllis Paul, Tommy Pearson, Andrew Pixley, Renata Pompelli, Jeannie Pool, Jamie Richardson, Judie Rosenman, Doreen Ringer Ross, Patrick Russ, David Schecter, Theresa Eastman Schifrin, David Schwartz, Doug Schwartz, Sam Schwartz, Daniel Schweiger, Warren Sherk, Brent Shields, Joe Sikoryak, Scott Skelton, Steven Smith, Mark Smythe, Chris Soldo, Paul Sommerfeld, Craig Spaulding, Sally Stevens, Sheila Sumitra, John Takis, Susanna Moross Tarjan, Ford A. Thaxton, Mike Todd, Robert Townson, Matt Verboys, Pete Walker, Nikki Walsh, John W. Waxman, Laurel Whitcomb, Steve Winogradsky, Jaz Wiseman, Reba Wissner, and Les Zador.

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And the late Tony Thomas, David Kraft, David Mitchell, Henry Adams, Arthur Greenwald, Dave Fuller, Lois Carruth, Ronni Chasen, Beth Krakower, and Nick Redman, all of whom encouraged me in countless ways over the decades, as well as friends at ASCAP, BMI, SESAC, Local 47 of the American Federation of Musicians, the Recording Musicians Association, Society of Composers & Lyricists, and the helpful personnel at my favorite libraries—​those at the University of Southern California, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences—​ must also be on this list. Finally, thanks to the many publicists who helped facilitate interviews (too many now, over 35 years, to name, but thank you!), and my editors at Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and the Los Angeles Times who have allowed me to pursue this line of work for so long: Steve Gaydos, Steve Chagollan, Ray Bennett, Rich Nordwind, and Anne Hurley. I am especially grateful to two trusted friends who regularly awoke to panicked emails from me about obscure themes and scores I simply had to find: Craig Henderson and Nik Ranieri. And most of all, to the extraordinary woman who has shared my life (and tolerated my obsessions) for nearly 25 years, without whom this work, and so much more in my life, would not have been possible: Marilee Bradford.

Introduction

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elevision music, someone once said, is “the soundtrack of our lives.” For the postwar “baby boom” generation and beyond, that is unquestionably true. We grew up in front of the set. The music that accompanied those images became—​for better or worse—​indelibly stamped on our minds. Kids of the 1950s don’t think of the William Tell overture as the start of a Rossini opera: to them it’s the Lone Ranger theme. Children of the 1960s can sing “a horse is a horse, of course, of course”; “just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a fateful trip”; and “they’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky”—​all instantly recognizable as the title songs for Mister Ed, Gilligan’s Island, and The Addams Family, respectively. Instrumental music, too, became as familiar as the pop tunes we were hearing on the radio. Any boomer can hum the opening notes of the Dragnet, Twilight Zone, and Hawaii Five-​0 themes. Kids who grew up still later are equally conversant with the music of The Brady Bunch, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Dynasty, and Hill Street Blues. Later generations know the themes for Friends, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, and Game of Thrones as well as they know any song by U2, Madonna, or Taylor Swift.

Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0001

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But the story of this unique subgenre of American popular music extends well beyond the simple creation of catchy tunes or clever lyrics in one-​minute bites. Virtually all of the most successful film composers of modern times—​John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Henry Mancini, Lalo Schifrin—​enjoyed their first taste of success in television. They learned and honed their craft toiling on weekly series. For veteran film composers, the 1960s and 1970s marked a downturn in their motion-​picture fortunes, especially as the movies increasingly shunned the traditional film score in favor of pop songs. So men like Bernard Herrmann, Alex North, Bronislau Kaper, George Duning, Franz Waxman, even the great Max Steiner, turned to the small screen for work, while others including Earle Hagen, Arthur Morton and Alexander Courage (who had worked on major films in better times) not only found steady employment in TV, they enjoyed bigger success in the new medium than they had ever found in the old one. And their work wasn’t all for silly sitcoms, clichéd westerns, or turgid drama shows. Some of the century’s most celebrated composers created music for television, often in the documentary field: Richard Rodgers on Victory at Sea, Darius Milhaud on The Twentieth Century, Morton Gould with World War I. Even the great Aaron Copland composed the theme for CBS Playhouse. As the made-​for-​TV movie matured into a forum for important social discourse and the miniseries tackled subjects on a grand scale—​from

Stanley Wilson conducting at Revue.

Roots to War and Remembrance, Shogun to Lonesome Dove—​the medium lost much of its stigma as “a vast wasteland” (FCC Commissioner Newton Minow’s infamous 1961 pronouncement) as front-​rank film composers like Elmer Bernstein, David Raksin, John Barry, Michel Legrand, and Ennio Morricone wrote television scores that lingered in the memory just as their greatest music for the big screen always had. Music for television has often been dismissed as lacking the quality or lasting impact of feature film scores. This is the argument of arrogant, elitist, and largely ignorant observers who consider the medium as a whole beneath serious consideration. Television scoring—​ just like its better-​paid cousin, music for movies—​is written to exacting specifications, under pressure of impending airdates and impatient producers, and is designed to meet specific dramatic needs. The difference is that the small screen demands more music, more quickly, and these days, more cheaply. To relegate all TV music to the junkpile is myopic. The fact is that not all film scores are great, just as most television music is forgettable. Both are, by and large, commercial endeavors, combining art and business for the sake of profit (and sometimes entertainment, education, or edification). Even Mozart didn’t write Cosi Fan Tutte as high art; he was trying to pay his bills. What follows is a survey of music for American television, from its earliest days, when very little of the music was original, to the present. The focus is on music specifically created for the medium, although there is (in Chapter 1) a discussion of the widespread use of library music for “tracking” into various shows. Three areas of television music are outside the scope of this study: daytime (mostly soap operas and game shows); children’s TV outside of prime time (daytime, Saturday mornings, and on cable); and the realm of musicals and operas (a rich arena of music-​ making that deserves a detailed study of its own). I first tackled this subject a quarter-​century ago, in a book that was saddled with an unfortunate title (TV’s Biggest Hits), received little promotion, and quickly went out of print. I have revisited that material, substantially revising and expanding it to cover topics omitted the first time around, and have chronicled much that’s happened in television music since. This book is the product of 35 years of research, including more than 400 interviews with composers, producers, orchestrators, and music editors; a thorough review of what little previous literature existed in the field; and viewings of countless series episodes, documentaries, telefilms, and miniseries with a critical eye toward the scores as they were heard by viewers over the past 70 years. This is not a musicological treatise. Rather, it’s a history of a vastly underappreciated realm of American music, wherein seasoned

Introduction

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professionals created sounds and scores that resonated in a thousand ways with millions of listeners. I hope the reader will find this both nostalgic and enlightening, reminding them of the themes and music they recall so fondly from the past, and perhaps gently prodding them to listen just a little more closely the next time they tune in or log on.

1 “Hi-​yo, Silver!”

The Birth of TV Music

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any of television’s earliest series simply moved over from radio, in some cases taking the same scripts and committing them to film (or restaging them live). Making the transition were many of the same actors and producers—​and, often, the music. Television adopted the commonplace radio strategy of using “canned” music in the vast majority of shows. Only in the rarest instances were early television programs actually graced with original music. The term “canned music” applied to prerecorded selections, usually chosen for specific purposes (whether “source” music, meaning originating on a radio, record player, or other obvious source; or as dramatic cues, designed to evoke suspense, create romantic moods, bridge disparate scenes, or otherwise enhance the on-​screen action). The classic example of a popular radio hero adapted for the new medium—​along with his highly identifiable theme music—​was The Lone Ranger (1949–​1957, ABC). A radio favorite since 1933, this saga of the masked avenger of the Western Plains was heralded by the finale of the overture to Gioacchino Rossini’s 1829 opera William Tell. The opening trumpet notes, and the narrator intoning, “A fiery horse with the speed of light, a cloud of dust and a hearty ‘hi-​yo Silver!’ ” made the transition to the small screen intact. As in radio, the drama Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0002

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was heightened by additional excerpts of classical music drawn from the works of composers such as Tchaikovsky and Liszt, plus music originally written for the Lone Ranger movie serials and other Republic westerns. In fact, the performances themselves were identical. “We had all of the music which had been recorded by George W. Trendle, who owned The Lone Ranger,” music editor Byron Chudnow recalled. “All those pieces, that familiar classical stuff that was on the radio. They sent the records out to us, and I had the records transferred to film. We’d never even heard of tape.” Chudnow, who had studied violin, was the only musician at Apex Films, where The Lone Ranger was being edited. So the job of putting music to the adventures of Clayton Moore and Jay Silverheels fell to him. “Most of [the cues] were bridges from one scene to another; sometimes you had a horse chase,” he said. In all, he estimated, the entire music library consisted of only a few dozen cues (all “badly recorded, with a small orchestra,” Chudnow remembered). “People didn’t expect anything else.” The entire Lone Ranger music library amounted to 25 single-​sided, 12-​ inch, 33 1/​3 rpm transcription records (plus the William Tell overture on a 78 rpm disc); 67 of its 89 cuts were classical music excerpts, the remainder rescored pieces of compositions by Republic composers William Lava, Alberto Colombo, Karl Hajos, and Cy Feuer. Most of the music was recorded in Mexico around 1940. The use of previously written and recorded music was known, as it was in radio, as a “needle-​drop.” In radio, an engineer literally cued up a record and lowered the needle onto the spinning platter at the appropriate moment during the action. In television, it was technically more complex: music was committed to film as a carefully synchronized element of the sight-​and-​sound presentation. But the object of the score—​ increasing the tension, propelling the chases, emphasizing emotional moments—​and the nature of the music itself remained the same. The vast majority of filmed television shows utilized canned music for a simple reason: it was cheaper than recording new scores. James C. Petrillo, the iron-​fisted president of the American Federation of Musicians (AFM), had long fought against the “mechanized” use of music in film, phonograph records, and radio (because it supposedly discouraged the employment of musicians for live performances). In 1950, Petrillo demanded that producers pay a 5 percent tax on the cost of every show that used union musicians to record a score, with the surcharge payable to the union’s already rich Performance Trust Fund. The networks agreed to Petrillo’s demand in 1951, but members of AFM locals 47 (Los Angeles) and 802 (New York) fought the controversial union boss on the issue, correctly believing that the demand had cost them considerable work—​because producers balked at such payments and skipped hiring “live” musicians altogether.

CBS West Coast music director Lud Gluskin, during testimony at a House subcommittee hearing in May 1956, blamed AFM policies for the fact that an average show using 10 musicians cost $2,000 in salaries and another $1,500 in Trust Fund payments. Because of this, he routinely went abroad to record music for CBS television and radio broadcasts (and was expelled from the union for doing so). An attorney for an association of TV producers testified at the same hearing that “90 percent of the television film now being produced is made with canned music.” Producers avoided much of the expense associated with recording music in Hollywood by privately licensing canned music that had been recorded outside the United States, often in Europe or Mexico. A number of entrepreneurs—​some of them composers, some just shrewd music “packagers”—​shopped these “libraries” of dramatic cues around town, particularly to independent producers who were anxious to provide stations with much-​needed product for the burgeoning medium. Adventures of Superman (1952–​1958), one of television’s first, and most successful, syndicated series, was typical of the programs that utilized music libraries. For the first season of this enduring adaptation of the DC Comics hero (“fighting a never-​ending battle for truth, justice, and the American way!”), producer Robert Maxwell contracted with music packager David Chudnow (the father of Lone Ranger music editor Byron). The elder Chudnow (1902–​2002) pioneered the music-​library business in television. A former studio pianist, he eventually became an independent music supervisor for dozens of mostly low-​ budget films throughout the 1940s, hiring composers, overseeing recording sessions, and handling the music budget. In 1950, he created the Mutel (Music for Television) music service. Robert Montgomery Presents (1950–​1957, NBC) became his first client; Superman soon followed. Chudnow founded the Mutel library with music from low-​budget films like Open Secret (1948, music by Herschel Burke Gilbert) and The Guilty (1947, music by Rudy Schrager), the scores of which he took over to France for re-​recording with slightly larger orchestras (approximately 40 musicians, compared with the 25 or so on the Hollywood recordings). He also approached Gilbert and two colleagues about expanding the library with music that could fit a variety of dramatic situations. All three would go on to small-​screen fame with the themes for fondly remembered shows: Gilbert with The Rifleman, Joseph Mullendore with Honey West, and Herb Taylor with Death Valley Days. Gilbert recalled: “Chudnow came to us and said, ‘Look, I need music for television. You guys write me two hours of music.’ I don’t remember if he gave us a thousand dollars apiece. We wrote two or three chases; two or three misteriosos, you know, the sneak-​alongs; some comedy music and love themes. And we’d write them so they could be longer or shorter, and with long tails so that they could be edited. By then, we really knew what we were doing from a craftsman’s point of view.”

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As written, most of the “cues” (individual pieces of music) were rather long—​an average of 90 seconds to two minutes. Chudnow recorded the music overseas, then created a series of discs that could be played for producers and music editors for auditioning purposes. Because this was an operation effectively designed to circumvent union regulations, the composers adopted pseudonyms for purposes of royalty payments by the music-​licensing organizations (in this case, ASCAP, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers; and BMI, Broadcast Music Incorporated, which also represented many film and TV writers). “But we still got the credit,” Gilbert pointed out, “because we sent ASCAP a list of our pseudonyms. That’s why we wrote the music, to get the ASCAP credit, and it’s made some of us fairly rich today. So it was no joke.” The first season of Superman, filmed in black and white and often dwelling on grim crime stories, was filled with the brooding, dramatic, and thrilling sounds of these up-​and-​coming composers. The individual cues bore titles like “Brawl,” “Creeping Misterioso,” and “Tragic Tension,” and the result was a virtual symphonic accompaniment that musically matched the earthly exploits of the super-​powered last survivor of the planet Krypton. For later seasons of Superman, the Mutel music was supplanted by music from British mood-​music libraries (notably the Francis, Day & Hunter, and Paxton collections) and, still later, American ones (Emil Ascher Video Moods, Langlois Filmusic). Mutel music was also “tracked” into dozens of 1950s series, in addition to Superman: Annie Oakley (1952–​1956, syndicated); Broken Arrow (1956–​1958, ABC); Captain Midnight (1954–​1956, CBS); China Smith (1953, syndicated); Duffy’s Tavern (1954, syndicated); Man with a Camera (1958–​1960, ABC); Racket Squad (1951–​1953, CBS); Ramar of the Jungle (1952–​1953, syndicated); Sky King (1951–​1954, NBC, ABC); Topper (1953–​1955, CBS); and many others.

THE SUPERMAN THEME Another aspect of the music of Adventures of Superman that typified 1950s TV series was the commission of an original series theme: music written and recorded specifically for the opening main-​title sequence, the end-​credit roll and, sometimes, interludes during the body of the program itself. The identity of that composer was not widely known for many years, as (again, typical of TV in that era) there were no screen credits for music, and no commercial recording of the theme until the mid-​1970s. The composer was Leon Klatzkin (1914–​1992), who served as music supervisor for the first season of the DC Comics adaptation starring George Reeves. Klatzkin’s name appears on all the series’

cue sheets (the formal documentation of music for every TV show, listing composers, music publishers, and duration of each cue in the score) as composer of both the “Superman March” and the flying music that accompanied the Man of Steel whenever he leapt into the air. Just as the main-​title sequence and opening narration for TV’s Superman mirrored the opening of the lavish Max Fleischer Superman cartoons of the early 1940s, its heroic musical theme seemed inspired by Sammy Timberg’s fanfare for the animation, with its ascending, three-​ note “Su-​ per-​ man” trumpet call. (Even John Williams’s theme for the 1978 Christopher Reeve Superman movie used a similar three-​ note scheme.) Producer Robert Maxwell, who had insisted that the Timberg fanfare be reprised in the Superman

Another prominent figure was Alexander Laszlo (1895–​1970), a Hungarian-​ born composer who emigrated to the United States in 1938 and became active in film work during the 1940s. Laszlo supplied music to the Roland Reed filmed-​television operation, which produced such shows as the sitcom My Little Margie (1952–​1955, CBS, NBC), the drama Waterfront (1954–​1956, syndicated), and the early science-​fiction serial Rocky Jones, Space Ranger (1954, syndicated). “He had recorded [the music] in Europe, or Mexico, or in his garage,” music editor Robert Raff quipped. “I think he wrote most, if not all, of it, because his style was quite distinctive. “I really started working with him on what the cues should be, and what music should sound like for television,” Raff said. “I found most of the music to be like underscore for motion pictures. He was a fine musician, but he had not been trained in the intricacies of television. We had long discussions, and he started coming up with music cues that were more in keeping for TV. If I was stuck [without music for a scene], I would call him and he would manufacture, somehow or other, the particular cue.” Composer Albert Glasser (1916–​1998), who later became famous for scoring such drive-​in movie classics as The Amazing Colossal Man (1957) and Teenage Caveman (1958), was responsible for the music of The Cisco Kid (1950–​1955, syndicated) and Big Town (1950–​1956, CBS, NBC). Both series employed libraries of music, but unlike many series, all of the music was clearly Glasser’s and a substantial portion was original to television. Producer Phil Krasne, who made low-​budget Cisco Kid movies in the late 1940s, had struck a deal with independent television producer Fred Ziv to create a Cisco Kid series for syndication. The TV programs retained two key elements from the films: actors Duncan Renaldo and Leo Carillo as Cisco and his sidekick Pancho, and the flavorful, Mexican-​style music written by Glasser for the original films.

radio broadcasts of the late 1940s, commissioned a theme for the TV series that followed the pattern. Klatzkin, who chose all of the Mutel library cues for the show’s underscore, appears to have been responsible for making that happen. Klatzkin played trumpet for the San Francisco Symphony from 1936 to 1941 and studied composition in the late 1940s with such Los Angeles notables as Mario Castelnuovo-​Tedesco and Arthur Lange. He composed the music for the low-​ budget film Inner Sanctum in 1948 and went on to score several more movies in the 1950s, mostly during his stint as musical director for producer Hal Roach Jr. (including Tales of Robin Hood, 1951, and Captain Scarface, 1953). Klatzkin also scored the half-​hour comedies My Hero (1952–​ 1953, NBC); The Gale Storm Show (1956–​1960, CBS, ABC); and The Dennis O’Keefe

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Show (1959–​ 1960, CBS). His strongest period as a composer was during the 1960s, when he wrote dozens of dramatic scores for the CBS-​produced westerns Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Cimarron Strip. Oddly, when Klatzkin applied for membership in the Screen Composers Association and Composers Guild of America in 1953–​1954, he failed to list Superman among his credits. Yet he did so in 1980 for the ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, and his family included it in the information provided for his 1992 obituary. During the 1950s, as an active member of the AFM and a composer who desired to continue to work in Los Angeles, he may have feared expulsion if it was discovered he was responsible for skirting union obligations by authorizing non-​union recordings (as happened to other AFM members, including CBS executive Lud Gluskin).

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Albert Glasser in the 1950s.  

(CONTINUED)

Glasser composed and orchestrated the scores, sent them to a colleague in Tokyo for re-​recording, and delivered the finished tracks to a music editor at Ziv for tracking purposes. The Cisco Kid, filmed in color, became a favorite with the younger set, and Glasser’s rousing score accompanied all 155 episodes. (Glasser, despite being paid only $3,000, including all orchestra costs, achieved an authentic sound on the old film scores by researching Mexican music of the period.) The Superman music was apparently recorded in early 1952, not long after Klatzkin’s Robin Hood score; the final bars of both bear a strong resemblance. Mexico City was a possible recording location, as considerable TV music was surreptitiously recorded there in the 1950s (including the children’s show Fury, conducted by Klatzkin’s Inner Sanctum collaborator Emil Newman), again to circumvent American union demands. By the 1980s, when Klatzkin was retired, those issues were moot, and he may have been more comfortable publicly taking credit. The “Superman March” and flying motif were the only original pieces composed specifically for the series. The copyrighted music on file at the Library of Congress is credited to Klatzkin.

While Cisco Kid simply reused the music from the Cisco movies, Glasser’s Big Town was one of the first scores specifically conceived as a library of original music for a single series. Another adaptation of a popular radio show, Big Town was a half-​hour newspaper drama featuring Patrick McVey as a crusading crime reporter and Mary K. Wells as a society columnist. Explained Glasser: “I would compose a ton of music for all the scenes in the series, including the cues for into-​commercial, out-​of-​ commercial, fights, love scenes, driving around town, chasing the crooks, in the police station, etc., etc. Then I would orchestrate the whole mess and send it in a big bundle to [another overseas friend] in Paris. There he would get the music copied out—​it was much cheaper there—​get the musicians and record everything on quarter-​inch tape.” Glasser conceptualized his music based on scripts. (Big Town debuted as a live series in New York in 1950 but moved to Hollywood as a filmed series in 1952, and it was for those shows that Glasser’s music was designed.) For his main theme, the composer went the Gershwin route of An American in Paris, attempting, in the composer’s words, to portray “the exciting rhythms of traffic in the big city, with a sweeping melodic line.” In 1954, the series switched networks and was recast with Mark Stevens (formerly the star of Martin Kane, Private Eye) and Trudy Wroe. And, recalled Glasser, the sponsors demanded new music as well: specifically, something along the lines of the then-​popular Dragnet theme. Glasser ultimately came up with a five-​note phrase (instead of the familiar Dragnet four-​note motif) and wrote “a ton of material, all based on those five notes.” It was all scored for eight French horns and two percussionists (the latter playing not only timpani but also snare drums, vibes, cymbals, and more). “Some of the tricks I had to devise to get various flavors and sounds out of this combination started to become very sneaky,” he said. Although Glasser had planned a Paris recording session, as he had done for the earlier Big Town score, he ended up literally recording the music in his own living room in Los Angeles. Two horn players and one percussionist, using overdubs, recorded the entire score. Although this was technically a violation of union regulations then in force, Glasser was proud that the $3,500 he had to record the score went to three local musicians and a sound engineer, and not overseas to anonymous French performers. Raoul Kraushaar (1908–​2001), a music director at Republic Pictures during the 1930s and 1940s, frequently enlisted composers to write music for films, often without screen credit. Much of the music written under Kraushaar’s aegis wound up in his own, widely used Omar Music service. The original Lassie (1954–​1971, CBS), starring Tommy Rettig, was among the first series to utilize the Kraushaar library for tracking purposes. The earliest MGM TV shows, including The Thin Man (1957–​1959, NBC) and

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Northwest Passage (1958–​1959, NBC), were also scored with music from the Kraushaar library. Composer Dave Kahn (1910–​2008) was one of Kraushaar’s “ghost” writers. He wrote some of the library music heard in the Hopalong Cassidy episodes specifically made for syndication (1952–​1954), a business relationship that had resulted from Kahn’s work as an orchestrator on Republic westerns. Kahn’s anonymity stretched into the 1960s, but his music—​mostly written for track libraries—​was everywhere on television in the late 1950s. The fame he never enjoyed should have begun with his music for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955–​1962, CBS, NBC), the half-​hour suspense anthology hosted in droll fashion, and occasionally directed, by the “Master of Suspense,” for Revue Productions (later Universal Television). According to longtime series producer Norman Lloyd, it was legendary composer Bernard Herrmann who suggested that Hitchcock use French composer Charles Gounod’s 1872 Funeral March of a Marionette as the series theme. (Herrmann had recently scored the director’s The Trouble with

Dave Kahn.  

Harry, launching a decade-​long collaboration in films that would later include Vertigo and Psycho.) Revue music director Stanley Wilson (1917–​1970) is believed to have created the original arrangement of Gounod’s amusing, macabre piece, which introduced Hitchcock as he “stepped into” his trademark caricature onscreen to introduce the program (“Good eeeveninnng . . .”). Almost overnight, that music was inextricably linked with Hitchcock and became, like the Rossini overture for The Lone Ranger, better known for its television associations than as a piece of classical music. Kahn’s frequent employer during the late 1950s was David M. Gordon (1907–​1983), a music publisher who had contracted with MCA-​owned Revue to provide music for their new television series. Unlike many earlier series, which used music on a more or less generic basis (comedy, dramatic, or suspense cues, often interchangeable between series), Revue commissioned music for specific shows without actually scoring individual episodes. Kahn created a second arrangement of the Gounod theme (utilized in later seasons) and composed a library of dramatic music specifically for Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Kahn also composed the themes and, as he had done with Hitchcock, wrote a substantial library for the John Payne western The Restless Gun (1957–​1959, NBC) and the family comedy Leave It to Beaver (1957–​1963, CBS, ABC). In each case, despite Kahn’s role as the undisputed sole composer, the music was often co-​credited to Kahn and Melvyn Lenard (the first and middle names of Gordon’s son, enabling the publisher to participate directly in music royalties). The Beaver theme, a playful tune with a hint of mischief, later gained a lyric and an unrelated title, “The Toy Parade” (a further division of royalties occurred, because lyricist Mort Greene was entitled to a third of the proceeds). Kahn wrote the Beaver theme without ever seeing the pilot. “I was just told it was a kids’ show and, basically, what it was all about,” he said. Like the music for Hitchcock and the other shows, it was written in Los Angeles but taken to Munich, Germany, for recording in order to skirt AFM regulations and penalties. Kahn contributed several other themes to 1950s television, including the suspense anthology Suspicion (1957–​ 1958, NBC), the detective show 21 Beacon Street (1959–​1960, NBC, ABC), and the William Bendix western Overland Trail (1960, NBC). He went on to become music editor for many of the Filmways comedies of the 1960s, starting with Mister Ed—​for which he composed a library of music, also recorded overseas—​ and several other series, including The Beverly Hillbillies and Green Acres. The issue of ghosting and awarding proper credit to the composer was a serious problem in those early days. Screen credits were rare and cue sheets, even when filed, did not always reflect the truth. Ziv, a major supplier of syndicated programming in the 1950s, almost never gave screen credit, and its own music editors professed ignorance as to the actual origin of the music they tracked into their shows, much less the identities of the composers.

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David Rose, the composer of “Holiday for Strings” and “The Stripper,” is widely believed to have written the themes for Ziv’s Highway Patrol (1955–​1959) and Sea Hunt (1958–​1961), yet both are officially credited to one Ray Llewellyn—​a name that no one connected with Ziv during that period could recall. If Llewellyn existed, he never joined BMI or ASCAP, and therefore never received any royalties for the thousands of plays of his music over the years. The grim martial rhythms of the Broderick Crawford police drama (“Ten-​four!”) and the melodramatic opening for the Lloyd Bridges skin-​ diving adventure became as well known as any themes of the era. No one received screen credit for the music in either case; the underscores were drawn from established music libraries, according to Ziv supervising music editor Milton Lustig. Rose (who had written music for Ziv radio shows in the early 1950s) later composed, and received credit for, the themes for Ziv’s Men into Space (1959–​1960, CBS) with William Lundigan, and The Case of the Dangerous Robin (1960, syndicated) with Rick Jason. Many of the individual music libraries eventually were supplanted by a highly organized new library created in the mid-​1950s by Capitol Records. Composer William G. Loose (1911–​1991), with the title of “western studio representative” at Capitol, oversaw this operation and, as a result, became the supplier of several memorable themes, including The Donna Reed Show (1958–​1966, ABC), Dennis the Menace (1959–​63, CBS), and The Texan (1958–​1960, CBS), all officially credited to Loose and Capitol executive John Seely.

William G. Loose.

Jack Cookerly (1926–​2017), who worked closely with Loose and wrote hours of music that was licensed through the Capitol library, explained the beginnings of the operation: “Bill Loose had written five hours of music for Capitol, without any reference to any films. They were [scoring] industrial films and in-​house films, so Bill set up some categories: dramatic, melodic, light activity, mechanical, this and that. So you could come in for any film and find some music for it. It wasn’t tailored for television at all.” When Screen Gems began production on The Donna Reed Show, executives “came over looking for a theme,” Cookerly recalled. “Bill had written a real nice, pleasant little melody which we eventually called ‘Music to Wash Windows By,’ because it’s so insipid. They picked that piece of music for the Donna Reed theme. [The studio] made a request that that theme be restricted—​because you didn’t want to find it on an Ajax commercial, which happened a couple of times—​so that theme was locked into the show.” Loose wrote the Dennis the Menace theme specifically for that series. Often, producers would request a “theme set,” essentially a small library of cues based on an original theme that Loose, Cookerly, or both might compose; this was the case with Donna Reed, Dennis, and others. Among the major users of the Capitol library was Desilu. Music editor Robert Raff, who joined Desilu about 1958, recalled that “99 percent of the track was out of Capitol” in those days. Shows such as The Real McCoys, though not owned by Desilu, utilized the studio’s production facilities. “They had a theme written for them, but beyond maybe half a dozen cues based on the main title, the rest was track,” Raff said. The Real McCoys (1957–​1963, ABC, CBS) starred Walter Brennan as patriarch of a West Virginia family that moved to central California. Veteran tunesmith Harry Ruby (1895–​1974), whose career dated back to Broadway in the 1920s and whose film work included songs for the Marx Brothers movies Duck Soup and Horse Feathers, wrote a country-​flavored title song, an early instance of a TV theme hinting at the characters’ backstory and an approach that would become commonplace a few years later. The anthology Desilu Playhouse (1958–​1960, CBS), which boasted an original theme by longtime MGM musical director Johnny Green (Raintree County), utilized no original dramatic underscore. Some of those first-​season shows that Raff tracked with previously recorded Capitol music were “The Time Element,” a Rod Serling fantasy that served as the basis for his Twilight Zone; and the two-​part “The Untouchables,” the ambitious Eliot Ness story that became the pilot for the famed crime series. Raff, in consultation with Loose, chose the cues to score the various films. The Capitol music proved so useful that “we actually physically moved the entire library into the studio,” Raff recalled. “They made duplicates of everything. I had two or three file cabinets full of records,

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just from the material that I liked.” Capitol’s so-​called Hi-​Q library encompassed several hundred hours of commercially available music by the mid-​1960s. The vast majority of prime-​time programs during the 1950s were tracked with library music. But there were a few notable exceptions, all attributable to producers who understood the value of original scoring to create moods and enhance atmosphere—​and who agreed to pay the high premium demanded by the AFM in order to achieve this. One of the earliest, and at the same time the most innovative, was Danger (1950–​1955, CBS), a live suspense anthology based in New York City. Guitarist Tony Mottola (1918–​2004), a highly respected musician on staff at CBS, had been doing a nightly 15-​minute music show, Face the Music (1948–​1949), with vocalists such as Johnny Desmond, when he heard from a young director named Yul Brynner (later the noted stage actor). According to Mottola, Brynner had been assigned Danger, a new half-​hour show designed to follow Suspense (1949–​1954, CBS) on Tuesday nights. In another holdover from radio, a number of studio shows, including Suspense, featured an organist playing live background music. “Yul wanted to do something different,” Mottola recalled. At the time, the postwar drama The Third Man (1949) was doing well at the box office and its score, played entirely on a single instrument—​the zither—​had become something of a sensation. “So Yul asked me if I would be interested in coming up with a theme.”

Tony Mottola (with guitar, seated) with director Yul Brynner, rehearsing for an episode of Danger.

Brynner described the opening visuals he had in mind: The camera pans along a fence at night. Suddenly, a dagger is thrown and sticks in the fence. A flashlight illuminates the still-​quivering weapon and the graffiti-​ like scrawl on the boards: “Danger” and the names of the evening’s stars. Mottola’s concept—​for electric guitar alone—​was both simple and undeniably effective: the insistent rhythm of a single repeated low note, interrupted at the point of the dagger flying into the fence by a single, ominous chord. Musicians began referring to it as “the Danger chord,” or “the Tony Mottola chord,” although in fact the entire theme was quite haunting and Mottola’s work involved more than just a signature tune for the opening and closing of the show. Brynner insisted, as did his successor, Sidney Lumet, on an original score each week. Mottola explained: “I would attend readings and rehearsals during the week. Then I would see a run-​through a couple of days before [air], and I would have a meeting with Yul, and later Sidney. We would discuss the various moods that we felt were needed, where music was needed, and so forth. And I would proceed to write to the script. Then, the day of the show, we would have a run-​through and I would play, although it was difficult for me [in terms of] timing, because it was stop-​and-​go, stop-​and-​ start. And then airtime, you got a cue and away you went.” Mottola was located in a booth next to the control room. He could see the stage action via a monitor, and the director in the control room before him; his headphones gave him the dialogue and sound effects in one ear and instructions from the director in the other. Mottola’s biggest problem was having only two hands. “I had to practically memorize those areas of the script that I was underscoring,” he said, “as I couldn’t turn pages and play the guitar at the same time.” The subject matter was often quite dark, and murder was never far away. But the source material was frequently impeccable: adaptations of stories by Ambrose Bierce, Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, Daphne du Maurier, and, for a particularly grisly episode about a malevolent child, Saki. The performers, as was typical for high-​profile network dramas in that era, were stellar indeed: Grace Kelly, Paul Newman, Jack Lemmon, Basil Rathbone, Charlton Heston, and many others. Mottola himself appeared in a 1953 show about a singer controlled by the mob. His fellow CBS star Johnny Desmond was cast in the lead; Mottola did double duty by playing the bandleader and, between nightclub scenes, racing back to his guitar to play the underscore. In an effort to vary the sound from week to week, Mottola often tried out fresh ideas for performance. For “The Killer Scarf,” a circus-​themed show televised live from Madison Square Garden in 1951, Mottola stroked the guitar strings with a pocket comb to imitate a hurdy-​gurdy. Just as often, the scripts would dictate a musical approach: a folk-​style melody for a western episode, Latin tempos for another set in a tropical port, an Irish reel for a show with J. Pat O’Malley, and a mock nursery rhyme for

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the murderous little girl in the Saki story “Sredni Vashtar.” For the first episode, “August Heat” with Alfred Ryder, Mottola created an ambitious study in triplets: light, rapid music to depict “nervous excitement, fear, trepidation, flight.” The music of Danger proved so popular that, in 1951, Mottola published a 31-​page folio for guitar players, and recorded several suites from the series’ first-​season scores on a 10-​inch LP. It was television’s first soundtrack album. Not one to hoard his hard-​won secrets of scoring for the medium, the guitarist filled his folio with explanations about creating bridges, curtains, stings, and other dramatic musical effects. Despite other work on The Perry Como Show and various studio commitments, Mottola found time to score other television shows, including Crime Photographer (1951–​1952, CBS) and the soap opera Portia Faces Life (1954–​1955, CBS). Meanwhile, on the West Coast, radio star Jack Webb had been successful in translating his popular police show to television, complete with music. The filmed Dragnet (1951–​1959, NBC) became the definitive cop show, its stilted dialogue, the detectives’ humorless demeanor (“just the facts, ma’am”), and the emphasis on investigative technique setting the stage for dozens of police procedurals to follow in the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond. Webb, a jazz aficionado who owned ultra-​high-​end stereo equipment, demanded original scoring for the television Dragnet, just as he had for the radio show (which continued until 1956). Walter Schumann (1913–​1958) joined Webb’s Dragnet team shortly after its 1949 debut on NBC radio. He composed the “dum-​de-​dum-​ dum” theme that millions associated with Dragnet on both radio and television. The decisive and melodramatic four-​note phrase (which became a kind of American musical code for “you’re in trouble now”) accompanied the opening shot of Sgt. Joe Friday’s badge number 714, as narrator George Fenneman solemnly intoned: “The story you are about to see is true. The names have been changed to protect the innocent.” The introductory four-​note theme, coupled with Schumann’s Dragnet march (used over the remainder of the main title and the end titles) was carried over intact from radio. During the drama itself, Schumann’s music was used largely as a transitional device and for dramatic emphasis at the end of many scenes. Schumann consistently used Nathan Scott (1915–​2010) as his orchestrator. The two had met before World War II, and Scott had often arranged for Schumann. After the war, Scott went to Republic as a composer-​ orchestrator on the studio’s many westerns. But soon after Dragnet went to television, Schumann contacted Scott again about orchestrating. The two went on to do both radio and TV versions for the remainder of their run during the 1950s, Schumann as composer, Scott as orchestrator and sometimes composer of the underscore. They also collaborated on other

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  Walter Schumann.

projects, notably a series of highly successful choral albums featuring “The Voices of Walter Schumann.” Webb was so keen on the importance of original scoring that he gave Schumann’s name prime placement during the end credits: an entire card just before Webb’s own as producer-​director. In addition, Scott received screen credit as orchestrator, an unprecedented move (and one that would rarely be repeated in series TV). According to Scott, the Dragnet orchestra consisted of 14 players (three trombones, a trumpet, four woodwinds, two violas, two celli, string bass, and keyboard). “The theme was kind of martial,” Scott recalled, “and the police dialogue was very rigid, clipped, and kind of militaristic in a sense. It seemed to fit, and so we stuck with it. Walter wrote nearly every theme, three or four lines for each episode. I would build on those themes, if he was ill or unable to do it for whatever reason. I would often take a theme from some past show and do it my way for this new show.” Scott also conducted about a third of the scores overall. Bandleader Ray Anthony’s jazz arrangement of the Dragnet theme became a top-​10 hit in 1953, the first television theme to crack the record charts. When Webb made the cover of Time in March 1954, the four famous notes appeared on a staff behind the image of Webb’s face, with bullets replacing the notes. Schumann also won the first Emmy ever given to a composer for original music for television (in 1954, beating Bernard Herrmann, Victor Young, and Gian-​Carlo Menotti).

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This popular and critical success also resulted in the first major lawsuit charging musical plagiarism in television. Robbins Music Corporation, a music publisher for Universal, in late 1953 formally accused Schumann of infringement, charging the Dragnet motif actually originated in Miklós Rózsa’s score for The Killers (1946). The Hungarian-​born Rózsa won Academy Awards for scoring Spellbound (1945) and A Double Life (1947), and would go on to even greater success with such biblical epics as Ben-​ Hur (1959, another Oscar winner) and King of Kings (1961). In The Killers, those four insistent notes served as the underpinning of the main title, then resurfaced periodically as a leitmotif, or recurring theme, to characterize the cold-​blooded murderers of the film’s title (played by William Conrad and Charles McGraw). As harmonized, the motif was actually more sinister and menacing in The Killers than ever heard on Dragnet. But the association of that music with a crime drama may have led the publishers to the conclusion that a musical theft had occurred. Rózsa’s attention was first called to the matter by a September 1953 Life magazine article that celebrated Dragnet’s top-​10 status and Anthony’s hit record. According to Rózsa, Schumann’s lawyers made musical comparisons to similar motifs in the Dvorák cello concerto and one of Brahms’s “Hungarian Dances,” but were unable to find “the ominous tritone” of the Killers motif in either. Scott contended that any plagiarism, if it occurred, was unintentional. Universal conceded that Schumann was at the studio during the scoring of The Killers, working on the Deanna Durbin musical I’ll Be Yours. Scott insisted that Schumann did not recall the film or the music. “But because Walter worked there [at Universal] at the time, Rózsa contended that he had stolen this dum-​de-​dum-​dum from him,” Scott said. “Walter was devastated by that. Because if he did it, it was not conscious. He was a very moral guy.” An out-​of-​court settlement of $100,000 and a 50-​50 split of all future royalties between Rózsa and Schumann was negotiated, although Rózsa never received screen credit on Dragnet, either on the first series or the later edition (1967–​1970, NBC). At the time, Schumann’s health was failing. He suffered from a rare heart ailment, and died after heart surgery at the University of Minnesota in August 1958, not long after scoring the pilot for the series Steve Canyon (1958–​1959, NBC), based on the Milton Caniff comic strip. (Scott took over the series scoring chores, but in tribute to the late composer, the credit read “music by Walter Schumann, conducted and orchestrated by Nathan Scott.”) After Schumann’s death, Webb said of the composer: “He was as much a part of Dragnet as I am.” Rózsa never wrote for television. Webb’s strong feelings about original music rubbed off on one of his writers. James Moser left Dragnet to create Medic (1954–​1956, NBC), a pioneering medical drama whose realistic approach to such hitherto undramatized subjects as manic depression, open-​heart surgery, and the likely aftereffects of a hydrogen bomb explosion, helped to expand the

storytelling potential of the medium. The half-​hour medical anthology was introduced and often narrated by Richard Boone (in his first starring role) as Dr. Konrad Styner. The style of Medic was more documentary than drama, the result of Moser’s journalism background and his firsthand research at Los Angeles–​area hospitals. Medic was also a breakthrough for original music in television. For the first time, a major film composer was signed to compose weekly scores for a filmed series: Victor Young (1900–​1956), whose facility with a melody was legendary (he had written standards such as “Stella by Starlight” and “Sweet Sue”), and whose scores for such films as For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943) and Shane (1953) contributed to their status as classics. Young’s theme—​music of great dignity—​opened each episode, as a narrator defined the physician as “guardian of birth, healer of the sick, comforter of the aged.” The end-​title music, spectacularly beautiful for television in that era, was an expansive piano solo against strings. (As a vocal titled “Blue Star,” it became a top-​40 hit.) The composer approached this assignment no differently than he would one of his features. “Victor’s sketches were immaculate,” recalled orchestrator Sidney Fine. “There was no distinction between what he sketched for this TV show and its small orchestra, as opposed to what he did for his films with a large orchestra. He wrote the same way.” Young wrote 32 original scores between mid-​1954 and early 1956, about 12 minutes of music per show, for an orchestra that averaged 26 players

Victor Young.

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(including 17 strings). Fine, who went on to orchestrate parts of Young’s music for Around the World in 80 Days (1956), believed that Young was “compulsive” as a composer—​considering the fact that, during the two-​ year period of Medic, he also wrote more than a dozen film scores. Yet his scores were “always melodic, and dramatic,” Fine said. “What he did was so right.” Fine’s orchestrations were so rich that, although he never received screen credit, his work was recognized with a 1956 Emmy nomination. (Young himself was nominated in 1954 as composer of Medic but won in a separate category as musical director for the four-​network simulcast of the Light’s Diamond Jubilee special, produced by David O. Selznick, October 24, 1954.) Also in 1954, the Walt Disney studio was preparing to plunge into television with Disneyland (1954–​1958, ABC), a show that would later be known as Walt Disney Presents (1958–​1961, ABC), Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color (1961–​1969, NBC), The Wonderful World of Disney (1969–​1979, NBC), Disney’s Wonderful World (1979–​1981, NBC), and Walt Disney (1981–​1983, CBS). The series was a convenient way to plug Disney’s grand new California theme park, as well as serving to showcase the studio’s film releases, cartoons, documentaries, and original programming. Disney’s musical staff expanded to handle the television work. George Bruns (1914–​1983) had joined the Disney operation in 1953 when planning began to turn Tchaikovsky’s Sleeping Beauty ballet into an animated feature (released in 1959, bringing Bruns an Oscar nomination for his musical adaptation). Bruns was not only working on Disneyland, but also helping plan the upcoming, five-​day-​a-​week afternoon children’s show The Mickey Mouse Club (1955–​1959, ABC). Like Webb on Dragnet and Moser on Medic, Walt Disney was one of a handful of producers who understood the value of original music. In fact, he insisted on “live” scoring, not tracking of previously written music, on all of his television shows. “We scored everything, but we didn’t have to,” Bruns noted in a 1968 interview. “We could have saved a lot of money, but Walt wanted the music right. He was not budget-​conscious when it came to music. He’d say, ‘Well, if you need that many men, use them.’ ” One of Bruns’s first assignments was the theme and underscore for a three-​part historical adventure to air during the “Frontierland” portion of Disneyland: the story of American frontier hero Davy Crockett, starring Fess Parker. According to Bruns, Disney asked for “a little throwaway melody . . . a little ditty or something” that could be used to link sequences from different times in the life of Crockett, as a means of avoiding excess narration. Screenwriter Tom Blackburn “gave me a bunch of lines,” Bruns said. “He wasn’t a lyric writer. I just picked his lines and put them together, made a verse out of them. Then he took that and wrote a lot more.”

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George Bruns (left) and Tom Blackburn working on Davy Crockett.

Bruns started at 7 a.m. one morning; two hours later, he had finished the tune. Disney heard and approved it by noon the same day. “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” (“. . . Davy, Davy Crockett, king of the wild frontier”) was first heard in “Davy Crockett, Indian Fighter” in December 1954. Bill Hayes was the first to record it and wound up with the biggest hit, including five weeks at no. 1 and 20 weeks on the charts overall. Parker himself recorded one of 20 cover versions which sold an estimated seven million copies over six months in 1955. Bruns, in 1978, attributed the tune’s blockbuster success to its simplicity and honest, folk-​like quality that seemed to have come out of the time and place: “There’s nothing to it. Funny thing was, we never had a lawsuit on that song, because everybody thought it was P.D. [public domain]. It wasn’t.” Blackburn ultimately wrote 20 six-​line stanzas to the song, covering Crockett’s entire life from Indian scout to member of Congress to Alamo freedom fighter. For the final program of the initial Crockett trilogy, “Davy Crockett at the Alamo,” Bruns set to music a poem found in Crockett’s own journal; it was called “Farewell.” Bruns scored again with the title song for Zorro (1957–​1959, ABC), Disney’s half-​hour adventure series with Guy Williams as the masked avenger of Spanish California in the 1820s. Williams played the swashbuckling, black-​clad night rider El Zorro (“the fox”) and his foppish civilian alter ego Don Diego de la Vega. The dramatic opening began with lightning striking in the form of a Z and the silhouette of Zorro astride his speedy horse, Toronado. A male chorus sang the lyrics (by series

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writer-​director Norman Foster): “Out of the night, when the full moon is bright, comes the horseman known as Zorro. . . .” All of the delightful Spanish-​flavored underscore in Zorro was the work of William Lava (1911–​1971). Lava was an old hand at western music, having labored on dozens of Republic serials and B westerns, such as The Painted Stallion (1937) with Ray Corrigan and Hoot Gibson, and Overland Stage Raiders (1938) with John Wayne. He became a Warner Bros. fixture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, scoring films like Colt .45 (1950). He scored Disney’s Mexico-​set The Littlest Outlaw (1955). For Zorro he penned motifs for all the main characters, and his scoring for the swordplay and chase sequences was so exciting that it even merited mention in the New York Times review of the series. In 1961, Walt Disney made a momentous musical decision: he hired Richard M. Sherman (b. 1928) and Robert B. Sherman (1925–​2012) as staff songwriters. The brothers had created pop hits for ex-​Disney Mouseketeer Annette Funicello (including “Tall Paul” in 1958), and, as freelancers, had written songs for Zorro and other Disney TV programs. Although they were hired for features as well as TV, it was on the small screen that they first made their mark. Disney moved his weekly series to NBC in the fall of 1961, and the all-​color telecasts demanded a new name (The Wonderful World of Color). Richard Sherman recalled: “We were doing comedy numbers for this [animated] character Ludwig von Drake, who was a brand-​new but very understandable sort of Dutch comedian, voiced by Paul Frees. We did two rather phonetic songs: ‘The Spectrum Song’ and ‘The Green with Envy Blues,’ to illustrate how color is used musically. Then Walt came to us and said, ‘At a certain point, when Ludwig von Drake finally turns on the knob, we want to have something really beautiful, totally different.’ Not a von Drake crazy song, but a real pretty song that would indicate that the world is full of gorgeous visual color.” The Sherman brothers’ tune—​which began “The world is a carousel of color . . .”—​set against kaleidoscopic shots and lovely images of nature ranging from rainbows to autumn leaves to flowers (and Buddy Baker’s arrangement, which caught the action as well as showcased the song)—​ introduced the Disney series for the entire 1960s. The vocal group The Wellingtons, who sang the Wonderful World of Color main title, would go on to even greater fame by performing the title ballad of Gilligan’s Island. The Sherman brothers contributed songs to a parade of fondly remembered Wonderful World of Color programs, including three starring, and with songs performed by, Annette: “The Horsemasters” (1961); “The Golden Horseshoe Revue” (1962); and “Escapade in Florence” (1962). Still later came their title themes for “The Mooncussers” (1962); the Civil War story “Johnny Shiloh” (1963); “The Ballad of Hector, the Stowaway Dog” (1964); and “Gallegher” (1965). Their greatest fame, of course, came with their Oscar-​winning score for Disney’s musical classic Mary Poppins (1964).

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Buddy Baker conducting Disney TV musicians in 1955.

Buddy Baker (1918–​2002), meanwhile, was musical director for nearly the entire run of The Mickey Mouse Club, whose theme song (“Who’s the leader of the club that’s made for you and me?”) was written by host Jimmie Dodd (an actor and songwriter who penned many of the child-​ friendly tunes heard on the series). After the “Club” ended, Baker penned a lively ditty for Leslie Nielsen as “The Swamp Fox” (1959), a Revolutionary War hero of the Southeast; and composed the scores for many of the fine nature documentaries that aired on The Wonderful World of Color, including “One Day at Teton Marsh” (1964). Among his notable theatrical films for Disney were the Oscar-​nominated score for Napoleon and Samantha (1972) and the music for the animated Fox and the Hound (1981). Disney himself took a serious interest in both songs and score. “Next to the stories, music was real important to him,” said Baker. “He didn’t really know anything about music except what it could do. I’ve been in meetings with him when he’d say, ‘Buddy, this feels like a big symphonic treatment through here.’ He had an uncanny sense of what was right for a sequence in a picture.” London-​ based composer Gerard Schurmann (1924–​ 2020) recalled meeting with Disney himself on “The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh” (1964), an exciting, filmed-​in-​England trilogy with Patrick McGoohan as a Scarlet Pimpernel–​style character. Schurmann—​who had recently orchestrated the Oscar-​winning films Exodus and Lawrence of Arabia—​ provided the three-​part adventure with a powerful sense of period (the late 1700s), locale (England’s south coast) and derring-​do (as McGoohan’s

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country vicar donned a disguise to lead a band of nighttime smugglers). Disney approved a large orchestra because he planned to release it not only on The Wonderful World of Color but also in European cinemas (as Dr. Syn, Alias the Scarecrow). He also commissioned a title ballad by Terry Gilkyson that 1960s viewers still recall (“Scarecrow! Scarecrow! The soldiers of the king feared his name . . .”). Disney may have been the first motion picture studio to sign on with the new medium, but soon after the Disney deal with ABC, Warner Bros. followed suit with the same network. As with Disney, there was a strong promotional angle involved: a 10-​minute “Behind the Cameras” featurette, promoting an upcoming Warner feature film, in every hour of programming. But viewers weren’t interested in the promos, which were eventually dropped. The programs were what counted. For its first season on the air, Warner Bros. Presents (1955–​1956) was the umbrella title for three rotating series, all based on Warner movies of the 1940s: Casablanca, Kings Row, and Cheyenne. Ironically, the least known of the titles, the Clint Walker western Cheyenne, was the sole survivor of the trio and went on to become a long-​running ABC hit. Casablanca starred Charles McGraw in the Humphrey Bogart role of saloon owner Rick Blaine, while Kings Row had Jack Kelly and Robert Horton in key roles. Both were equally uninspired adaptations; Casablanca lasted 10 episodes, Kings Row just seven before the ax fell. Viewer interest in Cheyenne led ABC to order more of the Old West wanderings of Cheyenne Bodie, for a total of 16 shows. Rounding out the network’s 39-​episode order were six stand-​alone anthology shows, essentially pilots for unsold series. Like Disney, Warner Bros. insisted on original music for their shows. Every episode of the 1955–​1956 season was scored—​a surprising development, and one that would only rarely be repeated until musicians’ union rules mandated it more than 20 years later. The Warner Bros. Presents main title was borrowed from Max Steiner’s score for The Fountainhead (1949), but each series had its own musical signature. For Cheyenne (1955–​1962, ABC), western veteran William Lava scored 10 of the first 16 episodes. Songwriters Jerry Livingston and Mack David contributed a “Cheyenne” song heard, in instrumental form, over that first season’s end titles. Lava’s familiar loping theme, called “Bodie,” however, formed the basis for the underscore, and it won out as the series’ theme during the second season and beyond. Country songwriter Stan Jones (1914–​1963), who wrote the classic “(Ghost) Riders in the Sky” and acted in John Ford films such as Rio Grande (1950), provided a lyric (“lonely man, Cheyenne . . .”) that was heard starting with the second episode of the 1956–​1957 season. David Buttolph (1902–​1983) scored Casablanca, Kings Row, and the anthology series, although Casablanca naturally used the song “As Time

Goes By” as its theme, and Kings Row drew on a Max Steiner tune from Saratoga Trunk (1945) for its end-​title theme. Buttolph had spent the war years at 20th Century-​Fox, scoring a number of notable pictures including Guadalcanal Diary (1943) before moving to Warners for most of the 1950s, scoring films such as Montana (1950) and House of Wax (1953). Buttolph and Lava divided scoring chores for the second season of Warner Bros. shows on ABC (1956–​1957): Lava did all of the Cheyenne episodes, and Buttolph composed the theme and scored all 19 hours of Conflict, a dramatic anthology. However, live scoring abruptly ended at Warner Bros. after Conflict. In the summer of 1957, Warners contracted with David Chudnow’s Mutel service to supply “canned” music for all its series, both continuing and new. Themes and short cues based on those themes would continue to be commissioned, but scoring of individual episodes would not return to Warner Bros. television until 1963. A handful of other programs utilized original music on a regular basis. Harry Lubin (1906–​1977) served as composer-​conductor for several seasons on The Loretta Young Show (1953–​1961, NBC), originally Letter to Loretta, a half-​hour filmed dramatic anthology hosted by and often starring the actress. Young made her entrance every week in a stylish new gown to Lubin’s sweeping, lilting theme. “Every single week we had a scoring date,” remembered Byron Chudnow, who served as music editor on this series as well. “[Lubin] did eight or nine minutes of music every week. “The guy was incredible,” Chudnow said. “He had a head full of melody. He wrote like nobody I ever heard. What was so astonishing was, he would come to the dubbing sessions; he wanted to be on the dubbing stage so that he could see how his music was being laid down. I used to set up a table for him with a lamp, over on the side. He would sit and orchestrate while the bloody picture was going—​he was listening to his cue and orchestrating next week’s show at the same time. I’ve never seen anybody write music that fast.” Lubin also wrote music for later seasons of Fireside Theatre, later Jane Wyman Theater (1949–​1958, NBC), Dick Powell’s Zane Grey Theater (1956–​1962, CBS), and, most prominently, Alcoa Presents, better known as One Step Beyond (1959–​1961, ABC). Lubin’s use of electronic keyboard instruments such as the Novachord and Trautonium, and a coloratura soprano voice, in conjunction with traditional orchestral elements, lent an appropriately eerie tone to the stories of psychic phenomena. In live television, Russian emigre Wladimir Selinsky (1910–​1984) scored many episodes of the Kraft Television Theatre (1947–​1958, NBC, ABC) throughout the middle 1950s. A violin soloist in Europe, he moved to America in 1925 and formed a string quartet that played popular music. He had his own radio show, Strings in Swingtime, and composed for radio drama before moving into live TV in New York. “Mr. Selinsky never puts

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a note on paper till he has seen one of the final rehearsals, a bare three days before show time,” the liner notes for an album of Selinsky’s Kraft compositions pointed out. He scored original plays by the likes of Rod Serling, Paddy Chayefsky, Reginald Rose, and Tad Mosel, which were directed by such later famous film names as John Frankenheimer, George Roy Hill, and Fielder Cook. Selinsky used a boys’ choir and chamber orchestra for the Stephen Vincent Benet story “A Child Is Born” with Mildred Dunnock and Harry Townes in December 1954, and researched the music actually played on the Titanic for the award-​winning “A Night to Remember” with Claude Rains and a cast of 100 in March 1956. He also contributed music to Lux Video Theatre (1950–​1957, CBS, NBC) and the U.S. Steel Hour (1953–​ 1963, ABC, CBS). Of course, original music remained the exception rather than the rule. A 1954 New York Times survey of anthology shows found excerpts from all of the following works on Studio One (1948–​1958, CBS) within a single month: Prokofiev’s Cinderella and Romeo and Juliet, Coleridge-​Taylor’s Petite Suite de Concert, Kabalevsky’s The Comedians, Thomson’s The Plow That Broke the Plains, Charpentier’s Impressions d’Italie, Sinigaglia’s Danza Piemontese, Respighi’s Pines of Rome and Feste Romane, Saint-​ Saens’s Carnival of the Animals, Berlioz’s Roman Carnival Overture, Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra, and Poulenc’s Les Biches. On the West Coast, CBS maintained a balance between tracking and live scoring. Almost from the beginning of television activity there, music director Lud Gluskin began to create a music library that was exclusive to CBS: music that would serve a variety of dramatic needs for both radio and television programs originating in Hollywood. Gluskin (1898–​1989) was a well-​known figure in New York and Los Angeles music circles. He flew with the Lafayette Escadrille during World War I and claimed to have won both the French Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. He then became a drummer with the Paul Whiteman orchestra and later formed his own band, touring Europe and making dozens of recordings in Paris and Berlin. He joined CBS Radio in 1935 and became music director for CBS Television in 1948. A confirmed Francophile, he visited the Continent every year, often recording music for the CBS library and bringing it back to Los Angeles (thus avoiding the use of the more expensive local musicians and incurring the wrath of the AFM). Gluskin was reputed to be a friend of CBS founder William S. Paley and was universally acknowledged as a power to be reckoned with in all matters of music at the network. According to Don B. Ray—​who started at CBS as a “cue selector” in 1954, oversaw the development of the CBS music library during the mid-​1950s, and went on to become an Emmy-​nominated composer (on Hawaii Five-​0)—​Gluskin would frequently recruit foreign composers to write original music for the CBS library. At the same time, Gluskin would

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  Lud Gluskin.

also bring scores of music that had already been written and recorded for specific shows in New York or Los Angeles, such as music written for CBS radio programs by Bernard Herrmann, and re-​record them abroad to avoid paying a reuse fee to the musicians’ union. As late as 1962, Gluskin continued to defend the use of library music for tracking. Citing time and financial pressures as adverse to writing good scores tailored to individual series episodes, Gluskin said: “Music for TV has become a mass production off the assembly line. Like a piece of scenery, one is not conscious of good mood music, but he misses it if it isn’t there. In [feature] pictures you can’t compose music factory-​style. Canned music is best because it is created by the best composers under normal conditions.” Still, during the heyday of live drama—​which moved from New York to Hollywood in the mid-​ 1950s—​ live music often accompanied live shows, usually at the insistence of the producer. The most distinguished figure to emerge from this pressure-​cooker world was Jerry Goldsmith (1929–​2004). Born in in Los Angeles, Goldsmith attended Los Angeles City College, studied piano with Jakob Gimpel and composition with Mario Castelnuovo-​Tedesco, before landing a job, in 1951, at CBS—​as a script typist. Eventually, he convinced Gluskin to give him radio assignments (on shows including Romance, Suspense, and CBS Radio Workshop), and he was signed to a seven-​year contract with the network. Goldsmith

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Jerry Goldsmith conducting a CBS session in 1959.

moved into live television starting in 1955 with scores for the anthology series Climax (1954–​1958), the first live drama to originate on the West Coast. Scores for live productions on General Electric Theater (1953–​1962), Studio One in Hollywood (1958), and Playhouse 90 (1956–​1960) followed. When he started on Climax, Goldsmith recalled, his job was primarily that of cue selector: choosing appropriate cues from existing music in the CBS library and editing them into a coherent score. As time went on, he convinced the producers to let him add an instrument or two, then to compose original scores. “I’d get to hire three instruments and I would play the piano, organ, and Novachord,” he said. The scores themselves, perhaps 25 minutes of music or more, would often be written in as short a span as three days and nights. “It was a wonderful training ground,” Goldsmith said. “Not just for me, for everybody: directors, actors, writers. None of us knew what we were doing. That’s why we were doing it,” he laughed. “It was the blind leading the blind.” For $175 a week, the composer was expected to come up with as much music as was demanded, for however many shows were assigned: sometimes a Climax and a G.E. Theatre in the same week and, toward the end of his CBS tenure, a Gunsmoke, a Twilight Zone, and a Playhouse 90. The original, New York–​based Studio One, for the most part, had been tracked with previously recorded music. Producer Norman Felton, who came out from New York to produce the new Los Angeles–​based Studio

One in Hollywood, insisted upon original scores. “I had quite a set-​to with CBS over it,” Felton later recalled. “I finally did get Jerry, who was quite young, to do the music with a small group for the Studio One shows that I did out here.” On one occasion, Felton called Goldsmith in after a run-​through of the music, which the producer would hear for the first time about two hours before air. “I need music from here to there,” Felton said, indicating a portion of the script. Goldsmith, puzzled, pointed out that no music had been written for that sequence and that, dramatically speaking, none was needed. “Oh, yes, it is,” Felton replied. “I’ve got to have music to cover the noise of moving the cameras around!” It was a lesson in the practical side of music-​making for television, especially in that early era. Goldsmith also credited producer Herbert Brodkin, who oversaw Playhouse 90, with stressing the importance of original music. But Playhouse 90—​so called because it was a 90-​minute showcase for original scripts by writers such as Rod Serling, Reginald Rose, and JP Miller—​ would sometimes require as much as 40 minutes of music for an orchestra of up to 18 players. For Playhouse 90, the musicians would be assembled in a studio next to the stage where the performance would take place. (Sometimes, on a Climax or a Studio One, Goldsmith and a small ensemble would even be in a corner of the same soundstage where the actors were located.) With a headset and a monitor, Goldsmith would cue the musicians. “From a technical point of view, you never knew what was going to happen,” the composer said. “Writing the music was one thing. The timings were only a guess.” Using a stopwatch to time an actor’s movement across a stage when the props hadn’t been placed yet was just one of many dicey elements. “It all changed when you went on the air,” he continued. “It picked up, or it slowed down, or [the actors] would forget their lines. You had to devise means of getting in, cutting. . . . It was really up to me to make it work.” Goldsmith had already had a firm foundation in harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and composition. “And when I got into [television], I found I didn’t know a thing. It was like starting all over again,” he said. He and his fellow craftsmen had no idea that they were in the midst of television’s Golden Age. “We were just struggling to get from one week to the next. The big hope was that we could finish one show without getting a camera in the shot, without getting a microphone in the shot, without having an actor blow a line, or catching a stage manager running from set to set. We just wanted to get on and off the air on time.” It was on these shows that Goldsmith met many of the directors with whom he would later collaborate on big-​screen films, including John Frankenheimer (Seconds), Franklin J. Schaffner (Planet of the Apes), Jack Smight (The Illustrated Man), Robert Mulligan (The Spiral Road),

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Delbert Mann (A Gathering of Eagles), Ralph Nelson (Lilies of the Field), and Arthur Hiller (The Lonely Guy). As live television waned and a growing number of the anthology series, including Playhouse 90, were produced on videotape, “there was a whole energy drop,” Goldsmith said. “You felt it among everybody. There was something about counting off and going on the air live to a zillion people. I never experienced that energy again.”

2 “Book ’em, Danno”

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n the fall of 1958, members of the AFM’s Los Angeles local, angry over union president James C. Petrillo’s intransigence on the “live” scoring issue, formed their own union. Petrillo, whose financial demands on producers caused most to avoid using original music in their shows, stepped down. His successors dropped the union’s claim to a percentage payment for every show with new music. MCA-​owned Revue Studios, which had become one of the leading suppliers of original programming to the networks, instituted a policy of scoring many episodes of its higher-​profile series, including Wagon Train and General Electric Theater. But one independent production in particular brought original scoring for television to widespread attention for the first time. The series was Peter Gunn, and the composer was Henry Mancini (1924–​1994). Peter Gunn (1958–​1961, NBC, ABC) was the brainchild of filmmaker Blake Edwards, who had created Richard Diamond for radio and had gone on to write and direct several feature films. Gunn (Craig Stevens) was an unflappable private detective who hung out at a nightclub called Mother’s, dated torch singer Edie Hart (Lola Albright), and enjoyed a friendship with a sour police lieutenant named Jacoby (Herschel Bernardi). With Edwards as producer and sometime writer-​director of Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0003

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individual episodes, Gunn offered a sophistication rarely glimpsed in the medium to that time. A flute player during his youth in the steel town of West Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, Mancini studied with arranger Max Adkins in Pittsburgh and became pianist-​arranger with the Glenn Miller–​Tex Beneke Orchestra (which was where he met his future wife, vocalist Ginny O’Connor, one of the original members of Mel Torme’s Mel-​Tones singing group) after the war. Mancini spent six years under contract at Universal, where he composed and orchestrated dozens of pictures that ranged from such high points as The Glenn Miller Story (1954, for which he received his first Academy Award nomination) and Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil (1958) to such low points as co-​composer on B science-​fiction flicks like It Came from Outer Space (1953) and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954). While at Universal, he composed partial scores for three of Edwards’s pictures. Mancini happened to be getting a haircut on the Universal lot when he ran into Edwards, who was then planning Peter Gunn. Edwards casually asked if the out-​of-​work composer might be interested in writing the music. His positive response altered the direction of television scoring practically overnight. Peter Gunn was an entirely jazz-​ based score. Reflecting later on the choice, Mancini said: “It was an idea that, I think, was obvious. Blake had set it in a jazz club. The minute that hit, the rest of it all fell into place. I could think of nothing else to put in there. I certainly didn’t want to use any strings.” As a film background, it wasn’t particularly innovative. Jazz had been an integral element of several widely admired film scores earlier in the decade, notably Alex North’s A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), Leith Stevens’s The Wild One (1954), and Elmer Bernstein’s The Man with the Golden Arm (1955). But prior to 1958, jazz was rarely heard in a television score except as source music from an occasional radio, record player, or jukebox. Peter Gunn gained immediate attention for three musical reasons: the nightclub setting was an obvious showcase for popular music; Mancini’s fresh-​sounding underscore consistently utilized jazz in dramatic, and occasionally comedic, contexts; and every episode featured an original score, not one tracked from a library of related cues that were recorded overseas. This was “cool” jazz of the West Coast style, written by an arranger from the big-​band era and played by some of the top soloists in the field. Although Peter Gunn was just a half-​hour show, there was often as much as fifteen minutes of music per episode. Mother’s had a resident five-​man combo, often seen in the background or featured as backing behind Edie’s vocals. Mancini augmented the core rhythm group with a trumpet, four trombones, and four woodwinds for the dramatic cues. “It had some unique sounds that people are still using,” Mancini later

acknowledged. “Unique kinds of playing techniques: fall-​offs on the end of notes and things like that, that were used dramatically; the use of bass flutes and alto flutes, for dramatic uses, and to take the place of a string section.” Prerecording was necessary when Lola Albright sang a number in the club, or when jazz soloists were seen performing on-​screen (drummer Shelly Manne, trumpeters Shorty Rogers and Pete Candoli, and guitarist Laurindo Almeida were among those who played themselves). All of the underscore, and much of the source music, was actually recorded after each show had been filmed and edited. “There were many times when the band was playing and they were way off,” Mancini admitted. “But they were hardly seen. They would have a temp track—​slow, medium, fast—​ and [the on-​screen performers] would just mime while the dialogue was going on. I would replace it later.”

Henry Mancini working on a Peter Gunn score.

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Mancini considered Albright the ideal Edie Hart. “She had an off-​ the-​cuff kind of jazz delivery that was very hard to find. Just enough to believe that she’d be singing in that club and that she shouldn’t be on Broadway or doing movies. That’s not in any way disparaging; it just was perfect casting.” Every episode opened with a teaser underscored by a closely mic’d walking bass. As fully developed later for the Peter Gunn soundtrack album, the piece was called “Fallout!,” but for the series, it would often go in a variety of different musical directions depending on the scene being scored. The title theme actually underscored one of the least interesting main-​title sequences in television history. A mere twenty seconds long (in black and white, like the rest of the show), the visuals simply identified the show and named Stevens and Edwards against a bland background and crudely flashing bullet-​striation patterns. The familiar Gunn theme—​still one of the most famous pieces of music ever written for television—​was built on an ostinato, a piano-​guitar unison combination that the composer found “sinister,” with a melody consisting of what he later described as “shouting brass” and “frightened saxophone sounds.” Because the series main title was so short, viewers only heard the first nine bars and the last four bars of the theme; the entire piece, never used during the show itself, was finally heard during the 50-​second end-​credit sequence. “Fallout!” and “Peter Gunn” were the only recurring themes in the show. The original album consisted largely of source-​music pieces written for the first few episodes, although the romantic “Dreamsville” became something of a love theme for Pete and Edie. The Gunn soundtrack album was another unique, even visionary, aspect of the Mancini score that altered not only the way that the public perceived TV music but, perhaps more important, the way that network and record-​label executives viewed musical scores created for the medium. Alan Livingston, then vice president in charge of television programming at NBC and prior to that vice president of artists and repertoire at Capitol Records, saw the commercial potential of the Gunn score. “He saw the pilot,” Mancini recalled, “and being a music guy himself—​an A & R guy responsible in a great way for bringing over the Beatles—​he heard it, called RCA, and said, ‘You guys ought to listen to this.’ ” The album was recorded in August and September 1958, the last session just a week after the show first went on the air. In fact, some of the tunes (among them “The Floater” and “The Brothers Go to Mothers”) were written for the LP and later used as source pieces in the show itself. “And then I made a whole piece out of ‘Fallout!,’ the opening walking-​ bass theme,” Mancini said. “It was just my instinct, that the tunes were there. That was the main thing. I felt that they should be handled for records, not just as throwaway pieces in a TV episode.”

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Henry Mancini’s original sketch for the main title of Peter Gunn (then, as a pilot, called Gunn for Hire).

Mancini’s instincts were unfailing. By early 1959, The Music from “Peter Gunn” had reached Number 1 on the Billboard popular album charts, spending 10 weeks at the top and 117 weeks on the chart overall. Although nominated for an Emmy, the music found greater success at the very first Grammy awards, where Mancini won his first two of 20 Grammys during his lifetime: one, the coveted Album of the Year award, the other for his arrangements on the LP. Mancini, previously a virtually anonymous “background score” composer, became a household name. “It was a very exciting period,” the composer later recalled. “People knew about it. The musicians were all very up for it; they enjoyed coming in to play. And the mail was completely surprising. I got letters from all over the place concerning the music, which was something that had never really happened to a composer before. It

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was almost like the music became one of the stars of the show.” And, of course, it was. Press coverage of Mancini’s contribution began within a month after the debut of Gunn (a writer for the Associated Press labeled him “the Gershwin of the gumshoes”). By December 1958, Newsweek reported that Mancini was receiving a third of all the show’s fan mail. By February, the band was back in the studios recording a second album for RCA. More Music from “Peter Gunn,” based on other themes from that first season, went to Number 7 on the Billboard charts and received six Grammy nominations. The success of Gunn, a top-​20 show in its first season, led to a second Edwards-​Mancini collaboration in television. Mr. Lucky (1959–​1960, CBS), based on the 1943 Cary Grant movie, starred John Vivyan as the suave owner of a floating gambling casino anchored just off the California coast. Ross Martin (later Artemus Gordon in The Wild Wild West) played his colorful sidekick Andamo, a fugitive from an unidentified Latin American country where he had been involved in revolutionary activities. Mancini consciously moved in a new direction with Mr. Lucky. The main title sequence was, again, just 20 seconds, but unlike Gunn, this one was animated and classy: a floating roulette wheel and tumbling dice in space, shifting to the shadow of a cat appearing over the dice (a seven, naturally) and a series of cards that formed themselves into the words “Mr. Lucky,” as the cat winked its single open eye. “It was a different approach,” Mancini said. “I really couldn’t use the flutes like I had on Peter Gunn. It had to be a turnaround, stylistically. That’s why I did the theme with strings, and added the Hammond organ over.” The music was a statement of elegance, with the organ solo providing a jazzy element of intrigue. And unlike Gunn, the theme worked its way into the episodic underscores. Whenever it was opened, Lucky’s pocket watch played, like a music box, the first five notes of the theme; it was also heard as source music aboard the ship Fortuna. On the other hand, Lucky emulated Gunn in its consistent use of a familiar opening motif: sparse, suspenseful Latin-​ styled percussion (called “Floating Pad” on the soundtrack album). The Mr. Lucky LP went to Number 2 on the Billboard charts in 1960 and won two more Grammys for Mancini (for orchestral album and arrangements). Andamo’s background, the southern California setting, and the need for almost constant source music aboard the Fortuna meant an abundance of Latin tunes in the score. They spawned a second LP, “Mr. Lucky” Goes Latin, which was actually released after the show’s cancellation. The 1959–​1960 season may have been the busiest in Mancini’s career. “We recorded Lucky on Tuesday nights and Gunn on Wednesday nights,” he recalled. He would “spot” (decide where music was appropriate) the next Lucky on Tuesday afternoon, then record the music for the show he

had just written on Tuesday night. On Wednesday afternoon, he would spot the next Gunn, then record the show that he had just completed writing on Wednesday night. In all, Mancini composed original scores for 114 Gunns and 34 Luckys. After the cancellation of Gunn in the spring of 1961, Mancini concentrated on his film career, almost immediately winning Academy Awards for the song “Moon River” and the score for Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and for the title song of Days of Wine and Roses (1962). Apart from two themes—​for the London-​based Man of the World with Craig Stevens (1962, syndicated) and the dramatic anthology The Richard Boone Show (1963–​1964, NBC)—​and the score for a United Nations–​produced television film, Carol for Another Christmas (1964, NBC), Mancini wrote no more television music until 1971. Almost lost in the hullabaloo surrounding the jazz score for Peter Gunn was the fact that, three nights before Gunn debuted, another series went on the air with the same idea: M Squad (1957–​1960, NBC), sporting a new musical signature by the legendary Count Basie. M Squad was a violent melodrama set in the crime-​ridden streets of Chicago, with Lee Marvin portraying Sgt. Frank Ballinger, a member of a special investigative unit of the Chicago police department. The first season of M Squad featured an appropriately grim opening and a martial end-​title theme (composed by Stanley Wilson, then musical director of Revue). The underscore, as with most series at that time, was drawn from library music commissioned, or acquired, by Wilson at Revue.

 Count Basie at the recording session for M Squad.

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In the fall of 1958, however, Revue’s new policy of “live” scoring began, and M Squad was one of the shows that benefited. “When I first got this notion I approached Basie,” Wilson told TV Guide in 1959. “He made the recording that opens the show every week. But it was too large a sound to carry through the rest of the show. That’s when I looked up two really top jazzmen, Benny Carter and Johnny Williams. “The three of us now do the writing and scoring. We record with a band heavy on brass—​four trombones, two trumpets—​[plus] rhythm section and two soloists: Carter, one of the best-​known in the business, and Williams.” Benny Carter was a veteran alto sax player and composer of note in the jazz world; Williams was a session pianist and up-​and-​coming composer-​arranger for television and movies. (He would later change his billing to John Williams and, with Oscars for such films as Jaws, Star Wars, and E.T. the Extra-​Terrestrial, become the world’s best-​known film composer.) So who first came up with the idea of jazz scoring for TV: Mancini or Wilson? As the anonymous TV Guide writer put it: “As nearly as can be determined, the decision to try jazz was reached by the two independently of each other.” The Basie theme was a characteristically brassy number with piano solo, and the tune was often interpolated into the episodic underscores, usually as an identifying motif for Ballinger puffing on a cigarette while reciting his hardboiled first-​person narration on the streets of Chicago. Wilson actually experimented with a number of composers before he settled on Carter and Williams. Ernest Gold, two years before he would write his Oscar-​winning score for Exodus (1960), contributed the first score and a subsequent one, but they were more in the metropolitan-​jazz realm than the swinging Basie-​Carter-​Williams mode that would become the norm for M Squad. Benny Carter recalled: “I did a date that John Williams was scoring. I was just a musician on the date, the soloist. That was the first time I met Stanley Wilson. And after the thing was over, he said to me, ‘Would you like to do a show or two for us?’ And I said, ‘Indeed I would, thanks for the opportunity.’ It started there. After I did one or two they offered me a contract.” Of that season’s 39 episodes, Williams and Carter scored 24. Williams, who was under contract to Revue, moved on to other series, while Carter stayed on to score all 39 half hours of the third and final season. Much of their best work from the second season of M Squad, including some of the tunes contributed by Wilson (who routinely eschewed screen credit, except as musical supervisor), was preserved in the M Squad soundtrack, recorded in March 1959 for RCA. It received two Grammy nominations, as the year’s outstanding orchestra album and as top film or TV soundtrack.

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Left to right: M Squad star Lee Marvin, composer Benny Carter, and Revue music director Stanley Wilson.

Wilson’s hiring of Benny Carter may have seemed casual. Perhaps it was. But it broke precedent, because Benny Carter became the first Black composer to receive screen credit for composing original dramatic scores in prime time. Carter (1907–​2003) had been active in the film studios throughout the 1940s and 1950s, working on such classics as Stormy Weather (1943) and The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), sometimes even appearing on-​screen, as in Thousands Cheer (1943). Carter also successfully led the fight to merge the segregated musicians’ union’s locals in Los Angeles. Yet Carter claimed to remember no instances of racial prejudice while he worked in television, which extended into the 1960s and 1970s with more than a dozen episodes of Chrysler Theatre, a handful of Ironsides, and several made-​for-​TV movies. The success of Peter Gunn and M Squad had immediate, and far-​ reaching, consequences, not only for private-​eye shows but throughout the medium. A particularly odd case was Richard Diamond, Private Detective (1957–​1960, CBS, NBC), which had one of the strangest musical histories of any show in television. Richard Diamond was David Janssen’s first starring role in series television. The character had originated on radio, with Dick Powell in the title role, in 1949; it was Powell’s Four Star Productions that made the television series. Diamond was a former New York City police officer who went into business as a private eye; Regis Toomey played his old friend, a gruff lieutenant on the force. Diamond began as a summer replacement series, in July 1957, with a theme by Frank DeVol (the ex-​bandleader who would go on to sitcom

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success with My Three Sons and The Brady Bunch) and the usual tracked underscore utilizing library music. DeVol’s theme could barely be heard in the 30-​second main title (because of an announcer prattling on about the sponsor, then slowly reading the title of the show and the name of the star), which underscored an atmospheric shot of a fedora-​topped Janssen walking down a dark alley, his face only illuminated when he lit a cigarette. DeVol’s end-​credit arrangement had an almost military feel, with its clipped brass under strings. It returned, along with the tracked score, when Richard Diamond came back as a mid-​season replacement in January 1958. All that was jettisoned when Peter Gunn became the talk of the business. When Richard Diamond returned for a third season in February 1959, not only was the format altered (the New York locale was dumped for the sunnier climes of southern California): the show had flashy new main-​and end-​title credit sequences and an outstanding jazz score by Pete Rugolo (1915–​2011). Title designer Maurice Binder, in one of his most distinctive jobs before gaining fame with the James Bond movie credits, created an animated opening in which white bars moved across the screen (first horizontally, then diagonally) and tiny silhouetted figures ran and climbed within them. A vertical bar appeared and widened as the silhouetted Janssen walked toward the camera, finally coming into view as he lit another of those cigarettes. The end titles, in an echo of the earlier Diamond credits, had the silhouetted Janssen, still smoking, walking into the distance at the right side of the screen while the credits occupied the left two-​thirds. Rugolo created a dual-​purpose theme: the bass line served as a convenient villain motif in the underscore, while the brassy primary melody stood for Diamond. He also wrote several secondary themes, most of which got a weekly workout: a traveling motif for Diamond; a love theme for his sometime girlfriend Karen Wells (Barbara Bain); a Latin feel for the show’s teaser, a quiet melody for Sam (Diamond’s telephone answering-​service girl, never fully seen and played early on by Mary Tyler Moore); and plenty of jazz for any nightclub into which Diamond might venture. Born in Sicily, Rugolo moved to the United States in 1921 and studied with composer Darius Milhaud before becoming famous in the jazz world as a composer and arranger for Stan Kenton’s postwar band. He spent most of the 1950s working as an arranger and orchestrator at MGM, breaking into television in 1958. Rugolo’s first assignment was to compose a new theme for The Thin Man (1957–​1959, NBC), the lighthearted TV adaptation of the classic film series, with Peter Lawford and Phyllis Kirk in the William Powell and Myrna Loy roles; longtime MGM musical director Johnny Green had written the original series theme. But Richard Diamond put Rugolo on the television scoring map. Rugolo, who was also West Coast musical director for Mercury Records, turned the Richard

Diamond score into a jazz album to rival the Gunn records in both perfor- COP AND DETECTIVE SHOWS mance and sound quality. Hiring Rugolo to score Richard Diamond was, surprisingly, Janssen’s 43 idea. “I was a bachelor then,” Rugolo said, “and we went to ball games together. We were buddies, and besides, he liked my work. He had all my albums; he was a big jazz lover.” Rugolo used an average of 12 musicians on Richard Diamond, including, like Mancini on Gunn, some of the West Coast’s finest jazz soloists. Unlike Gunn, however, Rugolo took offbeat chances with an occasional cello or oboe solo. Unfortunately, it didn’t last. As Richard Diamond entered its fourth season of production, Four Star, in a cost-​cutting move, chose to create new library music for all of its shows and record it overseas. Rugolo’s publishing partner, songwriter Jimmy McHugh (“I’m in the Mood for Love”), owned all rights to the Rugolo score, which was recorded in Los Angeles. The two factions could not come to terms on future uses of the Rugolo music, so when Richard Diamond returned with new episodes for the 1959–​1960 season, the animated titles remained but Rugolo’s music was gone. In its place was a theme that Richard Shores (1917–​2001) had written for the Four Star library, a staccato piece—​aptly titled “Nervous”—​ for percussion and brass, followed by a tenor sax solo. The same music would later become the teaser theme for the dramatic anthology The Dick Powell Show (1961–​1963, NBC). Out of 64 episodes of Richard Diamond, Private Detective, only 18 featured Rugolo scores. Yet it’s Rugolo’s music that fans associate with the series, and rightly so. Back at Revue, the jazz trend continued with Staccato (1959–​1960, NBC), starring actor-​director John Cassavetes in the unlikely role of Johnny Staccato, jazz pianist-​turned-​private eye. Between assignments, Staccato hung out at Waldo’s, a Greenwich Village club where he often sat in with the house band. As he explained in the pilot: “I put my musicians’ union card in mothballs five years ago, when it dawned on me that my talent was an octave lower than my ambition. So while my heart is still on the bandstand, I pay for the groceries away from the piano.” Music was such an integral part of the series that composer Elmer Bernstein (1922–​2004) was involved from the beginning. Bernstein was a natural for Staccato, having drawn wide attention to the dramatic possibilities of jazz with his innovative score for the movie The Man with the Golden Arm, following it up with a darker jazz score for Sweet Smell of Success (1957). In fact, Bernstein had written a jazz theme for an unsuccessful Revue pilot, Take Five, in early 1958. But Staccato became Bernstein’s contribution to the trend in television and, like its predecessors, it spawned an outstanding album of music from the series. Bernstein’s frantic theme reflected the title character, “a man who lives very hard and fast, with a tremendous amount of vitality and energy,” he said, a hard-​driving piece in the unusual time signature of 5/​4 (written and

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recorded, incidentally, months before the Dave Brubeck Quartet released its famous “Take Five,” which would gain attention for its own jazz application of 5/​4). He used three different bands on the Staccato episodes he scored from mid-​1959 through early 1960: a small combo consisting of as few as five players, especially for music played by the band at Waldo’s; a mid-​sized band that added trumpets, trombones, and reeds; and a large group that featured as many as 30 players (including saxophones, French horns, tuba, and extra percussion). The original main-​ title sequence involved animation of crudely drawn piano keys, with Cassavetes’s face appearing in the framework to Bernstein’s swinging saxophones and screaming trumpets. Low ratings, however, led the producers to retitle the series Johnny Staccato and replace it with action-​oriented visuals of Cassavetes punching his fist through glass and firing his revolver at the camera to the tune of a fast-​moving piano figure. One of the few unique aspects of Staccato was on-​screen billing for the musicians who both played on the score and were sometimes seen at Waldo’s. M Squad’s Johnny Williams, on piano, was featured in the pilot. The same Johnny Williams was responsible for another of the era’s great private-​eye jazz scores: Checkmate (1960–​1962, CBS). Checkmate was a one-​hour detective series, also from Revue, created by crime novelist Eric Ambler. Anthony George, Doug McClure, and Sebastian Cabot played the principals at the San Francisco agency of Checkmate Inc.—​ in Ambler’s words, “the men who do the peculiar work of manipulation necessary for the prevention of death by violence.” Atmospheric and often intriguing, Checkmate was the class of the genre at that time, and it gave Williams his first opportunity to musically carry an entire series by himself. John Towner Williams was born in New York in 1932. He moved with his family to California in 1948, although he returned to New York for studies at Juilliard after serving in the Air Force. His father, Johnny Williams, was a well-​known drummer who was part of Raymond Scott’s Quintette in the 1930s. Williams began his film-​studio work in 1956 as a pianist, both for composer Alfred Newman at 20th Century-​Fox and later on staff in the Columbia Pictures orchestra, doing occasional orchestration for composers Morris Stoloff, Dimitri Tiomkin, and Adolph Deutsch. From 1958, he was under contract as a composer at Revue, where his earliest assignments were M Squad, Bachelor Father, and various episodes of Wagon Train, Tales of Wells Fargo, and General Electric Theater. Checkmate, however, “was my first responsibility as a show,” Williams recalled, and was Wilson’s “expression of confidence in me. It meant that I had to produce a lot more music than I had been used to doing, and had to be on the [scoring] stage every week. Maybe he thought I would be most comfortable with that, because it was a kind of jazz-​oriented score,” Williams said.

In fact, Williams’s main-​title theme for Checkmate was arguably the most arresting of the period. Set against a striking visual pattern of swirling liquid shapes and shades, the theme’s blaring brass over a driving ostinato for electric guitar, bass, and percussion set the viewer on edge from the start. “The band on the main-​title session was probably eight brass with some winds, maybe as many as 20 musicians,” Williams recalled. “But the episodes were done with a small group; I think I had two flutes, two horns and two trombones, percussion and keyboard, [an average of] six or eight musicians. Shelly Manne was the percussionist, and he could always be relied upon for imaginative sounds.” Williams even convinced Wilson to record the format music (main and end titles and short “bumpers” for pre-​and post-​commercial show identifications) at Western Studios in Hollywood, which Williams felt “would give us the brilliant jazz sound that we needed.” Williams individually scored every one of that first season’s 36 hour-​ long episodes (plus three in the second season). He developed some of his first-​season themes into a Columbia soundtrack album; its superb big-​band charts and dreamy dance music resulted in a Grammy nomination as outstanding film or TV score of 1961. Several months later, drummer Manne even did his own small-​combo Checkmate LP, consisting of extended jazz improvisations on seven of Williams’s original themes. The record albums multiplied during this period. Nelson Riddle created only the theme and a handful of dramatic cues for The Untouchables (1959–​1963, ABC), yet he cleverly wrote an entire album when the series became a hit. Riddle’s music for producer Quinn Martin’s ultraviolent drama about G-​man Eliot Ness (played by Robert Stack), and his Walter Winchell–​ narrated, Depression-​ era battle against organized crime in

JAZZ ARTISTS TAKE ON TELEVISION After Count Basie wrote the M Squad theme in 1958, the race was on to sign other outstanding jazz artists to compose television scores. MGM may have scored the greatest coup of all when Duke Ellington agreed to compose the music for the pilot of The Asphalt Jungle (1961, ABC). Ellington (1899–​1974) had dabbled in movie scores, writing Anatomy of a Murder (1959) and receiving an Oscar nomination for Paris Blues (1961). The Asphalt Jungle, a cop-​show retooling of the 1950 film classic, was Ellington’s only foray into writing for dramatic television. Jack Warden, Arch Johnson, and Bill Smith starred in this adaptation, co-​developed by W. R. Burnett (who wrote the original novel), which ran for just 13 episodes.

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Ellington wrote 15 minutes of music for the one-​ hour pilot, which was recorded with his own 17-​ piece ensemble. The band came in (from Las Vegas, where Ellington was performing) for a single recording date at MGM on April 25, 1960. Experienced film composers normally record a quarter hour of music in one three-​hour session; Ellington and the band, apparently accustomed to more leisurely record dates, took 11 hours and went into the early morning of the next day. Recalled MGM music supervisor Harry Lojewski: “Frankly, there were a lot of problems with Duke’s score. They were very disorganized. They finally had to lock the doors of the scoring stage because every time they’d call a ‘10’ [the 10-​minute break required for every hour of recording by union musicians], the band would go to the bar next door. Finally some

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Chicago, relied on dark brass colors. As played over the end-​credit roll—​a drawing of desperate-​looking characters against a cityscape backdrop—​ it was almost dirge-​like, as if Ness were leading the gangsters to the death house. In fact, recalled Desilu music supervisor Jack Hunsaker, “there was a tremendous amount of track music in those first few years [of the series]. We relied on Capitol Records almost exclusively for a great deal of the underscore.” Most of it was actually written for the series by Capitol library stalwarts William Loose and Jack Cookerly. “Bill and I wrote a lot of packages specifically for The Untouchables,” Cookerly said, including Dixie tunes for the speakeasies and stark, dramatic music for the score: “timpani rolls, low trombones, and forget the melody except for certain cues. Really slam-​bang.” Dave Kahn, who had created the early library for Alfred Hitchcock Presents, went on to compose the theme for the original TV version of Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958–​1959, syndicated) starring Darren McGavin. As before, it was commissioned by entrepreneur Dave Gordon and recorded in Munich. But the success of private-​eye jazz scores led to a quick deal for an RCA album, which Kahn wrote and Skip Martin arranged into a first-​rate big-​band “soundtrack.” The music was never heard in the series. (Spillane even penned the jacket notes: “These sounds of violence fit Mike just like his all-​seasonal trenchcoat: crisp, strong and pulsating, yet with an underlying streak of sentiment.”)

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Warner Bros., meanwhile, took a very different tack. “Cool” was the byword, with the success of 77 Sunset Strip (1958–​1964, ABC) and its several companion series: Hawaiian Eye (1959–​1963, ABC); Bourbon Street

of them came in and set up a little bar behind their music stands. Many cues were done, but Duke didn’t understand what the timing was all about. So during the final dubbing of the pilot, there had to be a lot of editing.” Less than 11 minutes of the Ellington score survived in the final version, and only his theme was retained when the series went into production. Calvin Jackson (1919–​1985), a Black composer who had worked with MGM composer Georgie Stoll and was a fine jazz pianist, wrote five original scores. The remainder of the series was tracked with the earlier Jackson music and various cues from earlier MGM productions and the Capitol music library. Regardless of the problems associated with the pilot, Ellington’s music was the single most interesting element of the entire show, which went on

the air a year later as a summer replacement series. The main-​ title sequence consisted of helicopter shots of a big city at night, gradually panning down to the words “The Asphalt Jungle” painted on a well-​ lit rooftop. Ellington’s own distinctive piano could be heard over the main and end titles, and the unmistakable solo sounds of Johnny Hodges on alto saxophone, Harry Carney on baritone, and Jimmy Hamilton on clarinet were audible throughout the pilot score. The only music that composer André Previn (1929–​ 2019) wrote for American TV was for The Aquanauts (1960–​1961, CBS), which producer Ivan Tors (Sea Hunt) made for Ziv and focused on California salvage divers played by Keith Larsen and Jeremy Slate. Previn, a veteran film composer (Bad Day at Black Rock, Elmer Gantry) who eventually won four

Beat (1959–​1960, ABC); Surfside 6 (1960–​1962, ABC); and The Roaring Twenties (1960–​1962, ABC). 77 Sunset Strip starred Efrem Zimbalist Jr. and Roger Smith as Hollywood private eyes Stu Bailey and Jeff Spencer, whose tony offices were located on, in the words of the Jerry Livingston–​Mack David theme, “the street that wears the fancy label, that’s glorified in song and fable.” Also in the cast was Edd Byrnes as Kookie, the parking-​lot attendant at the nightclub next door. Long-​haired, ever-​primping hepcat Kookie’s popularity with the teenage crowd resulted in his joining the firm the next season. In Hawaiian Eye, set in Honolulu but filmed on the Warners backlot, Anthony Eisley and Robert Conrad were the detectives, with Connie Stevens as a lounge singer and Poncie Ponce as a cabbie; Grant Williams later joined the cast. Bourbon Street Beat was set in New Orleans with Richard Long and Andrew Duggan as the investigators, while Miami Beach was the setting for Surfside 6, with Troy Donahue, Van Williams, Lee Patterson, and Diane McBain in the leading roles. Only The Roaring Twenties tried something different, with a setting of New York City during the Prohibition era (but even that was obviously the result of the success of The Untouchables), with Dorothy Provine as a singer and Donald May and Rex Reason as newspaper reporters. All five shows prominently featured theme songs written by composer Jerry Livingston (1909–​ 1987) and lyricist Mack David (1912–​ 1994). The two had won acclaim, and an Academy Award nomination, for the songs of Walt Disney’s Cinderella (1950), including “A Dream Is a Wish Your Heart Makes” and “Bibbidy-​Bobbidi-​Boo,” and would continue to collaborate, again receiving an Oscar nomination for their ballad in Cat Ballou (1965). Separately, Livingston had a giant hit with “Mairzy

Oscars, was also one of L.A.’s finest jazz pianists. His lively, big-​band-​styled Aquanauts theme was retained even when the failing series was revamped and retitled Malibu Run at midseason. (TV Guide featured him in a 1961 story about music for TV but, when asked about the series years later, Previn had no memory of writing or recording it.) Meanwhile, top jazz trumpeter Maynard Ferguson (1928–​2006)—​who had often played on, but never composed, Hollywood soundtracks—​ wrote and played what Billboard later called “wildly swinging stuff” for Straightaway (1961–​1962, ABC), about race-​car designers played by Brian Kelly and John Ashley. Following the commercial paths of Peter Gunn, M Squad, and Staccato, a soundtrack album soon materialized, but the show suffered from poor ratings and the album

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quickly disappeared. (Ellington released a 45 rpm single of Asphalt Jungle, but no recording of Previn’s Aquanauts theme was released.) Mr. Broadway (1964, CBS) was not, strictly speaking, a cop show. But its star, former Peter Gunn actor Craig Stevens, played sophisticated Manhattan press agent Mike Bell, who regularly became involved with shady schemes and underworld types. Jazz great Dave Brubeck musically enhanced this short-​ lived creation of writer Garson Kanin. Brubeck (1920–​ 2012), whose unusual time signatures and sophisticated harmonies had made his Dave Brubeck Quartet a favorite of record buyers (particularly with the popular hit “Take Five” in 1959), was an early collaborator in the development of Mr. Broadway, starting work in the spring of 1964, several months before the series debut.

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 Warner Bros. songwriters Mack David (left) and Jerry Livingston.

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Doats” in the 1940s, and David later penned the words to Vikki Carr’s late-​1960s hit “It Must Be Him.” 77 Sunset Strip was their longest-​running prime-​time series. Performed by a small chorus and punctuated by finger-​snapping—​an aural hint that these dapper young men were “with it”—​the boogie-​woogie piano and jazzy brass sounds were heard not just in the main and end titles, but often several times during the hour. As Livingston recounted years

“I was reluctant to become involved in a medium unfamiliar to me,” Brubeck wrote in the liner notes to his 1965 LP Jazz Impressions of New York, consisting entirely of music written for Mr. Broadway. “I did not want to write fragmented themes and hours of cues which did not develop into tunes. Musical producer Robert Israel assured me . . . that I should feel free to write full-​length tunes from which cues and other background material could be developed,” Brubeck added. “My assignment, basically, was to capture the rhythm and atmosphere of New York City.” Israel ran the music operation for producer David Susskind’s Talent Associates, which made Mr. Broadway. So it fell to him not only to sign Brubeck but, since the composer had not previously written for film, also find a way to make it work. First came the raw material: “He was like a little boy with a

balloon toy,” Israel recalled. “He got involved to the point where I couldn’t stop him from writing melodies. I spent many hours with him going over sketches, a lot of which I knew would be inappropriate, but you couldn’t dampen his enthusiasm. The great inspiration was signing Oliver Nelson to the project.” Nelson (1932–​ 1975) was the brilliant jazz saxophonist who became, in the early 1960s, a well-​ known composer-​ arranger. His “Stolen Moments” is a jazz standard and his large-​ scale orchestral works, including Afro-​American Sketches (1961), The Kennedy Dream (1967), and Jazzhattan Suite (1967), incorporated both jazz and concert-​ music influences. “It was a chance to get my feet wet in TV,” Nelson said in 1968, “and actually it involved some challenging work. They would give me a melodic line written by Brubeck and ask me to construct and

later: “We saw the [pilot] film and went to work. With that private-​eye [setting], I felt it had to have a blues feel. The finger snaps came because there was an empty space in the music and we didn’t know what to put in—​so I snapped my fingers and said, ‘that’ll do.’ ” For Hawaiian Eye, Livingston and David reminded viewers that “the soft island breeze brings you strange melodies . . . exotic mysteries” (against a hilariously improbable visual backdrop of Eisley, Conrad, and company “surfing” off Waikiki). Bourbon Street Beat had a blues-​rock feel, while Surfside 6 was a cha-​cha, and you could dance the Charleston to The Roaring Twenties. All were memorable, all were right for their shows, and four of the five spawned record albums (Surfside 6 being the exception, although there was a single). Jack Halloran was credited with the arrangements for television. Warner Bros. bucked the trend, however, in its indifference to the growing number of original scores for episodic television. For the first two seasons of the studio’s venture into television (1955–​1957), original music was consistently written and recorded for series such as Cheyenne and Conflict. But for six seasons starting in the fall of 1957—​which encompassed the entire runs of most of its popular shows, both westerns and private-​eye series, until the final season of 77 Sunset Strip—​Warners relied primarily on library music acquired from outside sources or scores from earlier Warner productions. The main themes and a series of cues (act openers and closers, mostly) based on those themes were newly recorded for each show, but the majority of dramatic underscore was supplied by composers Paul Sawtell (1906–​1971) and Bert Shefter (1904–​ 1999) for three seasons beginning in 1958–​1959. As the company Music Scores Inc., they were given “musical supervision” screen credit and supplied libraries of cues for tracking by music editors.

Dave Brubeck (left) and Oliver Nelson at a Mr. Broadway session.

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orchestrate a love song or some other kind of theme out of it.” Explained Israel: “Dave wrote his material in song form, which would then be fragmented, inverted, the harmonies changed or altered to suit adaptation into cues, transitions, and background [by Nelson]. We drilled Oliver in terms of procedures and lengths. A lot of the stuff was improvised, in terms of timings, in the control room. I would say, ‘Listen, cut this off at bar 24 and give me a button at the end.’ And I would know that that would be a 30-​second cue which otherwise I couldn’t edit out because it wasn’t designed that way.” Brubeck noted that “the locale assignments ranged from nightclubs to churches, Greenwich Village to Harlem, Japanese to Latin. Ideas came easily from every source—​ words, situations,

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Supervising music editor Erma Levin used material that Sawtell and Shefter had composed (sometimes specifically for the shows, sometimes from old movies) and tracked it into the series wherever possible. However, for unusual situations, as well as to meet musicians-​union regulations about scoring a specific number of hours for each series, Los Angeles recording sessions were also held for music written by a trio of Warner regulars. Levin explained the process: “I would read a batch of scripts and get a generic idea of what they felt like. And then do what I call prototype timing: descriptions of scenes as if they had come off film, with intervals for throwing a punch, and landing a punch. . . . I would hand them out to all the composers: Frank Perkins, Michael Heindorf, Howard Jackson. All of them would be given the same piece, the same timings, and each one would write his mental creation [based on the written descriptions]. And we would have them performed.” That material, too, would go into the library. The exceptions generally involved the use of visible source music, such as the Frankie Ortega Trio at Dino’s in 77 Sunset Strip, The Baron’s piano in Bourbon Street Beat, the standards sung by Connie Stevens in Hawaiian Eye, and the Pinky & the Playboys music performed by Dorothy Provine and company for The Roaring Twenties. They were all prerecorded; Livingston and David supplied occasional incidental songs for the routines. David even served as a producer on the studio lot during the 1959–​1960 season. The Sawtell-​Shefter agreement expired in the fall of 1961, but the Warner series continued with virtually no original music on a weekly basis; 77 Sunset Strip, for example, was tracked from a variety of sources within the Warner music catalog. Cues from old film scores like The Big Sleep (1946) and A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) often surfaced, as did

places, characters—​all stamped with the personality of the city itself.” Brubeck’s involvement was deemed so important that he received main-​title credit: “original music by Dave Brubeck.” (The end titles further explained that the score had been “orchestrated and conducted by Oliver Nelson.”) The theme, with melody played by alto saxophonist Paul Desmond, was unmistakably Brubeck, and was set to silhouettes of the Manhattan skyline. After the theme, Brubeck penned four related countermelodies, he explained: “an eerie 12-​ tone melody, two blues themes, and a lighthearted baroque melody. These, played either alone or simultaneously with the original theme, are the backbone of the television score.” For Mike Bell’s Japanese assistant Toki (Lani Miyazaki), Brubeck

wrote a colorful theme that combined “Western beat and pseudo-​O riental sounds.” Brubeck’s quartet could regularly be heard performing the source-​music jazz in various episodes. According to Israel, Brubeck did not play on the larger orchestral sessions but was present to supervise the recording. The show was a critical and commercial disaster and an early casualty of the 1964–​1965 season, but Brubeck managed to score a 1964 Grammy nomination for “original jazz composition” for his theme.

bits from David Buttolph’s original scores for the Conflict and anthology series of the 1955–​1957 seasons. There was one notable exception, and that was Hawaiian Eye. The legendary Max Steiner (1888–​1971)—​composer of literally hundreds of film scores, including such classics as Gone With the Wind, King Kong, and Casablanca—​wrote, uncredited, a small library of music for this grade-​ B private-​eye series. Steiner cues appeared with surprising regularity throughout the 1961–​1962 season, bearing such generic titles as “Hawaii #12,” “Hawaii #19,” “Love Scene #1,” “Misterioso #10,” “Fight #2,” “Tiptoe,” and “Murder.” In his unpublished autobiography, Steiner discussed the experience with characteristic humor: “One day I received a cue sheet which said, ‘The Lurline enters Honolulu. We would like to have a majestic approach to this arrival. Try and give us some Hawaiian flavor and at the same time make it very majestic.’ The length of the sequence was five and a half seconds. The orchestra was as follows: one trumpet, one trombone, one horn, one piano, two violins, one cello, one drummer, four woodwinds, four saxes, and we doubled other instruments. How you can create a majestic arrival with an orchestra like that and give it Hawaiian flavor, all in five and a half seconds, I wouldn’t know.” That may explain why he wrote a library of longer cues and left it up to the music editors to track such sequences. For the final season of 77 Sunset Strip in September 1963, new producer Jack Webb (of Dragnet fame) dumped its famous song in favor of a noirish instrumental by 1950s orchestra bandleader Bob Thompson (1924–​2013). For two memorable seasons, a police captain regularly rolled up to a murder scene in his chauffeur-​driven Rolls-​Royce to a sexy alto saxophone and a breathy female voice whispering, “It’s Burke’s Law. . . .” The lighthearted series (1963–​1965, ABC) starred Gene Barry as the wealthy homicide detective, whose cases routinely involved an all-​star cast of suspects. The theme was by Herschel Burke Gilbert, who was then supervising the music of all of Dick Powell’s Four Star productions, including Burke’s Law. Gilbert also wrote the theme for Robert Taylor’s The Detectives (1959–​1962, ABC/​NBC). Gilbert later recalled that producer Aaron Spelling wasn’t too sure at first about interrupting the musical flow with a woman’s voice. But eventually, Gilbert said, “they had a contest. They were bringing girls to the studio by threes and fours, and they would choose the most sensuous of the voices. And it paid off. Everybody knew that theme.” Many episodes of Burke’s Law were scored by Gilbert’s former orchestrator Joseph Mullendore (1914–​1990), who had written the Racket Squad theme back in the 1950s. Mullendore got his own show when Burke’s Law spun off Honey West (1965–​1966, ABC), a half-​hour starring Anne Francis as a private detective. Mullendore’s brassy, jazzy theme was set to a screen filled with beehive-​style hexagonal portraits of Francis, which

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then cut to a series of action and glamour shots of the elegant private eye, her pet ocelot, and sidekick Sam (John Ericson). Mullendore’s Honey West LP was one of the best big-​band television soundtracks of the period. Quincy Jones burst onto the scene with his brash pilot score, and subsequent series work, on Ironside (1967–​1975, NBC). He had started in TV in the previous season, with lively, funny scores for the Will Hutchins sitcom Hey Landlord (1966–​1967, NBC), but it was on Ironside that his reputation, particularly for applying jazz in a dramatic context, was cemented. Jones (b. 1933) was born in Chicago but grew up in Seattle. A trumpeter who toured with the Lionel Hampton band, he began arranging in the mid-​1950s, studied in Paris with classical theorist Nadia Boulanger, and by 1964 had become the first Black vice president of a major record label (Mercury). Well known as an arranger-​conductor for artists such as Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald, he began a move into films with an acclaimed score for The Pawnbroker (1965) and an Oscar-​nominated one for the chilling In Cold Blood (1967). Ironside’s two-​ hour TV-​ movie pilot established the premise: San Francisco’s outspoken chief of detectives Robert Ironside (Raymond Burr), paralyzed by a sniper’s bullet, survived to find his would-​be assassin and returned, wheelchair bound, to work with a special team including a former juvenile delinquent, a detective sergeant, and a well-​ to-​do policewoman. Recalled Jones in 1972: “I played straight off the

Quincy Jones conducting in the late 1960s.

title. He was a rough dude, a metallic, strong-​principled cat. I just went straight with the emotional image.” So metallic was this image, in fact, that the composer used a cimbalom, whose sharp, percussive sound is the result of metal striking metal. The score was heavily jazz-​influenced and highly dramatic, setting the stage for the series that would debut that fall. Jones, who had initially planned to score the entire series, wound up writing just two episode scores (plus a song with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman for a later episode), and turned over the remainder to other writers. “It was just too hard, it was too much music every week,” Jones said later. “I was going for the throat. You scored on a Thursday; on Friday you were spotting the next one for the next week.” Although Jones continued to use a cimbalom in his episode scores, he drew far more attention with the brand-​new sound that he introduced in his 40-​second main-​title theme: Ironside was the first series to use a Moog synthesizer. The composer, searching for a tone that would imitate a police siren, had been introduced to the Moog by electronica pioneer Paul Beaver and found it useful for the opening seconds of his series main title. There was little resistance to this innovation, he recalled, because executives “didn’t know what the hell it was.” The composer even made his acting debut in one of his two early episodes, “Eat, Drink and Be Buried,” playing a hip jazz-​club owner. Guest star Lee Grant could be heard, in the teaser, remarking to a cocktail-​ party guest that “Quincy Jones really turns me on” while the composer’s Oscar-​nominated song from Banning (1967) played in the background. Jones’s multifaceted Ironside signature—​ to which the main-​ title visuals, all in shades of red, black, and white that first year, were edited—​ exemplified his philosophy of writing television themes. “You need a variety of elements,” he said in 1972. “I try to get a bass pattern that will work collectively or individually, also two or three accompaniment figures that are highly distinguishable. It’s designed so you can put all the elements together. You’ve got all different parts that are musically related in some way from an interval standpoint, and then the intervals have a relationship, so the material is organic.” Jones, initially warned by some anonymous executive against writing “too much street music” for the series, “tamed down” his theme for the TV version, but reimagined it with a thrilling, straight-​ahead jazz arrangement of Ironside on his Grammy-​winning 1971 LP, Smackwater Jack. Universal acquired the rights to the newly recorded track and adopted an abbreviated version that fall, and in subsequent seasons, for the series main title. Apart from Jones, the first season of Ironside included scores by Oliver Nelson (who had moved to Los Angeles to pursue studio work) and fellow jazz greats Benny Carter and Benny Golson. Beginning with the second season, Nelson became the primary composer, with Marty Paich

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(1925–​1995) taking over the series for the sixth and seventh seasons, and Nelson returning for the eighth. Paich, a highly respected West Coast arranger and bandleader, recalled being given complete freedom by producer Cy Chermak. “He loved the sound of the dectet, which was a sound that I had used behind Mel [Torme]: a few horns—​a trumpet, an alto, a trombone—​and then maybe four or five rhythm players. That gave me the jazz feeling; I didn’t want to go into strings and legitimate woodwinds because that wasn’t the kind of score it was.” In addition, Paich collaborated with his son David Paich (later a member of the rock group Toto) on a number of original songs that often opened episodes and became the basis for the dramatic underscore, a practice that was highly unusual for television at that time. Marty Paich received the series’ only two Emmy nominations for music: one, for his scoring of the 1972–​1973 season; and a second, which he won with David, for the song “Light the Way,” composed for an episode in the 1973–​1974 season. Hawaii Five-​0 (1968–​1980, CBS) went in a completely different direction. Composer Morton Stevens (1929–​1991) had written a memorable theme for the police drama 87th Precinct (1961–​1962, NBC) but created an entirely new sound for Hawaii Five-​0. Five-​0 concerned a special investigative unit based in Honolulu and headed by tough, single-​minded Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord), who reported only to the governor of Hawaii. Rather than tackling routine crimes, McGarrett and his team were called in only on the most baffling, politically sensitive, or logistically complicated cases. The result was a highly contemporary, rarely routine hour that was filmed entirely on location in the fiftieth state and became, for many years, the longest-​running police show in the history of television. Some of its phraseology even entered the American lexicon, such as “Book ’em, Danno,” McGarrett’s barked order to his second-​in-​command (James MacArthur), and Lord’s voiceover after the weekly preview of next week’s show: “Be there. Aloha.” Stevens, a Juilliard graduate who spent much of the 1950s as musical director for Sammy Davis Jr., was a television-​scoring veteran, having worked on Thriller, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and other series at Revue and MGM. He also happened to be a poker-​playing buddy of Five-​0 creator Leonard Freeman, and, since 1965, had been director of music for CBS West Coast operations. He was therefore in the ideal position to score the pilot (since it was not only Freeman’s production, but was partly financed by CBS Entertainment). The composer recalled that Freeman originally described the show to him this way: “It’s about a guy who’s as hard as a rock. And he’s living on a rock.” Stevens interpreted Freeman’s rather crude sexual parallel to mean that he wanted the music to suggest a “macho strength,” and,

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Morton Stevens conducting a CBS score in the 1970s.

after one false start (nixed by his favorite sounding board, his wife Annie, a former singer with bandleader Claude Thornhill), came up with the dynamic, unforgettable theme. “It took 11 minutes to get the basics down,” Stevens said. “The simplicity of it, and the driving force of instruments rather than simply the drums, made it into a popular rhythmic entity. With two trumpets playing the melody, and two trumpets playing the same melody an octave lower, it sounded like a blunderbuss coming at you.” Freeman, in his liner notes for Stevens’s own Capitol LP of first-​season Five-​0 music, said he insisted on “no ukeleles or steel guitars or falsetto singers or overused bongos,” a demand that Stevens later confirmed. “He didn’t want the typical Hawaiian sound,” the composer said, “so I found a new Hawaiian sound that Hawaii didn’t know it had.” The final triumph was the fusion of the music with editor Reza S. Badiyi’s main-​title visuals, a montage that is still one of television’s most impressive. The teaser smash-​cut to a giant wave rolling in to the sound of Stevens’s drumbeat. Scenes of the surf, the Honolulu setting, and the Hawaiian people were cut in precise time to the beat; a spectacular sunset and the gyrating hips of a hula dancer were superbly matched to the rhythm of the theme. The Five-​0 pilot featured 45 musicians, 14 of whom were brass players for that powerful sound. The average episode was scored with 18 to 20 musicians, Stevens said.

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While still juggling his administrative duties as head of CBS music (producing other composers’ recording sessions, and assigning composers to various in-​ house productions), Stevens managed to score seven episodes of the first season of Five-​0 and three dozen more over the course of the next 11 seasons. Literally dozens of others were tracked with music Stevens had written for earlier episodes. Jack Lord, who effectively assumed the reins of the show after Freeman’s death in 1973, demanded and got the composer’s commitment to score at least a few shows every year. The series theme became a pop hit because of an unexpected connection: CBS mixing engineer Ted Keep told his friend Mel Taylor, drummer for The Ventures, that a new cop show was sporting something of a rock ’n’ roll vibe. The band met with Stevens, recorded the tune in April 1968, the single was released in September, and it hit Number 4 on the Billboard charts in May 1969. Stevens invited Taylor and two of his fellow Ventures to play on a first-​season, drug-​themed episode called “Up Tight,” creating some of the most far-​out sounds in late 1960s TV (and included in the Five-​0 soundtrack album that Taylor subsequently produced). Stevens featured The Ventures on his theme for the Freeman-​produced Storefront Lawyers (1970–​1971, CBS) which was also rhythmically driven, but the show didn’t catch on and the single went nowhere. Three of Stevens’s nine Emmy nominations were for Hawaii Five-​0, and he won two of those. The first nod was for the two-​hour 1968 pilot; the winners were for “A Thousand Pardons, You’re Dead,” the opening installment of the second season, and what may be Stevens’s masterpiece, the sixth-​season opener, “Hookman,” in 1973. (In an instance that has never been repeated in the history of the Emmys for music, all three nominees for the 1973–​1974 season were Hawaii Five-​0 episodes, including one each for Stevens’s fellow composers Bruce Broughton and Don B. Ray.) “Nothing in TV came close to Hawaii Five-​0,” recalled Broughton. “Those scores would just knock you out of your seat. They were so inventive, so energetic, so cleverly conceived. I never got tired of listening to Mort’s music.” Stevens even appeared as a heroin-​addicted musician in a third-​season episode, “Trouble in Mind,” with singer Nancy Wilson. And when CBS decided that Khigh Dhiegh—​who played McGarrett’s nemesis Wo Fat on Five-​0—​was popular enough to merit his own series (as a private eye in San Francisco’s Chinatown), Stevens again came up with a memorable theme, deploying Asian instruments in a Western musical context. The theme for the short-​lived Khan! (1975, CBS) had an aura of mystery but a highly contemporary sound, with a rock ’n’ roll beat. The classic Stevens theme was declared among the must-​have elements of the Hawaii Five-​0 reboot (2010–​2020, CBS) that starred Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan. Composer Brian Tyler insisted on trying to recapture the original magic. “That theme is so iconic, it’s in the culture,” Tyler said. “If you take it out of the instrumentation and change

it up, you might have interesting music, but it isn’t Hawaii Five-​0.” So COP AND DETECTIVE he unearthed Stevens’s original 1968 arrangement, analyzed it, and re- SHOWS corded it anew. The main-​title visuals were cut to Tyler’s recording of the 57 theme with 35 players (including Tyler himself on drums). Stevens’s other great cop-​show theme was for Police Woman (1974–​ 1978, NBC), which starred Angie Dickinson as Sgt. Pepper Anderson, an undercover detective for the Los Angeles Police Department’s criminal conspiracy division. For this one, Stevens opened with a downward-​ spiraling synthesizer sound, simulating a police siren (although quite different from Jones’s use of the same instrument on Ironside) into what the composer described as a “heavy Brazilian beat.” And, in an in-​joke probably noticed only by a handful of music buffs, Stevens took his friend Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for the film Our Man Flint (1966) and, in the composer’s words, “turned it upside down and backwards” to create the primary melody. Because Police Woman was produced at Columbia, across town from Stevens’s home base of CBS, he did far fewer episodes (approximately 15) than he did for the original Five-​0. Dickinson returned to TV as a private eye in Cassie & Co. (1982, NBC) whose main distinction was its title sequence, more than a minute of footage of Dickinson’s famous legs set to a sexy theme by jazz saxophonist Grover Washington Jr. (1943–​1999). One of the most distinguished composers in films made a brief sojourn into television that produced two of the finest themes ever written for the medium, both of them for the law-​and-​order field. Bronislau Kaper (1902–​1983) established the musical formats for Arrest and Trial (1963–​ 1964, ABC) and The FBI (1965–​1974, ABC). Kaper spent 28 years at MGM, scoring such pictures as Green Dolphin Street (1947), The Red Badge of Courage (1951), and Mutiny on the Bounty (1962), winning an Academy Award for the score of Lili (1953). He was also a brilliant pianist, which may partially explain his Rachmaninoff-​ concerto-​style theme, with its beautiful piano solo, for Arrest and Trial. Revue had made a success of its 90-​minute western The Virginian, and so tried a similar-​length show about the criminal justice system. The first 45 minutes of Arrest and Trial focused on the crime and the investigation (with Ben Gazzara as the police detective), while the second 45 involved the accused’s day in court (with Chuck Connors as a public defender). The prestige that Revue attached to this series was especially evident in its musical treatment. Not only did Kaper compose the theme and score two episodes, but the equally gifted film composer Franz Waxman (1906–​ 1967) contributed three more, all in the fall of 1963. Waxman saw television less as a creative challenge than as an economic necessity. Waxman founded, and personally underwrote, the Los Angeles International Music Festival, which annually presented the best of contemporary concert music on the West Coast. “The income that he

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derived from working in television went to pay for the music festival,” the composer’s son, John W. Waxman, explained. Arrest and Trial (progenitor of the 1990s hit Law & Order) was short-​ lived. But Kaper enjoyed a long-​running hit series in The FBI. Quinn Martin, who had turned The Untouchables into a hit, by now had his own production company and a solid ABC series in The Fugitive. For The FBI, Quinn Martin music supervisor John Elizalde approached his old friend Kaper, whom he had known during the 1950s at MGM. “Bronny always had a way of doing really high-​quality, institutional sorts of things, which is exactly what The FBI was,” Elizalde said. “That show seemed made to order for the Ford Motor Company. At that time, they were looking for an institutional icon that would destroy the Tin Lizzie concept. They wanted something really solid.” That was evident in the opening titles, a series of shots of Washington, D.C., landmarks, including the Capitol, the Washington Monument, and finally the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Kaper composed a theme of grandeur and dignity, befitting these symbols of United States government. He scored four episodes at the start of the first season; veteran studio orchestrator Leo Arnaud wrote two more. Dominic Frontiere, an old Elizalde friend and colleague, conducted all of these scores with an orchestra of as many as 42. Quinn Martin stayed in the cop-​show business throughout the 1970s. First came Dan August (1970–​1971, ABC) with Burt Reynolds as a

Patrick Williams (left) with Quinn Martin music supervisor John Elizalde.

young California cop, which had a jazz theme by Dave Grusin. Noted Elizalde: “Dave was right for the picture. There’s a freewheeling quality to his music.” Grusin added a touch of color with a buzz kalimba, an African percussion instrument. Things heated up considerably with Pat Williams’s music for Quinn Martin’s The Streets of San Francisco (1972–​1977, ABC), an hour-​long drama shot on location in the California city with Karl Malden and Michael Douglas as police partners. Williams was inspired by the frenetic main-​title visuals of San Francisco exteriors, according to Elizalde. “It was pretty hip for its time,” Williams said proudly. “I took a sound that I had used in some of the brass albums I had made in New York. To play the melody, there was a unison between the trumpets in the medium register and the trombones in a high register. The trombones being that high added this intensity. It had this real hot quality to it. The band loved to play it.” The Streets of San Francisco main title remains one of the most exciting themes ever written for television. Its clavinet, wild rhythm guitar, and tenor saxophone solo (together with the terrific location filming on San Francisco locations) helped energize Streets from its opening moments. One of the longest-​running of the Quinn Martin shows was the unlikely Barnaby Jones (1973–​1980, CBS), which cast Buddy Ebsen as a private eye who came out of retirement to solve his son’s murder and remained in business, with Lee Meriwether as his daughter-​in-​law and assistant. Equally unlikely was Elizalde’s choice of composer: Jerry Goldsmith, who hadn’t done a police procedural since The Lineup expanded to an hour (1958–​1959, CBS) and Cain’s Hundred (1961–​1962, NBC) fought crime with syndicate lawyer-​turned-​prosecutor Mark Richman. Goldsmith’s Barnaby Jones music almost didn’t happen. The offer coincided with a fallow period in the composer’s career when, despite five Academy Award nominations for his scores for films such as Planet of the Apes and Patton, he was receiving few motion-​picture assignments. So he agreed to attend a screening of the pilot. “I got out of there, and I called my agent,” Goldsmith later related. “And I said, ‘Marc, please get me out of this. This [show] is horrible.’ And he said, ‘Do it. You can do it in five days.’ ” So Goldsmith relented, composed the theme and pilot score, and—​over time—​walked away with the BMI royalties for a long-​running hit on network television. Goldsmith’s theme accompanied a graphic main-​title sequence in which the name “Barnaby Jones” pieced itself together, jigsaw-​puzzle style. Blaring French horns gave way to a theme for alto flutes and very prominent bass, over a fast-​moving rhythm section: music that, in one minute, conveyed more energy than the elderly detective displayed in eight seasons. Not long after, Goldsmith also wrote a very contemporary theme for the acclaimed, Joseph Wambaugh-​created anthology Police Story (1973–​1977, NBC); he only scored the pilot, yet his alternately hip

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(electric guitar, organ) and sophisticated music was tracked throughout its first season. For Quinn Martin shows, Elizalde matched composer to show time and again: John Parker (1926–​2013), whose tuba theme for Cannon (1971–​ 1976, CBS) annoyed the overweight star William Conrad; Johnny Mandel, whose vintage 1930s sound, complete with swinging clarinet solo, perfectly complemented the period private-​eye series Banyon (1972–​1973, NBC) starring Robert Forster; and Nelson Riddle, whose vaguely Latin beat for Caribe (1975, ABC) was appropriate for Miami-​based police lieutenant Stacy Keach. By the 1970s, crime shows had achieved a new sophistication. In the fall of 1971, one network began rotating three different 90-​minute detective series under a single title: the NBC Mystery Movie (1971–​1977), with a unique theme by Henry Mancini (see sidebar). Columbo (1971–​1978, NBC; 1989–​2003, ABC) started out as a one-​shot World Premiere movie, Prescription: Murder (1968). Peter Falk played the rumpled, seemingly confused but quietly brilliant Los Angeles police lieutenant to a jazzy score by Dave Grusin. But it was a second TV movie, Ransom for a Dead Man (1971), that sold the series. Its music was by Billy Goldenberg (1936–​2020), who had become a fixture at Universal. Brooklyn-​born Goldenberg began his career as a rehearsal pianist for the Broadway theater. He wrote an original musical based on Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine (which had a brief run in New York) and dance music for TV’s Hullabaloo before working as musical director on several TV specials starring Petula Clark, Ann-​Margret, and Elvis Presley. In late 1968, he became assistant to Universal music chief Stanley Wilson, scoring episodes of It Takes a Thief and The Name of the Game and landing several major TV-​movie assignments. For Ransom for a Dead Man, Goldenberg set out to write “a dark, madly passionate and beautiful theme” for murderess Lee Grant. Goldenberg’s approach set the style for the Columbo series to follow; he scored three of the first-​season episodes, including the first, “Murder by the Book,” which was directed by Steven Spielberg, and featured typewriter sounds integrated into the score; and “Lady in Waiting,” for which he received an Emmy nomination. Neither Goldenberg’s rich, haunting Ransom score nor his scores for the Columbo series featured a theme for the disheveled detective. “There are characters in films that you do not musicalize,” said the composer. “They do it all for themselves. You can’t musicalize an investigation. You can’t make Columbo funny because [Falk] is doing it already in the acting. There’s too much of the intellectual in Columbo to write music. He is his own music.” Yet when Universal received requests for a Columbo theme and recording artists expressed interest for detective-​ theme compilations,

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Billy Goldenberg conducting at Universal in the early 1970s.

music executives chose a jazzy 6/​4 tune that Goldenberg had written as Columbo’s introduction in Ransom and published it as the Columbo theme (even though Gil Mellé had written his own signature motif and used it in three first-​season scores). After that, Columbo episodes were treated as individual mysteries, each as a separate musical entity. In the 1973 episode “Any Old Port in a Storm,” the character was heard to hum the children’s tune “This Old Man” (“knick-​knack paddy-​whack . . .”) and, because of Falk’s fondness for the song, it began to recur even in the scores themselves, becoming a kind of unofficial Columbo theme (especially in the two-​hour ABC movies of the 1990s). Goldenberg went on to write three more memorable 1970s detective show themes: Banacek (1972–​1974, NBC), with George Peppard as a high-​priced Boston insurance investigator; Harry O (1974–​1976, ABC), the well-​liked David Janssen series about a world-​weary San Diego private detective; and Kojak (1973–​1978, CBS), which brought Telly Savalas to series television as a lollipop-​sucking New York City police lieutenant. Harry O was an outgrowth of the TV-​movie Smile Jenny, You’re Dead (1974), while Kojak was a spinoff of the acclaimed three-​hour docudrama The Marcus-​Nelson Murders (1973), which won Goldenberg another Emmy nomination (for a song he had written with lyricist Bob Russell). Goldenberg’s original Kojak theme was succeeded in its final season by a new, more upbeat one written by Kojak series composer John Cacavas (1930–​2014). The composer was an old friend of Savalas (and, like the

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actor, came from Greek roots) and insisted on Cacavas as often as possible in his film and TV projects. Cacavas’s best effort in the police genre, however, was probably his brassy theme for Eischied (1979–​1980, NBC) with Joe Don Baker as a cat-​loving New York City chief of detectives. Like Goldenberg, Dick DeBenedictis (b. 1935) was a Broadway dance-​ music arranger who came out from New York in 1971 to join the Universal Mystery Movie team. He scored the Richard Widmark Madigan episodes (1972–​1973) and went on to do more Columbo episodes than any other composer (23 in total during both the 1970s and 1990s incarnation of the series), including the music-​themed “Etude in Black” with John Cassavetes as a conductor and “Murder with Too Many Notes” with Billy Connolly as a film composer. “I got pretty friendly with Peter Falk,” DeBenedictis remembered. DeBenedictis met producer Dean Hargrove on the Mystery Movies and went on to do many of his subsequent crime series, including the Dixieland-​style Matlock (1986–​ 1995, NBC) with Andy Griffith as a Southern lawyer; the jazzy Jake and the Fatman (1987–​1992, CBS) with William Conrad and Joe Penny; a religioso touch for Father Dowling Mysteries (1989–​1991, NBC, ABC) with Tom Bosley as a crime-​solving priest; and a stealthy clarinet theme for Diagnosis Murder (1993–​2001, CBS) starring Dick Van Dyke and son Barry Van Dyke. The second of the rotating Mystery Movie series was McMillan and Wife (1971–​1977, NBC), a lighthearted mystery with Rock Hudson as the San Francisco police commissioner and Susan Saint James as his curious wife. The theme and most of the scores over six seasons were written by Jerry Fielding (1922–​1980), an outspoken and immensely talented composer who never received his due from Hollywood. Fielding, like Mancini, began his studies with Max Adkins in Pittsburgh and went into radio as arranger for “Kay Kyser’s Kollege of Musical Knowledge” in the 1940s. He was Groucho Marx’s original bandleader on You Bet Your Life (1950–​1961, NBC), but, because he took the Fifth Amendment before the House Un-​American Activities Committee in 1953, he was blacklisted for the rest of the decade. Betty Hutton insisted upon hiring Fielding as musical director of her Betty Hutton Show (1959–​1960, CBS)—​effectively breaking the blacklist—​and he went on to such high-​profile pictures as Advise and Consent (1962) and the first of three Oscar nominations for The Wild Bunch (1969). Fielding’s approach to McMillan, beginning with the pilot film Once Upon a Dead Man (1971), was one of musical sophistication: a lightly jazzy theme for Mac and Sally, and darker textures for the inevitable murder scenes—​some of which would hint at the grim, often dissonant music he would be called upon to write later in the 1970s for filmmakers Sam Peckinpah (Straw Dogs), Michael Winner (The Mechanic), and Clint Eastwood (The Outlaw Josey Wales). The third element in the Mystery Movie wheel was McCloud (1970–​1977, NBC), which began the season before as an element of another rotating

Wednesday-​night series, Four-​in-​One. For this reworking of Universal’s movie Coogan’s Bluff (1968), Dennis Weaver starred as a Taos, New Mexico, marshal studying criminal-​investigation techniques with the New York City Police Department. David Shire scored the first season of McCloud, including a lively, country-​flavored theme. Producer Glen A. Larson eventually wrote his own McCloud theme that was first heard in late 1973. Shire (b. 1937), who had been writing off-​Broadway musicals, worked as a rehearsal pianist in the New York theater. His work on Stephen Sondheim’s original television musical Evening Primrose (in November 1966, on ABC Stage ’67) led to an offer from its director, Paul Bogart, to score some of the prestige dramas on CBS Playhouse the following season. Old friend Goldenberg introduced him to Stanley Wilson at Universal, and Shire joined the ranks of composers working in television. He went on to score many acclaimed films, including The Conversation (1974) and All the President’s Men (1976), winning an Academy Award for Norma Rae (1979) and a Grammy for the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack (1978). In addition to McCloud, Shire wrote a theme for George Kennedy’s short-​lived Sarge (1971–​1972, NBC), about a police detective who becomes a priest, that opened with a fast-​moving piano solo and ended with a massive organ chord. The Mod Squad (1968–​1973, ABC) broke new ground in the genre, both in terms of concept and music. Michael Cole, Peggy Lipton, and Clarence Williams III played three young people who worked undercover for the Los Angeles police. Their music was the work of one of the legendary figures of American television scoring: Earle Hagen. Hagen (1919–​2008) came out of the big-​band era, playing for Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey. In 1939, while playing first trombone and arranging for bandleader Ray Noble, he composed “Harlem Nocturne,” which became not only a jazz standard but also, nearly half a century later, the theme for Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984–​1987, CBS) starring Stacy Keach. In 1946, he began a seven-​year stint as a contract arranger and orchestrator at 20th Century-​Fox. He and fellow orchestrator Herbert W. Spencer worked almost exclusively on musicals; two of their films, Mother Wore Tights (1947) and Call Me Madam (1953), won Oscars for musical direction. In 1953, they left Fox and formed a partnership to provide music for the burgeoning new medium of television, initially for The Danny Thomas Show. Later, on his own, Hagen scored such TV classics as The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, and That Girl. Hagen’s theme for The Mod Squad was one of the most dynamic ever. Written specifically for the already shot main-​title visuals of Cole, Lipton, and Williams running down a darkened, rain-​soaked alleyway, its pounding beat, gutsy brass, and jazzy organ solo immediately told viewers that this was an action show. “We used rock ’n’ roll in the open spots: chases, fights, and things like that,” Hagen recalled. “But rock ’n’ roll doesn’t have any harmonic drive

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to it; it’s rhythmic drive, which doesn’t work well under dialogue. So when we got into scoring, especially scoring that had any tension to it, we went to 12-​tone,” an advanced form of composition developed by 20th-​ century composer Arnold Schoenberg. “With the exception of a theme that Shorty Rogers wrote [for the pilot] that we used for an association with the kids—​that we used to finish the shows with, very melodic—​the rest of the scoring was always pretty tense. Twelve-​tone [composition] creates a lot of tension,” Hagen explained. Fellow big-​band arranger Billy May also wrote many Mod Squad episodes. Aaron Spelling, who produced The Mod Squad in association with Danny Thomas, subsequently went into business with fellow producer Leonard Goldberg. Veteran Elmer Bernstein composed the jazz-​rock theme for their young-​cop series The Rookies (1972–​1976, ABC) with Michael Ontkean, Georg Stanford Brown, and Kate Jackson, and Barry DeVorzon masterminded an unexpected pop hit with his theme for S.W.A.T. (1975–​1976, ABC). S.W.A.T., which was widely criticized for its violence, starred Steve Forrest as the head of a police Special Weapons and Tactics unit that was called in whenever big firepower was necessary. DeVorzon (b. 1934) was a veteran of the record business, having worked as a songwriter, producer, and label executive from the late 1950s. He had done a couple of movies (notably Bless the Beasts & Children, whose theme, co-​credited to his musical partner Perry Botkin Jr., became a hit for The Carpenters and a

Barry DeVorzon, mid-​1970s.

1971 Oscar nominee) but had not done television. Still, he ran into producer Aaron Spelling and promised him “a hit theme” if he could be hired for one of Spelling’s series. Spelling took him at his word. DeVorzon watched the pilot and his heart sank. “The first thing I see is this big truck pull up and all these guys popping out with guns. I went home and, for about a week, tried to write a hit about a S.W.A.T. team. It was ridiculous. So I decided to try and give him the most exciting main title I can, and maybe that will help him forget that it isn’t going to be a hit. I wrote what I thought was a powerful, exciting theme for the show.” Trouble arose when he went to record it, however. DeVorzon, accustomed to the more leisurely recording schedules of records and movies, took nearly two hours to lay down the rhythm track for the theme, infuriating Spelling’s music supervisor, going over budget, and then refusing to do a “rough mix” of the theme for Spelling to hear (“you’ve done your first and last television show for us,” he was told). Luckily, the finished 24-​track mix met with Spelling’s approval and DeVorzon wound up scoring most of the series. He tried to get a record deal and was turned down everywhere except at Motown—​until he learned that a group called Rhythm Heritage (essentially producer Steve Barri and arranger Michael Omartian) had already recorded a faithful version of it. “It was absolutely accurate,” DeVorzon said. “They basically re-​created my main title.” The Motown session was canceled, and the Rhythm Heritage record became the first single from a prime-​time series to hit Number 1 on the Billboard pop charts since “The Ballad of Davy Crockett” 20 years earlier. (Omartian would later compose a catchy, ultra-​contemporary theme for the 1987 Margaret Colin private-​eye series Leg Work.) DeVorzon would go on to write two themes for the private-​eye series Simon & Simon (1981–​1988, CBS), which starred Jameson Parker and Gerald McRaney as private eyes in San Diego. “The first theme had a ‘South of the Border’ feel, since they were down there on the border,” DeVorzon recalled. “Phil DeGuere was a very hip producer. He wanted a real contemporary feel.” For the second season, “we decided to take a different approach to the two characters, kind of loose guys with a sense of humor.” He co-​wrote it with guitarist-​songwriter Micheal Towers, and that theme (with a solo by Eagles guitarist Joe Walsh) remained with the show to its conclusion. DeVorzon composed many of the scores, often in collaboration with Joseph Conlan, but left room for guitar improvisation for “a spontaneous feel.” Nelson Riddle, who had already enjoyed hits with his music for The Untouchables and Route 66, continued to be in demand for weekly television scores. A blaring, jazzy theme for Emergency! (1972–​1977, NBC) with Robert Fuller, Julie London, and Bobby Troup in a drama about paramedics in Los Angeles, became his longest running in the 1970s. But his best work in that decade may have been on television’s first miniseries,

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The Blue Knight (1973, NBC), based on detective-​turned-​novelist Joseph Wambaugh’s cynical veteran officer Bumper Morgan. William Holden won an Emmy for his TV debut in the role (director Robert Butler also won for his gritty depiction of L.A.’s mean streets). Riddle’s brass theme suggested the mindset of Holden’s world-​weary beat cop: a sense of justice tempered by years of dealing with the daily reality of street crime. George Kennedy succeeded Holden in the part when it became a weekly series (1975–​1976, CBS), and Kennedy himself asked Henry Mancini to write the theme and score the pilot; it would be the composer’s first TV-​movie score in more than a decade. Kennedy admired Mancini’s 1960 album The Blues and the Beat, and Mancini agreed that Bumper’s music would relate more to the big-​band era than modern pop. Mancini’s appropriately bluesy theme even featured a saxophone solo. “Why, a saxophone hasn’t been used in a television theme in 10 years,” Mancini said. “It all fits Bumper and gives the show a special kind of character.” Kennedy later said that Mancini’s theme was “the single most flattering thing that anyone ever did for me.” Mancini retooled his theme into a more contemporary, high-​energy piece with ARP synthesizer for the series main title. Riddle returned for the second season, revamping his original 1973 theme into a more upbeat piece for the opening, while Mancini’s music accompanied the end credits for both seasons. In 1976, a new Spelling-​Goldberg show opened with this introduction: “Once upon a time there were three little girls who went to the Police Academy. And they were each assigned very hazardous duties. But I took them away from all that, and now they work for me. My name is Charlie.” The voice belonged to John Forsythe, but the faces were far more memorable: Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett-​Majors, and Jaclyn Smith as Charlie’s Angels (1976–​1981, ABC), the private-​eye series that redefined the term “jiggle” and immediately shot to the top of the ratings (it was in the top five during its first two years, and in the top 20 for four of its five seasons on the air). Charlie was the never-​seen boss of an agency whose operatives were intelligent, attractive women (in succeeding seasons, Cheryl Ladd, Shelley Hack, and Tanya Roberts); their liaison was played by David Doyle. To Jack Elliott and Allyn Ferguson fell the task of setting their adventures to music. Elliott (1927–​2001) studied with contemporary classical composer Lukas Foss but came to Hollywood via the Broadway theater. He became a popular dance arranger on variety shows headlined by Judy Garland and Andy Williams; by 1971 he was music director of the annual Grammy Awards program and scored films including Where’s Poppa? (1970) and, later, The Jerk (1979). Ferguson (1924–​2010) studied with Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and Ernst Toch. He created a chamber jazz group in the late 1950s, arranged and conducted for Johnny Mathis, and joined

his old friend Elliott (whom he had met while studying at Tanglewood in the 1950s) in a television-​scoring partnership in 1968. In a solo capacity, he went on to score many of producer Norman Rosemont’s television remakes of literary classics, notably Les Miserables (1978), Ivanhoe (1982), and his Emmy-​winning Camille (1984). The Elliott-​Ferguson team provided the underscores for many action shows of the seventies, including The Rookies, Starsky and Hutch, Get Christie Love, and Police Story. The 90-​minute Charlie’s Angels pilot initially had a score by another composer; Elliott and Ferguson were called in with just four or five days to create a new one. They demanded and won the right to compose a new theme (because they hadn’t written the main title for either Rookies or Starsky, both Spelling-​Goldberg shows), gaining a long-​running hit. The Charlie’s Angels scores were actually assembled by committee. The Elliott-​Ferguson company was handling the music for so many shows that the work was divided up among several composers. One of the principals would watch the show and write the thematic material, which would then be developed and orchestrated by members of their team, usually including veteran orchestrators Greig McRitchie and Jack Smalley. “We generally had four days to do that show, and it was never any less than 28 or 30 minutes of music,” Ferguson recalled many years later. “I’d write the chapter theme, or Jack would, and then we’d get together with the guys—​‘here’s the theme for this week’—​and we’d go screen it, split it up, and I’d go in and conduct it, or Jack would, and that was it.”

Allyn Ferguson (left) and Jack Elliott.

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“It was an all-​star band, and we always had a dynamite rhythm section,” Smalley said, noting that the series generally had a 32-​piece orchestra. “Inevitably, there would be the car chase, or one of the Angels was in trouble and she’d have to get away,” laughed Scott Smalley, who joined the orchestration team with his father Jack. “So we’d crank up the rhythm section and have a big band screaming through it. With the big band, we could give it an element of fun, even though they were being chased by some serial killer or drug lord that they were going to arrest.” Elliott and Ferguson also wrote the small-​combo, urban-​jazz-​funk theme for Barney Miller (1975–​1982, ABC), the popular sitcom set in a New York City police precinct, starring Hal Linden as its long-​suffering captain. Bassist Chuck Berghofer came up with the opening few notes during the recording session (“I’d been fooling around with it a few weeks before that,” Berghofer recalled years later), and Ferguson’s son Dan played the guitar. In 1978, Elliott and Ferguson created the Foundation for New American Music and its performing arm The Orchestra, which commissioned new concert works (often merging jazz and classical influences) from many established film and television composers. Their partnership broke up shortly thereafter. Elliott went on to do the music for the Harry Anderson sitcom Night Court (1984–​1992, NBC), another funk-​based theme with a sassy saxophone solo by jazzman Ernie Watts. “I know how to get that hook-​song for the little screen,” he said later, “something that has a personality, that will also set up the show to come.” “Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time. . . . Keep your eye on the sparrow when the going gets narrow” went the theme for Baretta (1975–​ 1978, ABC), which starred Robert Blake as an unorthodox cop with a cockatoo named Fred. Colorado-​born composer Dave Grusin (b. 1934) was already an old hand at television, having composed the Name of the Game, It Takes a Thief, and Maude themes, scoring everything from Gidget to The Virginian, and working as musical director on Andy Williams’s variety show. He had also begun a promising career in feature films with scores such as Divorce American Style (1967), The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1968), and Winning (1969), and continued to work in the recording field as an arranger and jazz artist. Blake asked his friend, lyricist Morgan Ames, to write a song for the series; Ames enlisted frequent collaborator Grusin to write the music. According to Ames, both had been extremely busy on various projects, and, on the day the instrumental track for the main title was to be recorded, “We hadn’t written anything. I was writing this other song, a gospel [flavored] song called ‘Keep Your Eye on the Sparrow,’ taking off on that old spiritual,” Ames said. Working with Grusin at another session the same day, she

told him as he was preparing to leave for the Baretta rhythm date: “Here’s the chorus: ‘Keep your eye on the sparrow when the going gets narrow.’ “As I recall, he passed out blank paper to the band, which included [drummer] Harvey Mason and [guitarist] Lee Ritenour. And David went to the piano and started doing his magic. I know he did write it in his head driving to Universal. Fortunately, we didn’t have to do the lyric that day. I wrote that driving to the session a couple of days later.” Observed Grusin: “We were trying to get a street feel for the show.” So he and Ames hired African-​American vocalist Jim Gilstrap to record the song, and a trio of women (including Ames) to sing backup. “Actually, David thought of ‘don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time,’ ” Ames admitted, “and I did ‘don’t go to bed with no price on your head.’ And ‘don’t do it,’ ” she laughed, referring to the line interjected by the trio in response to the lead. Later, word came back that Universal executives had rejected the vocal for the series. “The reason was, they said, you can’t open a white show with a Black singer,” Ames said. “That was the tenor of the times. So the first season of the show was an instrumental theme with no vocal. We were really disappointed.” Ames got a letter from producer Jo Swerling Jr. that spoke of his “shock” and “heartbreak” at the decision by his superiors, adding that “I am hoping that if Baretta is a hit we’ll be able to convince our colleagues to reconsider their decision and allow us to use what is probably the best damn main-​title theme ever created.” The series’ producers did manage to briefly thumb their nose at what they saw as racist studio executives, however: They opened the sixth episode with a Black nun singing the song on camera, then utilized Gilstrap’s original, unused, main-​title vocal as the underscore for a car chase later in the same show. Baretta was a hit, and nobody says no to the star of a hit show. Blake got the song reinstated for the second season, but with Sammy Davis Jr. recording the vocal. Grusin scored just two episodes; he was succeeded by Tom Scott, who retained Grusin’s street feel for the rest of the series. Two composers revolutionized the sound of television scoring, both, initially, for cop and detective shows: Mike Post, starting with The Rockford Files (1974–​1980, NBC); and later, Jan Hammer, with Miami Vice (1984–​ 1989, NBC). Post was the first major composer to bring a pop music sensibility into weekly television, while Hammer’s all-​electronic approach was hailed as a stylistic breakthrough at the time. Post (b. 1944) was a rock ’n’ roll musician with little formal musical education. He played guitar on Sonny and Cher’s hit “I Got You Babe,” produced The First Edition with a then-​unknown vocalist named Kenny Rogers, and won a Grammy for arranging Mason Williams’s 1968 hit “Classical Gas.” In 1969, he became the youngest musical director in TV history on The Andy Williams Show.

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Pete Carpenter (left) and Mike Post.

Two chance meetings changed Post’s life, and ultimately the sound of television music. The first was on a southern California beach during the summer of 1968, when he nearly came to blows with fledgling TV scriptwriter Stephen J. Cannell over squatting rights for a choice spot on the sand. The second was at a golf tournament where he met trombonist-​ arranger Pete Carpenter (1914–​1987), another avid golfer who had been impressed by the unique sound of “Classical Gas.” Post and Carpenter became friends, and soon partners. Cannell, who befriended Post after the near-​fight on the beach, became a producer for Universal, and hired them to score his first series, Toma (1973–​1974, ABC), with Tony Musante as a New Jersey undercover cop. The breakthrough came the following year, on Rockford, with a Post-​Carpenter theme for the James Garner character that combined harmonica, synthesizer, electric guitar, and a pounding beat in a way that had never been heard before. “The whole story of that is Garner,” Post explained. “This great character, and the perfect casting. He’s Oklahoman—​a little Southern, but not completely—​so a harmonica makes sense. I had just gotten a mini-​ Moog [synthesizer] with that sassy sort of weep, ‘nya-​nya,’ to it. And I’m very guitar-​oriented, and nobody had done it on TV. “Rockford Files isn’t real rock ’n’ roll, but it’s close,” Post added. “We got calls from the dubbing stage [saying] ‘What is this?’ What it was, was our turn: guys who were raised on Chuck Berry, Bo Diddley, and the Rolling Stones.” Post remembered thinking at the time: “It’s going to be thundering guitars now, guys. That’s all there is. It isn’t five saxophones anymore: it’s thundering guitars.” Post had to fight to get a record out, but his extended version of the Rockford Files theme became a top-​10 hit

in 1975, winning a Grammy for Post and Carpenter for Best Instrumental COP AND DETECTIVE SHOWS Arrangement. The Cannell connection led to several other hits for Post and Carpenter, 71 including Magnum, P.I. (1980–​1988, CBS), from former Cannell producer Donald Bellisario. Post, who coincidentally had gone to high school with Magnum star Tom Selleck, came up with a rhythmically aggressive theme that again spotlighted rock guitar. (“Look, they put him in a red Ferrari, so it’s Testosterone City, right?” Post said.) The lighter moments of the theme were meant to underscore Magnum’s sense of humor, while the strings were inspired by the pastoral shots of the series’ Hawaiian locations. (The Post-​Carpenter theme was actually the second signature for the series. The first several episodes sported a jazzy, slightly more conventional theme by veteran arranger Ian Freebairn-​Smith.) Later came The A Team (1983–​1986, NBC), about the adventures of a team of Vietnam veterans (played by George Peppard, Mr. T, Dirk Benedict, and Dwight Schultz) whose services were available for the right price. Post and Carpenter emphasized their service-​unit style with militaristic percussion and their Vietnam backgrounds with a Cream-​like guitar solo out of the late 1960s. Post and Carpenter worked together on literally dozens of series, pilots, and TV movies: an estimated 1,800 hours of television before Carpenter’s death from cancer in 1987. Along the way there were military scores for the Robert Conrad wartime drama Baa Baa Black Sheep (1976–​1978, NBC); Beach Boys–​style high-​vocal harmonies for Richie Brockelman, Private Eye (1978, NBC); and an in-​your-​face theme for keyboards and guitars for the Fred Dryer police series Hunter (1984–​1991, NBC). Post’s song “Believe It or Not” (written with lyricist Stephen Geyer, sung by Joey Scarbury) reached Number 2 on the charts and is probably more famous than the Cannell-​created action-​comedy it was written for, The Greatest American Hero (1981–​1983, ABC). Cannell so valued the Post-​ Carpenter scores that he began giving them main-​title screen credit on several of his shows. Musically speaking, it was a surprising but fruitful partnership. The middle-​aged Carpenter came from a big-​band background and understood the technical aspects of scoring for dramatic television, while the young, hip Post knew contemporary music and the record business, and had an undeniable facility with a catchy tune. Recalled Post: “All of his friends thought, ‘Oh, poor Pete, he’s hooked up with this hotshot business guy, this hummer who really doesn’t know anything. Pete’s carrying the kid.’ And all of my friends were going, ‘Oh, man, what is Mike doing? He’s hooked up with this old guy who couldn’t hit a groove if he had to. Mike’s just getting ripped off.’ “The truth of the matter,” said Post, “is that nobody got ripped off. It was a real partnership. We never missed a deadline. We never had a contract. We never had a handshake. We split 50-​50 on everything and

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neither of us could remember who had written what. For the vast majority of the 18 years [we were together], we wrote in the same room at the same time. He’d play, I’d orchestrate. I’d play, he’d orchestrate. And we never had an argument. Not one unkind word between us in 18 years. If he was here today, I’d still have a partner.” Post occasionally worked alone, most notably on Hill Street Blues (1981–​1987, NBC), probably the greatest police drama in television history. With a simple series of solo piano chords, followed by synthesizer, strings, and rhythm-​section backing, Post created a gentle counterpoint to the main-​title visuals of police cars careening around corners and down mean city streets. It became a top-​10 hit and won two Grammys, for Best Pop Instrumental Performance and Best Instrumental Composition. Series co-​creator Steven Bochco recalled asking for “a piece of music that completely contradicts the film . . . sweet and sad and lyrical and melodic. The script was hard and bleak and urban and gritty, and I didn’t want to do the obvious musical interpretation of that.” Post said that he wanted to write “something poignant, that really had some heart to it,” and that he spent just half an hour on it before calling Bochco with the basic thematic material. Post’s solo piano set the tone—​sometimes light, often melancholy—​for many episodes of the Emmy-​winning ensemble drama about life in and around a big-​ city police precinct (with Daniel J. Travanti, Veronica Hamel, and Michael Conrad in the cast). Post went in an entirely different direction with NYPD Blue (1993–​ 2005, ABC), Bochco’s edgy, often graphic police drama with Dennis Franz, David Caruso, and (starting in the second season) Jimmy Smits. According to Post, Bochco suggested “serious power percussion,” while pilot director Gregory Hoblit said he had been thinking of subway sounds. At first puzzled, then inspired, Post came up with slam-​bang percussion that receded into a low-​key synthesizer theme before returning to those powerful drum sounds, all set to a rapidly moving succession of images of New York City that begin and end with a subway train. The scores themselves became an eclectic mixture of percussion, synthesized and sampled sounds, hip-​hop, Irish influences, and more, all realized by Post on a weekly basis in his Burbank studio. Post’s other credits included the dark, low-​brass sounds of the Ken Wahl undercover-​ agent melodrama Wiseguy (1987–​ 1990, CBS); his Emmy-​nominated theme for Unsub (1989, NBC), which featured the strange Australian wind instrument didjeridoo (a long, hollowed-​out wooden tube that produces a haunting, breathy sound); the all-​electronic Doogie Howser, M.D. (1989–​1993, ABC), a boy-​doctor series starring Neil Patrick Harris; a bouncy signature for the Scott Bakula time-​travel series Quantum Leap (1989–​1993, NBC); and the sexy, late-​night Florida detective drama Silk Stalkings (1991–​1999, CBS, USA). Post also supervised all of the music for Bochco’s daring but short-​lived musical crime

drama Cop Rock (1990, ABC), for which Randy Newman won a songwriting Emmy. His longest-​running franchise was producer Dick Wolf ’s Law & Order (1990–​2010, NBC) and its several spinoffs, more than 1,000 episodes. For this acclaimed New York–​based crime drama—​the first half dealing with the investigation, the second half with the prosecution—​Post wrote a dramatic theme featuring timpani, a clarinet, and a Dire Straits–​style guitar that he played himself. Subsequent series featured variations on the original: Law & Order: Special Victims Unit (1999–​, NBC) with a soprano sax; the more intense Law & Order: Criminal Intent (2001–​2011, NBC); Law & Order: Trial by Jury (2005–​2006, NBC); and others. Equally famous in the Law & Order franchise was the aural transitional device widely called the “chung-​chung” (“I call it the ching-​ching because it pays,” quipped Post). Producer Wolf called Post needing a sound effect for major changes of scene with a date-​stamp. “We pulled up different samples,” Post remembered: “a jail door slamming, a hammer striking an anvil, Japanese men stomping on a gym floor—​the amalgamation of all those sounds is what I ended up giving him.” The approximately 2.4-​second piece is officially titled “card sting.” Nominated five times for music Emmys (including nods for Hill Street Blues, Unsub, Silk Stalkings, and NYPD Blue), Post finally won the statue for his memorable, classically styled theme for Bochco’s Murder One (1995–​ 1997, ABC) with Daniel Benzali as a criminal lawyer. Post recalled Bochco asking for “a piece of Bach chamber music with a big giant bottom,” sound-​ wise. Bochco later called it “very Baroque in style” and, with its harpsichord sound (actually “a sample of a Bosendorfer on steroids,” Post said), it became “one of his best main title themes ever,” in Bochco’s opinion. Miami Vice was something else entirely. By 1984, MTV was a potent force in television, and music videos had become more than just a novelty: their quick-​cut, often impressionistic method of musical storytelling had become the ultimate sales tool for popular music. The idea started with NBC boss Brandon Tartikoff, whose scribbled “MTV cops” memo became legend in the annals of network program concepts. Executive producer Michael Mann ran with the notion, collaborating with former Hill Street writer Anthony Yerkovich to create a series that would look and sound like no previous police drama in TV history. Miami Vice was, in essence, just another buddy-​cop show, with Don Johnson as a white Miami vice detective and Philip Michael Thomas as a Black New York City officer who originally came to Florida to avenge the murder of his partner. Edward James Olmos played their ultra-​serious superior. The difference was in the execution. The pastel-​colored look, MTV-​style editing, the hip attitudes of the cops, and the then-​hot topic of drug use made Vice a very big hit, particularly with the desirable demographic of younger audiences.

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Jan Hammer.

Musically speaking, Vice broke new ground for network television. Built into each episode were montages set to current, or recent, rock ’n’ roll songs or those of up-​and-​coming artists. Several of the tunes heard on the series went on to hit status, notably two by Glenn Frey: “Smuggler’s Blues” and “You Belong to the City.” Mann went outside of the usual ranks of Hollywood composers for his series composer. He turned to Czech-​born artist Jan Hammer (b. 1948), who had played keyboards in the popular Mahavishnu Orchestra fusion group of the early 1970s. He later performed with guitarist Jeff Beck and enjoyed success with his own group before plunging into the world of film and television scoring. “We discussed different styles, basically modern, hip, progressive rock-​pop music,” Hammer recalled. “I happened to have some sketches that I carried around on cassette, music that I was working on. And I played them [Mann and Thomas Carter, the director of the pilot] one thing, and they really loved it. The piece of music that I played them was the Miami Vice theme.” Actually, Hammer later auditioned five other themes as possible musical signatures, but they always returned to the original. “People ask me, ‘Did you go to Miami, look at palm trees, absorb the flavor and the locale and all that?’ And I say, ‘No, I wrote this during the winter here in the hills north of New York City,’ ” the composer laughed. The series main title, in fact, was built around Hammer’s music: a series of shots of south Florida, including bikini-​clad women,

pink flamingos, the beaches, and the surf, played against Hammer’s highly contemporary theme. After the success of the two-​hour pilot—​which was handled conventionally, with Mann, Carter, and Hammer spotting the music and, as a committee, choosing the sounds—​ Hammer enjoyed unprecedented freedom in scoring the series. “What kind of music, and where it would go,” Hammer said, was entirely in the hands of the composer, a rarity on a weekly series. “It was a challenge,” Hammer said. “I had to come up with something fresh week after week. It was like making a one-​hour movie as opposed to recycling thematic material, which is how 99 percent of TV shows are done. “It was radically different from week one to week ten. There would be a show that was based totally on Jamaican reggae, and a show that would be balls-​to-​the-​wall rock ’n’ roll. Then you would have voodoo zombies walking around, so there was a Haitian percussion approach, and so on. Some shows were almost musique concrète, very strange, eerie electronic things.” Hammer worked entirely at his Red Gate studios in upstate New York. Each week, the videotape would arrive and Hammer would go to work. Rarely was there less than 20 minutes of music per week, and on the average Hammer had just four days to write and perform the score. “Most of it was done with keyboards,” Hammer said—​Fairlight, Memory Moog, Prophet, DX-​7—​although “there were some occasions where I played some rhythm guitar.” The keyboard approach involved “lots of acoustic samples,” Hammer explained. The score often included various congas, log drums, and as many different percussion sounds as Hammer could achieve in his studio. “The first two years went by like a blur, a total creative high,” Hammer said. He also scored all of the third season, but that “wasn’t so much fun.” For the fourth year, he scored the opening six and final three episodes, supervising the music for the remainder. Hammer actually appeared in two episodes, notably as a musician at the wedding of Johnson’s character to a rock star played by Sheena Easton in November 1987. The initial Miami Vice album was the first television score since Peter Gunn to reach Number 1 on the Billboard album charts; it stayed there for 12 weeks, and Hammer’s theme went to Number 1 as a single. He won two 1985 Grammys, for Best Pop Instrumental and Best Instrumental Composition, and was nominated for Emmys for his work on the first and second seasons of the series. A second Miami Vice album and Hammer’s own Escape From Television disc contained still more music from the series, both hugely successful on a worldwide basis. Succeeding Hammer on Miami Vice was Tim Truman (b. 1958), who recalled spending “several hundred thousand dollars” on musical gear to supply scores for the fifth season, again mostly electronic. That hip, synths, drum-​machine, and electric guitar style also proved appropriate

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for the theme for the Beverly Hills 90210 spinoff Melrose Place (1992–​ 1999, Fox). Truman received an Emmy nomination for his theme for another Darren Star–​created nighttime soap, Central Park West (1995–​1996, CBS) starring Mariel Hemingway and Lauren Hutton, with a sultry vocal by singer Tata Vega. Yerkovich’s next series, the beautifully rendered but short-​ lived Private Eye (1987–​1988, NBC), set in 1950s Los Angeles with Michael Woods and Josh Brolin, returned to the genre’s big-​band origins beginning with a jazzy pilot score by Joe Jackson (b. 1954). Fifties bandleader Shorty Rogers, eminently familiar with the period, contributed several scores. In the wake of Miami Vice’s success, however, producers began actively seeking all-​electronic scores, as much for its reduced costs as for the hip factor. One of the earliest shows on the upstart Fox network, 21 Jump Street (1987–​1991), starred a young Johnny Depp, one of a group of young undercover police officers investigating crime in Los Angeles high schools (his co-​ star, Holly Robinson, sang the show’s rock theme song, by Liam Sternberg, who had written the Bangles’ hit “Walk Like an Egyptian”). The series sported an all-​synth score by Peter Bernstein (b. 1951), “emerging from a 20-​year career in the rock ’n’ roll world on one hand and 13 years as an orchestrator,” mostly for his composer father Elmer Bernstein, he later recalled. “Home studios had found their way into the record world by 1987 but were unheard of in television. I was in a spare bedroom with a collection of synths and samplers, tape machines and a VHS video deck. It got me in a lot of trouble with various unions, mostly because no one had figured out where this new tech fit in the world of TV production, but it was thrilling to be at the bleeding edge.” He later added guitars and other instruments to his Fairlight and Synclavier keyboards. Bucking the trend was Remington Steele (1982–​1987, NBC), the creators of which astutely sought out Henry Mancini for its sophisticated title music, the title itself a takeoff on Peter Gunn. Mancini actually wrote two themes: an optimistic motif for the mysterious con artist (Pierce Brosnan) who adopted the persona of the fictional detective-​agency head, and a romantic theme for Laura Holt (Stephanie Zimbalist), the real private eye, that was heard over the end titles. Richard Lewis Warren (b. 1952) composed nearly all of the weekly scores, always with a nice balance of jazzy suspense and tongue-​in-​cheek humor. Warren, a Dallas veteran and the brother of actress Lesley Ann Warren, credited Mancini with getting him the job; Mancini had just finished working with her on Blake Edwards’s musical Victor/​Victoria. “He didn’t even want to do the background music for the pilot, just the opening and closing themes. He told [the producers] to hire me to do the background score and, if the series sold, to be its weekly composer. It was

all thanks to Henry Mancini’s faith in me as a person, without any knowledge of my work as a composer.” The familiar theme for Cagney & Lacey (1982–​1988, CBS) was actually the series’ second. Bill Conti was signed to create a new theme when the series was recast (with Sharon Gless replacing Meg Foster as Chris Cagney; Tyne Daly remained as Mary Beth Lacey) and rescheduled from Thursday to Monday nights. Cagney & Lacey was unusual for its focus on two female New York City cops, covering their personal lives as well as their profession as detectives. Recalling his initial meeting with one of the producers, Conti said: “Barney Rosenzweig said two things to me: We follow a comedy; we want to hold that audience. And don’t advertise that it’s a cop show.” So Conti conceived of a theme with “a light element,” starting with two alto saxophones playing in thirds (Ernie Watts and Ray Pizzi performed the original). “When it went into the tune, it didn’t sound like Magnum P.I., or other [cop shows] that might have been on at the time,” Conti said, although it did sport a strong beat. “It’s a happy tune. It has nothing to do with the show. When you think about it, this could be Laverne & Shirley. The music doesn’t advertise that this is a serious cop show; it made you smile.” It was not until the 1980s that women composers began to make strides in television. Interestingly, the three key pioneers all scored episodes of Cagney & Lacey before going on to greater success with other shows. Angela Morley (1924–​2009) was the first and ultimately the most honored, winning three Emmys out of a total of 11 nominations over a decade. Born Walter “Wally” Stott in Leeds, England, she was an acclaimed composer of “light music” and a veteran arranger (especially on the BBC’s now legendary 1950s radio comedy The Goon Show). Undergoing gender confirmation surgery in 1972, as Angela Morley she earned two Oscar nominations for her adaptation work on movie musicals. She started in American TV with three episodes of Wonder Woman in 1979 but spent most of the 1980s scoring such dramas as Dallas, Dynasty, and Hotel (six of her nominations were for original music; the others, including all three wins, were for her arrangements for TV specials). “She had wonderful taste,” said music director Ian Fraser, who often hired her as an arranger. “She was certainly one of the finest musicians I’ve ever known or worked with. As an orchestrator, her skill was unsurpassed, with a technical perfection that was drawn on and nourished by a lifelong devotion to music.” At virtually the same time, the much younger Nan Schwartz (b. 1953) was starting in TV. The daughter of famed Glenn Miller band clarinetist Wilbur Schwartz and Tommy Dorsey band vocalist Peggy Clark, she was a studio singer as a child and later studied composition and orchestration with such L.A. luminaries as Albert Harris, George Tremblay, and Billy Byers before apprenticing with Mike Post, Mark Snow, and Pat Williams.

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Nan Schwartz.

Her TV career began with Barnaby Jones in 1980; she eventually earned seven Emmy nominations for her work on the Rock Hudson series The Devlin Connection, Cagney & Lacey, the romantic drama Jack and Mike, the TV-​movie Under the Influence, and the TV version of In the Heat of the Night (1988–​1994, NBC). Schwartz scored more than 50 episodes of Heat of the Night, an adaptation of the Oscar-​winning 1967 film about a white redneck Mississippi sheriff and the Black Philadelphia detective who helps him solve a murder case. It starred Carroll O’Connor and Howard Rollins and used the now-​classic Quincy Jones title song as its opening theme. She utilized a musician, Mac Dougherty, who, she said, “played guitar and scat-​sang at the same time, which was a novelty, and one of the signature sounds of the show,” part of the series’ Southern-​blues musical identity. Her jazzy Jack and Mike music—​for Shelley Hack and Tom Mason as a Chicago newspaper columnist and her restaurateur husband—​was as hip as TV got in the 1980s; unfortunately the show only lasted a season (1986–​ 1987, ABC). Schwartz went on to become a Grammy-​winning arranger-​ orchestrator and among the most respected musicians in Hollywood. Shirley Walker (1945–​2006) became active in TV in the same year. Lou Grant music editor Daniel Carlin Jr., who witnessed Walker save The Black Stallion movie score from disaster, recommended her to the producers. “MTM [the production company] was populated by bright, progressive writers and producers, including very talented women such as Michele Gallery, April Smith and Leonora Thuna,” Carlin said. “I think we had a much more inclusive culture there than existed elsewhere at the time.”

Carlin convinced her to move to L.A. and launched her TV career with two Lou Grant episodes in 1980. She would go on to become a top composer of superhero series, both live-​action and animated, in the 1990s. How do you set to music the character of a sweet little old lady who writes best-​selling murder mysteries while also helping the police to solve real-​life crimes? That was the challenge for John Addison in creating the theme for the long-​running Angela Lansbury series Murder, She Wrote (1984–​1996, CBS). Addison (1920–​1998) moved to the United States in 1975. Born in Surrey, England, he had won an Oscar and a Grammy for his charming score for Tom Jones (1963), another Oscar nomination for Sleuth (1972), and an Emmy nomination for his music for the Richard Chamberlain production of Hamlet (1970). His 70 other films included The Seven-​Per-​Cent Solution (1976) and A Bridge Too Far (1977). He also scored all 26 hours of the miniseries Centennial (1978–​1979, NBC). Addison sought, in his words, “to express the character of Jessica Fletcher” in all its facets: the writer, the sleuth, the intellectual, the friendly lady, in the space of one minute. “For instance,” he explained, “you see a lot of shots of her at the typewriter. So that gave me the idea of doing that piano accompaniment figure” (the solo piano that begins the piece). “Then over it, I came up with a rising theme—​which is often heard on violins—​which I thought expressed her warmness and out-​of-​doors and nice-​person element, which people respond to. That rising phrase is then heard with trombones and bass instruments in a different variation, a little bit tongue-​in-​cheek, which is her sleuthing side. And there is a middle section, for the piano and other instruments, which has a baroque feeling, that conveyed her intellectual side.” Addison’s Murder, She Wrote theme, with its warmth and lighthearted tone, was delightfully appropriate for both Jessica Fletcher and the series. He won an Emmy for his score for the two-​hour pilot, “The Murder of Sherlock Holmes.” Also in the detective genre, he composed a jazzy theme for The Eddie Capra Mysteries (1978–​1979, NBC), and a classically styled one for William Conrad as Nero Wolfe (1981, NBC). In later seasons, as Mrs. Fletcher’s murder investigations took her to exotic locales, the producers often turned to composer Bruce Babcock (b. 1951) for appropriate musical backdrops. Babcock, who studied with both film-​music great Hugo Friedhofer and TV-​music great Earle Hagen, contributed authentic-​sounding Irish, Chinese, Russian, African, English, Italian, and other music to Murder, She Wrote; and alternately suspenseful and fun scores for such other popular crime and mystery series as Matlock, Father Dowling Mysteries, and Diagnosis: Murder, earning an Emmy and five additional nominations. His command of the orchestra and ability to convey diverse emotions and colors in music made him a sought-​after composer in the classical arena after he left TV in 1998.

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Another Murder, She Wrote composer took center stage on a different detective series: Steve Dorff (b. 1949), whose solo saxophone plus electric guitar drove the action on Spenser: For Hire (1985–​1988, ABC), with Robert Urich in his best-​ever role as Robert B. Parker’s sophisticated, literate Boston private eye. Dorff got the job because he was Urich’s neighbor and friend, but the theme and scores (co-​written with Dorff ’s longtime orchestrator Larry Herbstritt) rank as his most substantive for the medium (despite having sitcom hits like Growing Pains)—​perhaps because the show itself was a cut above, as Spenser quoted everyone from Kipling to Kierkegaard while Dorff ’s 35-​piece orchestra played under the dialogue. The mid-​1980s saw a pair of police-​procedural sendups that also satirized themes of the past. The outrageous Police Squad! (1982, ABC) starred Leslie Nielsen as the deadpan detective in six episodes from the team that made the comedy film Airplane!, and sported a big-​band theme by Ira Newborn (b. 1949) that parodied the Count Basie theme from M Squad. Newborn would go on to score the three Naked Gun big-​screen spinoffs from the canceled series. Sledge Hammer! (1986–​1988, ABC) with David Rasche as a tough, opinionated Dirty Harry–​style police detective, featured an early TV theme by Oingo Boingo frontman Danny Elfman (b. 1953). Series creator Alan Spencer recalled: “His concept for the theme wouldn’t comment on the comedy, but lend gravitas and verisimilitude. My direction was to keep the score earnest, which he did. The hilarious soprano was Danny’s idea, almost subliminally invoking the sort of incongruous vocals that pepper Clint Eastwood movie themes [such as Lalo Schifrin’s] Magnum Force. Magnum Force was definitely an influence on my design for the Sledge Hammer! credit sequence, as well as Maurice Binder’s iconic 007 gun-​barrel opening.” In terms of music schedules, Moonlighting (1985–​1989, ABC) went from the sublime to the ridiculous. Writer-​producer Glenn Gordon Caron’s witty, often outrageous series about a wisecracking private detective (Bruce Willis) and his icy, ex-​model partner (Cybill Shepherd) became almost as famous for its production problems and behind-​the-​scenes battles as for its sophisticated banter and well-​played sexual tension between the characters. Caron brought in composer Lee Holdridge at a surprisingly early stage. “Before he shot the film, he wanted me to write a theme, which is unusual,” Holdridge recalled, “just based on the script, what my impressions would be.” Holdridge’s most astute move may have been to ask Caron to name his favorite singer. It was Al Jarreau. The composer listened to several of Jarreau’s albums; what he heard was “this very sophisticated, jazz-​oriented singer with these wonderful striking rhythmic tracks.” He was inspired to write “something that’s elegant on top but streetwise on the bottom, because that’s what I saw with the two characters.”

Holdridge wrote five proposed themes, which he then auditioned for Caron with a 35-​piece orchestra (while the pilot was still shooting). The producer chose the third of five—​the one that Holdridge happened to write the night before the date. “The character in the script had said that he played the harmonica,” the composer remembered. “I used the harmonica with string orchestra and sax, and I had this great rhythm section playing underneath it.” The theme set, Holdridge wrote the pilot score; Jarreau was subsequently signed to write the lyric and sing the theme over the end titles of the two-​hour movie. “That tune really became a signature for the show,” Holdridge said. It was also Emmy-​nominated and later received two Grammy nominations. Alf Clausen (b. 1941) orchestrated most of the pilot and worked, with Holdridge, on the initial five episodes; he soon became the series’ regular composer. Clausen grew up in North Dakota. A former French horn and bass player, he graduated from and taught at Boston’s Berklee College before moving to Los Angeles, where he eventually became musical director on the Donny and Marie variety show in the late 1970s. The complexities of shooting Moonlighting—​tons of dialogue, offbeat filming techniques, the backstage controversies—​not only kept the series constantly behind schedule, it tightened the scoring process (one of the last elements of production, and the one that usually gets squeezed when a show is late) almost to the breaking point. “When I started,” Clausen said, “I would spot on Tuesday and score on Friday—​usually Friday at 4 or 7 o’clock so that I would have the bulk of Friday to finish. As the series went on and the time crunch got to be more ridiculous, we would spot on Wednesday morning and score on Friday. There was actually an episode where I had 16 hours to write the score. Somehow it all got done.” Clausen recalled frequent phone calls to Caron begging for “another six hours” to write. Yet, Clausen insisted, the last-​minute demands were worth the trouble. “To me, at the time, it was probably the most adventurous piece of episodic on television. It was groundbreaking in many ways. The creative juices that were flowing in the entire company were really something to behold. And you don’t come upon those very often.” In one case, for example, it was Caron who suggested that Clausen write an entire score for solo tenor saxophone (for the 1986 “Big Man on Mulberry Street,” which featured Sandahl Bergman dancing an impressionistic production number directed by Stanley Donen). Clausen was most proud of his Emmy-​nominated work on “The Dream Sequence Always Rings Twice,” the 1985 black-​and-​white episode in which David and Maddie imagined themselves as a trumpeter and a torch singer in a 1940s Hollywood nightclub. Before shooting, Clausen wrote arrangements for Shepherd’s songs and three originals in the same 1940s big-​band style. After shooting—​and with all of six days to compose—​Clausen wrote the underscore, also in the style of the period.

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The following season, Clausen was nominated for his Elizabethan-​style music for the 1986 episode “Atomic Shakespeare,” a hilarious adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew with David and Maddie as Petruchio and Kate. “That was one of the legendary Moonlighting episodes that was only two-​thirds finished when I scored it,” the composer recalled. His orchestra included such period instruments as lute and viola da gamba; the tongue-​in-​cheek nature of the show required Clausen to arrange the Carpenters hit “Close to You” for recorder and harpsichord. (As Willis strolled through the courtyard hearing this, he remarked: “I loveth a band that playeth the oldies.”) Clausen received four more Emmy nominations for his work on Moonlighting. Surprisingly, at the same time, he was also writing weekly scores for the sitcom ALF (1986–​1990, NBC), about a fur-​covered, smart-​ aleck alien who becomes part of a suburban family. Asked about the coincidence in names, Clausen often quipped: “No, they didn’t name the series after me, but I granted them the rights to use my face as a likeness.” Medical examiners, later referred to with the more sophisticated term “forensic pathologists,” inspired varying musical approaches. Swinging saxophones lightened the mood of Quincy, M.E. (1976–​1983, NBC), starring Jack Klugman as an L.A. medical examiner (with creator-​producer Glen A. Larson sharing composer credit with Stu Phillips). CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000–​2015, CBS)—​starring William Petersen and Marg Helgenberger as Las Vegas crime-​lab scientists—​went in a different direction, licensing a 1978 Pete Townshend song, “Who Are You.” The subsequent spinoffs, in a similar vein, also licensed classic songs by The Who: CSI: Miami (2002–​2012, CBS) with David Caruso and Emily Procter, 1971’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”; CSI: New York (2004–​ 2013, CBS) with Gary Sinise, 1971’s “Baba O’Riley”; and CSI: Cyber (2015–​2016, CBS) with Patricia Arquette and Ted Danson, 1967’s “I Can See for Miles.” The network “shelled out millions” for the rights to the four popular hits, one major newspaper reported at the time; however, no details about the deals have ever surfaced and it is likely that the songwriter primarily benefited via performance royalties generated after each season aired. The Who singer Roger Daltrey even guest-​starred in a seventh-​season episode of CSI. Wendy Melvoin (b. 1964) and Lisa Coleman (b. 1960) came from the rock world (winning a Grammy as part of Prince’s Revolution in the 1980s) and the film world (with credits like Dangerous Minds and Soul Food in the 1990s). Producer Allan Arkush recruited them for Crossing Jordan (2001–​2007, NBC) with Jill Hennessy as a Massachusetts medical examiner. They began by writing Celtic-​flavored themes reflecting her Boston Irish heritage (Irish flute, bagpipes, Uillean pipes). “But as the show started evolving, and became more procedural, not as character-​driven, the music had to change with that, and sound a little more electronic,”

Coleman said. Melvoin referred to their work as “soundscapes. We come from a film place,” she added. “We fight with TV constantly. We want to take cues longer, a little bit further.” They would go on to win an Emmy for their rock-​tinged, voice-​laden theme for the Edie Falco comedy-​drama Nurse Jackie (2009–​2015, Showtime). Another police procedural took a more unorthodox approach for its theme. Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–​1999, NBC), produced by filmmaker Barry Levinson and shot in his hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, was among the most critically acclaimed dramas of the decade, earning three Peabody Awards during its run. Andre Braugher, Yaphet Kotto and Ned Beatty were among the ensemble cast of this gritty, realistic, and often downbeat depiction of urban crime. Levinson chose recent Peabody Conservatory graduate Lynn F. Kowal (b. 1967) as his theme composer, in part because he wanted people from Baltimore on his crew, but also because, she said, “he didn’t want something that sounded like traditional television music.” She sent him her “more experimental stuff, because that’s what I wanted to hear on television.” Levinson loved the opening of a 10-​minute piece she called “African Venture,” which combined African percussion with electronic elements, and used it for the series main title (set against mostly black-​ and-​white images of the city and the cast). Jeff Rona (b. 1957) scored the first two seasons; he would later score the drug-​trade miniseries Traffic (2004, USA).

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3 “Head ’em Up! Move ’em Out!”

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esterns, mostly low-​budget affairs, were a television staple almost from the beginning: The Lone Ranger, The Cisco Kid, The Roy Rogers Show (1951–​1957, NBC), The Gene Autry Show (1950–​1956, CBS), and others were favorites, mostly with younger viewers. Every kid in America could sing such familiar songs as Dale Evans’s “Happy Trails to You” and Autry’s “Back in the Saddle Again.” Most of these shows were tracked with library music for their underscore. The fall of 1955 marked the beginning of the “adult western” on network television, with the debuts of Gunsmoke (1955–​1975, CBS), The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp (1955–​1961, ABC), and Cheyenne (1955–​1963, ABC). Gunsmoke was an adaptation of the CBS radio series that was then being scored by Rex Koury (1911–​2006), and the television series naturally adopted his theme (although Koury never received screen credit, as was the practice of the time). Koury’s loping, “On the Trail”–​style melody was used under the end titles; a variation on it was heard during the dramatic opening scenes, as Marshal Matt Dillon (James Arness) gunned down an outlaw in the streets of Dodge City, Kansas; and it was, on rare occasions, alluded to in the underscores. Fred Steiner and Morton Stevens created the most dramatic versions of Koury’s original tune in various arrangements during the 1950s and 1960s. Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0004

Apart from the theme, all of the music during the early years of Gunsmoke, as well as in such later CBS-​produced westerns such as Have Gun—​Will Travel and Rawhide, was drawn from the CBS music library. The network’s West Coast music director, Lud Gluskin, regularly commissioned music from various composers specifically for tracking into CBS series. By the end of the 1950s, the CBS library included literally hundreds of hours of generic western music written by composers both famous and unknown, all of which was logged (by composer, timing, and nature of cue) for easy reference. The unknowns included René Garriguenc and Lucien Moraweck, two French composers whom Gluskin had known for years and who emigrated to the United States to become staff writers at CBS. Garriguenc and Moraweck wrote considerable material for the library but only received screen credit much later when they composed scores for specific episodes of the CBS westerns. The more famous included William Grant Still (1895–​ 1978), the esteemed concert composer who may have been the first African American to write for American television. His 10-​minute “Laredo” suite, which contained such cues as “Cowpoke Visits Mexico,” “Frontier Fort,” and “Lonesome Cowboy,” was tracked into many episodes. Even more western music was contributed by Bernard Herrmann (1911–​1975), whose relationship with Gluskin dated back to the days of Herrmann’s work for CBS radio in New York during the late 1930s. Herrmann’s first film score happened to be for a picture that many critics still consider the finest ever made: Citizen Kane (1941). He won an Academy Award for The Devil and Daniel Webster (also 1941), and wrote colorful and distinctive scores for diverse films such as Jane Eyre (1943), The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947), and The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951). During the period of his work for the CBS library, he had just embarked on a 10-​year relationship with director Alfred Hitchcock that would produce such classics as Psycho (1960). Herrmann wrote only two film scores with western themes: Garden of Evil (1954) and The Kentuckian (1955). But he wrote several hours of western-​flavored music for television, beginning with two television pilots and four suites of music specifically composed for the library at CBS. Herrmann’s “Western Suite,” which Gluskin recorded in Paris in July 1957, was written for woodwinds and percussion and consisted largely of suspense cues bearing such generic titles as “Night Suspense” and “Bad Man.” Herrmann composed and orchestrated three other suites for brass and percussion, including “Western Saga,” also recorded in Europe that summer. This music was more recognizably “western” in tone, and met myriad scoring needs, as indicated by such cue titles such as “The Canyons,” “Open Spaces,” and “The Hunt.” Also written for brass and percussion were the shorter “Desert Suite” and “Indian Suite.” All were imaginative in their use of limited orchestral resources to produce a variety of unique sounds and dramatic effects.

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Also for CBS, Herrmann scored the unsold pilot Ethan Allen (which went into the library) and, more significantly, the pilot for Have Gun—​ Will Travel (1957–​1963). Richard Boone starred in this half-​hour series as Paladin, a thoughtful and highly educated gunfighter-​for-​hire whose home base was the Hotel Carlton in San Francisco. He was frequently attired in all black, and his business card bore the symbol of a chess knight. This was no singing cowboy; Paladin could shoot a villain and recite a Shakespeare soliloquy over the corpse. Herrmann responded with an atmospheric score, again for brass and percussion, that included a decisive series of descending two-​, three-​, and four-​note phrases that opened each episode as Paladin drew his long-​barreled revolver and aimed at the camera. His title music also accompanied the first season’s end credits. That changed at the start of the second season, the result of an incredibly lucky break for a young singer-​actor named Johnny Western (b. 1934). Western had performed with Gene Autry during 1956 and 1957 and went on to live his dream as a TV cowboy with a number of guest shots and a continuing role on the syndicated Boots and Saddles (1957). The interiors for that show were shot on the same studio lot where Boone was filming Have Gun—​Will Travel, and Western, a Boone admirer, wrangled a role as an overconfident young gunfighter on the new CBS series. While shooting the episode “The Return of Dr. Thackeray” in March 1958, Western came up with a lyric that he liked: “Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam /​Paladin, Paladin, far, far from home.” His wife was expecting their second child, and he happened to be on location with the show on the day his daughter was born. Nervous and unable to be with his family, he recalled: “I picked up my guitar for something to do, and started playing and singing ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky.’ And this ‘Paladin, Paladin, where do you roam’ starting coming out, to exactly the same beat as ‘Ghost Riders.’ So I sat down with a yellow legal tablet and I wrote it down just as fast as I could. It all just fell into place. I wrote the whole thing in about twenty minutes.” Before the end of the day, Western had returned to Hollywood and cut a demo at a friend’s studio. He delivered copies to series producer/​ co-​creator Sam Rolfe and star Boone. “I had nothing in mind at all, except to say, here’s a musical thank-​you card for having me on the show,” Western explained. Within just days, the songwriter heard from Rolfe, who had discussed the tune with Boone and decided to make it a theme; subsequent negotiation with the top brass of CBS resulted in a firm deal, including ownership of the song, screen credit, and a recording contract with Columbia Records. “The Ballad of Paladin” would become the series’ new end-​title theme. According to Western, the song’s authorship is also credited to Boone and Rolfe because, in the recording studio, Boone suggested a more driving rhythm and Rolfe modified one line to read “. . . his fast gun for hire heeds the calling wind.” But even if neither had contributed, Western

said, “it would have been worth it to me to have given them each a third of the song, because both of these guys had gone to CBS without my knowledge and said, ‘We want this for the theme song on the show.’ ” The theme, as heard in the series, was actually recorded by Gluskin in England (with three guitars and a bass) with Western adding his vocal later in the states. Over the years, Western recorded five different versions for various album projects, although it was guitarist Duane Eddy who achieved the biggest popular success with his version (a top-​40 hit in 1962). The earliest occasion of a major Hollywood songwriter contributing a theme to a television western came in 1955, when Harry Warren (1893–​ 1981) wrote, with lyricist Harold Adamson, the title song for The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp. Hugh O’Brian rose to stardom in the title role of this semi-​serialized tale of the famous Old West marshal, his friendships with Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday, and his stints as a lawman in Dodge City, Kansas, and Tombstone, Arizona. Warren’s amazing output included such movie hits as “We’re in the Money,” “I Only Have Eyes for You,” “Jeepers Creepers,” “You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby” and “Chattanooga Choo Choo.” He won Oscars for “Lullaby of Broadway,” “You’ll Never Know” and “On the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.” He got the Wyatt Earp assignment thanks to executive producer Louis F. Edelman. The two had been good friends for many years, their association dating back to the producer’s

  Harry Warren in the 1950s.

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involvement with the Gold Diggers musicals and many other films at Warner Bros. The Warren-​Adamson collaboration produced the first memorable western tune specifically written for television. Robustly sung by an all-​male chorus led by Ken Darby, the song painted a heroic picture of the title character: “Wyatt Earp, Wyatt Earp, brave, courageous and bold /​Long live his fame and long live his glory and long may his story be told. . . .” Perhaps the most unusual aspect of the music of Wyatt Earp was the fact that most of the score, like the title song, was performed a cappella by Darby’s quartet. Darby (1909–​1992), a veteran vocal arranger and associate of longtime 20th Century-​Fox music director Alfred Newman, arranged the bridges and transitional cues for his singers (although, in a token nod to traditional western scoring, library music was also heard occasionally). “Using only singers gives [us] something new and different in the way of background music, but it costs us about a third of what live music would cost,” Edelman told TV Guide in 1958. Added Darby: “We can hum [to sound like] banjos, jew’s-​harps, drums, three trombones, and a trumpet.” Warren went on to write two other themes for television, both westerns: The Californians (1957–​1959, NBC), another song with Harold Adamson lyrics for the Adam Kennedy-​Sean McClory half-​hour show about San Francisco in the 1850s; and an instrumental theme for Tales of Wells Fargo (1957–​1962, NBC) when it expanded to an hour in the fall of 1961. Darby also scored The Californians with his quartet, The King’s Men, as well as another Louis Edelman production, The Adventures of Jim Bowie (1956–​1958, ABC) with Jim Forbes as the knife-​wielding title character. For Bowie, Darby himself wrote the title song, “Jim Bowie, Adventurin’ Man.” Darby later wrote the familiar words to Lionel Newman’s theme for the long-​running Daniel Boone (1964–​1970, NBC), the Fess Parker series about the Kentucky folk hero, although screen credit went to Darby’s wife, Vera Matson. With the success of Cheyenne, another fall 1955 entry, Warner Bros. attempted to capitalize on the national mania for TV westerns with six more westerns over the next four seasons. Warner’s initial habit of creating weekly original scores, however, would last for only the first two seasons of Cheyenne. Debuting in the fall of 1957 were Sugarfoot (1957–​1960, ABC) with Will Hutchins as a gentle cowpoke studying the law by correspondence course; Colt .45 (1957–​1960, ABC) with Wayde Preston as a government agent who posed as a gun salesman; and Maverick (1957–​1962, ABC) with James Garner and Jack Kelly as gambler brothers and good-​natured con artists Bret and Bart Maverick. For Sugarfoot, the producers reached back to the music that Max Steiner had written for the 1951 film with Randolph Scott, with an added bridge by Warner music director Ray Heindorf; Paul Francis Webster

(1907–​1984) added lyrics for a vocal version in the fall of 1958. Composers Paul Sawtell and Bert Shefter, whose own western library (courtesy of the Mutel music service) was being used to score most of the Warner westerns, composed the Colt .45 theme, which was replaced halfway through the first season when a new title song was written by composer Hal Hopper (1912–​1970) and writer-​producer Douglas Heyes. For Maverick, the studio again turned to David Buttolph, who had written so much music for Conflict and the Warner anthology series during the two years that the studio commissioned original scores. Buttolph’s jaunty tune would be accompanied, starting in the second season, by another Paul Francis Webster lyric (“Natchez to New Orleans, livin’ on jacks and queens, Maverick is a legend of the West . . .”). According to studio music department correspondence of the time, these themes and the cues based on them were “recorded abroad, [to be used] as signature music and also for scoring whenever possible.” The remainder of the scoring was provided by Mutel, mostly the music of Sawtell and Shefter. During the 1958–​1959 season and for the next two seasons, Warner Bros. would contract directly with Sawtell and Shefter (as Music Scores Inc.) for the underscores. Bronco (1958–​1960, ABC), with Ty Hardin as a drifter in post–​Civil War Texas, featured a song by Jerry Livingston and Mack David, originally sung by Hal Hopper, later by arranger Jack Halloran’s vocal group. Livingston and David also wrote “Gold Fever” as the theme for The Alaskans (1959–​1960, ABC), which starred Roger Moore, Dorothy Provine, and Jeff York as fortune hunters during the Gold Rush of 1898. Over at Revue, library music was still the order of the day. At first, Tales of Wells Fargo with Dale Robertson, and then Wagon Train (1957–​ 1965, NBC/​ABC), starring Ward Bond and Robert Horton, were tracked with library music commissioned by Revue musical director Stanley Wilson and usually supplied by music publisher David Gordon. In 1958, original, episode-​specific scores became the rule rather than the exception at Revue, and on no series was this more apparent than Wagon Train. The story of a Missouri-​to-​California trek, Wagon Train started out in the fall of 1957 with a theme by composer Henri René (1906–​1993) and a never-​heard lyric by Bob Russell (1914–​1970). It was replaced the following season by a new song by songwriters Sammy Fain (1902–​1989, who had won Oscars for “Love Is a Many-​Splendored Thing” and “Secret Love”) and Jack Brooks (1912–​1971, an Oscar nominee for “That’s Amore”). Johnny O’Neill sang this evocative ditty (“Rollin’ over prairie where there ain’t no grass /​rollin’ over mountain where there ain’t no pass /​sittin’ on a board eyein’ the weather /​prayin’ to the Lord, please stay together /​side by side on the wagon train”). This, in turn, was replaced in 1959 by a new orchestral theme by Jerome Moross (1913–​1983), which became its best known, and remained with the series until its cancellation. Wilson himself wrote the theme for

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Major Adams, Trailmaster, the alternate title for Wagon Train episodes in syndication. Wilson commissioned original scores for the series every week, many from major Hollywood film composers. During the 1958–​1959 season alone, the roster of composers working on Wagon Train included Roy Webb (Notorious), David Raksin (Laura), Ernest Gold (Exodus), Cyril Mockridge (Miracle on 34th Street), David Buttolph (Guadalcanal Diary), Conrad Salinger (The Last Time I Saw Paris), Laurindo Almeida (the world-​renowned guitarist), and Heinz Roemheld (The Lady from Shanghai), several of whom scored more than one episode. Wilson’s genius was in signing Jerome Moross to score a second-​season episode that guest-​starred Brian Donlevy. Moross, who divided his time between the theater, concert music, and Hollywood, composed the quintessential western film score in The Big Country (1958). His grasp of musical idioms that were uniquely American in character was, at that time, matched only by Aaron Copland’s concert music. Moross was subsequently commissioned to compose the new Wagon Train theme, also known as “Wagons Ho!” (Ward Bond’s signal to move the wagons ahead). Moross’s Wagon Train main-​title theme—​like his Oscar-​nominated Big Country score, music that speaks of wide-​open spaces and the American West—​accompanied drawings of Bond, Horton, and the covered wagons they led. Unfortunately, he had used it once before, as a minor motif in a 1959 Jeff Chandler film titled The Jayhawkers.

Jerome Moross, late 1950s.

“I wrote that theme, which is very unimportant in The Jayhawkers, and I forgot about it,” Moross later explained. “They [Revue] hired me to write a new theme for Wagon Train, and without thinking of it, this theme was in my mind and I wrote it down for Wagon Train.” Paramount, which released The Jayhawkers, complained (considering Wagon Train was then the second most popular series on television). “They brought the matter to me,” Moross recalled, “and I said, ‘it can’t be.’ Sure enough, it was.” According to Moross, however, Paramount “let it pass” and did not pursue legal action over the theme. “It was unimportant in the film and, after all, I suppose Paramount felt they might have to ask a similar favor of Universal some day.” In all, Moross scored six Wagon Train episodes during the 1959–​1960 and 1960–​1961 seasons but, although asked, declined to stay with the series. He did, however, compose two short scores for CBS westerns (for 1961 episodes of Have Gun—​Will Travel and Gunsmoke) and, much later, the theme for the series Lancer (1968–​1970, CBS), a family western set in California during the 1870s that starred Andrew Duggan, James Stacy, and Wayne Maunder. All were examples of the distinctive western flavor and momentum that made The Big Country such a groundbreaking score. CBS, meanwhile, was launching a new western of its own and moving in a different musical direction. The show was Rawhide (1959–​1966), and Dimitri Tiomkin had agreed to compose the theme for this ambitious hour created by Charles Marquis Warren and starring Eric Fleming and Clint Eastwood as trail boss and ramrod, respectively, of a Texas-​to-​Kansas cattle drive. Tiomkin (1894–​1979) was a film composer of note, a Russian who took naturally to westerns, as heard in his scores for Duel in the Sun (1946) and Red River (1948). It was his music for High Noon (1952), however, that STANLEY WILSON, REVUE’S PIONEERING MUSIC DIRECTOR Stanley J. Wilson (1917–​ 1970) was one of the most important figures in television music history. As music director for Revue Productions (later Universal Television) from 1954 to 1970, he either launched or helped to propel the careers of more than a dozen top film and TV composers including John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Quincy Jones, Lalo Schifrin, Dave Grusin, and more. He hired African-​ American composers, including Benny Carter and Oliver Nelson, in an era, and at a studio, where integration was lagging behind that of American society. “He was greatly important to me, and to so many others,” said Williams, who went from in-​demand studio pianist to fledgling TV composer when

Stanley Wilson.

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significantly altered the way that many westerns were scored: he used a simple, folk-​style tune, “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’ ” (with lyrics by Ned Washington), throughout the film, winning Academy Awards for Best Song and Best Score for his efforts. Although Tex Ritter sang it in the movie, it was Frankie Laine who had the hit record with High Noon. So when the commercially minded Tiomkin scored Gunfight at the OK Corral (1957), again with Washington and again using a ballad throughout the film, Laine got the call to perform it on the soundtrack. And, in early 1958, when Tiomkin and Washington agreed to collaborate on a theme for Rawhide, Laine once more was signed to sing. Legend has it that the famous, high-​priced Tiomkin agreed to write a TV theme as the result of a colossal misunderstanding. When initially approached, the composer reportedly asked who was starring in the series. Told over the phone that it was Eric Fleming, Tiomkin is said to have replied: “Good. If Errol Flynn is the star, I’ll write the music.” Tiomkin is also said to have had difficulty understanding the dialogue and nature of the Rawhide pilot, and that as a result the initial Rawhide song had to be considerably modified. The original music and lyrics on file at CBS, in fact, were marked “revised, June 28, 1958.” The Rawhide theme was one of the earliest examples of commercial considerations dictating a musical approach for television. According to Laine, CBS wanted a single released at least eight weeks before the series was to debut (originally, in the fall of 1958); and the plan was to use the record, in part, as the actual series main title. CBS-​owned Columbia Records executive Mitch Miller, who had produced Laine’s similarly outdoorsy “Mule Train” hit eight years earlier, arranged Rawhide for Laine, with a 12-​voice male chorus, guitars, bass, and accordion (punctuated by whip cracks à la “Mule Train”). The driving, country-​flavored tune

Wilson hired him in 1958. “He nurtured and encouraged younger people, most of whom have gone on to distinguished careers.” Originally a trumpet player from New York, Wilson became an arranger for Freddie Martin’s band in the 1940s and an orchestrator at MGM before joining Republic Studios as a composer-​ orchestrator in 1947. There he worked on more than 100 films, ranging from the serial Commando Cody to “B” features with titles like Leadville Gunslinger. Wilson moved to Revue in 1954 and oversaw the scoring of the then-​fledgling studio’s early television output, supervising the tracking for various series and often composing the themes himself. Wilson’s own music included the original themes for detective series M Squad and Markham (1959–​ 1960), westerns Tales of Wells Fargo, Cimarron

City (1958–​ 1959, NBC), Buckskin (1958–​1959, NBC) and Major Adams, Trailmaster (1961–​1965); and the final season of General Electric Theater (1961–​ 1962). Most significantly, he (along with Juan Esquivel) composed the Revue Productions logo, later the Universal Television fanfare, that accompanied dozens of shows throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Williams described Wilson as “a very avuncular individual, not controlling, but always providing a safety net emotionally, technically, financially, whatever. He was most supportive, almost like a parent.” Williams spent seven years under Wilson’s tutelage, learning the craft by scoring sitcoms (Bachelor Father), detective shows (Checkmate), dramas (Alcoa Premiere), and westerns (Wagon Train). Williams called Wilson “a dreamer, an artist, a kind

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Ned Washington (left) and Dimitri Tiomkin.

made the charts, effectively preselling the series—​which had by now been delayed until midseason. “Keep rollin’, rollin’, rollin’ /​tho’ the streams are swollen /​keep them dogies rollin’, Rawhide!” went the colorful Washington lyrics. Laine’s rendition proved so popular that the Rawhide producers wrote him and his actress wife Nan Grey into a third-​season episode, “Incident on the Road to Yesterday.”

of visionary” who hoped the Universal music department would someday be considered one of the greats, like those of Fox and MGM. Wilson was that rarity in Hollywood: a warmly supportive boss. He was also a quietly dedicated liberal: he enabled Carter, the famed alto sax player and jazz arranger, to become the first Black composer to regularly receive screen credit in TV with his music for M Squad. And when Jones came out from New York in 1965, Wilson championed him by giving him Ironside. “That’s where I paid my dues,” said Jones. “He was way more than just a musical supervisor: Stanley was one amazing, incredible human being.” Later, again at Wilson’s urging, came Oliver Nelson and Benny Golson. The jazz crowd found a home at Universal. “Stanley taught me all the synchronization

techniques, and how to make my writing easier to conduct,” said Schifrin, who scored several Universal shows before his success at Desilu with Mission: Impossible. “He was one of the most influential guys in Hollywood.” Some of Wilson’s other finds were Goldsmith, who had done TV at CBS but whose work at Revue (notably the Boris Karloff horror series Thriller) led to a career in films; Morton Stevens, who did both Thriller and 87th Precinct at Revue before leading his own music department at CBS; and such later Grammy, Oscar, and Emmy winners as Patrick Williams (whose early Universal shows included The Virginian and Name of the Game), David Shire (The Virginian, McCloud), and Billy Goldenberg (It Takes a Thief, Night Gallery). “The wonderful thing about Stanley,” Shire recalled, “and why he was so valuable in the position he was in,

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Tiomkin wrote only the theme, although several cues based on it were arranged and recorded later. The original music package for Rawhide was composed by Russell Garcia (1916–​2011), the veteran composer-​arranger who would later score The Time Machine (1960) and the theme and many scores for the comic western Laredo (1965–​1967, NBC). CBS music head Lud Gluskin asked him for “some wide-​open-​spaces music, some chases, some fights, all sorts of music” for a new western series, Garcia recalled (in all, 30 or 40 minutes of music, all recorded in Europe prior to Tiomkin’s involvement). Garcia’s own Rawhide theme, frequently heard in the underscore, finally achieved prominence as the end-​credit music for the series’ final season. The vast majority of Rawhide episodes were tracked from stock music in the CBS library; in fact, of the first 100 episodes, only four benefited from original scores. Most were written by TV veterans Fred Steiner, Leon Klatzkin, and Rudy Schrager; the final season boasted original scores by film greats such as Bernard Herrmann, Hugo Friedhofer, and Johnny Green. Two other Tiomkin themes graced the CBS airwaves for Hotel De Paree (1959–​1960) and Gunslinger (1961). Tiomkin composed his only original television score for the pilot of Hotel, about a Colorado adventurer named Sundance, played by Earl Holliman. With a lyric by Paul Francis Webster, the melody was used for a song called “Sundance” over the end credits. For Gunslinger, a short-​lived series starring Tony Young, Tiomkin re-​teamed with Washington and Laine for another great song in the service of a hopeless show. Gunslinger, at least, was released as a single. Laine, parodying his own western-​theme reputation (à la Blazing Saddles), later sang the title songs for the comedy westerns Rango (1967, ABC) and Lobo (1979–​81, NBC).

was that he was not only a first-​rate administrator but a consummate musician, orchestrator, and conductor. He knew the territory, whether it was scheduling, conducting for a composer who wanted to sit in the booth, advising about what key musicians to hire for a specific score, or making a suggestion about the way to make a cue more effective.” “He had a huge impact,” said Grusin, who composed the themes for Name of the Game and It Takes a Thief for Wilson and who was with him in Aspen in 1970 when Wilson, only 52, suffered a coronary and died. “He had a very good liaison technique with producers and directors: Don Siegel and guys who were working in the trenches over there all got along great with Stanley,” Grusin remembered. Wilson was also known for his generosity to older composers who found themselves less in

demand for features, and gave them work at Revue during the 1960s. Bernard Herrmann scored the Alfred Hitchcock Hour and Chrysler Theater series there; Franz Waxman did episodes of Kraft Suspense Theatre; and Bronislau Kaper scored Arrest & Trial. Elmer Bernstein, although already a known film composer, came to TV to do General Electric Theater, Riverboat, and Staccato under Wilson’s direction. “He was the father of underscore for television,” said Sandy DeCrescent, who worked closely with Wilson throughout the 1960s (and eventually rose to become the most powerful musicians’ contractor in Hollywood). “He single-​handedly elevated the level of music in television in those years, with his guidance and his mentoring. That quality of music will never be repeated.”

Meanwhile, The Rifleman (1958–​1963, ABC) took a new approach to the traditional western by concentrating to a greater degree on family matters. Chuck Connors played Lucas McCain, a widower who ran a ranch near North Fork, New Mexico, with his young son Mark (Johnny Crawford). Every episode began with a determined-​looking McCain firing his .44 Winchester at some unseen outlaw on the streets of North Fork, accompanied by the strains of Herschel Burke Gilbert’s memorable theme. Gilbert (1918–​2003) was a Juilliard-​trained violist who had become an arranger for the Harry James band during the mid-​1940s. He went to Columbia as an orchestrator in 1946, working on pictures such as Rogues of Sherwood Forest. He also orchestrated for Dimitri Tiomkin on films including Duel in the Sun and It’s a Wonderful Life before becoming a full-​time composer in the early 1950s. He received consecutive Oscar nominations for his score for The Thief (1952), the title song of The Moon Is Blue (1953), and musical direction on Carmen Jones (1954). Gilbert’s past experience on films for producers Jules Levy and Arthur Gardner and director Arnold Laven (including 1952’s Without Warning) led them to call him for the pilot of The Rifleman. And, because it was already a strong series possibility, Gilbert not only scored the pilot, he wrote an entire library of music (an hour and a half) for the series to come. It was all recorded in Munich with a 60-​piece symphony orchestra, and the same library served the series for most of its five-​year run. The Rifleman theme was “my idea of a western melody,” Gilbert said later. “I wrote about four themes: a very pretty one for the boy [Crawford], a couple for heavies, any crook.” (At one point, Gilbert recalled, the music “got more fan mail than Chuck Connors.”) Gilbert’s Rifleman score was so successful that Dick Powell, whose fledgling Four Star Television operation had bought the series, offered the composer the post of music

Producer Douglas Benton, in 1993, recalled Wilson’s influence on shows like Thriller. “If anybody is responsible for the quality of television film scoring, it’s Stanley Wilson,” Benton said. “He had a tremendously high standard. If you weren’t any good, you didn’t last. But if you were, he would find the right spot for you. So as long as Stanley was alive, we had far and away the best television music in the business.” In 2012, Universal Studios—​ with the encouragement of both Williams and director Steven Spielberg—​named a street on its lot after Stanley Wilson. It is a few short steps from the now-​ demolished Stage 10 where Wilson conducted literally thousands of hours of music by young composers who would go on to become the biggest names in Hollywood film music.

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Herschel Burke Gilbert.

director. For five years, Gilbert oversaw the music of all Four Star series, writing some of it, assigning composers to write others, and conducting the annual library sessions in Germany. Gilbert’s associates at Four Star included Joseph Mullendore, who wrote the theme for the western anthology Zane Grey Theatre (1956–​ 1962, CBS), and Rudy Schrager (1900–​1983), who scored Wanted: Dead or Alive (1958–​1961, CBS) with Steve McQueen as bounty hunter Josh Randall. Gilbert himself scored the Robert Taylor crime drama The Detectives and episodes of the dramatic anthology The Dick Powell Show (1961–​1963, NBC). For every series, a library of music was created that was designed to meet every possible scoring need. “Every picture has a chase of some kind,” Gilbert explained. “Most of them, especially in series, have a love scene of some kind. Almost every picture has a happy ending. It’s a framework within which you can write classical music and be right most of the time. Plus, when you’re dealing with drama, you can really write contemporary music. You can get away with all kinds of dissonance.”

One of the Four Star westerns was Black Saddle (1959–​1960, NBC/​ The Westerns ABC), whose unusual musical history began with Jerry Goldsmith. 97 Goldsmith had scored the radio western Frontier Gentleman for producer Antony Ellis. When Ellis moved into television with Black Saddle, starring Peter Breck as a gunfighter-​turned-​lawyer, he asked Goldsmith to write the theme. Because the composer was still under contract to CBS at the time, he penned it under a pseudonym (that of his then-​brother-​ in-​law, J. Michael Hennagin) and never received screen credit for his fast, rhythmically exciting theme for guitars, brass, and percussion. Arthur Morton (1908–​2000), who several years later became Goldsmith’s regular orchestrator, wrote a library of Americana music for the series. The fall of 1959 also saw the debuts of two important new series that involved top musical talent: Bonanza (1959–​1973, NBC) and Riverboat (1959–​1961, NBC). Bonanza, the first television western to be broadcast in color, was the story of a sprawling Nevada ranch and the family that owned it: strong-​willed patriarch Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene) and his three sons (Pernell Roberts, Dan Blocker, and Michael Landon), all by different mothers. Alan Livingston, at the time vice president of television programming at NBC (which owned Bonanza), asked his brother Jay Livingston—​who with his partner Ray Evans formed one of the all-​time great Hollywood songwriting teams—​to pen a theme for this new series. Livingston (1915–​2001) and Evans (1915–​2007) had, at that time, been nominated six times for the Best Song Oscar, and won three of those, for “Buttons and Bows,” “Mona Lisa,” and “Que Será, Será.” They also wrote the Bob Hope standard “Silver Bells,” as well as the song score for one of TV’s first “spectaculars,” Satins and Spurs (1954), which marked Betty Hutton’s small-​screen debut. The team agreed to write a song for $750, with another $750 payment if the series sold. (The back-​end money was what counted: Livingston and Evans would publish the song themselves, which turned out to be a bonanza of its own.) Recalled Evans: “The only guidelines they gave us were, it can’t be long, it’s got to sound triumphant, it’s got to sound western and be like a march, that sort of thing.” “The title didn’t make any sense,” Livingston remembered. “They talked about changing it but they liked the sound of it. There’s no reason for ‘Bonanza,’ when you think about it. The ranch is called Ponderosa.” Added Evans: “We had a hell of a time trying to write lyrics to make ‘Bonanza’ make sense.” Nonetheless, Livingston and Evans wrote a song that became one of television’s best-​known themes—​at least, as played instrumentally. The finale of the pilot script called for the Cartwrights to ride out of Virginia City singing the title song, and although the scene was filmed, the episode as aired used an alternate take without the tune. The lyrics—​“we’ve got a right to pick a little fight, Bonanza!”—​were first widely heard on an album sung by star Lorne Greene in 1964.

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Jay Livingston (left) and Ray Evans.

Creator-​producer David Dortort was unhappy with the lyrics, but agreed to use the Livingston-​Evans song, instrumentally, over the main and end titles, so long as his composer of choice, David Rose, did not have to interpolate the song into the weekly dramatic underscores. Rose (1910–​1990) had been a pianist and arranger for NBC Radio in Chicago and Mutual Radio in Los Angeles in the 1930s and 1940s. He became the musical director for comedian Red Skelton’s radio program in 1947 and made the transition to television with Skelton’s variety show in 1951 (an association that lasted throughout Skelton’s 20-​year TV career). As a film composer, he received Oscar nominations for his scoring of The Princess and the Pirate (1944) and the song “So in Love” from Wonder Man (1945). His active recording career throughout the 1950s and 1960s included such hits as “Holiday for Strings” and “The Stripper,” and he won his first Emmy for musical direction on An Evening with Fred Astaire (1958). Dortort was a believer in the power of music in film. He not only gave Rose an orchestra of as many as 35 musicians, he also insisted upon scoring every episode (despite union regulations that, at the time, permitted extensive tracking). The result was one of the richest-​sounding series of the era, often comparable to the lush sounds of Rose’s concert albums. In 1962, Rose called the series “the best thing I’ve done musically, principally because I’m given such broad latitude. My concept of TV music involves thinking of various instruments in terms of colors, and then fitting the colors to the mood and action on the screen.”

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  David Rose.

Rose scored the vast majority of the 430 episodes, often orchestrating his own scores despite his myriad other commitments, including the Skelton show and several other television series. His stately “Ponderosa” theme opened act one of every episode. Highlights of his work during the first two seasons appeared on an MGM album, including a tender waltz for “Silent Thunder,” a 1960 episode in which Little Joe (Landon) fell in love with a blind girl played by Stella Stevens; the dramatic score for the 1961 episode “Sam Hill”; and tasteful, reverent music for the 1960 episode “The Hopefuls,” about a religious sect en route to California. He was especially proud of his heroic score for the two-​part “Ride the Wind,” a story of the early days of the Pony Express that aired in early 1966; he won an Emmy for “The Love Child” episode in 1970. The Livingston-​Evans song, freshly arranged every year, lasted 11 seasons, until Dortort asked Rose to write his own, new Bonanza theme (titled “The Big Bonanza”) for the 1970–​1971 season. Viewer demand for the familiar original Livingston-​Evans tune led to its reinstatement for the fourteenth and final season in the fall of 1972. Rose also scored the two-​hour pilot for Dortort’s second successful western series, The High Chaparral (1967–​1971, NBC). This too was the story of a powerful landowner, rancher Big John Cannon (Leif Erickson), his marriage to Mexican heiress Victoria Montoya (Linda Cristal), and their struggle to forge an empire in the Arizona Territory during the 1870s. The score was one of Rose’s finest, including a noble main theme

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with strummed guitars that helped to establish the Southwestern locale (originally penned for a 1966 Bonanza episode, “Four Sisters From Boston”). All 95 subsequent episodes were scored by Harry Sukman (1912–​1984), who occasionally filled in for Rose on Bonanza (including the entire eleventh season), and who had won an Academy Award for adapting the music of Franz Liszt for Song Without End (1960). Sukman would later arrange John Williams’s film theme for Dortort’s TV spinoff of The Cowboys (1974, ABC) and score that series as well. Rose’s longtime association with the Bonanza company led Michael Landon to choose Rose as his primary composer for three Landon-​ produced series that followed, starting with Little House on the Prairie (1974–​1983, NBC), based on the Laura Ingalls Wilder books about growing up in Minnesota in the 1870s, starring Landon, Karen Grassle, Melissa Gilbert, and Melissa Sue Anderson (its theme also originated in a Bonanza score, the 1971 episode “Top Hand”). Later, Rose scored the Landon series Father Murphy (1981–​1982, NBC), with Merlin Olsen as a kindly orphanage keeper in the Dakota Territory, and Highway to Heaven (1984–​1989, NBC), with Landon as an angel helping people on earth, and Victor French as his human guide and companion. Landon preferred stories filled with sentiment, and Rose’s music helped him to achieve his weekly goal of moving the audience emotionally. About Little House, Rose explained in 1974: “It has nothing to do with western music. It’s dramatic, contemporary music done in a legitimate scoring fashion, which is almost a disappearing art.” Rose received four more Emmy nominations for Little House, winning two, as well as a final nomination for Father Murphy. Both Dortort and Landon gave Rose full publishing rights to his scores, something that few composers would ever achieve in television. Rose’s other television credits included two other westerns, The Monroes (1966–​1967, ABC) with a young Barbara Hershey, and Dundee and the Culhane (1967, CBS) with John Mills; plus the backstage-​Hollywood drama Bracken’s World (1969–​1970, NBC) with Eleanor Parker; and the sitcom Mr. Adams and Eve (1957–​1958, CBS) with Howard Duff and Ida Lupino. For Riverboat, also an hour-​long period drama, Revue musical director Wilson wisely turned to Elmer Bernstein. Riverboat starred Darren McGavin as the colorful captain of the Enterprise, a stern-​wheeler that plied the Mississippi, Missouri, and Ohio rivers during the 1840s; Burt Reynolds played his pilot. Bernstein scored this adventure in a distinctly Americana idiom, clearly folk-​influenced yet big and bold in a grand orchestral manner. The rhythms and colors heard throughout the pilot, and 14 subsequent Bernstein-​scored episodes that first season, presaged the famous score that he would compose the following year for The Magnificent Seven.

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Elmer Bernstein.

Bernstein had always been interested in American folk music and, having been mentored by Aaron Copland—​“Aaron kind of invented American music,” he pointed out—​he had “always been looking for some opportunity to use it. Until the time of Riverboat, I never had a real chance. I had a sense of it in a picture I did very early on, called The Tin Star [1957] with Henry Fonda. But Riverboat was the first chance, really, to go all out with that kind of material.” The series was considered so important by the executives at Revue that, Bernstein recalled, the pilot score boasted more than 50 musicians and “the orchestras on all the Riverboats were always around 40,” an unheard-​of ensemble for episodic television. “It’s kind of hindsight,” he added, “but I realize now that The Magnificent Seven was a logical outgrowth of Riverboat.” By utilizing the services of veteran orchestrators Leo Shuken (1906–​ 1976) and Jack Hayes (1919–​2011)—​the team that would orchestrate all of Bernstein’s big western features, including The Magnificent Seven, The Hallelujah Trail, and The Sons of Katie Elder—​the composer was able to write not only all those Riverboat episodes the first year, but also the jazz scores for Staccato at the same time. Shuken and Hayes also wrote their own Riverboat scores, as did other veteran orchestrators such as Al Sendrey and Al Woodbury. For the second season, the Bernstein theme was replaced by a new one written by Gerald Fried (b. 1928), who took over the weekly scoring chores. His Riverboat theme had a distinctly Southern feel, with the banjo prominently featured (and which hinted at some of the down-​home sound

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that would later win him an Emmy for Roots). “I thought the five-​string banjos were the most exciting instruments that man ever made,” Fried said. “You had the most American sound possible, a five-​string banjo twanging along. The producer just didn’t like it [so] they took out some of the banjo tunes.” Fried endured a certain amount of criticism for his earlier series at Revue, the jazz score for Shotgun Slade (1959–​1960, syndicated), a western with Scott Brady as a frontier detective with a unique firearm (its lower barrel fired a 12–​gauge shell, the upper barrel a .32 caliber bullet). The small-​combo jazz approach (prominently featuring electric guitar and harpsichord) seemed hopelessly anachronistic for a sagebrush saga. In his liner notes for the LP, Wilson admitted: “The idea of writing a musical score with a jazz feeling for a western TV series is something that was joked about, but never taken seriously, until we started the Slade series.” A former oboist with the Dallas and Pittsburgh Symphonies, Fried was a Juilliard-​trained composer who scored his boyhood friend Stanley Kubrick’s earliest films, including The Killing (1956) and Paths of Glory (1957). A prolific composer for television, his later credits included the comedy Gilligan’s Island, episodes of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and Star Trek, and both Roots miniseries. Revue was churning out westerns left and right throughout this period. Englishman Cyril J. Mockridge (1896–​1979) wrote the rich, full-​ blooded theme and nearly two dozen scores, over the first two seasons, for Laramie (1959–​1963, NBC), which starred John Smith and Robert Fuller as Wyoming ranchers. The Deputy (1959–​1961, NBC), with Henry Fonda as the marshal of an Arizona town, was scored by veteran studio guitarist Jack Marshall (1921–​1973). The Tall Man (1960–​1962, NBC), with Barry Sullivan as Pat Garrett and Clu Gulager as Billy the Kid, was scored by Juan Esquivel (1918–​2002), who had achieved success in the recording field with mood-​music albums featuring unorthodox orchestrations. His Tall Man music was an equally strange mixture of jazzy sounds and western styles. (Esquivel and Stanley Wilson were co-​credited with the Revue/​Universal emblem fanfare that followed every end-​credit roll from the studio for many years.) Two more greats of the silver screen toiled briefly in the realm of the TV western, both at virtually the same time: Hans J. Salter (1896–​1994), who wrote Wichita Town (1959–​1960, NBC), and Hugo Friedhofer (1901–​ 1981), who scored the majority of Outlaws (1960–​1962, NBC). Salter was known as “the master of terror and suspense” for his superb scores for the Universal horror films of the 1940s and 1950s. His music for movies such as The Wolf Man (1941), The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942), and The Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954) frightened filmgoers as much as the imagery in those black-​and-​white classics. Born in Vienna, Salter conducted in opera houses, studied composition with modern

composer Alban Berg, and wrote music for early talkies at Berlin’s famous UFA studios, until the rise of Hitler brought him to America in 1937. In the United States, he worked on more than 200 films over a 30-​ year period and received six Academy Award nominations. Salter had scored several Joel McCrea westerns, including Wichita (1955) and The Oklahoman (1957), so when McCrea prepared to go into TV with a series called Wichita Town, loosely based on the feature, Salter was signed to provide the music. The half-​hour series cast McCrea as the marshal of Wichita, Kansas, and the actor’s son Jody McCrea as his deputy. “There wasn’t even one script ready when I was engaged,” Salter recalled, “so I had to visualize what kind of music I would need. I had to write about an hour of music for different situations—​for chases, stampedes, quiet prairie moods, and things like that.” Salter composed and orchestrated an entire library of cues, which he recorded with a 70-​ piece orchestra in Munich, giving Wichita Town a symphonic sound that was rare for television. The music of Wichita Town was purposefully descriptive, with pastoral moments, melancholy moods, and up-​tempo hoedowns. The reason for the composer’s facility within the genre stretched back to Salter’s childhood in Vienna. “There was one movie house that specialized in westerns,” the composer recalled. “I used to spend whole afternoons there, watching and observing the western flavor. So when I came to America, it was nothing new to me. I felt at home in this atmosphere and it inspired me; I think the opening and the exploring of the West is the most interesting part of American history.” Salter, who was as talented at the oater genre as he was with horror scores, went on to compose scores for Laramie, Wagon Train, and The Virginian, all for Wilson at Revue. He also wrote a library of exotic and dramatic music for the filmed-​in-​India adventure Maya (1967–​1968, NBC) with Jay North. Friedhofer was one of the most revered composers in Hollywood. As legendary in musicians’ circles for his dry wit as for his brilliance as an orchestrator and composer, he won an Academy Award for his score for The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), and was nominated for eight other films, including An Affair to Remember (1957) and The Young Lions (1958). He also orchestrated 15 of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s film scores, and scored other films, including Vera Cruz (1954) and Marlon Brando’s One-​Eyed Jacks (1961). Outlaws was one of two western pilots that Friedhofer scored in 1960; both sold. The second one, a Civil War saga called The Blue and the Grey, was retitled The Americans (1961, NBC) and became the midseason replacement for Riverboat with a new score by Bernard Herrmann. Outlaws starred Barton MacLane and Don Collier as lawmen in the Oklahoma Territory circa 1890, and the stories dealt more with the bad guys than the good. Friedhofer’s theme actually was a song heard only in the initial episode (“Outlaws runnin’ from the hang-​rope, outlaws runnin’ from the

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gun /​Outlaws stayin’ on the back trails, hidin’ from the sun . . .”), but it was still effective in instrumental form in succeeding hours. “I composed, orchestrated, and conducted some 34 episodes, after which I bowed out,” Friedhofer later recounted. “Trying to maintain a certain standard of quality while knocking out anywhere from 15 to 25 minutes of music weekly well-​nigh did me in. Bear in mind that not a single show was scored with track, and such material that was repeated was carefully tailored, and generally re-​orchestrated because—​like an idiot—​I wrote practically every episode for a different orchestral combination. It was fun, until my strength started to give out. It was also sheer idiocy, considering the fact that mass production is not, and never was, my forte.” Friedhofer scored the entire first season and the first several episodes of the second season. His later association with Earle Hagen led to co-​ composer credit on The Guns of Will Sonnett (1967–​1969, ABC), including a wistful ballad sung over the titles by star Walter Brennan; he also wrote a 1965 Rawhide and three scores for Lancer. While Wagon Train was initially the leading western at Revue, for which Stanley Wilson recruited so many top composers, it was ultimately succeeded as the studio’s “A” genre entry by The Virginian (1962–​1970, NBC). The ambitious Virginian, based on the Owen Wister novel, was television’s first 90-​minute film series, an expensive gamble by both the studio and network that viewers wanted a virtual western movie with the same cast every week. Initially produced by Charles Marquis Warren (Rawhide), the series was set on the Shiloh Ranch near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, and originally starred James Drury as the never-​named title character, its foreman; Lee J. Cobb as Judge Garth, its owner; and Doug McClure as Trampas, a headstrong young cowhand. The choice of composer for this prestige series was something of a surprise: Percy Faith (1908–​1976), the Canadian-​born arranger-​conductor whose appealing, often string-​drenched, arrangements of popular music had become a staple of beautiful-​music radio stations and a hit with adult record buyers throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Faith’s involvement came about because of his friendship with Harry Garfield, Universal’s recently named business head of the music department (Wilson remained the department’s “creative” head). Despite his success as a Columbia Records artist, Faith was no stranger to film scoring, having received an Oscar nomination for the Doris Day film Love Me or Leave Me (1955) and having scored Tammy Tell Me True (1961) for Ross Hunter at Universal; he later wrote an elegant score for the all-​star turkey The Oscar (1966). The scope of The Virginian attracted top guest stars (including Bette Davis, Robert Redford, and George C. Scott) and, in terms of script and direction, few concessions were made to the series’ small-​screen origins. Everyone treated The Virginian like a movie, and Faith was no different. His stirring theme—​set to shots of Drury and friends galloping down

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  Percy Faith.

dusty trails—​was instantly memorable, and his two original scores (“The Executioners” in the first season and “No Tears for Savannah” in the second) featured multiple themes and displayed musical subtleties that were unusual for television. For Stanley Wilson, however, the problem of The Virginian was one of logistics: how to create a full score, often at least 40 minutes of music, on a weekly basis for this high-​profile series. Wilson’s solution was to commission some complete original scores, create some partial scores, divide others among several composers, and track the rest with music from earlier shows. The list of composers who wrote for The Virginian was, like Wagon Train, another who’s-​ who from the feature-​ film side of the business: Paul J. Smith (1906–​1985), the Disney composer who won an Oscar for Pinocchio, scored one and part of a second, both without credit; David Buttolph wrote three in the second season; Hans Salter wrote one complete score and part of another; Franz Waxman scored a fifth-​ season show; Leonard Rosenman did six; David Shire wrote five; and Lyn Murray composed four. Max Steiner, who had written classic big-​screen westerns such as Dodge City (1939) and The Searchers (1956), was asked to score The Virginian but never did. The team of Leo Shuken and Jack Hayes, whose complete grasp of American musical styles made them perfect as orchestrators for Elmer Bernstein’s Western scores, contributed nine originals (and half of a tenth) themselves. Wilson and staff

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composer-​orchestrator Sidney Fine (1904–​2002) also wrote large sections of Virginian scores, often without screen credit. Bernard Herrmann wrote four complete scores between the summer of 1965 and the summer of 1968. Herrmann’s final work for the medium, in fact, was on The Virginian, an episode (telecast in January 1969) titled “Last Grave at Socorro Creek.” Composer Patrick Williams, who attended the August 1968 sessions, recalled marveling at the makeup of the orchestra—​30 strings and an electric bass—​and the sight of a cowering young producer who was awed by the great, and typically rude, Herrmann (who, during a break, gruffly and disdainfully asked, “How do you like your little tune?”). For the fall of 1970, Universal decided to revamp the series. The renamed The Men from Shiloh (1970–​1971, NBC) continued to star Drury and McClure but added Stewart Granger as the new owner of Shiloh and Lee Majors as a ranch hand. The Percy Faith theme was eliminated in favor of a new musical signature by Ennio Morricone. Morricone (1928–​2020) was by then world-​famous for his music for the witty, violent “spaghetti westerns” of Italian filmmaker Sergio Leone: Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1966), and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966), all starring Clint Eastwood. His unique musical approach, which included offbeat vocal effects and orchestrations that ranged from the bizarre to the traditionally symphonic, was as responsible for the success of those films as any single element. The television piece was conceived along similar musical lines. For The Men from Shiloh, Morricone created a theme that musically captured a day on the ranch, beginning quietly with strings, adding a duet for recorder and electric guitar, and moving into a galloping rhythm for strings and guitars, augmented by solo female voice and male chorus (with the brief addition of harmonica and occasional whip cracks). He recorded in Rome. Back in L.A., title designer Jack Cole (who had already done title sequences for Ironside and would later do The Rockford Files and The Six Million Dollar Man) created an atmospheric evocation of the Old West from daguerreotypes of frontier life, excerpts from period advertisements (“revolver for only $2.50”), and nineteenth-​century-​ styled drawings of the four stars. Informed that Morricone would be recording a new theme, Cole created a “temp track” from his earlier western themes and later matched the final music to his masterful imagery. The Men from Shiloh would be the legendary composer’s only theme for a weekly American television series. Richard Markowitz (1926–​1994) contributed two classic themes to the medium, both for westerns: The Rebel (1959–​1961, ABC) and The Wild Wild West (1965–​1969, CBS). A California native, Markowitz studied in France with classical composer Arthur Honegger and wrote ballet music for modern dance choreographer Katherine Dunham’s company before

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 Richard Markowitz conducting in the 1960s.

breaking into movies with his jazz score for Stakeout on Dope Street (1958). Producer Andrew J. Fenady and director Irvin Kershner, who made Stakeout, came back to Markowitz when they joined forces with actor Nick Adams to bring The Rebel to television. Adams, who received co-​ creator credit with writer Fenady, played Johnny Yuma, a Confederate soldier who, as the title song put it, “roamed through the West” during the years after the Civil War. Johnny Cash sang the song, while a branding iron in the shape of Adams’s profile (Confederate cap and all) burned the image into a wooden fence during the main title. “My friend Johnny never did get the lyrics right,” producer Fenady (who wrote the words) recalled. “He couldn’t keep his tenses straight. I’d say, ‘Johnny, look, I don’t care whether you say, “Johnny Yuma was a rebel, he roamed through the West,” or “Johnny Yuma is a rebel, he roams through the West,” please don’t say, “Johnny Yuma was a rebel, he roams through the West.” ’ He never did get it right the first time around. We went back and got it another time. But still, he made us rich.” Cash’s recording of “The Rebel” went to Number 24 on the Billboard country charts. Markowitz scored the first season of The Rebel with a 13-​piece band, including period-​appropriate harmonica and guitar. For the second season, Markowitz re-​orchestrated many cues into a library of music for a 35-​ piece orchestra. He oversaw its recording in Belgium, then returned to the United States and worked on a weekly basis with the music editor to track the second-​season episodes.

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While he was scoring the first season of The Rebel, Markowitz was also writing weekly jazz scores for Philip Marlowe (1959–​1960, ABC) with Philip Carey as Raymond Chandler’s famous private eye. Writing jazz for a crime drama and a western-​style score for The Rebel at the same time proved to be good training for his biggest hit: The Wild Wild West. Robert Conrad and Ross Martin starred in this fun series about James West and Artemus Gordon, a pair of resourceful Secret Service agents who reported directly to President Ulysses S. Grant. It was essentially James Bond in the Old West; they battled mad scientists and assorted megalomaniacs with the aid of various gadgets, operating out of their own private railroad car. In fact, Markowitz almost didn’t get to write the theme. CBS, in hopes of striking gold again with another Rawhide, commissioned a title song from Dimitri Tiomkin and Paul Francis Webster. They actually wrote three: “Wild West,” “Ballad of the Wild West” and “The Ballad of Jim West,” with two tunes and three sets of lyrics (all of which Tiomkin would have owned via his Erosa Music company, which also published “Rawhide,” a highly lucrative deal). At least two of them were recorded in December 1964 and January 1965. Herschel Burke Gilbert, who had left Four Star to become music director at CBS, conducted the sessions. He recalled that Tiomkin’s song “was old-​fashioned, and the picture was sort of update-​western.” Said Markowitz: “It just didn’t have any of the fun in it.” Tiomkin claimed at the time that network executives liked the melody but asked for a change of lyrics, which the composer said he refused. In any case, the song was ultimately rejected and Tiomkin was paid a hefty sum. Markowitz believed that, as part of Tiomkin’s settlement with CBS, Markowitz was denied “theme by” credit during the entire run of the series (an unusual move, as on-​screen theme credit had by this time become routine). As for his own, now-​classic main title, “I conceived of the idea of going half traditional western and half jazz, kind of a sense of jazz,” Markowitz explained. The Wild Wild West theme is in two parts: the “work” motif, played by Fender bass and brushes on the drums, for West “doing his schtick, getting out of a tight spot,” and the “Big West” motif, a heroic orchestral signature for the good guys. Markowitz felt that “being quasi-​ serious with the big theme, and fun with the rhythmic theme” was the solution to the scoring dilemma posed by a show that had outrageous characters and plots yet played the danger and suspense for real. The animated main title intertwined both. It consisted of five panels, with a drawing of West in the middle. First, West fells a bank robber with a karate chop in the lower left panel; then he draws his gun on a gambler about to pull an ace out of his boot at top right; then he disarms a man at top left; and finally he kisses a woman who pulls a blade from her hair, leaving her breathless (in the first season) or knocking her down (in subsequent years) as he walks away and the title The Wild Wild West appears. The same artwork appeared at each act break, freeze-​framing the final scene of each act into a new drawing.

In all, Markowitz scored 11 episodes (six in the first season, four in the second, and one in the third), with many others being tracked with Markowitz’s earlier music. It remained the project of which he was most proud. “I had done other westerns, movies of the week, and so forth,” he said, “but I never came up with something quite as happily wedded to the material, for me, as that was.” Markowitz wrote a secondary theme for Artemus Gordon—​“a European feel, polite but quirky.” He also brought in colleague Robert Drasnin, who utilized serial techniques in a motif for recurring villain Dr. Miguelito Loveless (Michael Dunn), first appearing in the 1965 episode “The Night the Wizard Shook the Earth.” Markowitz also scored the western Hondo (1967, ABC), with Ralph Taeger as a cavalry scout in the Arizona Territory; and dozens of other television classics ranging from episodes of Dr. Kildare and The FBI to Police Story and Murder, She Wrote. His last main-​title theme was for The Law and Harry McGraw (1987–​1988, CBS) featuring Jerry Orbach as a Boston private eye and Barbara Babcock as a sophisticated lawyer. George Duning’s work on The Big Valley (1965–​1969, ABC) was perhaps the last great western score for American series television of the sixties. Another family-​centered hour, this one was set on a ranch in the San Joaquin Valley of central California during the 1870s. Barbara Stanwyck starred as the widowed matriarch of the Barkley family, with Richard Long, Peter Breck, Lee Majors, and Linda Evans as members of her family. Duning (1908–​2000) had been a jazz trumpet player and an arranger for bands and radio, eventually serving as musical director on Kay

  George Duning.

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Kyser’s “Kollege of Musical Knowledge” for eight years. After World War II, he became a contract composer, arranger, and conductor for Columbia Pictures, where he worked for 17 years and received five Oscar nominations, including his classic scores for From Here to Eternity (1953) and Picnic (1955). For the western genre, he wrote 3:10 to Yuma (1957) with its Frankie Laine–​performed title song, and Cowboy (1958). By the mid-​1960s, Duning had become quite active in television, having written the themes for Naked City, Tightrope, and George Burns’s Wendy and Me, among others. After screening the Big Valley pilot, Duning decided “it should have an Americana feeling, a wide-​open sound. “I treated it like I would have a theatrical motion picture. One thing that seems to have happened over the years, as television started getting big, a lot of motion-​picture composers were treating it as sort of a stepchild. And frankly, I don’t think they gave their best on some of the earlier TV shows. Also, they were fighting deadlines that were much worse than you ever had in motion picture scoring. But I treated every show, no matter how small—​a half-​hour sitcom or a two-​hour movie of the week—​ as if I was writing a major motion picture score.” That was immediately apparent on The Big Valley. Duning’s main theme had a grandeur unlike many of its small-​screen counterparts. In addition to the main theme, he composed a theme for the Barkley family and individual motifs for Victoria (Stanwyck), characterized on Duning’s original sketches as having a “quiet dignity”; music of turmoil for illegitimate son Heath (Majors); and a haunting melody for headstrong daughter Audra (Evans). “I used the tried-​and-​true leitmotif technique of setting an identifying theme for each of the major characters,” Duning explained. Duning scored the pilot, four first-​season episodes, and a library for tracking purposes. Later scores were written by Elmer Bernstein, Lalo Schifrin, and Joseph Mullendore. On The Big Valley, Duning conducted an orchestra of 40 musicians. The soundtrack LP, in contrast, featured an orchestra of 80 and—​while drawn from those early scores—​was re-​ orchestrated by Duning into a complete concert work, developing and extending themes that he had written for the series into a virtual tone poem of the American West. Ray Heindorf conducted the music in Italy. The year 1965 saw the start of two other notable westerns. Branded (1965–​1966, NBC) starred ex-​Rifleman Chuck Connors as a disgraced cavalry officer who had been unjustly dismissed from the service for cowardice. “Branded: marked with a coward’s shame /​What do you do when you’re branded? Will you fight for your name?” Composer Dominic Frontiere (with lyricist Alan Alch) penned the song that quickly established the series premise. Frontiere remembered immediately disliking the producer who engaged him: an individual who asked for “a song that sounds like a bugle call” with lyrics to explain the story. He called Alch, an old colleague with whom he once wrote comedy material. “We wrote this terrible piece of music. It was hysterical. We laughed all night,” Frontiere recalled. “The next day, the

producer came in with his entourage, and Alan stood in the crook of the piano, barely containing his laughter. We started to play this military song, and the goddamned producer says, ‘I love it.’ And for years, this worst piece of music was on the air,” he laughed, “the theme for Branded.” For Rod Serling’s short-​lived and underrated The Loner (1965–​1966, CBS), about a disillusioned Union soldier (Lloyd Bridges) searching for life’s meanings in the post–​Civil War West, Jerry Goldsmith borrowed a countermelody from a theme in his score for the Kirk Douglas classic Lonely Are the Brave (1962) but imbued his theme and two episode scores with the concertina-​and-​percussion, guitar-​and-​marimba flavor of his music for the more recent Rio Conchos (1964). (Dimitri Tiomkin, incidentally, was originally asked to supply the theme for The Loner but declined when 20th Century-​Fox refused to grant him ownership of the music.) The granddaddy of them all, Gunsmoke, remained on the air through 1975, and the increasing number of recording hours demanded by the musicians’ union led to an equivalent number of original scores, some by major composers. When Morton Stevens became CBS music director in 1965, he recruited several feature-​film composers for the task. Among them were Franz Waxman, whose two-​part “The Raid” in 1966 bore similarities in sound and color to his Oscar-​nominated score for Taras Bulba (1962); Goldsmith, who had written a handful of Gunsmoke half-​hours in 1960, returned to pen a charming score for “The Whispering Tree” in 1966; and Elmer Bernstein, who wrote a grim one for the 1972 episode “Hostage.” Many of those late sixties and early seventies scores were the product of CBS western workhorse Leon Klatzkin, plus John Parker and Jerrold Immel. Immel’s later theme for How the West Was Won (1977–​1979, ABC), which also starred James Arness, was his finest work for television, a sweeping orchestral overture that played against spectacular footage of the unspoiled landscapes of the American West: forest-​covered mountains, rushing rivers, colorful canyons, and buffalo grazing on the open plains. Equally impressive was his end-​title arrangement, set entirely against paintings by western artist Charles M. Russell. After The Virginian became a success at the 90-​minute length, two other series emulated the longer-​is-​better formula: Wagon Train expanded from an hour for one season starting in the fall of 1963, and Cimarron Strip (1967–​1968, CBS) tried the longer format, but lasted just a single season. Cimarron starred Stuart Whitman as a federal marshal in the Oklahoma territory of the late 1880s; Jill Townsend played a cafe owner, Randy Boone a photographer, and Percy Herbert a hard-​drinking Scotsman. Maurice Jarre, who was best known for his Oscar-​winning music for the David Lean epics Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Doctor Zhivago (1965), but who had also scored Richard Brooks’s western The Professionals (1966), was signed to compose the theme and pilot score. Jarre’s title music, set against a slowly retreating aerial shot of Whitman riding across the prairie, was

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impressive. CBS music director Stevens brought in several other veteran western composers to score individual Cimarron episodes, including George Duning, Cyril Mockridge, and Richard Shores (who had scored many episodes of Audie Murphy’s 1961 western Whispering Smith at Revue). To no one’s surprise, the most unusual score was contributed by Bernard Herrmann. For a 1968 episode titled “Knife in the Darkness,” a Harlan Ellison script about a Jack the Ripper–​style killer terrorizing the town, Herrmann created chilling music written entirely for the lowest woodwinds, double basses, harps, and timpani. Filled with growling bassoons and thumping percussion, it may have been the scariest western score ever written. Bruce Broughton recalled the Herrmann sessions: “He was up there conducting, and he got the downbeat right, but when the piece was supposed to end, he was still conducting and the orchestra was still playing. So we racked [the film] up again. Second pass, same thing: he starts in the right place and the last streamer [a visual indicator on the film] comes and Herrmann’s still emoting. He was way off.” Stevens, who was supervising, gently suggested that Herrmann come into the booth to help balance the sound levels while Stevens conducted a cue or two. “Herrmann turned to him and said, ‘Are you worried because it isn’t ending on time? It doesn’t matter. It’s all going to work anyway.’ The point is that he was right,” Broughton said. “The producers felt afterward that it was the best score they had all year—​because it was not specific to the action, it was specific to the emotion. It didn’t matter whether it went out when it was supposed to go, or it hit this nose twitch or this eye blink. Emotionally, it was right on the money.” Kung Fu (1972–​1975, ABC) may have been network television’s most unique western. Set in the nineteenth-​century American West but regularly flashing back to the hero’s youth in a Chinese monastery, it starred David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine, a former Shaolin priest who was wanted for the murder of a member of the royal family. It began as a 90-​minute movie but attracted so much attention that ABC ordered a series. The mysterious Caine was a man of few words and resorted to his considerable martial-​arts skills only when threatened. He often reflected on the teachings of his Chinese masters (Keye Luke, Philip Ahn) in flashbacks filled with sometimes cryptic, sometimes profound sayings (“the dust of truth swirls and seeks its own cracks of entry”) based on Eastern philosophies. “We knew that we had to have [a composer] who was not necessarily Hollywood mainstream if we were going to make this an original television series,” producer Alex Beaton recalled. He and his colleagues chose Jim Helms (1933–​1991) to score the film and subsequent series. Helms, a former studio guitarist and arranger for singer Rod McKuen, became the musical voice of Caine. His pilot score was filled with surprising sounds: flutes and

considerable percussion, including bells, gongs, wind chimes, and wood blocks, with few hints of melody in the traditional Western sense. For the series, Helms created one of the seventies’ most memorable themes: graceful and gentle, with the flavor of the East—​at least as perceived by Western ears—​that musically described the soft-​spoken, always peaceful character of Caine (seen walking through the desert at sunrise during the main title, at sunset during the end credits). “I don’t remember telling him to give us an Oriental theme,” Beaton recalled. “What we wanted were suggestions, subtle references, the nuances of an Oriental overtone. That main title suggests something Western and Eastern. It actually defines the man,” he added, referring not to Caine but to Helms: “really a very sensitive, quiet, and unassuming talent.” Helms’s music was an important component of what Beaton referred to as “constant transitional challenges,” moving back and forth between the West and old China without confusing viewers. Working with as few as 12 musicians, his choices were often unusual: sometimes scoring the slow-​motion fight sequences, sometimes not; sometimes beginning act one or closing act four without music at all. In addition to his adroit use of percussion to imply China and the mysticism associated with the character, he suggested the period in America with a harpsichord, and also created Caine’s bamboo-​flute melodies when the character began to play on camera during the first season. Like Caine himself, Helms’s music exhibited a quiet power. While Young Maverick (1979–​1980, CBS) featured an instrumental adaptation of the original Maverick theme, Bret Maverick (1981–​1982, NBC) took a new musical direction. Not only did country singer Ed Bruce (“Mammas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys”) write and perform the title song of the new series—​in which James Garner reprised his Old West grifter role, now older and a bit wiser—​but he also co-​starred as a former lawman and proprietor of the saloon in Sweetwater, Arizona, where Maverick finally settles down. Actor Stuart Margolin (who played Angel on Garner’s The Rockford Files), who directed the Bret Maverick pilot, suggested Bruce for the role, and the theme song followed. Its lyrics introduce an older and a little wiser Maverick: “Too many dusty trail towns, too few and far between /​tired saloons and sawdust-​covered floors /​Too many one-​more-​showdowns and aces over queens /​winning’s just a way of keeping score . . .” Bruce co-​ wrote it with his wife Patsy Bruce and fellow country songwriter Glenn Ray. Garner joined him on the record version, which was the B-​side of a 1982 country hit for Bruce (“Ever, Never Lovin’ You”). The Young Riders (1989–​1992, ABC) cast Stephen Baldwin, Josh Brolin, and Ty Miller as fast-​riding, crack-​shooting Pony Express riders in 1860. Matching the “revisionist western” concept was the music of John Debney (b. 1956), which used an electric guitar in addition to acoustic

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guitars, fiddle, harmonica, and an aggressive rhythm section. “For the time it was a very modern sound,” Debney recalled. He was Emmy-​ nominated for his theme and won for a second-​season episode about the Underground Railroad that featured a gospel group and orchestra. “People were in tears during the recording,” Debney noted, “because everybody knew how important this story was.” For Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman (1993–​1998, CBS), about a pioneer physician (Jane Seymour) in 1860s Colorado and the mountain man (Joe Lando) with whom she fell in love, composer William Olvis (1957–​2014) bathed the series in warm orchestral Americana with the occasional help of such folk instruments as fiddle and slide guitar. Creator-​producer Beth Sullivan discovered Olvis’s music on a demo submitted by his agency. “When his music came on, it was like recognizing someone you knew,” she remembered. “I didn’t know anything about music, except what I liked and what I could feel. His music went right to people’s hearts.” Sullivan “fought like mad” for an orchestra for the pilot (and a handful of later, important episodes), and got Olvis approximately 50 players to launch the series. Weekly episodes were closer to eight to 10 musicians, often recorded in Olvis’s house to save on studio costs. Action-​movie star Chuck Norris came to weekly television with Walker, Texas Ranger (1993–​2001, CBS), a modern-​day western that also starred Clarence Gilyard as his partner and Sheree J. Wilson as an assistant district attorney. Country musician Tirk Wilder, who had been studying martial arts with a colleague of Norris’s, was commissioned to write a song—​“The Eyes of the Ranger”—​that became the longest running of its three themes (debuting in early 1995, halfway through its second season). Norris himself sang it. The most offbeat of these 1990s westerns was The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. (1993–​1994, Fox), which starred Bruce Campbell as a lawyer-​ turned-​bounty hunter who encountered strange phenomena and futuristic technology. Randy Edelman (b. 1947)—​a successful film composer whose credits included Ghostbusters II (1989), Kindergarten Cop (1990) and The Last of the Mohicans (1992)—​supplied a thrilling, heroic signature that belied the tongue-​in-​cheek nature of the storytelling. After the series’ failure, NBC licensed it for extensive use in its sports programming, including the 1996 Olympics (and Edelman’s music was considered so vital that he won a Sports Emmy as a contributing producer). “It wasn’t from a movie, and it wasn’t really something that anybody knew,” Edelman said. “It was original, and it seemed to have the right spirit. It’s got a very flowing melody, it’s triumphant, with a certain warmth. And it has at the end of it, what all television things like this have, a ‘button,’ an ending flourish that works really well if they need to chop it down into a 15-​second thing.”

4 “You are traveling through another dimension”

Fantasy and Science Fiction

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call the Twilight Zone.

W

ith those carefully chosen words, writer Rod Serling ushered in a new era of fantasy and science fiction on television. It was his opening narration on the first episode of The Twilight Zone (1959–​1964, CBS), a weekly anthology of thought-​provoking tales, often told with irony, sometimes with twist endings, and nearly always with a serious point. Serling was one of the medium’s most talented writers. His scripts for Playhouse 90 and Kraft Television Theatre had won three Emmys (for “Patterns,” “Requiem for a Heavyweight,” and “The Comedian”), two Writers Guild Awards, and a Peabody. He saw The Twilight Zone as a vehicle for commentary on the human condition. His writing on The Twilight Zone would bring him two more Emmys during the seasons to come, and his on-​screen role as narrator and host would make him a household name.

Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0005

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Music played an integral role in The Twilight Zone, sometimes in establishing far-​off locales, more often in setting the mood and creating the dramatic and emotional context in which the characters functioned. Lud Gluskin, then CBS West Coast music head, was credited with the choice of Bernard Herrmann to compose the theme and score the pilot, a half-​hour Serling script titled “Where Is Everybody?” Herrmann’s Twilight Zone theme—​played against images of moving webs, otherworldly landscapes, and a twinkling starfield—​immediately established a sense of foreboding. Performed by a small ensemble of strings, brass, woodwinds, and harp, Herrmann’s unresolved back-​ and-​ forth minor chords left the listener unsettled and in expectation; “slowly moving, subtle, and dreamy” was how fellow composer Fred Steiner described it. Herrmann’s end-​title theme, slightly shorter than the narrated main title, ultimately resolved to a major chord, allowing the listeners a final release from the tensions and enthralling storytelling they had just experienced.

Bernard Herrmann with his beloved Twi, the stray dog he found at the Goldwyn scoring stage while recording a Twilight Zone episode.

Herrmann wrote seven scores for the series, including three of the earliest. For “Where Is Everybody?,” with Earl Holliman as an apparent amnesiac wandering lost in a deserted town, Herrmann musically established the victim’s confusion and growing paranoia with a frequently repeated three-​note phrase. For “The Lonely,” about a convict (Jack Warden) exiled to a deserted asteroid who falls in love with his robot companion (Jean Marsh), the composer impressionistically evoked both the solitude and the nighttime sky with vibraphone, harp, organ, and brass (similar to the Atlantis sequences in his Journey to the Center of the Earth score, also composed in 1959). For Serling’s moving script “Walking Distance,” with Gig Young as a stressed-​out executive who finds himself thrown back in time twenty-​five years to his happy childhood, Herrmann composed a haunting reverie to the nostalgia of the past. Written only for strings, harp, and celeste, it was alternately poignant and passionate, and, Herrmann’s biographer suggested, may hint at the composer’s own “longing for a similarly romanticized childhood.” In tone and color, it presaged Herrmann’s finale music for Fahrenheit 451 (1966). In the second season, Herrmann scored another classic episode, “Eye of the Beholder,” in which plastic surgeons unsuccessfully attempt to alter a supposedly ugly woman’s appearance. Because of the clever filming techniques used to shoot Serling’s teleplay, only at the end did the viewer realize that the “deformed” woman was conventionally beautiful and that her hope was to become like the rest of her alien society, with monstrous porcine features. Later Herrmann scores included the 1962 “Little Girl Lost” (in which Herrmann’s music merited an up-​front title card along with the writer and director, a rare acknowledgment for a composer in television in that era) plus the 1963 episodes “Living Doll” and “Ninety Years without Slumbering.” Herrmann returned to Twilight Zone after its first season despite a monumental slight: the elimination of his original series theme in favor of a radically different musical approach, and then only after two other proposed new Herrmann themes had also been written and rejected. As the second season of Twilight Zone neared, a new, shorter main title was designed. The fuzzy images of webs remained, but a horizontal black bar now moved slowly across the screen from right to left, while a sun (or moon?) gradually disappeared beneath it, leaving a starfield and the sudden appearance of the show title. In August 1960, Herrmann wrote his new themes for the series. One, marked “allegro maestoso,” was a triumphant fanfare for brass, vibes, and harps (which bore stylistic similarities to the composer’s theme for the 1951 science-​fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still). A second, written for the same ensemble but with greater urgency, hinged on a series of sharp, repeated two-​note phrases for muted brass. Both were

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recorded; a shorter version of the latter was ultimately used for an act-​ break “bumper.” Enter Marius Constant (1925–​2004), a Romanian-​born, France-​based avant-​garde composer from whom Gluskin, on some of his many trips abroad, had commissioned original music for the CBS library. Constant was a pioneer in such twentieth-​ century musical forms as musique concrète, aleatory music, and improvisatory music for the concert hall; he also had written a number of widely performed ballets. Virtually all of the Constant music in the CBS library consisted of brief fragments, some no longer than five seconds, many scored for a strange ensemble including electric guitars, flute, tenor saxophone, and percussion including bongo drums. For reasons that remain shrouded in mystery, the new Herrmann themes were rejected, either by producers or executives at the network. “I’m sure the problem with Herrmann’s version was, it was very ‘down,’ ” recalled CBS music supervisor Don B. Ray. “And somebody decided it had to be more ‘up.’ I would say that Lud had no hand in causing this to happen, because when all was said and done, he was very loyal to Herrmann, the quality of his writing.” “Evidently they didn’t like it,” said Jerry Goldsmith, referring to the dark, original Herrmann motif. “So I wrote a theme they didn’t like, and I think a couple of other people wrote themes that they didn’t like. So, out of desperation, Lud said, well, here, let’s try this.” “This” was Gluskin’s assembly of two unrelated Marius Constant pieces that happened to be in the library. The brief “Etrange No. 3” and slightly longer “Milieu No. 2” were combined into a new theme for The Twilight Zone. The Constant music “was never intended to be used as a main title,” Ray pointed out. In fact, “it was not really good for [tracking as] backgrounds. It was too fragmentary. It was marvelous if you had four seconds and then a dissolve,” but otherwise the Constant music went largely unused in the library. Producer Buck Houghton recalled: “We just wanted to make it different. That is about the only reason. The title background was different too. You see, Twilight Zone was not a huge success while it was on the air. Everybody was reasonably content, but it was not a hit. So there was a motive behind everybody to say, ‘Well, let’s not let them think they’re seeing a rerun. Let’s jump off with new music, new title backgrounds, new approach.’ ” The Constant music—​written and recorded merely as two fragments for tracking into odd dramatic situations—​went on the air at the start of the second season, in the fall of 1960. His eerie, instantly recognizable Twilight Zone wasn’t even a melody. It began with a series of repeated, intriguingly dissonant, four-​note phrases played by two electric guitars. (Also in the band: a flute, piccolo, clarinet, tenor sax, trombones, timpani, bongos, and harp.) “We all thought [Gluskin] was out of his mind,” Goldsmith laughed. “It was the most ridiculous theme I ever heard in my

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Marius Constant score for “Etrange No. 3” in the CBS music library.

life. But it came back to haunt me, because when I did Twilight Zone: The Movie [1983], I had to re-​record it.” Marius Constant never received screen credit for his surprising contribution to American pop culture; he wasn’t even aware of what had been done with his music. “Somehow,” Constant said in 1985, “I never learned that my theme music had become so popular until two years ago,” referring to its use in the Twilight Zone movie. He recalled having dinner with some Americans “and I happened to mention in passing that I had written the theme for The Twilight Zone. There was a moment of stunned silence, followed by an enthusiastic outburst; it was as if I had confessed to having written Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony!” Constant’s memory of the commission, however, was faulty. He claimed that he had won an “international competition” for the theme and that CBS paid him $500. The fee could be accurate, but Gluskin often recorded library music by Paris-​based composers; Constant happened to get lucky when Gluskin set unrelated cues against the new Twilight Zone imagery for the second season. Later, there was reportedly legal action between composer and network over music ownership rights; no outcome was ever publicized. The majority of Twilight Zone episodes, like most other CBS-​produced programming of the time, were tracked with music from the library. In

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addition to the Constant material, there was considerable Herrmann music available. Herrmann’s “Outer Space Suite,” composed for woodwinds and percussion in 1957, was used, as were Gluskin’s overseas re-​recordings of several Herrmann scores for CBS radio, including “The Hitchhiker” (1942) and “The Moat Farm Murder” (1944). Still, Gluskin commissioned original scores when he felt the programs merited them, and often recruited top composers to write them. Early in the first season, Franz Waxman, who won an Oscar for his music for Sunset Boulevard (1950), scored the similarly themed “The Sixteen-​Millimeter Shrine” with Ida Lupino; Leonard Rosenman, who won acclaim for his East of Eden music (1955), scored the men-​into-​space episode “And When the Sky Was Opened”; and Leith Stevens (1909–​1970), no stranger to end-​of-​the-​world tales with his music for When Worlds Collide (1951) and War of the Worlds (1953), scored the classic “Time Enough at Last,” with Burgess Meredith as a bookworm who survives a nuclear holocaust. Fred Steiner (1923–​2011) scored seven episodes. A veteran composer for radio and live TV (notably the early 1950s CBS comedies Life with Luigi and My Friend Irma, and seven Playhouse 90s including the classic “The Miracle Worker”), Steiner was a versatile musician who had scored Gunsmoke and Have Gun—​Will Travel, and had written the themes for Perry Mason and Navy Log. Among his best scores were two 1961 half-​ hours with nineteenth-​century settings: harmonica-​and-​guitar folk melodies for “A Hundred Yards over the Rim,” with Cliff Robertson as a pioneer who had somehow stumbled into a twentieth-​century town; and music of profound sadness, for strings alone, for “The Passerby,” about the aftermath of the Civil War, with Joanne Linville and James Gregory. Steiner’s hour-​long shows, all from 1963, included “Mute,” with a young Ann Jillian as a telepathic child, for which Steiner provided strange string effects; “Miniature,” a charming story with Robert Duvall as an introvert who imagines life inside a dollhouse, scored with familiar silent-​ film-​era music, played music-​box style; and “The Bard,” a comic episode with Jack Weston as a hack writer who magically summons William Shakespeare to help him pen a TV pilot. “Lud was not exactly what one might call a thoroughly educated or accomplished musician,” Steiner said, “but luckily for all concerned, he had the willingness and open-​mindedness to not only hire the best composers available, but to allow them almost complete freedom in the music they wrote for these shows. In all the years that I worked for Gluskin at CBS, I cannot recall any instance of Lud interfering with me or insisting on changes in my music—​which is not to say that he would not suggest a minor change or two, talking to me from his listening post in the control booth. The ensembles we used at CBS were always small, obviously for budgetary reasons. My ensembles on Twilight Zone ranged in size from five players on ‘Miniature’ to fourteen on ‘King Nine Will Not Return.’ ”

Nathan Van Cleave (1910–​ 1970) scored the most Twilight Zone episodes: a dozen in all. Frequently working in collaboration with his former radio colleague Fred Steiner (as they did on such films as 1958’s Colossus of New York and 1964’s Robinson Crusoe on Mars), Van Cleave’s scores included the 1959 “Perchance to Dream,” which marked an early and unusual use of electronic instruments in television. Later came his otherworldly music for the 1960 “Elegy,” a coolly militaristic score for the Elizabeth Montgomery–​Charles Bronson post-​apocalyptic tale “Two” (1961), and the lyrical music (for strings, winds, guitar, and Novachord) for 1962’s “I Sing the Body Electric,” based on the Ray Bradbury story. Some of the most striking Twilight Zone scores were created by the versatile Jerry Goldsmith. For the first-​season episode “The Big Tall Wish,” about a boy who believes that his wish has helped a prizefighter (Ivan Dixon) win a bout, the music focuses on the child, with variations on a melody played on the harmonica. For the second-​season episode “Nervous Man in a Four-​Dollar Room,” Goldsmith wrote a jazz-​oriented score utilizing electric guitar, bass, percussion, and flute to create an almost constant feeling of agitation. Goldsmith’s final three Twilight Zone scores were heard in rapid succession in January 1961, yet they couldn’t be less alike in style. For “Dust,” about a nineteenth-​century hanging averted, allegedly, by a bag of magic dirt, the composer played the Old West setting with guitars, harmonica, and pump organ. For “Back There,” a time-​travel story about a theoretician (Russell Johnson) who attempts to avert Lincoln’s assassination, Goldsmith suggested the period with harpsichord and a small string ensemble. What many consider Goldsmith’s Twilight Zone masterpiece, “The Invaders,” was a tour de force for Agnes Moorehead as a solitary farmwoman besieged by tiny astronauts in a UFO. Filmed virtually without dialogue, the visual action, sound effects, and—​most important—​the music carry this Richard Matheson script. Goldsmith underscored the action with jagged, often frightening musical effects for strings, harp, and keyboards. “The norm for an orchestra on Twilight Zone was six men. Which is wonderful because it forces you to be very inventive,” Goldsmith said. “It’s easy to write for a 65-​piece orchestra.” (When Joe Dante asked Goldsmith to score a half-​hour Amazing Stories in 1985, the composer treated it as if it were a Twilight Zone episode, using six musicians. The Amazing Stories production staff had been prepared to give him 45 players, which was not uncommon on that show.) When Goldsmith left CBS, he went to Revue and steady employment on its horror series Thriller (1960–​1962, NBC). He composed 16 original scores for the Boris Karloff–​hosted anthology, which lasted only two seasons but remains a favorite of fantasy buffs despite only rare appearances in syndication.

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Thriller actually began as a more sedate, mystery-​oriented hour with few scares. Pete Rugolo started the series, writing the theme—​which played against lines crisscrossing the screen and forming the title—​and 20 of the initial 37 episodes. Well known as a jazz composer (with The Thin Man and Richard Diamond already behind him), Rugolo might have been an ideal choice had the direction of the series not changed radically at mid-​season. “It was very challenging,” Rugolo recalled, “because we only had a budget for maybe eight to ten men. I would use very unusual combinations: a harp, flute, French horn, tuba, it all depended on the script. Each story was different. Sometimes I would just use strings alone; harpsichord, all different instruments that would make unusual sounds because [the stories] were a little strange.” The time crunch, however, was nightmarish. “They would give it to us on a Friday and we’d have to score it on a Monday. And there would be a lot of music, 25 or 30 minutes of music,” Rugolo said, “and so some weeks it was impossible.” Rugolo’s scores were often jazz-​tinged but were more dramatic in nature than his detective-​show scores. As with Richard Diamond, he arranged his best themes from the series into a first-​rate album, filled with the unusual orchestral colors and combinations that marked his writing for Thriller. The lack of true horror, however, worried the higher-​ups. According to associate producer Douglas Benton, network executives—​who had been expecting scary tales introduced by the veteran horror-​film actor—​ were shocked to see film-​noir stories, “something out of RKO, 1947,” in Benton’s words. Several key production personnel were let go, among them Rugolo. When Goldsmith was free of CBS, Revue music director Stanley Wilson immediately hired him for Thriller. The hour-​long Thriller proved to be a far better showcase for Goldsmith than the half-​hour Twilight Zone. As an anthology, it offered a smorgasbord of stories, both period and contemporary; with Wilson as a supportive boss, Goldsmith was offered the freedom to experiment with various musical styles and approaches. It brought him his first Emmy nomination (shared with Rugolo, for the series’ 1960–​1961 season) and, more important, attention from Alfred Newman, the legendary music director at 20th Century-​Fox. After hearing one of Goldsmith’s Thriller scores, Newman called to praise his efforts and ultimately recommended him to the producers of Lonely Are the Brave, his first major picture. “Being experimental was a matter of economics in television,” Goldsmith said. “The numbers force you to be creative. If you’re doing a show with three musicians, you have to be pretty imaginative to make it hold for an hour. When I was doing Thriller, the wilder and more off-​the-​ wall I could be, the happier the producer was. It wasn’t being different just to be different—​it was letting your imagination run rampant, as long as it was within the realm of the dramatic context.”

Goldsmith’s innovative work on Thriller (all of which aired in FANTASY AND 1961) included an Old English–​style folk tune for “Hay-​Fork and Bill-​ SCIENCE FICTION Hook,” a grim tale of ancient Druid rites in a Welsh village; a demented 123 nineteenth-​century music-​hall waltz for alto saxophone to represent the title character in “Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper”; a charming lullaby for celeste and harp for the little girl in “Mr. George,” about a child’s imaginary friend (which presaged his approach to Poltergeist, 1982); a darkly whimsical salon valse for solo piano in “What Beckoning Ghost?,” about a woman who thinks her husband is trying to murder her; and ethereal flute with modal writing for strings and brass in “God Grant That She Lye Stille,” about the return of a three-​hundred-​year-​old witch to her ancestral English home. One of the most chilling—​and musically interesting—​of the Thrillers was the first-​season “The Terror in Teakwood,” with Guy Rolfe, Hazel Court, and Charles Aidman in a story of a concert pianist whose crazed ambition leads him to literally steal the hands of a more talented rival out of the dead performer’s crypt. Goldsmith’s orchestral score created the fright, but the limelight belonged to two original pieces for piano written and played by Caesar Giovannini (1925–​2017). Giovannini, a freelance studio musician, composed a Chopin-​esque nocturne and a flamboyant, virtuoso sonata—​a key element in the script—​for performance in a concert-​hall setting. The notes for Stanley Wilson’s 1963 Decca LP Themes to Remember (which consisted entirely of music from Revue shows) noted that the “Teakwood Nocturne” had “evoked more requests for a recording than any other theme in the Revue repertoire.” Although written for Thriller, Giovannini’s “Teakwood” themes would often resurface in other Revue/​Universal shows throughout the 1960s when classically styled solo piano pieces were needed. The other composer on Thriller was Morton Stevens, who wrote an additional 16 original scores. Stevens’s output included virtually all of the series’ black comedies, plus one particularly notable hour of terror: the 1961 “Pigeons from Hell,” based on a story by famed fantasy writer Robert E. Howard, scored entirely for strings, percussion, and eerie solo voice. One of the special aspects of Thriller was the creation of a kind of “overture” of the episode’s score for the end titles, a departure from standard television practice of reprising the series theme. Sometimes the end titles on Thriller ran as long as a minute and 40 seconds. Television briefly flirted with the brave new world of electronic music on ‘Way Out (1961, CBS). British author Roald Dahl was the host for this half-​hour, videotaped anthology of strange and weird tales. The end title credit read “electronic music by Luening, Ussachevsky, Dockstader,” a reference to three of New York’s pioneering creators of strange soundscapes: Otto Luening (1900–​1996), Vladimir Ussachevsky (1911–​ 1990), and Tod Dockstader (1932–​ 2015). Ussachevsky and

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Luening founded the Columbia-​Princeton Electronic Music Center while Dockstader experimented at Gotham Recording during production of the series. Evidence indicates that the three did not collaborate (in fact, Ussachevsky denied Dockstader access to the Columbia-​Princeton lab), but rather suggests that producer David Susskind’s music team acquired acetates and tapes from all three composers, then edited and layered bits and pieces for each episode as they saw fit. The main title sequence changed, from a giant eyeball to a bizarre disembodied hand in flames, but both were set to unsettling, electronically generated sounds. The end titles changed, too, sometimes accompanied by the electronics and other times with Robert Cobert’s more conventional but still eerie acoustic music. The series lasted only three months and was quickly forgotten, as was the electronic milieu in television for the next several years. For its first seven seasons, Alfred Hitchcock Presents aired as a half-​hour series and was tracked entirely with library music. For its expansion into The Alfred Hitchcock Hour (1962–​1965, CBS, NBC), executive producers Norman Lloyd and Joan Harrison, both longtime Hitchcock associates, began to commission original scores. The mainstays of the mystery series were two other Hitchcock associates: Lyn Murray (1909–​1989), who had scored To Catch a Thief (1955) for the director, and Bernard Herrmann, who was by now Hitchcock’s most celebrated composer. Herrmann’s scores for Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960) not only elevated those films into suspense masterpieces, they became textbook examples of the dramatic possibilities inherent in original film music. Murray wrote 23 scores, 11 of them in the first hour-​long season, including a new arrangement of the Gounod “Funeral March for a Marionette” as the series main title (set against creepy new visuals involving a castle under threatening skies, weird-​looking eyes, and the famous Hitchcock caricature). Murray would go on to compose the themes—​a main title and a rock ’n’ roll tune called “Assembly Stomp” for the end credits—​for Mr. Novak (1963–​1965, NBC) with James Franciscus as a high school English teacher; the music for Sandburg’s Lincoln (1974–​1976, NBC), a prestigious series of six specials with Hal Holbrook as Abraham Lincoln; and the scores for a number of public television programs, including his Emmy winner, the National Geographic special “Miraculous Machines” (1984). Herrmann composed 17 scores for the Hitchcock Hour, all for the second and third seasons. It was the most music he would ever write for any television series, and in the most concentrated periods. He worked from August to November 1963 on six of his seven second-​season scores, and from July through October 1964 on seven of his ten third-​season scores. Between stints on the television series, the composer wrote the music for Hitchcock’s Marnie (1964). He also rearranged the Gounod main title, solely for bassoons, for the series’ final two seasons.

“Hitch would approve the stories, but he never spoke about music at all,” series producer Norman Lloyd recalled. “We knew Benny Herrmann was his favorite composer. But Benny was irascible. He had alienated people; he couldn’t get a job. So Stanley Wilson and I said we’ve got to put him on the Hitchcock Hour. Benny had a very strong dramatic flair,” Lloyd added. “He had a sense of the theatrical in relation to story. This is what he brought that was so brilliant.” Herrmann’s most compelling work nearly always involved surprising instrumental combinations and vivid musical colorations. The 1963–​1964 scores included “A Home Away from Home,” a clever Robert Bloch story about the inmates literally taking over the asylum (scored for strings, harp, and vibes); “Terror at Northfield,” an all-​woodwind ensemble for an Ellery Queen tale about a father’s vengeance for his son’s murder; and “The Jar,” in which a calliope and variations on the ancient “Dies Irae” theme underscored a strange Ray Bradbury story about the effects that the contents of a weird carnival sideshow artifact have on the residents of a tiny backwater town. For the series’ final season, Herrmann’s contributions included “The Life Work of Juan Diaz,” Bradbury’s macabre tale of a Mexican family victimized by a gravedigger, with a score based almost entirely on a habanera (and thus reminiscent of the nightmare sequence in Vertigo); Scottish reels for “The McGregor Affair,” about a Scotsman’s murder of his alcoholic wife; vibes and harps for “Consider Her Ways,” a science-​fiction story about a future Earth populated entirely by women; and a playful waltz for flute and harp for the imaginative child of “Where the Woodbine Twineth.” “There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. . . .” So intoned the narrator at the start of The Outer Limits (1963–​1965, ABC), another innovative anthology and one that assumed monumental cult status over the years, based largely on a handful of thoughtful scripts penned by creator Leslie Stevens, producer Joseph Stefano (who scripted Psycho), and science-​fiction author Harlan Ellison; on innovative direction by the likes of Byron Haskin (War of the Worlds); and on creative cinematography by Conrad Hall (who would later become the Oscar-​winning cameraman of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and American Beauty). The music for the first season of The Outer Limits was composed by Dominic Frontiere (1931–​2017), who also received “production executive” credit on the series as a principal in Stevens’s Daystar Productions company. Prior to The Outer Limits, the former accordionist and 20th Century-​Fox arranger had written the theme for the cop show The New Breed (1961–​1962, ABC) and had scored all of Stevens’s Stoney Burke (1962–​1963, ABC), which starred Jack Lord as a rodeo performer. Later, he scored a hit with his music for the western Hang ’em High (1968) and received a Golden Globe for The Stunt Man (1980).

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Dominic Frontiere conducting in the 1960s.

Frontiere’s Outer Limits theme began with an orchestral fanfare and segued to a strange, string-​dominated sense of wonder. The main-​title visuals, set to the famous narration, ranged from a sine-​wave oscilloscope pattern to fuzzy images of a test pattern and the moon. “I wanted the main title to be almost pompous,” he reflected many years later. “I wanted it to have a classical sound, in that there’s a big universe out there. And because I was the producer, I got a big orchestra budget. I’m very proud of it.” The Outer Limits was one of the first series to benefit from a “sound design” approach: one that integrated music and sound effects to create a unique overall sonic atmosphere. Daystar music supervisor John Elizalde worked closely with Frontiere on the series. “We made all kinds of crazy sound effects and musical things,” Elizalde said. “We rigged up an oscillator, and Dominic would play it just by jiggling the knob. He had absolutely perfect pitch, and a huge physical facility. Somehow or other he could play that thing just like an instrument. We used to call it the Onafets, which is Stefano spelled backwards.” Elizalde, who not only had been a concert pianist and music editor but also was highly proficient in technical matters involving all kinds of sound reproduction, created many of the sound effects for the series, including alien voices and electronic tonalities as needed. He even reviewed scripts for proper terminology and often concocted scientific-​sounding jargon for the dialogue. “It was all very primitive, but a lot of fun,” he said. Unlike the Revue series Thriller and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The Outer Limits operated on budgetary restrictions that demanded a handful of original scores and extensive tracking of many episodes. As with The Twilight Zone, however, Frontiere and Elizalde chose the key episodes for original music. The two largest sessions were in August 1963

(creating a large library of music along with scores for early episodes such as “The Architects of Fear” and “The Human Factor”), when Frontiere conducted a 45-​piece orchestra, and in February 1964, when he had 43 players for “The Forms of Things Unknown” (a highly stylized hour that Stefano had designed as a pilot for a possible spinoff series). On other dates, Frontiere’s orchestra would fluctuate from as few as seven players to as many as 31. The music of The Outer Limits included some of Frontiere’s best work for television. His approaches ranged from a lyrical love theme for “The Man Who Was Never Born” to menacing faux-​Asian sounds in “The Hundred Days of the Dragon” and early electronic music for the alien environment of “Nightmare.” For the largest scores, Frontiere utilized the services of one of Hollywood’s premier orchestrators, Edward B. Powell, who spent many years orchestrating the scores of Alfred Newman at 20th Century-​Fox. A falling-​out with ABC management resulted in the ouster of most of the Daystar production group, including Stevens and Frontiere, for the second season of The Outer Limits. Frontiere’s theme was replaced with new music by composer Harry Lubin. It wasn’t exactly new, however. Lubin simply wrote a variation of his “Fear” main title from Alcoa Presents: One Step Beyond (1959–​1961, ABC), the John Newland–​hosted anthology of supposedly fact-​based incidents involving the occult and the supernatural. Lubin’s scores—​which ranged from fully orchestral on “Soldier” to predominantly organ and percussion on “Demon with a Glass Hand,” the two classic Ellison scripts—​were usually far less subtle than those of Frontiere. And, as on One Step Beyond, Lubin frequently employed electronic instruments (including the theremin and ondes Martenot) to stress the science-​fiction elements of the stories. Frontiere’s music for The Outer Limits turned out to be useful three years later, when producer Quinn Martin launched The Invaders (1967–​1968, ABC), a Larry Cohen script about the arrival of aliens on Earth and the attempts of architect David Vincent (Roy Thinnes) to convince everyone else that the visitors had taken human form and were out to colonize the planet. In the fall of 1966, Frontiere was busy with other TV assignments (including the western Iron Horse and war series 12 O’Clock High and The Rat Patrol), so Quinn Martin post-​production chief Elizalde “tracked” the Invaders pilot with preexisting Frontiere music, mostly from The Outer Limits and, especially, its proposed spinoff pilot The Unknown, which aired on Outer Limits as “The Forms of Things Unknown.” The latter’s three-​note motif denoting alarm, set to visuals of multicolored elliptical lights illuminating the title, was perfect for this exercise in paranoia. When ABC decided to program The Invaders at midseason, Frontiere dove in to score the next three episodes, retaining the Unknown motif

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as the danger-​infused opening music but penning a very different closing theme for Vincent, both rhapsodic and heroic, that Elizalde didn’t like. “Dominic had an end-​credits that, in my opinion, didn’t fit the picture at all. It was kind of grandiose, very melodic and an almost Broadway-​type theme. I told Dom it wasn’t working.” Frontiere protested, Martin sided with Elizalde, and Frontiere quit the series. “The curtain went down,” Elizalde said ruefully. “We didn’t talk to each other for several years.” Frontiere’s preferred theme ran only once, at the end of the third episode, “The Mutation.” Elizalde built a new end-​title theme “from the main title and a couple of inside cues,” he recalled. Frontiere’s early episode scores, however, were wonderfully moody and dramatically apt (featuring electric harpsichord and electric guitar for particularly “alien” sounds). Elizalde recruited a new composer, Duane Tatro (1927–​2020), for most of the series’ second-​season scores. He was a Stan Kenton band alumnus who had studied with Arthur Honegger in Paris, and his interest in modern compositional techniques, particularly the 12-​tone system, made him perfect for The Invaders (and subsequent Quinn Martin series including The FBI and the Ken Howard period drama The Manhunter, 1974–​1975, CBS). “If it worked dramatically, John didn’t give a damn what you did musically,” Tatro said. “I was subversive, but I’m convinced that the reason I was successful was that I had a sense of drama. You could do almost anything you wanted as long as it fit.” Frontiere later scored The Immortal (1970–​1971, ABC), a Christopher George series about a man whose blood made him immune to disease and the aging process. A terrific TV movie (1969) with a bittersweet Frontiere theme, the same premise turned out to be a quickly cancelled misfire as a series (with a man on the run storyline à la The Fugitive). Twentieth Century-​Fox was a consistent supplier of science fiction to sixties television, primarily due to one man: producer Irwin Allen, who had made the classic sci-​fi films The Lost World (1960) and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (1961). He turned the latter into a television series (1964–​1968, ABC) starring Richard Basehart and David Hedison as the inventor and captain, respectively, of the highly advanced nuclear submarine Seaview. As with most of Allen’s shows, Voyage started on a somewhat serious premise but eventually degenerated into monster-​ of-​ the-​ week melodramatics. Paul Sawtell, who had scored the Voyage feature film, came back to score the pilot (including a new theme for the series) and five first-​season episodes. A more intriguing choice for composer was Hugo Friedhofer, who scored four more 1964 episodes (two of them completed, because of Friedhofer’s notoriously slow pace, by Alexander Courage), although Friedhofer later referred to his work on Voyage as “sheer torment. The producer of this waterlogged epic is so sound-​effects happy,” Friedhofer wrote, “that the show might just as well be scored with an

infinite series of variations on ‘Asleep in the Deep’ for all the difference it would make.” A variety of other composers worked on the four seasons of Voyage, including such sci-​fi veterans as Leith Stevens, who wrote nine episodes. Sawtell’s original theme was briefly replaced, for exactly one episode. Jerry Goldsmith was hired to score the opening show of the second season, “Jonah and the Whale.” He wrote a brooding, Herrmann-​esque piece that was used over the main and end titles. Sawtell’s brighter, more familiar theme returned the following week, and remained with the series until its cancellation in 1968. Lost in Space (1965–​ 1968, CBS) was Allen’s futuristic version of the classic Swiss Family Robinson, about an extended family of castaways on a far-​off planet in 1997. John Williams (then still billed as “Johnny”), newly freed of his Universal contract, first worked for Fox music director Lionel Newman on this show. The premise had husband-​ and-​wife scientists (Guy Williams, June Lockhart), their three children (Marta Kristen, Angela Cartwright, Billy Mumy), their pilot (Mark Goddard), and an obnoxious stowaway named Dr. Smith (Jonathan Harris) enduring countless crises in space, including the usual quota of monsters and alien visitors. Newman had scored the original pilot (which had no Dr. Smith) using Bernard Herrmann’s music for the previous Fox sci-​fi films The Day the Earth Stood Still and Journey to the Center of the Earth.

 John Williams conducting in the mid-​1960s.

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Williams scored four of the first seven episodes, and many of the series’ later hours were tracked with this music. Williams’s main title, set to animation that hinted at the series’ often youth-​oriented outer space hijinks, featured an unusual electronic instrument invented by former Glenn Miller band trombonist and UCLA music professor Paul Tanner. Part theremin and part ondes Martenot, Tanner’s unnamed instrument could control the pitch of the electronic sound more precisely than a traditional theremin. (As a result, it was widely used, particularly on George Greeley’s scores for the Bill Bixby–​Ray Walston comedy My Favorite Martian, 1963–​ 1966, CBS; Tanner provided the weird sounds every time Uncle Martin’s antennae went up or when he utilized his powers of levitation.) But Williams avoided electronics in his scores, preferring a more traditional orchestral approach to the drama. The Lost in Space ensemble, Williams recalled, “was mostly without strings. So we had a pretty healthy brass section, eight or ten [players], and some woodwinds and percussion—​a little more generous than the Universal ensemble typically would be.” Most prominent were his danger motif, in which brass and woodwinds signaled trouble for the Robinson clan; a lumbering tuba theme for the robot (reminiscent of Herrmann’s music for the robot Gort in the Day the Earth Stood Still score); and a driving theme for the Chariot, a 1997 version of the all-​terrain vehicle in which the family traveled while repairing their damaged Jupiter 2 spacecraft. Williams wrote additional themes for humorous moments, mostly arranged for upper woodwinds, usually involving Penny’s extraterrestrial pet chimp or resourceful Will’s quizzical reactions to Smith’s antics; and otherworldly sounds for percussion, used to accompany a spacewalk sequence in the first episode. Williams’s diverse and interesting musical responses to the various environmental dangers that threatened the Robinsons turned out to be a kind of trial run for the disaster films that the composer would become famous for several years later: the heat of the planet’s blazing sun (Allen’s The Towering Inferno, 1974); the constant seismic activity (Earthquake, 1974); and the raging torrents of water as the Robinsons crossed the planet’s inland sea (Allen’s The Poseidon Adventure, 1972). More to the point, it was his first exposure to the science-​fiction realm that, a dozen years later, would rocket him into the position of film’s most famous composer. “I guess the intention was probably to be pretty straight with it, but some of it, even at the time, was kind of campy,” Williams recalled. “I remember doing some silly waltzes with four flutes and things. That just seemed right for this kind of carrying on that Irwin had there. It did get a little bit broad fairly quickly. I even sometimes think in my mind that it was a kind of precursor of Star Wars in a way, because [the series] had the robots, the various characters, and the broad musical treatment.” Williams’s grandly romantic, fully symphonic approach to George

Lucas’s 1977 space opera would win an Academy Award and almost singlehandedly rejuvenate the orchestral score in motion pictures. Williams wrote a new theme for the third season of Lost in Space, a far bolder, more adventurous musical signature that skipped the electronics entirely. Herman Stein (1915–​2007), who was no stranger to science fiction with past film scores such as It Came from Outer Space (1953) and This Island Earth (1954), contributed five other early scores to Lost in Space and, like Williams, avoided the use of electronic gimmicks. “Music has to appeal to you on a human level,” Stein said. “I remember once Lionel [Newman] wanted me to use an electric violin for one of these things, and I hated the idea. It didn’t fit and it was unnatural. I think that’s the wrong approach with music. You’ve got all kinds of sound effects and [technicians] can do it much better than you can as a composer. But they cannot do what I can do: I can make you afraid, or I can make you sad. That’s something else.” Allen engaged Williams for two more of his sixties sci-​fi series: The Time Tunnel (1966–​1967, ABC) and Land of the Giants (1968–​1970, ABC). In each case, Williams—​whose film career was beginning to take off—​composed only the themes and pilot scores. For the time-​travel series The Time Tunnel, Williams accompanied the colorful animated titles (which featured a man being buried in the sand inside an hourglass) with a rhythmic, brass-​dominated theme that even incorporated a tick-​tock sound. For the scenes of scientists Tony and Doug (James Darren, Robert Colbert) falling through time, he came up with swirling musical effects for flutes, vibes, chimes, and harps. Williams composed a different theme for each season of Land of the Giants, both highly dramatic. A measure of the trust that Allen placed in Williams is the fact that, although the producer was said to abhor dissonance, both Williams’s Time Tunnel and Land of the Giants scores contain just such writing as appropriate to the bizarre, baffling happenings in each. While Irwin Allen was pleasing the kiddie audience on CBS and ABC, Gene Roddenberry was attempting to appeal to a more sophisticated demographic with Star Trek (1966–​1969, NBC). For this most famous of televised sci-​fi programs, Roddenberry imagined a twenty-​third-​century federation of many civilizations and a giant, faster-​than-​light-​speed starship with a human captain (William Shatner), a half-​Vulcan science officer (Leonard Nimoy), a cynical Earth doctor (DeForest Kelley), and a multiracial crew that together confronted the unknown with a particularly humanistic philosophy. Despite the trends at the time, Roddenberry decided against electronic music. “I felt very strongly that I wanted very earthlike, romantic music,” he later recalled, “almost Captain Blood–​like, a seagoing feeling of music and human adventure. I was afraid that if, on top of bizarre alien landscapes, I had beep-​beep-​beep music, then I would be in trouble.

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Alexander Courage.

So I wanted music that said adventure, courage, boldness—​all the things we talked about in the opening [narration], ‘to boldly go.’ ” Roddenberry relied on Desilu’s unofficial music director Wilbur Hatch for advice on choosing a composer for his ambitious, special effects–​laden hour. Hatch recommended Alexander Courage (1919–​2008), an old friend from the days of CBS radio in the late 1940s. Courage spent much of the 1950s as an arranger-​orchestrator at MGM; he scored the western classic The Left-​Handed Gun (1958) and wrote music for dozens of series episodes, including MGM’s National Velvet (1960–​1962, NBC) and Fox series including Daniel Boone. Courage was not a science fiction fan. “I never have been,” he said. “But I thought, ‘Well, what the heck. It’s another show.’ I visited the set down there in Culver City, at the old Selznick studios, and met Gene and so forth, and we got along fine.” According to Courage, Roddenberry’s dictum was: “I don’t want it to sound like space music”—​meaning, nothing “far out. He wanted something that had some balls and drive to it. In fact, he told me to always write that way through the show, all of it.” Searching for a theme, the composer recalled hearing, many years ago on the radio, the song “Beyond the Blue Horizon” in an unusual arrangement that suggested the heavens. Courage took his inspiration from that memory: “I figured that if I could get something that sounded like it was going off into space, and have a lot of motion underneath it, then that might work. That’s what I came up with. I tried to have long intervals,

which would make it kind of go ‘out,’ and then scales that went up and out. . . . And I wanted to have a strange kind of unearthly sound, so I had a very, very primitive early synthesizer, and Loulie Jean Norman, who was the great studio soprano, to do an ‘ah’ or an ‘oh’ on the tune. That really got to Roddenberry, because he was quite a sexpot and anything that had to do with a woman’s voice was just right for him. So he mixed in more soprano and less of the instruments than I would have wanted. Aside from that, it’s really right there.” That “early synthesizer” was actually an eerie, electronically altered violin sound manufactured by Jack Cookerly; Fred Steiner’s more traditionally orchestral arrangement replaced it after a few episodes, and the wordless vocal was more prominently heard when the second season began (despite complaints by cost-​conscious Desilu executives that the soprano, governed by Screen Actors Guild rules, would have to be paid every week for her 30 seconds of singing). Norman remembered singing it only once, although new vocals were recorded for the second and third season titles. As a part of the pilot score, Courage also wrote an opening fanfare: eight notes for brass that would become among the most familiar musical signatures of the next three decades. “I had to fit that to the picture,” Courage recalled. “So I just wrote a fanfare. Little did I know what was going to happen to it.” Courage’s fanfare for the USS Enterprise, even more than the series theme, became so inextricably linked with the Star Trek phenomenon that its inclusion in each of the Star Trek feature films (which began in 1979) was a foregone conclusion. Courage also became involved with the sound effects of the pilot. “I told Gene that it might be kind of an interesting thing if we did some of the sound effects on the alien planet based on music. So we went into Glen Glenn [recording studio] one evening with about four or five [musicians], and we had them play certain things which we then fooled around with on the [mixing] board. We made the elevators opening and closing, the wind on the planet, and all kinds of stuff like that.” Courage’s music for the first pilot, “The Cage,” introduced the basic themes: the heraldic fanfare to announce the Enterprise (that would be used to underscore Shatner’s opening narration in the series), the main theme (that soaring melody with its surprising beguine rhythm), and an alien motif (an ethereal sound, performed alternately by voice and flute). He also used an electronic organ on both “The Cage” and the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” often in highly dramatic musical contexts, to stress the otherworldly nature of the drama. In addition to the pilots (recorded in January and November 1965), Courage scored two early first-​season shows (“The Man Trap” and “The Naked Time,” in August 1966), and Roddenberry’s unsold 1966 series pilot Police Story. He then left Star Trek in order to take the prestige job of associate music director and chief arranger on Doctor

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Rundown of cues and musicians needed for Star Trek pilot recording. Note “soprano” in seven cues, including “Main Title” and “True Love.”

Dolittle (1967), the major-​screen musical that earned him an Academy Award nomination (for musical adaptation, with Lionel Newman) but nearly ruined 20th Century-​Fox financially. After the debacle of Doctor Dolittle, Courage returned to score two more episodes in the series’ third season. Unfortunately, however, Roddenberry’s ill-​advised attempt to write a lyric to Courage’s Star Trek theme caused a rift with the composer. Roddenberry’s words (“Beyond the rim of the star-​light /​My love is wand’ring in star-​flight . . .”), which have rarely been performed, cost Courage 50 percent of his music performance royalties from that point on. Courage protested, but because a clause in his Desilu contract permitted Roddenberry to add lyrics (and claim half the royalties), the composer had no legal recourse. Roddenberry never apologized, Courage said: “If he had told me about this, and we had come up with a really decent lyric—​which it isn’t—​we both could have made more money out of it. He just knocked something out and that was it.” When Star Trek became a series, Roddenberry entrusted all decisions regarding music to his associate producer, Robert H. Justman. Justman, a television veteran who had recently worked on The Outer Limits, knew the difference between Mozart and Mahler (and may have been the only producer in Hollywood with a harpsichord in his living room). Justman chose the composers, spotted the music (choosing where cues would begin and end, and deciding the nature of the score), and attended every scoring session.

Fred Steiner wrote more original scores for Star Trek than any other composer, including all or part of 12 episodes, plus library music over the series’ three seasons. “When they screened the pilot for me,” he recalled, “I instantly knew what the approach should be: big adventure music. After I screened it, I went to Gene and he said the same thing. He wanted adventure music, for the Captain Blood of space. So the music reflects that—​trying to get as big and noble a sound as possible.” They undertook this despite a relative paucity of orchestral forces: as few as 17 on Courage’s pilots to a high of 26 on some of Steiner’s scores. Because of the thoughtful nature of the series, Star Trek tended to bring out the best in its composers. Steiner’s music may have been his finest for the medium. Among his memorable 1966 contributions were what he called “harshly shocking, dissonant, glittery, clattering ‘zap’ chords,” as well as his mysterious opening and closing music for “Charlie X”; the dark suspense-​and-​terror music of “The Corbomite Maneuver”; a militaristic theme for the alien Romulans in “Balance of Terror”; and lyrical passages for the title characters of “Mudd’s Women.” Sol Kaplan (1919–​1990), whose film scores included Titanic (1953) and The Spy Who Came in From the Cold (1965), scored only two episodes of Star Trek, but they were among the series’ most dramatic, and their music was tracked throughout first-​and second-​season shows: the 1966 “The Enemy Within,” with its complex rhythms and grim variations on the Courage fanfare; and the 1967 “The Doomsday Machine,” which contained, in Steiner’s words, “the brassy, cacophonous, persistently rhythmic motive so often sounding in moments of threatening danger or encounters with outer-​space monsters.” Gerald Fried’s five episodes included a lively, fun score, incorporating Irish influences, for the lighthearted 1966 “Shore Leave”; strange and primitive music for Spock and the Vulcan ceremonies in the 1967 “Amok Time”; and exotic, Native American–​style woodwinds and percussion for 1968’s “The Paradise Syndrome” that hinted at his later scores for such Native American–​themed telefilms as I Will Fight No More Forever and The Mystic Warrior. Fried’s approach to the music for Spock, who was forever in denial of his illogical human half, was particularly interesting: “I tried to write something that was emotionally expressive, espressivo, to show this part of him, but I played it with the bass guitar: this thumping, rhythmic drone which is anything but emotional. It doesn’t have that ability to convey emotion.” His savage, Stravinsky-​ inspired combat music in “Amok Time” would later be parodied in other shows and films, including Futurama and The Cable Guy. Justman’s admiration for George Duning’s Picnic score led him to sign the composer for the more romantic episodes, including the 1967 alien love story “Metamorphosis,” and a pair of sensitive 1968 episodes: the telepath tale “Is There in Truth No Beauty?” and “The Empath,” in

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which Duning’s haunting score speaks for the beautiful, mute title character. Duning claimed to have been the first composer in Hollywood to employ the then-​new Yamaha E-​3 organ on the latter. Jerry Fielding wrote just two scores, notable for very different reasons: the 1967 classic “The Trouble with Tribbles,” a playful score including a theme for the ship’s chief engineer Scotty; and the 1968 sci-​fi western “Spectre of the Gun,” which in tone, style, and orchestral color (including harmonica and accordion) presaged his Oscar-​nominated music for the classic The Wild Bunch (1969), on which he was just starting work. When work began on Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–​1994, syndicated), Roddenberry insisted on adopting Jerry Goldsmith’s theme for Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) as the theme for the new series, while also approving Justman’s idea to preface it with the Courage fanfare as a link to the classic original. The series starred Patrick Stewart as Jean-​Luc Picard, captain of a new Enterprise in the twenty-​fourth century. Three composers were primarily responsible for the music of Next Generation: Dennis McCarthy (b. 1944), who worked on all seven seasons; Ron Jones (b. 1954), who worked on the first four; and Jay Chattaway (b. 1946), who succeeded Jones. A former road musician and arranger-​conductor for Glen Campbell and a veteran television composer on series including MacGyver, McCarthy discovered early on that the producers of Next Generation wanted a markedly different approach from the music of its illustrious predecessor: orchestral, yes, but subtler, establishing mood, and avoiding the bombast of the

Star Trek composers (left to right) Ron Jones, Jay Chattaway, and Dennis McCarthy.

original. “I treated everything in the show as the second movement of a symphony,” McCarthy said, “even the battle scenes.” McCarthy and his colleagues were criticized by some Trek fans as failing to meet the standards of the original, but McCarthy found the directive a creative challenge, “making it exciting, giving you the emotional impact, without making you say, ‘Gee, the music’s big.’ Keeping the music almost subliminal.” McCarthy went on to score the next three Trek series and became the only composer to be Emmy-​nominated for all four, including Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–​1999, syndicated), Star Trek: Voyager (1995–​ 2001, UPN), and Star Trek: Enterprise (2001–​2005, UPN). He received five Emmy nominations alone for his music on Next Generation, winning in the 1991–​1992 season for the two-​part “Unification” story that guest-​ starred Leonard Nimoy as Spock. He also won the following year for his main-​title theme music for Deep Space Nine. Paramount didn’t stint on the orchestral forces necessary. McCarthy and his colleagues averaged 40 musicians, sometimes more than 50, but never fewer than 36—​an aberration for 1990s TV, when many producers were turning to synthesizers and samplers to avoid the expense of union musicians. For Deep Space Nine, McCarthy keyed on the isolation of the far-​off outpost in coming up with the theme: “Solo horn in front, solo trumpet later on, big powerful subdued orchestra underneath it,” he explained. “Nothing in your face. Restrained power, with the loneliness of the solo instrument.” McCarthy was freer to employ “strange harmonic and odd percussive effects” on Deep Space Nine. “We had a fresh start and we could be a little more experimental,” he said. McCarthy’s impressive work on the Star Trek series led to his massive orchestral and choral score for the seventh big-​screen film, Star Trek: Generations (1994), whose initially ethereal main-​title music segued to a spectacular arrangement of the original Courage fanfare, musically embodying the transition between the old and new Star Trek casts. Star Trek: Voyager, with Kate Mulgrew captaining a starship lost in space, sported an original Jerry Goldsmith theme. Goldsmith’s sweeping orchestral signature, set to stunning visuals of the ship cruising among the stars and planets, had an innate majesty and a grandeur with few if any parallels in television music. Explaining his approach, Goldsmith spoke of space as “the last frontier,” adding: “When any explorer goes into a new land, they’re adventurers. There’s always something of a nobility about that.” The theme won Goldsmith his fifth Emmy. McCarthy scored an astounding 260 episodes of the four series; Chattaway scored more than 180 and received five Emmy nominations, winning for the final Voyager episode “Endgame.” Reflecting years later on the musical approach, Chattaway said: “Maybe in the utopian world of the twenty-​fourth century, the Klingons aren’t bad, they’re just different. Or the Romulans have an edge, but they’re not evil; they might

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have conflicts with the Federation. [Producers] wanted the music to be a little more neutral, for the audience to make up their own minds. We figured out how to do it and still keep our musical integrity. “The leashes got a little looser as we progressed,” Chattaway added. “Deep Space Nine was so much more about relationships; the music was more intimate and personal. When Voyager came along, this was much more action. And when we got to Enterprise, we had a whole battery of electronic instruments and guitars. It became addictive to write all that music and then get up in front of the best musicians in Los Angeles and have music played back that you had written maybe only hours earlier. I don’t think I’ll ever again have as amazing an experience as working with the people that made Star Trek.” In 1969, Rod Serling decided to return to television with a two-​hour pilot for a proposed new anthology series to be called Night Gallery. A huge success both critically and in the ratings, the TV-​movie spawned a series (1970–​ 1973, NBC) that combined fantasy, horror, and sometimes science fiction. Serling was the host (and, as on Twilight Zone, often the writer), introducing each segment standing next to an original painting inspired by the piece. Billy Goldenberg’s assignment to score the two-​hour Night Gallery was a direct result of his friendship with then-​up-​and-​coming television director Steven Spielberg. Goldenberg had already scored the occult telefilm Fear No Evil (1969), which included choral music based on devil-​worship incantations. Spielberg’s segment of the Night Gallery pilot starred Joan Crawford, who happened to be one of the composer’s favorite actresses. Tipped off by Spielberg, he lobbied both Universal music director Stanley Wilson and producer William Sackheim and won the assignment. Goldenberg’s approach was different for each of the three segments. For the first, in which Roddy McDowall played a greedy young man

GIL MELLÉ, ELECTRONIC MUSIC PIONEER Gil Mellé (1931–​2004) dragged television into the brave new world of electronic music. His theme for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery was, while not the first all-​electronic main title (that distinction went to the 1961 Roald Dahl anthology ‘Way Out), the first one that was widely noticed by the industry. It announced, in a major way, that electronic music was not just a fad or gimmick but a new musical tool of vast potential. Mellé’s background was among the most eclectic in Hollywood. Born in Jersey City, New Jersey, he was: a self-​taught musician; a jazz saxophonist signed to Blue Note Records when he was 19; a painter whose art appeared on albums by Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk; and a pioneer in the

field of electronic music, building his own instruments and recording the first LP of electronic jazz (Tome VI, 1968) even before the term “synthesizer” was widely known. At the time of Night Gallery, Mellé was in the midst of creating his groundbreaking all-​electronic score for the sci-​fi thriller The Andromeda Strain (1971). He had already scored Perilous Voyage (a telefilm that sat on the shelf until 1976) for producer Jack Laird, utilizing a mix of orchestral and electronic music; My Sweet Charlie (1970), a landmark TV movie that would win Emmys for actress Patty Duke and writers Richard Levinson and William Link (Columbo); and The Psychiatrist (1971, NBC), a short-​lived Roy Thinnes drama whose theme and episode scores again combined electronic with orchestral music. His Night Gallery theme utilized the same unique inventions

responsible for his wealthy uncle’s death, he scored McDowall’s character with “a little synthesizer piece which was very hard-​edged but almost sounded like bees buzzing or ants running”; for the second, about a blind woman’s desperate ploy to see, he accompanied Crawford grandly with “giant orchestral chords” as she descended a staircase; for the third, he imagined fugitive German war criminal Richard Kiley’s hopes of escape into a more peaceful life (as depicted in a gallery painting) with a Kurt Weill–​style song, with an original German lyric. Goldenberg’s “dark, very Bernard Herrmann–​like” theme for the film was not retained for the series because of a change in producers. For the new main title, producer Jack Laird turned to Gil Mellé (see sidebar). Mellé also composed a small library of music for the series, but most of the scoring chores fell to other composers, including Universal regulars Benny Carter (who provided a nostalgic big-​band sound for Serling’s Emmy-​nominated “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar”), Robert Prince (1929–​2007), and Oliver Nelson. Noted concert composer Paul Glass (b. 1934) wrote superb scores for the Orson Welles–​narrated “Silent Snow, Secret Snow” and “The Messiah on Mott Street,” both in 1971. Laird’s own background as an ex-​musician led him to two more surprising choices for Night Gallery: John Lewis (1920–​2001), who had composed the music for Odds Against Tomorrow (1959) with his Modern Jazz Quartet, and Eddie Sauter (1914–​1981), who scored Mickey One (1965) with Stan Getz, contributed effective second-​season scores. Sauter wrote a new theme for the third season, now as a half-​hour series, and scored all of those episodes.

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The Sixth Sense (1972, ABC), with Gary Collins as a parapsychologist, lasted less than a year but went through four different themes. David Shire wrote the first one and remembered thinking at the time: “At last, a series that uses the occult as a noble force, as a benevolent force. [The

Gil Mellé.

as his Andromeda Strain score, its eerie noises and ghostly percussion battery accompanying images of weird paintings and ghoulish faces, setting the tone for the scary happenings to follow. Mellé’s association with the genre continued with Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–​1975, ABC). Darren McGavin first played irreverent, intrepid newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak in Dark Shadows creator Dan Curtis’s TV movie The Night Stalker (1972), which was an immediate sensation. The Night Stalker, about a vampire on the loose in modern-​day Las Vegas, was scored by Robert Cobert using a unique approach that combined jazz with the musical melodrama of his earlier work for Curtis on the Gothic daytime soap; the sequel, The Night Strangler (1973), employed the same theme.

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theme] was for Oriental cymbals and cello. It was a mantra, a very simple melody, very unlike what I usually do because I was trying to suggest in the theme the psychic ambience of the guy’s mind.” Shire’s hypnotic, mystical music lasted just four episodes. “It was thrown out,” Shire recalled, “and the feedback I got was that they wanted something that said ‘exciting dramatic series’ and ‘solving crimes’ and all of that.” To replace it, Universal music editors went into the library and found an eerie melody that Billy Goldenberg had written for a 1970 episode of The Name of the Game (for a dream sequence in which Gene Barry was contemplating suicide); it became the new main title. Eight months later, Lalo Schifrin recorded a theme that was never used. Again, the producers turned to Goldenberg for a dramatic new theme, although his music for the same season’s Ghost Story (1972, NBC), with its electronically created wails and otherworldly orchestral sounds, was even spookier. Shire, meanwhile, went on to write the theme for the long-​ running Linda Lavin sitcom Alice (1976–​1985, CBS), and to receive multiple Emmy nominations for prestige TV films such as Raid on Entebbe (1977, NBC) and the six-​hour The Kennedys of Massachusetts (1989, ABC). Schifrin, meanwhile, followed in the footsteps of Jerry Goldsmith and Leonard Rosenman by penning the theme and three early episode scores for the short-​lived TV adaptation of the popular film series Planet of the Apes (1974, CBS) with Ron Harper and James Naughton as astronauts who crash-​land on a future Earth whose leaders are talking apes; Roddy McDowall (who was in four of the films) played a friendly orangutan who joins them on the run. Schifrin’s music, mostly orchestral with occasional synth colors, matched the film scores for harsh, aggressive textures against the show’s forbidding landscape. He even recorded an amusing novelty tune, “Ape Shuffle,” for the studio’s record label, which unfortunately made no impression on record buyers.

McGavin, as executive producer of the weekly series, hired Mellé. Unfortunately, the composer didn’t have as much time to conceptualize the theme as he had hoped. “When do I start?” Mellé asked McGavin. “In twenty minutes,” came the reply. “He was serious,” recalled the composer. McGavin was about to shoot the main-​ title sequence, in which the reporter enters the newspaper office late at night and is whistling the theme on-​camera. Mellé protested, but with the clock ticking away, he came up with an idea. He had always liked a subsidiary theme that he had written for a sequence in another Universal pilot, Gene Roddenberry’s The Questor Tapes (1974). They went into the music library, found the sequence, and whistled the theme into a tape recorder for McGavin—​who promptly

rode off on his golf cart to shoot the main title. Mellé scored the first four shows, but quit in a dispute with the producers, who were at odds with McGavin on the direction of the music. (“Darren wanted me to play it straight,” he recalled, despite the series’ frequent lighter moments.) Jerry Fielding came in to score several subsequent episodes. Mellé brought his unique sounds and sensibilities to a series of TV-​ movies and miniseries. He conducted the London Symphony Orchestra in a moody and powerful symphonic score for the all-​star, four-​hour Frankenstein: The True Story (1973, NBC). “I had a set of special orchestra bells built that went down to a low C in the bass clef,” he recalled with pride in 1983. “I tried to write a beautiful score; I didn’t try to write monster music.” It remains his orchestral masterpiece—​yet much of his finest work was in the

The success of Star Wars led to the inevitable television copycat shows. Writer-​producer Glen A. Larson—​who had successfully cashed in on several big-​screen bonanzas with small-​screen variations (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid led to Alias Smith and Jones, The Sting led to Switch, etc.)—​came up with two: Battlestar Galactica (1978–​1979, ABC) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–​1981, NBC). Galactica was the more watchable of the two, an ambitious saga of an ongoing space battle between the survivors of a devastated human civilization (now searching for their cousins on a far-​off planet called Earth) and the race of mechanical beings out to destroy them. The ensemble cast included the fatherly commander (Lorne Greene), his good-​guy son (Richard Hatch), his daughter (Maren Jensen), and a hotshot pilot (Dirk Benedict). Larson (1937–​2014) had been a member of the Four Preps singing group of the early 1960s, both as songwriter and performer, and Stu Phillips (b. 1929) produced the Four Preps’ last single in 1965. A pop record producer (“Blue Moon,” “Johnny Angel”) who had also achieved success as an arranger-​conductor (the Hollyridge Strings) and film and TV composer (1966’s Dead Heat on a Merry-​Go-​Round, The Monkees in 1966–​1968), Phillips began his long television association with Larson on The Six Million Dollar Man and continued by co-​ writing the themes and scoring many episodes of Switch (1975–​1978, CBS), Quincy, M.E. (1976–​1983, NBC), and Knight Rider (1982–​1986, NBC), among others. On Galactica, Larson came up with the fanfare that opened the theme, while Phillips did the rest. For the spectacular three-​hour pilot—​ reportedly the most expensive ever made to that time, most estimates exceeding $5 million—​Phillips achieved an appropriately symphonic sound (having created an early temporary track of such classical composers as electronic realm. He created a chilling ambiance for A Cold Night’s Death (1973, ABC) and a futuristic soundscape for the four-​hour World War III (1982, NBC). “There were marches,” Mellé said of the latter, “but they were impressionistic, almost ghostly marches, like troops off in the mist. In the encounter between the Russians and the Americans, while all these guys were running around shooting, I played totally against the scene; the music was very slow and deep. I wrote about the philosophy of destruction.” He worked with Syren, his five-​man “chamber group that could perform electronic music live” and incorporated a handful of traditional acoustic instruments, marking an early instance of what is today referred to as a “hybrid” score. Fatal Vision (1984, NBC) and The Deliberate Stranger (1986, NBC) posed very different, even

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disturbing, challenges for the composer. Both were grim chronicles of multiple murders: Fatal Vision, based on the Joe McGinniss book about Green Beret Jeffrey MacDonald, accused of murdering his wife and children in 1970; The Deliberate Stranger, the story of convicted 1970s serial killer Ted Bundy. “In order to do justice to the picture,” Mellé said, “to really capture the horror of what these people were, you have to get inside of those characters. You have to see the world through their eyes, and then step outside and look closely at them, almost under a microscope. And it’s a painful experience working on a picture like that.” Mellé’s electronic palette was appropriate in each case. Fatal Vision and The Deliberate Stranger utilized unique sounds and textures (sometimes in tonal, sometimes atonal, ways) to paint musical portraits of

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Stu Phillips conducts the Los Angeles Philharmonic for the pilot of Battlestar Galactica.

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Stravinsky, Ravel, and Walton). What’s more, Universal managed to secure the services of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which had not previously participated in a television project. The Philharmonic was suddenly hip after playing Star Wars to a sold-​out audience in November 1977, then releasing a Star Wars album in February 1978 that shot to the top of the classical charts. “It was quite a coup to have the Los Angeles Philharmonic as the recording orchestra,” Phillips later reminisced. “This came about because of Ernest Fleischmann’s desire to expand the orchestra’s audience base,” he added, deranged men. The main title of Fatal Vision, for example, “starts off with a hurdy-​gurdy kind of theme at the beginning,” Mellé observed, “then this vast swooping of colors, like a watercolor painting somebody doused with water, everything melting one into the other.” Director David Greene, who appreciated his maverick style and collaborated with him on both World War III and Fatal Vision, called him “the Orson Welles of film composition.” “He’s the only true genius I’ve ever known,” added director Jerrold Freedman (The Psychiatrist, A Cold Night’s Death). “He had an amazingly restless mind. Certainly in terms of electronic music he was way ahead of his time.” Columbo creator William Link called him “the most brilliant man I ever knew. Gil was an artist, a lone wolf who never ran with the rest of the pack.”

Mellé said in 1992: “What I tried to do, with Andromeda and Night Gallery and the other pictures, was to use the synthesizers in a different way than the orchestra. I never tried to imitate the orchestra with electronics. It was an addendum to music, not a replacement for it. That was always my philosophy. So when I dreamed of a day 20 years later when electronic music would catch on, and I knew it would, I really saw a world of new music. I never dreamed I’d be seeing guys using string patches and drum machines and electronic trumpets. I really didn’t. I thought they would see the potential. Instead, they haven’t. The real potential of electronic music has not been even slightly tapped.”

referring to the symphony’s executive director. “It was a very timely and lucky break for all of us.” Phillips conducted the Philharmonic over five days in June 1978, ironically on the recording stage at 20th Century-​Fox—​which was then suing Universal, charging that Galactica was essentially a ripoff of Star Wars, which Fox had distributed. Phillips recalled outspoken Fox music director Lionel Newman as saying he “didn’t give a rat’s ass” about Fox’s legal woes if he could rent the stage for five full days. The 90 players of the L.A. Phil were certainly a TV-​music luxury, although Phillips recalled that week as “a day-​to-​day nightmare, when almost every cue I had written needed to be corrected on the stage to accommodate the constant changes to the film that Glen was making.” Phillips was rewarded with a 1978 Grammy nomination for the Galactica soundtrack album (all drawn from the pilot, which was later released as a theatrical film). Phillips rose to the occasion with the pilot score, and with subsequent episodes (using from 37 to 47 musicians from the standard pool of studio players). The two-​parters, especially, with their grand-​scale storylines and bigger budgets, were notable: choral incantations for the ancient civilization in “Lost Planet of the Gods”; chilly soundscapes for “Gun on Ice Planet Zero”; ethereal strings, harp, and choir for the mysterious light beings of “War of the Gods.” Although Phillips wrote new material for nearly every episode, the last-​minute chaos of post-​production forced him to recycle earlier material to ease the pressure caused by constant re-​cutting. “So the 28 minutes [the average amount of music] basically became a jigsaw puzzle,” he said, combining new material with already familiar themes for the fighter-​ship launches, battles, and love scenes. As a result, the Philharmonic (having played much of this during those initial sessions) was credited every week. Phillips also launched Buck Rogers, which cast Gil Gerard as the comic-​ strip hero and Erin Gray as his romantic interest Wilma. Larson contributed a song, “Suspension,” as the series theme. Buck Rogers later won a music Emmy, for Bruce Broughton’s charming score for the 1981 episode “The Satyr.” The Six Million Dollar Man (1974–​1978, ABC)—​about an astronaut (Lee Majors) whose jet crashes, requiring him to be “rebuilt” as a half-​man, half-​machine cyborg—​began life as a 1973 TV-​movie with an orchestral score by Gil Mellé. Producer Glen A. Larson brought in Phillips to compose the score for the first of two subsequent 90-​minute TV-​movies, along with arranging Dusty Springfield’s vocal of Larson’s title song (“He’s the man /​catch him if you can, beat him if you can, love him if you can . . .”) which disappeared after the two films. The weekly series sported a theme and an estimated 50 episode scores by Oliver Nelson, the 1960s jazz great who, with Stanley Wilson’s help,

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became a top TV composer and a fixture at Universal. His driving Six Million Dollar Man theme, with its fast-​moving string figures and propulsive brass, became a favorite of 1970s action TV watchers. Tragically, he died of a heart attack at the age of 43. A confirmed workaholic who always orchestrated every note of his scores, he finished recording a Six Million Dollar Man score in late October 1975 and died a few hours later. More than one colleague said he “worked himself to death.” Its spinoff, The Bionic Woman (1976–​1978, ABC, NBC) with Lindsay Wagner as a female cyborg, featured an easygoing strings-​and-​piano theme by Jerry Fielding and more than two dozen scores by Joe Harnell (whose “Jaime’s Theme” became the end-​credits music starting with the second season). Televised fantasy took a step up with the introduction of two high-​profile anthology series a few seasons later: Amazing Stories (1985–​1987, NBC) and a revival of The Twilight Zone (1985–​1987, CBS). Steven Spielberg served as executive producer of the big-​budget Amazing Stories, and so naturally recruited his longtime feature-​film composer John Williams to supply the theme and score those episodes that Spielberg himself planned to direct. Williams’s theme, a bravura orchestral fanfare, accompanied a cleverly designed main title that, in one minute, chronicled the history of American storytelling: from a Native American campfire to a family gathered around the TV. In between came computer-​animated ancient scrolls, flying books, a ghost, a sword-​wielding knight, and a spacecraft rocketing past the earth. Williams also scored the premiere, the half-​hour “Ghost Train” (about an old man’s belief that he can atone for a disastrous childhood mistake by catching, 75 years later, a train that no longer exists), and the hour-​long “The Mission” (a wartime drama, starring Kevin Costner, about a soldier trapped inside the gun turret of a crippled fighter plane). In addition to Williams, the generous musical budget of Amazing Stories brought many feature film composers back to the medium, including Jerry Goldsmith, Georges Delerue, James Horner, Michael Kamen, Bruce Broughton, and Johnny Mandel. The Twilight Zone was something else altogether. Producer Philip DeGuere hired The Grateful Dead—​the popular rock group with no experience in scoring film—​to compose a theme and score early episodes. (Asked about his choice at a pre-​ debut press conference, DeGuere replied: “I wanted to go for the leading experts in the Twilight Zone.”) Robert Drasnin, the veteran composer who was then CBS West Coast music director, recalled: “Just to get the first episode on the air was such a scene. They spent 52 hours in the studio to try to get the one-​minute theme. The production costs were enormous. We were always trying to salvage something of theirs.” The new Twilight Zone main title was visually interesting but quite grim. The camera gradually receded from a bleak landscape through the

window of an empty room, which dissolved into a revolving snow-​globe containing images of a fetus, a spider, a doll, and a unicorn. A nuclear explosion gave way to a ghostly image of Rod Serling; the window frame mutated first into a skull and crossbones, then into the show title. The Dead’s theme was a series of discordant, mostly percussive, sounds whose only recognizable element was a quotation from the original Marius Constant theme at the instant Serling’s image appeared. The music disappeared into a heartbeat by the close of the main title. In addition to the theme, the group attempted to score the first hour (which consisted of three stories) at their studios near San Francisco. “We ended up dropping music completely from one of them,” Drasnin said. “It just wouldn’t work and couldn’t be fashioned into anything, so we just relied on sound effects. For the others, we kept some of the cues, as many as we could, but we were there [in dubbing] all night trying to salvage that thing.” After two or three disastrous episodes, Drasnin flew to San Francisco to work with them. Merl Saunders, a Bay Area keyboard player who had been friends with the members of the Dead for many years, improvised some scores with the group and handled the music for several others on his own. “By the fourth or fifth show,” Drasnin said, CBS management convinced DeGuere that the Dead’s attempts to score the new Twilight Zone had been expensive failures and that experienced composers were necessary. Drummer Mickey Hart, however, continued to do sound design for the series, including musical effects, and Saunders contributed occasional scores. The roster of Twilight Zone composers wasn’t the who’s-​ who of Amazing Stories, but several veterans did sign on. Apart from Drasnin and Fred Steiner, both of whom worked on the original Zone, the composers included Morton Stevens, Dennis McCarthy, Basil Poledouris, Craig Safan, and Christopher Young. Poledouris was also responsible for arranging the Gounod melody for the updated version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985–​1986, NBC); he and Safan scored the two-​hour pilot. Beauty and the Beast (1987–​1990, CBS) was a landmark of the genre. Cinematically conceived, intelligently written, and classically scored, this modern-​day version of the fairy tale won fans among many critics, and immediately attracted a cult following. The premise centered on Vincent (Ron Perlman), a gentle, leonine figure who dwelled in a labyrinth beneath the streets of Manhattan, and Catherine (Linda Hamilton), an attorney whose life he had saved and with whom he fell in love. Creator Ron Koslow gave Lee Holdridge (b. 1944) just five days to score the pilot. Holdridge, born in Haiti and raised in Costa Rica, moved to the United States in 1959 and became arranger/​conductor for pop singer Neil Diamond in 1969 (which led to their collaboration on the film and album for Jonathan Livingston Seagull in 1973). His symphonic approach and melodic gifts had distinguished big-​ screen fantasies,

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Lee Holdridge winning the Emmy for Beauty and the Beast.

including The Beastmaster (1982) and Splash (1984), and he consciously emulated the Erich Wolfgang Korngold style of swashbuckling music with a rousing score for the short-​lived series Wizards and Warriors (1983, CBS). Holdridge was impressed by Koslow’s vision of the series as “a fairy tale set in modern-​day New York” but was initially stumped for an approach. Watching the scene in which Catherine is nursed back to health and is about to leave Vincent’s underground world, Holdridge was struck by the duality of the premise: “The world below is safe, the world above is dangerous. . . . Suddenly a concept hit me: if the music is very diatonic, very melodic, very pure when they’re alone together, and then it’s more discordant, more dissonant, more polytonal when they’re out in the real world. . . .” Holdridge’s stunningly beautiful music set the tone for the wildly romantic series. He scored the first six episodes, and then turned the series over to composer Don Davis, who maintained the high orchestral standard on a weekly basis. Together, their music received five Emmy

nominations, winning three (for Holdridge’s 1987 pilot, for the song “The First Time I Loved Forever” that he later wrote with Melanie, and for Davis’s 1990 “A Time to Heal”). An album, “Of Love and Hope,” featuring Perlman reading poetry to excerpts from their scores, became a bestseller in 1989. Jim Henson, whose Muppets had become famous on PBS’s Sesame Street and later in the internationally successful variety romp The Muppet Show (1976–​1981, syndicated) and Fraggle Rock (1983–​1987, HBO), created a small-​screen masterpiece in The Storyteller (1987–​1989, NBC). Henson’s daughter Lisa, who studied folklore and mythology in college, inspired the series, which was written by Anthony Minghella years before he became an Oscar-​winning director (The English Patient, 1997). “I think they’re the best television shows ever made,” Henson told the Washington Post as the series debuted, and he wasn’t far from wrong. John Hurt played “the storyteller,” an old man sitting by the fireplace in a medieval hall with his dog (a sophisticated puppet operated by Jim’s son Brian Henson). Nine were made, all based on obscure European folk and fairy tales, using both actors and puppets, with innovative visual style. Produced in London, its evocative small-​ensemble scores were by the then up-​and-​ coming English composer Rachel Portman (b. 1960), who would go on to win an Oscar for Emma (1996) and an Emmy for Bessie (2015). As she later recalled: “[Jim] was the most delightful man, charming and funny and gentle. I was young, and he gave me a real break; I was very grateful to him. That was a pivotal moment in my twenties, after which I never stopped working.” Portman conveyed some of the strange settings and unusual characters with wooden flutes (“The Luck Child”), celesta (“A Story Short”), ondes Martenot (“Fearnot”), and soprano saxophone (“Hans My Hedgehog”). The offbeat sound of a bass clarinet figured in both main and end titles. Portman recalled Henson attempting to whistle “like rubies,” for “The Soldier and Death” episode, without success. “But he was very musical,” Portman noted, “and he was delighted with everything I wrote.” Despite massive critical praise and an Emmy win as outstanding children’s program, The Storyteller was a ratings disappointment and NBC didn’t even air all nine. Portman returned to score the final four episodes, The Storyteller: Greek Myths (1997, HBO), with Michael Gambon narrating the stories of Theseus, Perseus, Orpheus, and Daedalus. For the cult favorite Twin Peaks (1990–​1991, ABC), filmmaker David Lynch turned to his regular composer Angelo Badalamenti (b. 1937). Badalamenti, who composed the music for several Lynch films including Blue Velvet (1986) and Mulholland Drive (2001), created a moody, ominous ambiance for Lynch’s endlessly quirky, often maddening series about deception and murder in a small town in the Pacific Northwest. The two-​hour

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Angelo Badalamenti.

pilot introduced the characters: an FBI agent (Kyle MacLachlan) who arrived to investigate the brutal murder of teenage Laura Palmer, the local sheriff (Michael Ontkean), the diner owner (Peggy Lipton), the wealthy hotelier (Richard Beymer), his daughter Audrey (Sherilyn Fenn), the mysterious sawmill owner (Joan Chen), and her sworn enemy (Piper Laurie). Badalamenti composed and performed the score for the pilot, and all of the episodes, at his studio in New York, with just seven musicians (including himself on synthesizers and piano): another synth player, electric guitars, clarinets, tenor saxophone, flutes, and percussion. His approach “came out of all the visuals, the characters and the mood of Twin Peaks that feels very, very natural,” the composer explained at the time. Lynch, in asking Badalamenti for a love theme, described in detail what he wanted in terms of musical moods, according to the composer: “He said, ‘Well, we need some very slow, dark thematic theme that could tie scenes together and, from this minor feeling, go into a ‘climb,’ a very beautiful climb, then build to a climax. Let that climax just tear your heart out, just make it so beautiful and yet minimal. Let it peak, then fall down very, very slowly and make that fall go right back into that dark intro.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay.’ ” As realized, the love theme—​which became the heart of the series score—​was “kind of mysterious,” Badalamenti explained. “It’s dark. It covers a lot of ground for Twin Peaks, various types of mystery, certain kinds of darkness, shots of the fan in the hall, those kinds of things.”

Primarily played on keyboards, it became a frequently used device signaling unsavory activities in the town. First heard with the discovery of the girl’s body, its extended version brightened considerably with ascending piano notes, transitioning from minor to major, and, in doing so, becoming a motif associated with Laura Palmer, particularly for flashbacks. Badalamanti’s main-​title theme, underscoring bucolic images of life in Twin Peaks (Douglas firs, waterfalls, lumber mills), was a soft and dreamy tune primarily heard on synthesizers and electric guitar; with lyrics by David Lynch, it became a song called “Falling” (one of two hypnotic tunes performed in the pilot by Lynch-​Badalamenti discovery Julee Cruise at the local hangout, the Roadhouse). Noted Badalamenti: “The main title theme has an intentional sixties sound; it’s not really the sound of the sixties but some of the chord structure is. Julee Cruise in the club has a today kind of sixties sound. But it’s not like any recording of sixties music that I’ve ever known.” Badalamenti wrote leitmotifs for several characters. Finger-​snapping and brushes on snare drums were hallmarks of his sensuous theme for Audrey (who, in one of the series’ more infamous moments, tied a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue), who would often be seen dancing by herself to some fifties-​ish cool jazz tune in the diner. “She’s in her own world,” Badalamenti observed, “and the music seems to work very well when she’s in her little naughty mood.” The pilot set the “retro” tone and launched so many of the themes that a number of cues were simply tracked into subsequent episodes, although Badalamenti continued to write new music, and new arrangements of old cues, throughout the series’ run. He received three Emmy nominations (for series scoring, original song, and main title theme) and a Grammy (Best Pop Instrumental Performance) for his Twin Peaks music, then reprised many of the themes in his music for the big-​screen prequel Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) and in the long-​in-​gestation sequel on Showtime 25 years later. The X-​Files (1993–​ 2002, Fox) demanded an altogether different approach: executed entirely with state-​of-​the-​art synthesizers and sampling devices but without the clichés brought on by too many electronic scores in the wake of Miami Vice and its many clones. Executive producer Chris Carter, who created the series about FBI agents investigating unexplained phenomena, chose Mark Snow (b. 1946) as his composer. Snow was a Brooklyn-​born, Juilliard-​trained oboist and drummer who, with fellow Juilliard student Michael Kamen, was a founding member of the New York Rock ’n’ Roll Ensemble during the late 1960s. Snow came to Los Angeles in the early 1970s and found steady work in television, including writing the theme and weekly scores for the popular, lighthearted Robert Wagner–​Stefanie Powers mystery Hart to Hart (1979–​1984, ABC). His

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Mark Snow at the time of The X-​Files.

reputation grew with his Emmy-​nominated TV movie scores, including Something About Amelia and Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. Carter gave Snow specific directives about the music for the X-​Files pilot: “He said he hated melody, but he loved atmospheric and minimal,” the composer recalled. Steve Reich and Philip Glass were among the modern composers cited as possible models for the score. Snow created the theme entirely apart from the visuals that came to accompany it: images of flying saucers, distorted faces, disconnected phrases like “government denies knowledge,” the FBI identification tags of lead characters Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), and finally a human eye that becomes a rapidly moving nighttime sky as the backdrop for the series’ catch line “the truth is out there.” After several false starts, Snow came up with an echoing rhythmic figure—​ “dark, atmospheric, moody,” in the words of the composer—​and, later, “this light, eerie, whistling over it.” Both elements were accidental discoveries: his synthesizer’s delay-​echo switch just happened to be turned on, and the whistling sound was a matter of turning a knob on one of his synthesizer units, completely altering the sound while playing the same musical notes. Snow’s music quickly became a crucial factor in setting the creepy, often unsettling mood of the series. Some weeks, Snow, at the Synclavier in his Santa Monica studio, wrote and performed as much as 40 minutes of music—​ including “a lot of quiet, sustaining, atmospheric stuff ”—​to underscore

everything from low-​key dialogue scenes to bizarre moments involving extraterrestrial visitors. Ultimately he received six Emmy nominations for his X-​Files work (one for the theme, five more for weekly scores). Explaining his impossible schedule, Snow said, “it’s extremely spontaneous, very un-​thought-​out. It has a rhythm of its own. It’s like an abstract painter starting with a dot, expanding on it, and not knowing where it’s going to end up. Chris didn’t want music to tell a story or be too programmatic, but rather to just be supportive. “There are basically two types of shows: the standalone shows that deal with the monsters and the paranormal weirdness, and the big mythology cover-​up government-​conspiracy shows. The quirky ones are the ones that I can really stretch out with and create weird, fun, crazy stuff; the mythology shows have always been fairly straightforward with a sound-​ design approach, traditional twentieth-​century orchestral language.” The score evolved over nine seasons, two feature films (1998, 2008) and a two-​season revival (2016–​2018), with Snow scoring them all—​more than 200 episodes. “Music for the first year or two was very synthesizer sustains, ambient, not melodic, not harmonized,” he recalled. “That got boring for me, so I slowly but surely slipped into a more musical approach in combination with the minimal sound design. There have been emotional episodes where I play simple but very melodic, and I hope poignant, emotional pieces that are very different from the inception of the show.” Snow also scored the Carter-​created Millennium (1996–​1999, Fox) with Lance Henriksen as a retired FBI agent with psychic abilities, its Celtic-​flavored theme featuring a violin solo. “This overall sense of doom and darkness and chaos, with hope and light at the end of the tunnel” was the direction he was given. Snow went on to score more than 100 episodes of Ghost Whisperer (2005–​2010, CBS), with Jennifer Love Hewitt as a woman who can communicate with the dead. Twice Emmy-​nominated for its scores, Snow appreciated the opportunity to write “melodic music, sound-​design music, tension music, the full gamut, from warm and human moments to World War III gangbusters.” The massive success of the Star Trek franchise demonstrated an audience thirst for sci-​fi in many different forms. NBC jumped in with a big-​budget, Steven Spielberg–​produced saga with Roy Scheider as commander of a future submarine, seaQuest DSV (1993–​1996). Composer John Debney recalled it as “Star Trek underwater. Steven wanted a John Williams–​ish sound, and that’s what I strove to give him,” with 40-​to 50-​piece orchestras every week. Debney scored nearly the entire first season and won a 1994 Emmy for his noble symphonic theme. Don Davis won for a second-​season episode, “Daggers,” and Russ Landau was nominated for the third-​season opener, which featured his new theme for the retitled seaQuest 2032. For creator J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 (1994–​1998, syndicated, TNT), German composer Christopher Franke (b. 1953), a longtime

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member of the techno-​pop group Tangerine Dream, merged synthesized sounds with a remotely recorded Berlin orchestra and occasional vocals. He once described his approach as being “as experiment-​friendly as possible without leaving the happy marriage between the orchestral and electronic sounds” for the space opera set on a twenty-​third-​century space station peopled by various races from across the galaxy. By 1995, composer Shirley Walker had proven herself as a top dramatic composer, notably for the comic-​book shows The Flash and Batman: The Animated Series and the action series Viper. So she became a welcome collaborator with producers Glen Morgan and James Wong on Space: Above and Beyond (1995–​1996, Fox), a twenty-​first-​century story about young Marines being thrown into an interstellar war with a malevolent alien species. Her memorable military motifs, powerful brass writing, and undeniable ability to musically convey the horror and tragedy of war made her the first choice for Morgan and Wong in all their future projects (including the Final Destination film series and the paranormal series The Others, 2000, NBC). Walker earned her only prime-​time Emmy nomination for an episode of this series, “The River of Stars.” The high-​ rated syndicated series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys (1994–​1999) and Xena: Warrior Princess (1995–​2001), starring Kevin Sorbo and Lucy Lawless, respectively, were loosely based on ancient Greek myths but took a more modern storytelling approach. Detroit-​born, classical-​and jazz-​trained Joseph LoDuca (b. 1958) first worked with producers Rob Tapert and Sam Raimi on the cult movie The Evil Dead (1981); ultimately he scored more than 250 episodes of the two series, often using Salt Lake City orchestras and members of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir for a huge sound. “The music is as good-​natured as the show,” LoDuca said of Hercules, “we get in on the fun.” As for Xena, he managed to combine “primitive drumming, eastern European rhythms and a Bulgarian women’s chorus” and add such further ethnic touches as the kaval (a shepherd’s flute) and gaida (Balkan bagpipes). “The tone of Xena tends to be more exotic, darker because of her past and her stone-​faced posture,” LoDuca said. “There’s a lot less major-​key writing in Xena than there is in Hercules.” Seven of LoDuca’s 11 Emmy nominations were for Xena, and he won twice: for the 1999 Xena episode “Fallen Angel” and for a later Raimi-​ Tapert fantasy series, Legend of the Seeker (2008–​2010, syndicated). Network television expanded in the 1990s, the new outlets focusing on younger demographics than the traditional “big three” of NBC, CBS, and ABC. An example of this thinking was Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–​2003, WB, UPN), producer Joss Whedon’s reimagining of the movie he scripted by that title in 1992—​“high school as a horror movie,” as he once put it. Sarah Michelle Geller played the title character, a student at Sunnydale High who happens to be the latest in a long line of women destined to battle evil forces; her friends Willow and Xander (Alyson Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon) and

mentor Giles (Anthony Stewart Head) were part of her inner circle and a tortured vampire named Angel (David Boreanaz) was her love interest. Rock group Nerf Herder supplied the main-​title theme (at the suggestion of Hannigan), and several composers contributed to the Buffy soundtrack over its seven seasons. Canadian-​born Christophe Beck (b. 1972), a graduate of both Yale University and the University of Southern California’s prestigious film scoring program, was widely considered the most significant contributor to the sound of the series. He scored nearly 60 episodes during the second, third, and fourth seasons, returning later to score the series’ 100th episode in the fifth season and the well-​regarded musical episode “Once More, With Feeling” in the sixth. Beck recalled scoring Buffy and the legal drama The Practice (1997–​2004, ABC) simultaneously, “two of the best gigs on TV. I had Buffy, which was a challenge but also really rewarding creatively, and The Practice, which was still pretty rewarding but much easier . . . very little music and, unlike Buffy, extremely simple.” He found “the right voice for the show” midway through the second season and began writing recurring themes. Beck’s classic-​horror approach to “Becoming” (the second-​season finale, filled with choral sounds and mournful solo violin) won the 1998 Emmy for series scoring. Beck’s season-​finale scores invariably elevated the series’ most dramatic moments, as in the third-​season “Graduation Day,” fourth-​season “Restless,” and fifth-​season “The Gift,” in which Buffy sacrifices her life (“she saved the world, a lot,” read her epitaph), all of them written and directed by Whedon. Beck earned a second Emmy nomination for his music direction of the 2001 Buffy musical (along with guitarist Jesse Tobias), for which Whedon penned all the amusing songs and the cast performed their own vocals; the cast album broke into Billboard’s top 50). One of the most talked-​about network shows of the early twenty-​first century was the mystery-​drama-​fantasy Lost (2004–​2010, ABC), about the strange and occasionally supernatural happenings on a South Pacific island where a commercial jet has crashed, leaving dozens of survivors. The backstories of surgeon Jack (Matthew Fox), fugitive Kate (Evangeline Lilly), con man Sawyer (Josh Holloway), lottery winner Hurley (Jorge Garcia), married couple Jin and Sun (Daniel Dae Kim, Yunjin Kim), the stoic Locke (Terry O’Quinn), drug addict Charlie (Dominic Monaghan), and others gradually unfolded as they clashed with each other and joined together to confront the mysteries and dangers of the island. The serialized, ever more complicated saga won 11 Emmys including Outstanding Drama Series in its first season, as well as for Michael Giacchino’s score for the pilot. New Jersey-​born Giacchino (b. 1967) made movies as a boy, attended New York’s School of Visual Arts, and studied music at Juilliard, then later at UCLA, while pursuing work in the video-​game field. He began scoring games in the mid-​1990s and launched his TV career in 2001 with J. J. Abrams’s spy series Alias.

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Michael Giacchino at a recording session for Lost.

As he had on Alias, Abrams himself composed an unsettling 15-​second electronic intro for the series. For the weekly scores, Giacchino fought for an orchestra—​by this time a rarity in series television—​and designed an ensemble of 34 (eventually growing to 42 by the final season): strings, trombones, piano, guitar, harp, and percussion. “It sounded nothing like jungle music,” he explained. “Everything was already there for you to see in the most beautiful detail, and I wasn’t going to echo that. The goal was to make the audience uncomfortable, trying to create textures and sounds that you wouldn’t normally hear.” Abrams and fellow producers Carlton Cuse and Damon Lindelof came to rely on the composer to supply the requisite emotion—​so much so that they started writing “the Giacchino” into scripts, a hint as to their goal for the music in various scenes (“the Giacchino crescendoes,” “haunting Giacchino cue plays,” etc.). Ironically, Giacchino never read the scripts; he preferred to experience the show like a viewer. “For me, it’s a way of being reactive, as the audience is supposed to be. Scene by scene, I can be shocked or surprised or sad. Whatever I’m feeling, that’s what I put down. I would hate to subconsciously give away the answers.” He eventually wrote an estimated 40 major themes and 150 secondary motifs over the 121 episodes, approximately 52 hours of music in all. “I treat it like an opera,” Giacchino said. “Every character has a theme, some have two or three. There are themes for the island, the Smoke Monster, the hatch . . . it’s fun to go back to those.” An eerie, act-​ending trombone glissando became a trademark of the show. In addition to seven soundtrack albums, Giacchino promoted the music via live concerts (again, a rarity for television music) in Hawaii

in 2007 and in Los Angeles in 2010 and 2016. Pieces of the wreckage of FANTASY AND Oceanic 815, the crashed plane, actually became percussion instruments SCIENCE FICTION in the show and in those concerts. The concerts included many fan-​ 155 favorite moments: the dissonance and terror of “Smoke Monster,” the accelerating drama of “Locke’d Out Again,” the rich string sonorities of “The Constant,” the driving drums of “Getting Ethan,” the haunting elegy “Life and Death,” and the powerful first-​season raft sendoff, “Parting Words.” The second half included the dark and weird signature for “The Others,” the optimistic piano and strings of “LAX,” the island rhythms of “Devotion,” the surging sounds of “Oceans Apart,” the mournful cello solo of “Oceanic 6,” and the bold and climactic “Bobbing for Freighters.” Giacchino’s feature-​film career took off during this period, with huge hits in the Pixar films The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and Up (winning him an Oscar), as well as Abrams’s Mission: Impossible III and Star Trek film franchise. Of Lost, Giacchino said, “I love the show. Years from now, I know I’ll point back to it and think, that was something special and I’m glad I got to do it.” Minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937)—​creator of such operas as Einstein on the Beach and Oscar-​nominated film scores including The Hours—​composed his first television theme for Night Stalker (2005–​2006, ABC), a reboot of the 1970s series produced by former X-​Files producer Frank Spotnitz. “I just thought it was very interesting,” Glass said of the commission. “How do you write a 30-​second piece? Everything is extremely compressed.” The opening title sequence was just 20 seconds; Glass wrote a slightly longer version for the end credits. Composed for two pianos, strings, and harp, it contained the composer’s signature arpeggios and underscored visuals of the reflected glass of Los Angeles buildings as occult-​investigating newspaper reporter Carl Kolchak (Stuart Townsend) drove through the night. “We wanted the main title to be personal, lonely, about isolation,” said Spotnitz. “In the beginning, we thought maybe there was a scary element, too, but that went by the wayside in favor of the loneliness and the emotional approach that we settled on. It was an exploration for both Philip and us. There is an undeniable beauty and power to his work.” “We talked in terms of intensity,” Glass said. “They also wanted a romantic element, and they wanted it to be very powerful towards the end.” Spotnitz said he and his colleagues initially feared offending the famous concert composer, whom he called “one of the towering figures of twentieth-​century American music.” But the producer finally told him the theme needed “more oomph.” “That was the breakthrough,” Glass said. “I said, ‘Oh, now I get it. I know how to do that.’ ”

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Fantasy and science fiction continued to play an occasional role on the networks, but few shows succeeded; Night Stalker lasted only six weeks. The Bryan Fuller–​created Pushing Daisies (2007–​2009, ABC) managed 22, but spread over two seasons. Daisies, billed as “a forensic fairy tale,” offered a complicated premise involving a pie baker (Lee Pace) who can revive the dead, a private eye (Chi McBride) who uses him to solve crimes, a childhood girlfriend (Anna Friel), and a waitress (Kristin Chenoweth). Composer Jim Dooley (b. 1976) navigated this charming but strange mix of black comedy, fantasy, and crime procedural with delightful and eclectic musical choices. His insistence upon a real string section, not samples, combined with a winning sense of playfulness and whimsy, made the series consistently fun and earned him a 2008 Emmy. Music also played a critical role in Once Upon a Time (2011–​2018, ABC) because of the unusual nature of the series: Snow White and Prince Charming (Ginnifer Goodwin, Josh Dallas) are menaced by an Evil Queen (Lana Parrilla), encountering Rumpelstiltskin, Cinderella, Jiminy Cricket, and other storybook characters in a fairy-​tale past that has eerie parallels in a modern Maine town. A little boy convinces a visiting Boston bail-​bondswoman (Jennifer Morrison) to stay and help him discover the truth; she turns out to be the daughter of Snow White and Prince Charming. Composer Mark Isham (b. 1951) chose an unusual approach for Once Upon a Time: themes for individual characters, intertwined and varied as necessary, a modern-​day version of Peter and the Wolf. “When Rumpelstiltskin starts weaving his devilish magic, it’s just the right thing to do,” Isham said. “You can play that theme under someone who’s been affected by him, or you can hint or foreshadow, but fundamentally, these are themes for characters. It’s a little more ‘on the nose’ than most projects I’ve done.” Because Isham remained in demand for feature films (which offer bigger budgets and more time than doing a TV series), he assembled a team to help. With a half-​hour of music to write for each 45-​minute episode (usually in 10 days or less), he had two assistant composers, orchestrators, and other technical assistants to pitch in as necessary. Still, he remained the primary architect of each score, structuring it and composing whatever new material is required. Isham composed at the computer, like most contemporary composers, creating an artificial music “mockup” (using samples and synthesizers to simulate what the orchestra will later play “live”) as he wrote. This early version of the score, emailed to the producers, gave them an idea of what Isham was planning and afforded time for changes in case of differences of opinion about mood or approach. The style was as varied as the characters and as outlandish as the story: stately, majestic music for kings and queens; ominous moods for the various scheming characters; powerfully dramatic moments for

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John Debney recording The Orville on the Fox scoring stage.

life-​and-​death battles spanning millennia. Isham and his co-​writers, Cindy O’Connor and Michael D. Simon, were Emmy-​nominated for their work on the final season. “These are iconic Disney characters,” Isham said as the series concluded. “They just need that traditional sound, the real warmth and heart that a live orchestra can bring. It’s part of the world you’re trying to create. We kept that quality and approach. It was really fun.” The Orville (2017–​2019, Fox) set new records for orchestra use in television. Producer-​star Seth MacFarlane, an Oscar-​nominated, Emmy-​ winning songwriter and Grammy-​nominated big-​band singer, demanded a 75-​piece orchestra and commissioned veteran Emmy-​winning composers Bruce Broughton, Joel McNeely, and John Debney to score the series—​a mix of Star Trek–​style science-​fiction adventure with the kind of offbeat humor that made MacFarlane’s animated series popular. “Casting a composer is like casting an actor,” MacFarlane said. “This is a swashbuckling kind of pilot; it really wanted a theme that felt a little bit like a march, that harkened back to the golden era of sci-​fi.” MacFarlane insisted that his composers be “serious musicians who can compose, orchestrate, and really handle an orchestra that size.” Theme and pilot composer Broughton described his music as “dramatic sci-​fi. It’s got all the space chords,” he said with a laugh. “It may as well have been a movie.” McNeely echoed that sentiment: “Seth wants each show to be its own individual story, to think of it as scoring completely different movies from week to week.” “Seth wants these to have a big, cinematic feeling,” added Debney. “It’s huge for television, and it’s the biggest gift a composer can get.” The challenge, the composers said, was finding the right tone. “We go

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from funny, comedic scenes to big, adventurous battle scenes,” reported Debney. “The score never references the comedy; Seth wants it always to be played straight,” McNeely said. The numbers climbed as the seasons progressed, from 75 to 85 and finally 93 musicians for McNeely’s second-​season finale. “It’s all due to Seth’s love of orchestral music,” said Debney. “It’s so much fun and so creatively stimulating being able to write this big, rhythmic and muscular music every week.”

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he scene: two good-​looking guys traveling around the country in their 1960 Corvette convertible—​wind in their hair, complete freedom from commitments, meeting interesting people along the way. They needed a little traveling music. With Nelson Riddle at the wheel, they got it in Route 66 (1960–​1964, CBS). Martin Milner and George Maharis were the actors, but they tooled along the highways of America to an infectious theme penned by one of the all-​time great arrangers. Riddle (1921–​1985) had been a trombone player and arranger in the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra, and, after World War II, an arranger for NBC Radio in Hollywood. His hit arrangements of “Mona Lisa” and “Unforgettable” for Nat King Cole led to a long stay at Capitol Records and several significant album projects with Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and Ella Fitzgerald; and he was musical director on weekly TV variety shows headlined by Sinatra, Cole, and Rosemary Clooney in the late 1950s. Riddle’s Route 66 theme—​ piano playing a jazzy little riff while a generous string section rises and falls, followed by building brass, all to a driving beat in the rhythm section—​somehow said “open road” to millions of viewers (and, in 1962, record buyers who turned Riddle’s theme into a hit, reaching Number 30 on the pop charts and earning him Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0006

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Grammy nominations for composing and arranging). Years later, Riddle explained: “I think it gets the intriguing mysticism which often generates at the beginning of a trip. There’s a big question mark, that notion that this is going to be a little different. There’s the persistence of sound, of motion, the romance of seeing them drive down this highway.” The composer’s son, bandleader Christopher Riddle, later recalled his father saying that the Route 66 theme should be played with “urgency, like the accelerator is down.” Producer Herbert B. Leonard, who filmed Route 66 on location around the country, was an admirer who wanted Riddle to write the weekly scores for the series—​but not, initially, the theme. “I chased André Previn for nine thousand years to sell me ‘Like Young,’ ” Leonard recalled. “Like Young,” written by Previn—​then a popular jazz pianist as well as film composer—​and recorded with the lush strings of bandleader David Rose, had been a hit in 1959. Jazz piano, insistent beat, the famous Rose string section: the key elements were there. “I couldn’t get it,” Leonard said. “So I said, ‘Listen, Nelson, I love this piece. I don’t want you to steal it, but I want you to capture the tempo and the style.’ And he came up with the theme, and I fell in love with it.” Riddle not only wrote the theme, he scored the show on a week-​to-​ week basis, with an orchestra that averaged 22 to 24 players. His orchestrator, Gil Grau, consistently received screen credit (a departure from television tradition). But, although the theme had a jazzy feel, much of

Nelson Riddle conducting in the 1960s.

Riddle’s scoring consisted of straight dramatic writing: Buzz and Tod’s encounters on the road brought them into all kinds of situations, enabling Riddle to compose a wide variety of music. The same was true of Leonard’s other series, Naked City (1958–​1959, 1960–​ 1963, ABC). In its first-​ season half-​ hour format, with James Franciscus and John McIntire as New York City police detectives, the series had an original theme by George Duning (which, with Ned Washington lyrics, was turned into a “soundtrack” LP that had little connection to the series). The dramatic underscore consisted entirely of library tracks. When Naked City returned in a one-​hour format, Paul Burke and Horace McMahon became the stars, and Leonard commissioned Billy May (1916–​2004) to write the theme and scores. Like Riddle, May was widely known for his arranging skills, having charted “Cherokee” for Charlie Barnet and a number of songs for Glenn Miller during the war years. His own successful big-​band recordings of the 1950s led to a long stint writing for TV and films in the 1960s and 1970s. “Billy was perfect for New York,” Leonard said, referring to the fact that Naked City was filmed on Manhattan locations. Leonard wanted a “sophisticated” sound, May recalled, one that May realized with a strong statement for orchestra, prominently featuring the brass section. Another Leonard innovation, used in both Route 66 and Naked City, was the elimination of standard main-​title sequences in favor of titles superimposed over the conclusion of the action in the teaser. To accommodate this format, a brief statement of the theme (often integrated into the score) was heard under the titles. Then, a more developed version of the theme was heard over the opening titles in the first act, and, in the case of Naked City, a reprise under the famous concluding narration (“There are eight million stories in the naked city; this has been one of them”). May remembered the band as including six brass and four woodwind players, plus harp and percussion; only rarely was he able to use strings. “We had a theme for the detective’s girlfriend [Libby, played by Nancy Malone], and when we introduced her, I talked them into letting me use six celli. Then every time there would be a show where she was prominent, they had to let me use the celli again. Over the budget, you know.” As on Route 66, the orchestrator (on Naked City, often Bill Loose) received screen credit, along with the composer. Leonard, who disapproved of library tracks, insisted on original scores for most of his Route 66 and Naked City episodes. All told, Riddle and May are believed to have written an estimated 200 scores for these shows. Riddle created a new theme for the final season of Naked City in the fall of 1962. And as he was finishing the four-​year run of Route 66, Riddle began a new series for Four Star about an extended international family of debonair swindlers, The Rogues (1964–​1965, NBC) with a surprising all-​star cast: Englishman David Niven, Frenchman Charles Boyer, and American Gig Young, with Gladys Cooper as the matriarch and frequent planner of

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their various heists and cons. Riddle’s lighthearted, sophisticated musical touch was just right for this critically acclaimed series of capers and cons and resulted in a first-​rate soundtrack album. Pete Rugolo created his own kind of traveling music for two successful series: The Fugitive (1963–​1967, ABC) and Run for Your Life (1965–​1968, NBC). Rugolo’s earlier connection with David Janssen on Richard Diamond, Private Detective, and the fact that they frequently socialized, may have been a factor in his getting the assignment to write The Fugitive. Janssen played Dr. Richard Kimble, “an innocent victim of blind justice,” as William Conrad’s opening narration explained every week over Rugolo’s propulsive theme: “Falsely convicted for the murder of his wife, reprieved by fate when a train wreck freed him en route to the death house. . . .” John Elizalde, then on loan from Daystar to producer Quinn Martin, worked with Rugolo to develop an entire library of cues for the series. The composer did not recall seeing a pilot. Elizalde “gave me an idea of what the character was about, and that in the main title he would be running and that [the music] should be a fast-​moving piece,” Rugolo said. Rugolo composed and orchestrated approximately 90 minutes of music. “I wrote a lot of variations,” he said. “Every possible kind of suspense. I wrote a theme for Gerard [the police lieutenant, played by Barry Morse], a few love themes, some neutral cues, some sad cues. I wrote a lot of chases, because I knew he would be running a lot. Opening themes, act endings based on the theme. Dance pieces. All those things they used over and over.”

Pete Rugolo.

Elizalde took the music to London, where it was recorded with a 55-​ piece orchestra, “mostly members of the London Symphony Orchestra,” Elizalde recalled; Harry Rabinowitz conducted. That library, recorded over a period of four days, formed the basis of the music for all four seasons of the series, because no single episode actually received an original score—​an unusual situation for a prime-​time hit in the sixties. Supplementing the Rugolo library was music from the CBS library, which was licensed by Quinn Martin for tracking purposes. Because many of the cues heard in The Fugitive had originally been written for shows like Gunsmoke and The Twilight Zone, “for all intents and purposes it was a Jerry Goldsmith–​ Benny Herrmann show,” Elizalde said. (Elizalde, in fact, credited Goldsmith’s decision to write Barnaby Jones to the composer’s substantial royalties from The Fugitive—​a series he never actually wrote for. Elizalde ran into Goldsmith one day at lunch, right after the announcement that Kimble was soon to be exonerated in the two-​part series finale. According to Elizalde, Goldsmith quipped, “John, what’s this I hear, they’re going to cancel our show?”) Roy Huggins, who created but did not produce The Fugitive, had been a Stan Kenton fan and was aware that Rugolo’s arrangements were a major factor in Kenton’s sound. He hired Rugolo to score Run for Your Life, a drama about a lawyer (Ben Gazzara) who learned that he had an incurable disease and had, at most, two years to live. Again, Rugolo wrote a bold and brassy signature, filled with movement, and remained with the show through its three seasons on the air. “I loved doing that show,” Rugolo recalled. “I tried to write a fast theme, a moving theme, at the beginning. I would write jazz chases, and there were a lot of shows where Gazzara would go to different countries. He would go to Spain, and I would write a concerto with guitar. I had to write German music, Italian music, Japanese, Chinese. . . .” He was rewarded with an Emmy nomination in the music-​composition category for all three years of the series, and afterward became Huggins’s virtual house composer, working on his subsequent series, including The Outsider with Darren McGavin (1968–​1969, NBC); the lawyers’ segment of The Bold Ones with Burl Ives (1969–​1972, NBC); Cool Million with James Farentino (1972–​1973, NBC); and Toma with Tony Musante (1973–​ 1974, ABC). Both of his Emmys were earned for Huggins projects: the TV movie The Challengers (1970), about race-​car drivers preparing for the Grand Prix, and for a 1971 episode of The Bold Ones. Meanwhile, at the hospital. . . . Two major medical dramas debuted within a span of five days in the fall of 1961: Dr. Kildare (1961–​1966, NBC) and Ben Casey (1961–​1966, ABC). Kildare starred Richard Chamberlain and Raymond Massey in the first television adaptation of the Max Brand characters that inspired a series of MGM films in the 1930s and 1940s; Chamberlain played the young intern James Kildare and Massey his crusty mentor Dr. Gillespie. Casey,

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an original idea by James Moser (who created Medic), starred Vince Edwards as a neurosurgeon and Sam Jaffe as his wise old boss, Dr. Zorba. Musically speaking, the approaches to a similar dramatic framework were markedly different. Producer Norman Felton, who had been impressed by Jerry Goldsmith’s creativity on Studio One in Hollywood, prevailed upon the up-​and-​coming composer to create a romantic musical signature for the handsome Kildare. Goldsmith responded with a memorable fanfare, a series of stately brass chords that announced the setting: the modern and efficient Blair General Hospital. This formed the underpinning of the melody which, in a vocal version sung by Chamberlain himself, became a top-​10 hit in early 1963. (The fanfare, incidentally, was originally written by the composer for a 1958 live Studio One, then reused for an unsold CBS hospital pilot, the 1959 World in White.) Goldsmith scored five of the first seven episodes. Carmen Dragon (1914–​1984), in what is believed to be his only work for television, composed two subsequent 1961 shows. The vast majority—​more than 80 episodes of Dr. Kildare over the five seasons—​was scored by MGM workhorse Harry Sukman. Sukman won his own series the following year with The Eleventh Hour (1962–​1964, NBC), a literate psychiatry drama starring Wendell Corey; Sukman scored nearly 40 of those hours as well. (An earlier Kildare pilot, produced in 1960 with an elaborate piano-​concerto-​style theme by FBI composer Bronislau Kaper, never aired.) For Ben Casey, the producers sought out David Raksin (1912–​2004), the venerable feature film composer whose score for Laura (1944) is one of the most memorable film scores ever written, and whose theme is also one of the most recorded tunes in history. The composer, who began his Hollywood career working with Charles Chaplin on Modem Times (1936), scored a wide variety of films, including Forever Amber (1947), Force of Evil (1948), and The Bad and the Beautiful (1952). Raksin, then in the midst of writing the jazz score for John Cassavetes’s film Too Late Blues (1962), was reluctant to take on a television pilot. A screening of the well-​written hour, however, convinced the composer. There was no main-​title sequence in the film; he was simply told that it would contain scenes of a desperately ill patient being wheeled through hospital corridors into an operating room where his/​her life must be saved. Raksin’s response was “oh, urgency and tension,” and he immediately came up with the rhythmic concept for Ben Casey. Written in 5/​4, Raksin’s brass and percussion propelled the viewer through the main-​title visuals, which were shot entirely from the patient’s point of view (on a rolling gurney, looking up at the lights and the doors being passed through) and concluding with Casey’s arrival and the beginning of his examination. Preceding the main title is one of the 1960s’ most famous opening scenes: Zorba’s solemn recitation of five words—​“man,

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David Raksin.

woman, birth, death, infinity”—​while an anonymous hand draws the universal symbols for each of those five concepts on a blackboard. Raksin’s theme for Breaking Point (1963–​ 1964, ABC), a psychiatry drama starring Paul Richards (and also produced by Bing Crosby Productions, which made Ben Casey), was equally sophisticated, with a melancholy opening played by four alto flutes. Several years later, a similar dueling medical-​series competition began. Marcus Welby, M.D. (1969–​1976, ABC) and Medical Center (1969–​1976, CBS) debuted on consecutive nights. Marcus Welby starred Robert Young as a kindly general practitioner and James Brolin as his young associate, while Medical Center featured Chad Everett as a surgeon and James Daly as his mentor. Leonard Rosenman (1924–​2008) scored all seven years of Marcus Welby. The composer’s roots were in the concert world, having studied with modern classical composers Roger Sessions and Arnold Schoenberg, and noted conductor Serge Koussevitsky. He happened to be James Dean’s piano teacher when Dean was filming East of Eden (1955), which led Elia Kazan to commission Rosenman’s first film score for the Steinbeck classic. He later scored Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause (1955); for The Cobweb (1955), he composed the first 12-​tone score for a commercial Hollywood film. From a dramatic orchestral opening, Rosenman’s first-​season Welby arrangement stressed the old-​fashioned nature of Welby’s practice by using a harmonica to state his theme; subsequent seasons would feature

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Leonard Rosenman.

a more conventional approach with strings, and later, solo trumpet, playing the melody. During the first several seasons of Welby, Rosenman wrote original music for an average of 12 of the 24 episodes. The remainder would be tracked with the earlier music, occasionally leading to unexpectedly comic transpositions of the material: “Sometimes during the operations I had a chance to do some odd music. I remember I wrote a sequence for a brain operation, and a few months later I happened to watch Marcus Welby just to see what they were doing, and now the brain music was on during a mastectomy,” he said. Welby occupied Rosenman’s attention during the late summer and early fall (with an occasional single episode or two to be scored later in the season), enabling him to concentrate on concert-​ music commissions, teaching, and occasional big-​screen film scores such as A Man Called Horse (1970), Barry Lyndon (1975), and Bound for Glory (1976), the latter two earning him Academy Awards. The pilot for Medical Center was scored by Lalo Schifrin (b. 1932), an Argentinean composer who studied with noted modern composer Olivier Messiaen at the Paris Conservatory, later joined trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie’s jazz band, and began scoring for films and television in the early 1960s. By the time he did Medical Center, Schifrin had amassed two Oscar nominations (for Cool Hand Luke and The Fox), four Grammys (including two for the Mission: Impossible soundtrack album, 1967), and

four Emmy nominations (for The Making of the President 1964 and three for Mission: Impossible). Schifrin’s original Medical Center theme was a solemn affair, suggestive of the daily life-​and-​death struggles at the university medical facility; it was heard in the pilot and under the first-​season end titles. (The original main-​title sequence was without music, using only a heartbeat and a sound montage of the voices of anonymous hospital personnel.) For its second season, Medical Center went hip with an upbeat new Schifrin theme that began with electric guitars and rhythm section and segued quickly into an ascending synthesizer tone to aerial shots of an ambulance en route to the facility. “I see an ambulance coming, and I thought, why not do the siren so that the same sound becomes [a musical] pitch? So I did it with a big Moog synthesizer. There was no other instrument that could do that [at the time].” He received two more Grammy nominations for the new Medical Center theme (composition and arrangement) in 1970. Schifrin wrote several Medical Center scores, and, although it was an MGM series, a number of Fox veterans came over to write individual scores, including Alexander Courage, Arthur Morton, and (for the very first episode) Ben Casey composer David Raksin. Schifrin’s use of a Moog in the Medical Center main title was unusual for its era. Not so by the time of St. Elsewhere (1982–​1988, NBC), the theme of which was executed entirely electronically by composer Dave Grusin. Ed Flanders, Norman Lloyd, and William Daniels headed the ensemble cast of this critically acclaimed drama about the professional and personal lives of the personnel at Boston’s St. Eligius Hospital (derisively termed “St. Elsewhere” because of its hospital-​of-​last-​resort reputation). The winner of 13 Emmys over its six seasons, it was the finest hospital drama in the history of the medium. Grusin’s bright, catchy theme for St. Elsewhere played against images of the hospital and its characters, each of which began in black and white and then changed to color. “The approach was just to try and find some alternative way to do what every TV show has to have anyway, but to try to do it electronically,” Grusin explained. “If I had done it acoustically, maybe it wouldn’t have been as unique in some way.” Grusin created the sounds at his GRP record studios in New York City. Discussing the television theme in general, Grusin said, “There needs to be something distinctive about the sound right off the top, because that’s what will get people in from the other room or keep them from turning the dial. It’s a constant challenge. It used to be a lot of energy, a lot of tempo, a lot of contemporary ‘today’ kind of feel and so forth. And that’s not necessarily going to save you if everybody else is doing the same thing.” Grusin scored the pilot, but the remainder of the six years of St. Elsewhere was scored by J. A .C. Redford (b. 1953), who received two Emmy nominations for his consistently thoughtful, sensitive music for

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the series (including the widely praised two-​part early history of the hospital, “Time Heals”). Redford’s innate facility for Americana would come to the fore with such later work as the series The Road Home (1994, CBS) and the Western TV-​movies Independence (1987) and Conagher (1991). The St. Elsewhere crew went on to make another interesting, but short-​ lived, ensemble drama with Tattingers (1988–​1989, NBC), the story of a Manhattan restaurant (owned by a divorced couple played by Stephen Collins and Blythe Danner) with a Gershwinesque theme by Stephen Sondheim’s longtime orchestrator Jonathan Tunick (b. 1938). In September 1994, two high-​profile hospital dramas debuted directly opposite each other on Thursday nights. The Michael Crichton–​created ER (1994–​2009, NBC) sported a striking main-​title sequence of appropriately blues and greens, intruded upon by the flashing reds of ambulance lights. James Newton Howard (b. 1951), the Oscar-​nominated, phenomenally successful film composer (The Fugitive, King Kong, The Hunger Games), followed Schifrin’s lead in incorporating a synthesized siren effect at the top of his 47-​second title theme. “I put it in a real frenetic context,” he explained. “I tried to write something that was chaotic and yet, at the same time, had some heart to it.” The rhythms of Howard’s Emmy-​ nominated ER theme, created solely with synthesizers and electric guitar, mirrored the kinetic feel of the series. The word “emergency” (with the “er” highlighted) accompanied the siren figure, while the guitar and piano (the “heart” of the piece) were heard under rapidly moving images of stars Anthony Edwards, George Clooney, Sherry Stringfield, Noah Wyle, and other cast members. Composer Martin Davich, who scored nearly the entire series, supplied a new, also fast-​moving, electronically created signature for the final three seasons. Both later won Emmys for other, short-​lived, series: Howard, for an evocative theme, featuring voices, for the Andre Braugher medical drama Gideon’s Crossing (2000–​2001, ABC), and Davich, for the Irish-​ Catholic family drama Trinity (1998–​1999, NBC). Chicago Hope (1994–​2000, CBS), from creator David E. Kelley, starred Mandy Patinkin, Adam Arkin, E. G. Marshall, and Hector Elizondo. Composer Mark Isham, also an Oscar-​nominated composer for films (A River Runs Through It) took a slightly more traditional approach, with an optimistic theme for acoustic guitar and trumpet with strings and pulsing electronics. “A year later, they asked for something electronic, ‘contemporary and edgy,’ those famous words,” Isham recalled, so he wrote a new theme for piano, drums, synths, and electric guitar. And in the only instance in TV Academy history of the same composer writing two different themes for the same series, both were Emmy-​ nominated (in 1995 and 1996). And, like his fellow composers on ER, it was another, short-​lived, drama that won him his Emmy: EZ Streets (1997–​1998, CBS), the critically acclaimed but low-​rated Paul Haggis

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  Fred Steiner.

crime drama about Irish gangsters and cops starring Ken Olin, Joe Pantoliano, and Jason Gedrick. Isham’s colorful, atmospheric theme incorporated Irish flutes, pennywhistle, Bodhran drums, and trumpet. Courtroom dramas have been a staple of television entertainment almost from the beginning. Perry Mason (1957–​1966, CBS) became television’s definitive lawyer show, adapting Erle Stanley Gardner’s characters for the small screen in a way that captured the fancy of viewers for nine mostly high-​rated seasons. Raymond Burr played the shrewd defense attorney; Barbara Hale was his secretary Della Street, William Hopper his investigator Paul Drake, William Talman was prosecutor Hamilton Burger, and Ray Collins was police lieutenant Tragg. As the camera moves slowly through a courtroom, deserted except for Mason seated at the defense table studying some brief, the music begins with a decisive bit of orchestral drama. Pause: Mason looks up from his papers and smiles. The theme begins with swinging trombones and insistent piano notes, while muted brass and strings play the familiar melody as the credits appear. It sounds simple; it was anything but. Fred Steiner, who worked regularly at CBS throughout this period, wrote the Perry Mason theme. Steiner and CBS music director Lud Gluskin “had this idea that the music for Perry Mason should be a combination of his two sides: the suave, well-​dressed man about town, so that you had a kind of sophisticated sound. And then you have him dealing with criminals and crime, and historically, you associate jazz with the lower, seamy sides of life.

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“At that point, R & B [rhythm and blues] was the big thing, and the R & B rhythm, without associating it with crime, just seemed like what I was looking for. The idea became to write something that would have a contemporary beat for that side of him, and yet have this symphonic sound to represent him as the kind of guy who goes to the opera. So that was the idea, and the theme was very difficult to write. It sounds easy now, but I must have gone through four or five different versions,” Steiner said. Following standard practice in those days at CBS, the theme was recorded outside the United States (initially, in Mexico, Steiner recalled). The composer also wrote a library of theme variations and mood music for use in the series. Individual shows were tracked with this, and other music from the CBS library. Original scores were only rarely commissioned; Jerry Goldsmith wrote two in 1959 and Richard Shores composed several during the final season. Steiner wasn’t given screen credit until late in the series’ run. The Defenders (1961–​1965, CBS) also dealt with the law, but it took a completely different approach. E. G. Marshall and Robert Reed played father-​and-​son defense attorneys in this hour drama filmed on location in New York City. Reginald Rose, who won an Emmy for writing “Twelve Angry Men” for Studio One in 1954, created The Defenders; neither he nor executive producer Herbert Brodkin (Playhouse 90) shied away from potentially controversial subjects. For The Defenders, Leonard Rosenman created one of the great fanfares in television history. To scenes of the U.S. courthouse complex in Manhattan’s Foley Square, a solo trumpet set the tone, followed by a sweeping orchestral theme, and, once again, that solo trumpet. Before he sat down to write the theme, Rosenman was asked to write music that would “express the law.” Rosenman scoffed at the notion: “That’s a literary idea, it’s not a musical idea,” the composer pointed out. “Music can’t describe that. If music is associated with, let’s say, a pictorial thing which describes a courthouse, then from then on when you hear it, you will think of the law.” The association of music and image worked: Rosenman’s theme, linked in viewers’ minds with the courthouse and the faces of integrity-​conscious Marshall and Reed on those steps, came to suggest the dignity of the American legal system. Another filmed-​ in-​ New York series that tackled serious social issues was East Side/​West Side (1963–​1964, CBS), which starred George C. Scott as a dedicated social worker, Elizabeth Wilson as his supervisor, and Cicely Tyson as the office secretary. Too controversial for network executives, too downbeat for many viewers, East Side/​West Side—​which attempted substantive stories about everything from drug addiction to child abuse—​was canceled after a single season. Executive producer David Susskind’s music supervisor Bob Israel recommended Kenyon Hopkins (1932–​1983) to score the series. “What we wanted was a really gritty, angular sound,” Israel recalled, the feeling

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  Kenyon Hopkins.

that Hopkins had created in his score for the Paul Newman pool-​hall drama The Hustler (1961). Hopkins had also scored Baby Doll (1956) and The Fugitive Kind (1959), and had written a jazz album for producer Creed Taylor titled The Sound of New York (1959). That “sound” was what the series demanded. Hopkins’s arresting main-​and end-​title music accompanied rapidly moving images of subway trains seen from several different perspectives: from the platforms, watching them pass by at high speeds; from the front, looking ahead into the tunnels; and from the final car, watching the lights recede into darkness. Jazz was the predominant form in the series, and Hopkins received both an Emmy nomination and a Grammy nomination for his work on East Side/​West Side. In a similar vein, although scored for smaller jazz combinations, was his work for The Reporter (1964, CBS), a short-​lived series created by playwright Jerome Weidman, with Harry Guardino as a New York City newspaper columnist. Two decades later, social issues would be examined in a legal context on a regular basis in L.A. Law (1986–​1994, NBC), one of producer Steven Bochco’s ensemble dramas. It originally featured actors Harry Hamlin, Susan Dey, Richard Dysart, and Corbin Bernsen in a weekly series of plots and subplots about a high-​powered Los Angeles law firm, its personnel, and its always fascinating caseload. As he had on Hill Street Blues, Bochco turned to composer Mike Post for music. But, with plenty of lead time before L.A. Law was to go on the air, Bochco made Post work

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overtime to come up with a theme. The one that finally ended up in the series was the composer’s fifth attempt. After four “respectful” rejections, Post said, he called Bochco and pilot director Gregory Hoblit (who had designed the main-​title visuals, from the trunk closing to the Century City skyscrapers) into his Burbank studio and, piece by piece, with input from Bochco and Hoblit, assembled the final L.A. Law main title. “Let’s do this logically,” Post recalled saying. “It’s the law: it is grand, powerful, majestic, fair. French horns, right? Okay. Now, it’s California, so it’s got to have some sass to it, and I can’t do the Beach Boys because it shouldn’t be a shuffle. ‘Born in the USA,’ right? Here’s the big snare drum thing: mm-​mm-​kish, mm-​mm-​kish, you guys like this tempo?” Post noodled various licks at the keyboard until Bochco and Hoblit agreed on a melody. “Now, I said, what else is this show about? It’s about sex! Either the screwing that’s being done or the screwing the lawyers are giving the clients. Alto saxophone. Nobody’s done Junior Walker. . . . They sat on the couch, lick for lick, and when I was done, I said, that’s your theme.” It won a Grammy as Best Instrumental Composition. Noted Bochco: “Mike is very generous of spirit in the work process and he will work endlessly until you’re happy. He’s not happy until you’re happy. And he’s as creatively un-​defensive as anyone I’ve ever worked with. He makes it fun. He humors us, and helps us to understand his process.” Both Post and Bochco spoke wistfully of their favorite Post theme for a

Mike Post.

failed series: Bay City Blues (1983, NBC), about a minor-​league baseball Drama team. “It was like an anthem; it had a sad grandeur to it,” Bochco recalled. 173 Shannon’s Deal (1990–​ 1991, NBC) was a very different story. Filmmaker John Sayles (Eight Men Out) had written the pilot about a disillusioned Philadelphia lawyer (Jamey Sheridan) with a gambling problem. Producer Stan Rogow, remembering Duke Ellington’s musical contribution to Anatomy of a Murder (1959), sought multi-​Grammy-​ winning trumpeter Wynton Marsalis to compose the score. “Wynton and jazz resonate into the past, but Wynton specifically has a very contemporary flavor,” Rogow said. “That felt to be a perfect match to Jack Shannon and Shannon’s Deal, which is hopefully very contemporary, but the character and the style and the texture do go back even into the 1940s in terms of film.” Marsalis, then 27, had not previously scored a film. He explained that he spent “maybe a month” working out the themes, then two days in a New York recording studio with eight of his own sidemen, improvising to the picture. “The music is mainly there to give spice to the film,” he said. “You don’t really need a lot of instruments. What you need is music that will lend an air of drama or beauty. That can be one instrument or a hundred and one. Mainly,” he added, “I’m just trying to use the language of the blues.” In addition to the two-​hour pilot, Marsalis composed individual scores for several episodes of the critically acclaimed, short-​lived drama series. Fellow jazz artists David Benoit, Tom Scott, and Lee Ritenour also contributed scores, making Shannon’s Deal a rare and welcome excursion back into the jazz sound that made so many 1960s series memorable. The Trials of Rosie O’Neill (1990–​1992, CBS), which cast Sharon Gless as a Los Angeles public defender, was distinguished by a theme written by pop singer-​songwriter Carole King. King appeared in a first-​season episode about Rosie’s high-​school reunion that also featured Gless’s Cagney & Lacey partner Tyne Daly; she played and sang an extended version of “I Wish I Knew,” the series’ title song (regularly performed under the main titles by Melissa Manchester). Television went to war with Combat! (1962–​1967, ABC), which featured some of the most sophisticated music written for the medium to that point. Vic Morrow and Rick Jason starred in this black-​and-​white, war-​ is-​hell chronicle of one infantry platoon’s experiences in Europe during World War II. Leonard Rosenman’s lively march, punctuated by the sounds of bomb bursts and illustrated by a parade of rifles with fixed bayonets before portraits of Morrow and Jason, set the heroic tone during Combat’s main title. The dramatic underscores, however, were quite apart from the traditional “Caissons Go Rolling Along” style of so much war-​movie music. “I was living in Rome during that time,” Rosenman said, “doing a great deal of conducting and also busy doing all the music for Combat,

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which was a library. Some of it was very experimental. Since you were dealing with torture, pain, violence, war, human emotions on a large scale—​the fact that it was not a period piece or a love story—​I could utilize a lot of the techniques of the twentieth century. Also, since the film was not on the screen and I just did them as pieces, I could do them the way I wanted. “These were basically sketches for compositions of my own. It was almost abstract, very dissonant,” Rosenman said, comparing them in style to the music that would later bring avant-​garde composer Gyorgy Ligeti to prominence (particularly after Ligeti’s music appeared on the soundtrack of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968). He even gave them titles like “Tortured Crawling” and “More Tortured Crawling.” Rosenman conducted a large symphony orchestra for the Combat music, annually sending back new additions to the series library for tracking purposes. The pilot, and a few episodes, were actually scored “to picture,” but the vast majority were cut together by music editors back in the states. “After four years, I got so tired of writing music for Germans crawling through the bushes,” Rosenman said, “I wrote a letter to the producer at the time, and typed it out like an army directive (‘subject,’ ‘to’), requesting a transfer to the Pacific.” In fact, the same producers were then preparing a pilot about the war in the South Pacific (Attack with Gary Conway and Warren Oates, 1966), which Rosenman scored; the show didn’t sell. Rosenman did, however, score one more war series: Garrison’s Guerillas (1967–​1968, ABC) with Ron Harper. Equally interesting was Rosenman’s music for one of the legendary unsold pilots of the sixties: Alexander the Great (1964, ABC) starring a pre–​Star Trek William Shatner in the title role (and a surprising cast that included Joseph Cotten, John Cassavetes, and a pre-​Batman Adam West). Rosenman consulted a Greek scholar on lyrics and, while in Rome, wrote a score for symphony orchestra (minus violins) and large men’s chorus (singing, in Greek, about the conqueror of the ancient world). Highly dramatic, including colorful music suggestive of the era—​using obscure instruments to evoke exotic sounds—​the score for Alexander the Great, like the show itself, was heard once and unfortunately forgotten. Dominic Frontiere took a more traditional approach to his two war dramas, 12 O’Clock High (1964–​1967, ABC) and The Rat Patrol (1966–​1968, ABC). 12 O’Clock High was an adaptation of the 1949 Gregory Peck film, the story of Air Force bombardiers stationed in England during World War II, with Robert Lansing as their commander during the first season and Paul Burke as their leader during the second and third. Frontiere, a pilot himself, wrote a patriotic-​style anthem as its theme, and imbued the scores with an unmistakable wild-​blue-​yonder quality. He approached the series this way: “My theory was, everybody knew who

won the war. What we were looking at were stories about how we won the war. And a lot of stories were going to be about people who died fighting that war. So I wrote this anthem, as opposed to a let’s-​go-​to-​war military march.” He remained with the series throughout its duration, although he took time out in 1966 to write the theme and a library of music that was recorded in Munich for The Rat Patrol. Unlike 12 O’Clock High, which examined the personal, often tragic, side of men in war, along with impressive aerial footage, Rat Patrol was an action-​packed half hour with Christopher George as the leader of a quartet that took on Rommel’s Afrika Korps practically single-​handed every week. The main title was particularly impressive, with images of American jeeps sailing over giant sand dunes in pursuit of German tanks set to Frontiere’s upbeat martial music (“happy, ‘we’re going to kick ass and go home’ music,” as the composer put it), recorded as a library in Munich, Germany, to save on costs. (Curiously, Frontiere replaced better-​known composer Alex North, whose own score for the pilot was rejected; North recycled the material into his score for the 1968 war film The Devil’s Brigade.) TV turned decidedly antiwar with M*A*S*H (1972–​1983, CBS), an adaptation of director Robert Altman’s 1970 black comedy about a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit during the Korean War. The doctors and nurses stationed at the 4077th were played by Alan Alda, Wayne Rogers, McLean Stevenson, Loretta Swit, Larry Linville, and Gary Burghoff. For music, writer Larry Gelbart and director Gene Reynolds turned to Johnny Mandel (1925–​2020), who had scored the film for Altman, and who had suggested a key scene-​linking device that the director used throughout the film: the loudspeaker announcements and playing of bad Japanese jazz from Radio Tokyo. Mandel, who arranged for Count Basie’s orchestra and Sid Caesar’s classic Your Show of Shows in the 1950s, worked only occasionally in television but had written some of the most significant film music of recent years: the innovative jazz score for I Want to Live (1958), and music for three films whose themes became popular standards: “Emily” from The Americanization of Emily (1964), the Oscar-​winning “The Shadow of Your Smile” from The Sandpiper (1965), and “A Time for Love” from An American Dream (1966). The composer created a new, instrumental, arrangement of his “Suicide Is Painless” film song, “but with the same flavor as the one over the main title of the movie, with the guitars,” Mandel recalled. The music provided an unexpected and gentle counterpoint to manic main-​title scenes of “people running with stretchers, and choppers coming in, the kind of thing you normally associated with very hyper music,” he added. China Beach (1988–​1991, ABC) captured the Vietnam War experience in terms more dramatic and personal than any other series. Dana Delany, Marg Helgenberger, Robert Picardo, Jeff Kober, and Michael Boatman

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Johnny Mandel.

were among the cast of this superbly written and acted chronicle of the experiences of personnel stationed at a medical facility near Da Nang. John Rubinstein (b. 1946), the actor-​composer who had written the theme for Family (1976–​1980, ABC), and scored the Emmy-​winning Jane Fonda drama The Dollmaker (1984), composed a plaintive theme for harmonica, piano, and strings for China Beach. He scored the two-​hour pilot and the two-​hour finale; Paul Chihara (b. 1938) composed many of the weekly scores. However, the main-​title theme, per network edict, wound up being “Reflections,” the 1968 hit by Diana Ross and the Supremes, just one of dozens of period tunes used to evoke the era in the series. Rubinstein’s theme was heard under the end titles. Some of the most fertile ground for original music in television through the years has been in the realm of the dramatic anthology. What is generally thought of as TV’s Golden Age, the live broadcasts of the 1950s, is based largely on the weekly anthologies that produced classic scripts such as Paddy Chayefsky’s “Marty” (for Philco Television Playhouse, 1953); Reginald Rose’s “Twelve Angry Men” (Studio One, 1954); Rod Serling’s “Patterns” (Kraft Television Theatre, 1955); Gore Vidal’s “Visit to a Small Planet” (Goodyear Playhouse, 1955); and JP Miller’s “The Days of Wine and Roses” (Playhouse 90, 1958). For budgetary reasons, most were “scored” with needle-​drops and stock music acquired from libraries. Most of the anthologies went to film or videotape by the late 1950s. As original scoring became commonplace from 1958 onward, many of

these shows were scored with new music. The richest musical palette belonged—​not surprisingly, considering Stanley Wilson’s involvement—​ to a Revue series: General Electric Theater (1953–​1962, CBS). When Revue started scoring in the fall of 1958, the Ronald Reagan–​hosted anthology was treated to an original score every week by Elmer Bernstein, his first regular work in television (and a coup for the series, considering his demand in the motion-​picture arena after the success of The Man with the Golden Arm and The Ten Commandments). Bernstein composed a new theme for the half-​hour Sunday-​night series and 30 scores in the 1958–​ 1959 season. “I thought that television was the coming medium, and it was exciting,” Bernstein recalled, finding the series “fun to do, because they were all different. Some were more exciting than others [but] it was a very nice atmosphere.” With an orchestra of about 25 players, Bernstein gave every story a fresh musical treatment; only the title music remained the same from week to week. Highlights of the Bernstein scores, all for 1959 episodes, included a charming French melody for Fred Astaire in “Man on a Bicycle”; Hebraic influences for the biblical David story “The Stone”; a Scottish flavor for the Dan O’Herlihy tale “Robbie and His Mary”; and two shows in which the music spoke for mute characters: a heartbreaking motif for Joan Crawford in “And One Was Loyal” and a tender treatment for Janice Rule in “Train to Tecumseh.” With Bernstein off to score Riverboat and Staccato for Revue the following season, Stanley Wilson wrote a new series theme and assigned a number of different composers to handle individual episodes. The series’ primary composer for the final three seasons was Conrad Salinger (1901–​1962), who was better known as a brilliant arranger and orchestrator, notably for such 1950s MGM musicals as Singin’ in the Rain, Gigi, and Brigadoon. Lyn Murray and Jerry Goldsmith contributed several scores; Morton Stevens’s first credit was on a GE Theater that starred Sammy Davis Jr. (“The Patsy,” 1960). Stevens was Davis’s musical director, and it was Davis who brought him to Wilson. Wilson was sufficiently impressed to hire Stevens, who went to work on Thriller a few months later. The music for Alcoa Premiere (1961–​1963, ABC) was almost entirely the work of Johnny Williams. With the jazz of Checkmate behind him, he graduated to a series that demanded a more orchestral approach. He began by writing an elegant theme—​Fred Astaire, after all, was the series host—​but continued to write diverse music for more than three dozen episodes over the next two years (including a lively score for a baseball story, directed by John Ford, that opened the second season). The Television Academy affirmed the quality of work: Williams was awarded an Emmy nomination in the original-​music category for each season. Williams looked back on that period as a training ground for his film career to come. “In the flurry and heat of battle, as a youngster with not

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John Williams promotional ad, 1963.

a lot of experience, I was just very busy, extremely focused, and did my best to keep up with the work,” he said. “Wilson was helpful by just being the kind of person he was. He was most supportive, almost like a parent. I couldn’t help but learn a tremendous amount. I certainly didn’t know very much when I started, and whatever I may have gleaned out of the whole process, it certainly would have been the result of what was, in retrospect, a tremendous opportunity.” Williams went on to Kraft Suspense Theatre (1963–​ 1965, NBC), scoring over half of its first season, including one of the scariest themes of the decade. Set to animation of a single figure beset by silhouetted antagonists and searching for an escape, Williams’s Suspense Theatre theme (particularly in its more intense, second-​season version) suggested terror in the Bernard Herrmann tradition. It was on the Kraft series that Williams met Robert Altman, the director who would later hire him to write the music for Images (1972), which garnered an Oscar nomination for the composer, and The Long Goodbye (1973), on which he collaborated with legendary songwriter Johnny Mercer.

Williams explained the process: “I would record all day on a Tuesday, let’s say, in six hours. We’d have about 25 or 30 minutes of music to do. The next morning, Wednesday, we would spot the next episode to record the following Tuesday. At these spotting sessions, very often the producers or directors weren’t even there. Wilson would spend two hours with me, then he’d spot a show with Benny Herrmann, or one with Elmer Bernstein, then go over on the stage and conduct something for someone else. And because of this volume, naturally the producers and directors couldn’t babysit the projects all the way through editing and scoring and dubbing the way they do features. They would just shoot their film and go off and shoot their next episode. “There were a few exceptions to this, however, and Altman was one of them. He didn’t impose himself but he was tremendously interested. He was one of the few directors and/​or producers who would turn up at these spotting sessions with Stanley Wilson. Some others did also, but very few, and it was very unusual if they did. Altman would also come to the [scoring] stage and offer suggestions and be very interested. But [on] most of the recording sessions that I did there, there was not a producer or director on the stage. If they came, they visited briefly and then went back to whatever it was they were shooting that week.” For the second season of Suspense Theatre, Bernard Herrmann scored two episodes and Franz Waxman four, including a percussive score for the Robert Goulet war story “Operation Greif ” (in the style of his Objective Burma score, 1945) and a Mexican-​flavored one for “That He Should Weep for Her,” which featured a rare dramatic performance by Milton Berle. About Waxman, Williams said, “I don’t think he enjoyed doing television very much. I think he was annoyed that he had to write so quickly, and the orchestras weren’t all that big, and the shows weren’t all that good. He had come from the world of feature film where things were better. I think he was worried about working, and he felt that from the point of view of the development of performance revenue from music, a film composer was going to have to work in television. “I think the same comments would apply to Herrmann. I think Herrmann, because of his character, dashed the things off more. I don’t think he took it very seriously. It was just kind of a job, like doing a radio show, which he had done in his youth. So I don’t think they were disdainful of the new medium; but I think they were certainly suspicious of it and disturbed by it.” Williams also wrote the classy theme for Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater (1963–​1967, NBC) and scored a handful of its episodes, including the acclaimed “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” based on the Alexander Solzhenitsyn book. The Chrysler Theater was, by this time, the most prestigious anthology series in television. Rod Serling, Edward Anhalt, Budd Schulberg, and William Inge were among the writers; Sydney Pollack won an Emmy for directing. Executive producer Dick

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Berg hired the composers, including Williams, with whom he had worked on Alcoa: “I had come to trust in Johnny,” he said. “He was dependable, and there simply wasn’t a lot of time for philosophical discussions. People like Johnny were pretty much left to their own devices.” Berg was especially impressed with jazz artist Benny Carter, whom he hired to score the 1963 show “Something About Lee Wiley,” a profile of the jazz vocalist starring Piper Laurie. “He wrote as melodic and moving a score as I have ever had. He was one of the few guys I’ve dealt with who had no problem expressing himself emotionally. Benny would let the stops out.” Carter wrote more than a dozen additional scores over the series’ four seasons. Berg reluctantly hired Bernard Herrmann for one show, the 1963 “Seven Miles of Bad Road” with Jeffrey Hunter. He found the composer “very gruff and very opinionated,” and the music—​an especially dark score for brass and percussion—​worried him because “it was extremely strong. The score became as prominent as what was going on visually, and I was unsure of it.” Unlike most composers on the series, Herrmann attended the dubbing session, and naturally objected when Berg chose to tone down a cue as “too loud or too intrusive. And he insisted that that was the point—​that the point needed to be made, and that that kind of help was required. “This debate went on for four or five hours,” Berg said. “Every time I would say something he would snort. And there were occasions where the music was quite intrusive, as a matter of fact. Finally, for the only time in my life, I had to send somebody out of the room. I banned him from the dubbing session. It got very obscene between us and it was horrendous. “But there’s a postscript,” the producer added. “When the film played, two weeks later, I realized that there was something almost camp about the film itself and that Herrmann had perceived that. And what he was doing was to help the film. A man and a score that I had resented during the process, I came to realize, had—​to the extent to which it had been preserved—​been our salvation.” Herrmann wrote three more Chrysler hours, in 1965 and 1966. Lalo Schifrin contributed two unique scores. The first, 1964’s “Clash of Cymbals,” concerned a talented pianist (Laura Devon) and her romantic involvement with a flamboyant conductor (Louis Jordan) who is also a judge in her upcoming competition. “I did a kind of classical score for that, because it took place in conservatories and concert halls,” Schifrin recalled. Piano works by Mozart, Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, and Beethoven were included (performed by renowned pianist Pearl Kaufman), and Schifrin conducted excerpts from Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 4. “With that score, I was doing the groundwork for The Competition,” Schifrin said, referring to his 1980 film about a piano competition with Richard Dreyfuss and Amy Irving. “It’s a different movie, a

different project, but a similar story, and I already knew how to prescore the classical pieces.” Even more unusual was “A Small Rebellion,” a 1966 episode that won an Emmy for Simone Signoret, one of her only two dramatic-​TV appearances. She played a major star whom a first-​time playwright (George Maharis) hoped to convince to perform in his play. The entire hour, essentially a two-​character dialogue, took place in an empty theater. Schifrin remembered the spotting session with Berg, Wilson, and director Stuart Rosenberg: “I said, ‘I have an idea. Dizzy Gillespie a cappella.’ They looked at me like I’m crazy.” Schifrin proposed to sketch original music for the jazz great to improvise to. “With different mutes, I [felt that I] could do something very interesting. Not jazz; modern music performed by Dizzy Gillespie. They went for that. They flew in Dizzy, and he stayed at my house. And we did it: I was conducting Dizzy, all alone, no more musicians. It worked great.” (Schifrin and Rosenberg later did several films together, including 1967’s Cool Hand Luke, 1976’s Voyage of the Damned, and 1979’s The Amityville Horror, all of which resulted in Oscar nominations for the composer.)

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Actor Richard Boone, meanwhile, created a repertory company to bring original plays to TV on a weekly basis. Famed playwright Clifford Odets (Golden Boy) was his story editor, and Buck Houghton (Twilight Zone) was the producer of The Richard Boone Show (1963–​1964, NBC), a noble experiment. Henry Mancini wrote a lyrical theme for harpsichord, and Houghton hired several of his former Twilight Zone composers to contribute music, including four scores by Bernard Herrmann. For series dramatizing American history, patriotic music was the order of the day. Broadway composer Richard Rodgers (who had already demonstrated his flag-​waving mettle on the documentary Victory “UMBRELLA” THEMES NBC and Universal were always trying new ways of presenting drama on television. As the 1960s progressed, they expanded the standard 60-​minute drama form to 90 minutes (The Virginian in 1962, The Name of the Game in 1968), which required them to “rotate” stars week after week (since it was difficult enough to shoot a one-​hour episode in six days; a longer episode required nine or 10). The Bold Ones (1969–​1973), a one-​hour drama with rotating medical, legal, and law-​enforcement elements, followed. Its first-​season theme was an unusual mix of percussion and brass by Stanley Wilson, replaced for its second and third seasons by a dynamic, brassy new theme by Dave Grusin. (That second season of The Bold Ones added a new series, The Senator, starring Hal Holbrook, a

superbly written and consistently thought-​provoking drama about an idealistic young legislator—​and a rare instance of a series that looked and sounded like a documentary, containing no theme or underscore whatsoever. Cancelled after a single season, it went on to win five 1971 Emmys including Best Drama Series.) By the fall of 1970, NBC even placed four series in a single Wednesday-​night timeslot, giving it the overall title of Four-​in-​One and commissioning Billy Goldenberg to create an electronic fanfare to introduce each (six episodes of McCloud followed by six of San Francisco International Airport, six of Night Gallery, and six of The Psychiatrist). These experiments proved successful enough that, in the fall of 1971, Universal produced an NBC Mystery Movie that initially aired on Wednesday

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at Sea) composed the theme for The Great Adventure (1963–​1964, CBS), an anthology initially produced by John Houseman. Rodgers received main-​title screen credit as his optimistic march played against images of the changing American flag through the decades. For Profiles in Courage (1964–​1965, NBC), based on John F. Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize–​winning book about American political leaders, Nelson Riddle created a stirring musical backdrop for Saul Bass’s title visuals featuring an eagle and tolling bells. It was based on the old Irish ballad “The Boys of Wexford,” a favorite of the thirty-​fifth president, whose ancestors hailed from that part of southeastern Ireland. Perhaps the finest of these projects was The Adams Chronicles (1976, PBS), public television’s most ambitious original drama to date, a 13-​part series that examined four generations of leading American political figures over 150 years. The cast included George Grizzard as John Adams, Kathryn Walker as Abigail Adams, and David Birney as John Quincy Adams. The score by John Morris (1926–​2018)—​then best known as the Oscar-​nominated composer for such Mel Brooks comedies as The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein—​was rich with Americana gestures, a feeling of dignity, and music suggestive of the eighteenth-​and nineteenth-​ century New England locales. Likely on the strength of his Adams Chronicles music, he went on to write the haunting, melancholy score for the four-​part The Scarlet Letter (1979, PBS) with Meg Foster as Hester Prynne. Morris’s use of dramatic chords in the key of A (the so-​called scarlet letter of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel) was a nicely subtle touch. Morris’s best-​known PBS composition was probably his charming theme for Julia Child’s cooking show The French Chef during its final seasons in the early 1970s.

nights. Introducing all three detective series (Columbo, McCloud, McMillan and Wife) was an “umbrella” theme by Henry Mancini, returning to series television after an eight-​year absence. The minute-​long opening featured a shadowy figure, against a cloudy sky at dusk, shining a flashlight. Mancini’s Mystery Movie theme marked the start of the composer’s fascination with offbeat electronic sounds: a whistle-​like tone (made, according to keyboard player Clare Fischer, by the Yamaha YC-​ 30 combo organ) over strings and rhythm. “I didn’t want to suggest a Hitchcock flavor,” Mancini explained. “I wanted a sophisticated tone with a mystery device that ends with a touch of humor, and the touch had to be light, never ponderous.”

The concept proved so successful that, for the fall of 1972, NBC added a second night of detectives, titling one the Sunday Mystery Movie (retaining the overall Mancini theme and adding Hec Ramsey to the rotation) and retitling the original as the NBC Wednesday Mystery Movie. The latter series, which lasted through 1974, introduced Banacek, Madigan, and Cool Million, in its second year retaining Banacek but adding The Snoop Sisters, Faraday and Company, and Tenafly. It initially boasted a roaring big-​ band theme by Quincy Jones (unfortunately replaced at midseason by the Mancini original; asked about it years later, Jones didn’t even recall writing it). ABC, meanwhile, tried its own rotating series, called The Men (1972–​ 1973), and commissioned an umbrella theme from Isaac Hayes. Hayes (1942–​ 2008), who a few months earlier had won a Best

By the late 1960s, the dramatic anthology was passé in television. But Universal kept the basic ingredients alive with creative packaging, beginning with The Name of the Game (1968–​1971, NBC), a 90-​minute series with three rotating stars: Gene Barry as a powerful magazine publisher; Tony Franciosa as an investigative reporter; and Robert Stack as a crime-​story editor. Susan Saint James won an Emmy as their funny, charming research assistant. “Fame” was the name of the game, as expressed in the title of the 1966 TV movie that led to the series. Benny Carter scored the film, one of two Universal pilots he composed that became series—​both of which went to Dave Grusin for new themes (the other was the pilot for It Takes a Thief). Grusin’s Name of the Game theme was among the most dynamic of the era. Jazzy, exciting, kinetic, with an undeniable contemporary sound, it accompanied 40 seconds of colorful graphics: the names of the three stars filled the screen, then merged into the images of each (the order rotating depending upon who starred in that week’s story). Said Grusin about TV theme writing: “At the time, I don’t think I was very analytical about it. To try and make something, in 35 or 45 seconds, complete or maybe a little memorable in terms of having something strong. It’s like writing a short story as opposed to a novel, where you have a limited number of words and you have to make your point quickly. Beyond that, I don’t think I took it apart too much. I just tried to write it so that I could like it.” Grusin wrote two early scores for Name of the Game, but Universal newcomers Billy Goldenberg and Robert Prince were mainstays of the series. Normally, they would work on separate installments, but in one case they divided a show, earning an Emmy nomination for their efforts: the remarkable 1971 Gene Barry episode “LA 2017,” written by science fiction author Philip Wylie and directed by Steven Spielberg. Goldenberg and Prince

Song Oscar for his theme from Shaft (1971), wrote a four-​ minute tune that made the top-​ 40 charts as a single. Heard strictly on television, however, his “Hot Buttered Soul”-​style strings, brass, and rhythm—​ with reverbed female voices repeatedly cooing, “the mennnn . . .”—​was butchered into a 40-​second main-​title sequence designed to introduce Assignment: Vienna with Robert Conrad, The Delphi Bureau with Laurence Luckinbill, and Jigsaw with James Wainwright. “I had three different movements,” Hayes recalled, “I wrote it so they could cut it to the respective series. I had some funk in it, some dramatic things, the strings and the horns. We used to play it live in my concerts.” In later years, ABC tried the “wheel” concept again with the ABC Mystery Movie, later retitled the

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Isaac Hayes (left) (The Men) and Burt Bacharach (ABC Movie of the Week).

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Dave Grusin conducting in the 1960s.

created a partly orchestral, partly electronic smorgasbord of scoring, source music, and futuristic sounds for the environmentally ravaged, twenty-​first-​ century totalitarian nightmare world that Barry’s character imagined.

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At Christmas 1971, CBS aired a TV movie titled The Homecoming with Patricia Neal and Richard Thomas. A touching memoir by writer Earl Hamner Jr., of a special holiday he experienced as a boy in Virginia’s Blue Ridge Mountains during the Depression, it won a Christopher Award, three Emmy nominations, and the hearts of millions of viewers. Director Fielder Cook, who worked with Jerry Goldsmith on Playhouse 90, called in the composer. Taking his cue from the nature of the film, Goldsmith

ABC Saturday Mystery (1989–​1990), both of which featured an atmospheric theme by Mike Post with a wailing saxophone, half-​whispered male vocal effects (“ca-​shik-​a-​ca-​ca”), and interesting string and synthesizer figures. The first trio of detectives was B. L. Stryker (Burt Reynolds), a revived Columbo, and Gideon Oliver (Louis Gossett Jr.); the second season featured a quartet that retained Stryker and Columbo but added a new Kojak and Christine Cromwell (Jaclyn Smith). The original title sequence was far superior, beginning with a swinging overhead lamp and blending mysterious, disconnected images (a skull, a hanging telephone receiver, a weird underwater doll, a skulking black cat). Movie-​ night themes tended to be bright curtain raisers. In 1965, newly named CBS music-​ department head Morton Stevens composed an

elegant theme for the CBS Thursday Night Movies that later doubled as the theme for the network’s Friday Night Movies and, still later, the CBS Late Movie. In 1966, Universal’s World Premiere movies on NBC were heralded by a 40-​second theme by studio music director Stanley Wilson. Ray Ellis’s pop-​ orchestral signature for NBC’s Saturday Night at the Movies was a well-​remembered fixture of the 1970s, while Perry Botkin Jr. penned a brassy intro for the ABC Sunday Night Movie in 1974. Most striking was the title sequence for ABC’s Movie of the Week (1969–​1975), the first network attempt to make a 90-​minute “movie for television” every week, initially on Tuesdays and later adding a second night on Wednesdays. ABC licensed Burt Bacharach’s “Nikki,” a tune he wrote for his newborn daughter in 1966. “I liked the melody a lot, but

wrote a simple, spare score for The Homecoming, imbuing the music with regional flavor by using two guitars, banjo, accordion, harmonica, and recorder as his instrumentation. It was restrained but heartfelt; the composer repeated that accomplishment on half a dozen scores for the series that the network quickly commissioned, based on the film: The Waltons (1972–​ 1981, CBS). Richard Thomas and several of his younger costars returned for the series; the parents were now played by Michael Learned and Ralph Waite, with Ellen Corby and Will Geer as the grandparents. As he did in The Homecoming, writer-​producer Hamner narrated the opening and closing of each episode. The Waltons was an unexpected hit, a touch of homespun Americana that was reminiscent of simpler times and family warmth in the post-​Woodstock, mid-​Vietnam, and imminent-​Watergate era. Although Goldsmith returned for the series, the producers asked for a new theme. “They thought [the original] was too gentle,” the composer recalled. “Today, I would have argued with them. I like the theme for The Homecoming better. It was certainly more authentic.” The Waltons theme had much the same flavor, with guitars, accordion, and harmonica, but added an autoharp and a solo trumpet as the primary voice for the melody. “I was thrilled with the themes from the very first time I heard them,” creator Hamner later said. “The Homecoming is one of the loveliest scores I ever heard.” Goldsmith’s original scores for The Waltons included pastoral sounds for early episodes “The Foundling” and “The Typewriter,” a melancholy oboe for the grandfather in “The Star,” Hebraic influences for a Jewish family in “The Ceremony,” a quiet flute for the would-​be writer of “The Literary Man,” and a lyrical theme for John-​Boy’s first romance in “The Love Story.” Goldsmith’s longtime orchestrator Arthur Morton assumed musical responsibilities for the remainder of the first and second seasons. Later came another close Goldsmith colleague, Alexander Courage (who

I imagined it in a much more heroic arrangement,” ABC promotions chief Harry Marks later said. Arranger Harry Betts recorded a one-​minute version that, as played against the colorful slit-​scan photography of Douglas Trumbull (reminiscent of the Stargate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey the year before), became the best-​ remembered movie-​night overture in TV history. The biggest, most nagging mystery remains the composer of the long-​running theme for Hallmark Hall of Fame, the series of high-​quality specials begun by the greeting-​card company in 1951 (with a presentation of Gian-​Carlo Menotti’s Christmas opera Amahl and the Night Visitors). Hallmark engaged legendary title designer Saul Bass to create a new animated opening in 1964—​ six crowns that become one, which spins as the corporate

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logo appears—​initially scored by MGM veteran Jeff Alexander (The Lieutenant, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies). But in 1966, Alexander’s theme was replaced by a regal new brass fanfare, apparently commissioned by Hallmark’s Chicago-​ based advertising agency, Foote, Cone, & Belding. Neither Hallmark Cards nor the agency retained any records regarding the music, and no one associated with either firm could recall who actually wrote the piece, which heralded more than 40 years of award-​ winning drama on all three broadcast networks. Composer Mark McKenzie, who created new orchestral arrangements for the Hall of Fame in 2010, called it “truly iconic and certainly the classiest theme on television.”

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ultimately wrote 123 individual scores). Courage described his Waltons approach as “Appalachian mountain music with a lot of heart.” As on Goldsmith’s scores, Courage utilized a small ensemble, averaging 17 pieces: strings and woodwinds but no brass, often with an accordion, harmonica, and acoustic guitar for a similar regional sound. Much later, Christy (1994–​1995, CBS) featured Kellie Martin as a naive young teacher in the Appalachian Mountains of Tennessee before World War I. Composer Ron Ramin (b. 1953), the son of Patty Duke Show composer Sid Ramin, earned an Emmy nomination for his warm and touching score for the pilot of this critically acclaimed series, flavoring it with guitar, recorder, and dulcimer to suggest the rural setting. (Producer Barney Rosenzweig, for whom Ramin scored dozens of episodes of the earlier Cagney & Lacey and The Trials of Rosie O’Neill, referred to Christy as “Little House on the Prairie with intelligence.”) In a far different vein was the music for the prime-​time soaps. The granddaddy of them all was Peyton Place (1964–​1969, ABC), which aired twice a week (and, during the height of its popularity, even three times). Based on the scandalous Grace Metalious novel and the popular 1957 film, it starred Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow, along with Dorothy Malone, Barbara Parkins, Ed Nelson, and Chris Connelly. The producers naturally chose Franz Waxman’s memorable film theme for the main title, but Arthur Morton wrote the vast majority of music for the series. Although better known as an orchestrator of the highest rank, Morton had contributed original scores of his own to Shirley Temple’s Storybook (1958–​1961, NBC/​ABC) and, for Bus Stop (1961–​1962, ABC) with Marilyn Maxwell and Rhodes Reason, a theme that colleague Hugo Friedhofer later called “most tasteful and haunting.” Morton’s lyrical scores for Bus Stop led to Peyton Place, another Fox series. “I had a whole set of themes for the characters,” Morton recalled. He estimated that he scored about four hundred of the half-​hour shows—​a recording session was held practically every week—​over the course of the series’ five-​year life. Even those he didn’t write (which were scored by Fox colleagues such as Cyril Mockridge) usually contained Morton’s material. “At Fox, I had a wonderful orchestra,” Morton said. “I had 10 violins, four violas, four cellos with a bass. I had one of each woodwind and three horns. And occasionally I had a harp or a piano or, because we had a wonderful trombone player out there, Dick Nash, I’d write a piece for trombone.” After Peyton Place, other series attempted to mine the same territory. Best-​selling trash novelist Harold Robbins created The Survivors (1969–​1970, ABC), which starred Lana Turner, George Hamilton, and Ralph Bellamy in an expensive, high-​gloss soap that was canceled after just 15 episodes. Maurice Jarre scored the pilot, but by the time the

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Arthur Morton.

much-​troubled series hit the airwaves, newly arrived French composer Michel Colombier (1939–​2004) had replaced him, scoring the first six hours with a sense of contemporary music and high drama. One of the decade’s most expensive flops was Beacon Hill (1975, CBS), an American Upstairs, Downstairs set in Prohibition-​era Boston and taped in New York with a large cast of Broadway actors including Stephen Elliott, Nancy Marchand, David Dukes, Kathryn Walker, George Rose, and Beatrice Straight. Marvin Hamlisch (1944–​2012), who was then the hottest composer in Hollywood, coming off his triple 1973 Oscar win (song and score for The Way We Were and adaptation score for The Sting), took a chamber approach to his music for the series, composing a yearning theme for alto saxophone and strings, also adding harp, piano, and flute. “I love that theme,” Hamlisch said years later. “In a theme for television, it’s usually the first five, six, or seven notes that are the hook. And the saxophone is a very arresting instrument.” Beacon Hill lasted all of 11 weeks, but the cancellation couldn’t have mattered much to Hamlisch: his A Chorus Line was, at literally the same time, becoming Broadway’s biggest smash, eventually earning him a Tony and the Pulitzer Prize. Then came Dallas (1978–​1991, CBS), the undisputed king of prime-​ time soaps. The tales of intrigue within and without the oil-​rich Ewing family on Texas’s sprawling Southfork ranch grew in popularity, until the “Who Shot J. R.?” episode of November 21, 1980, became the most-​watched TV program to that time. Larry Hagman was the conniving J. R. Ewing, Patrick Duffy his nice-​guy brother who married the

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Jerrold Immel.

daughter (Victoria Principal) of his father’s longtime rival; Linda Gray was J. R.’s alcoholic wife, while Barbara Bel Geddes and Jim Davis were the husband-​and-​wife ranchers who ran Southfork. Jerrold Immel (b. 1936) was on the short list of both producer Leonard Katzman and creator David Jacobs (the latter of whom had just seen a TV-​movie of Immel’s and admired the music) to provide the series’ music. A former copyist at Four Star and supervising copyist/​music librarian at CBS, he had worked with Katzman scoring Gunsmoke and had written the spectacular theme for How the West Was Won. About Dallas, Immel recalled: “I had read the script, and I had a conversation with Len in which he told me that he would like it to be big, like the movie Giant, but contemporary and urban. Contemporary and urban at that time meant disco. That was really all I had to go on.” Set against images of the city skyline, the oil fields of Texas, and the cast, the Dallas theme successfully combined an urban glamour with a rural ambience to become the familiar aural signature of the Ewing family. Bruce Broughton, who came aboard with the third season, received four Emmy nominations, winning two, for his Dallas scores (both for 1983 episodes). Observed Broughton: “You could play Dallas any way you wanted and you couldn’t hurt the show. I would try to see how far I could go before it went over the side. You could play J. R. as dark and evil as you wanted, or you could play him with a lot of charisma and character, or say he was cute and charming. You could play sentiment, dripping violins

over Miss Ellie, or Jock’s nobility. These people could be doing despicable things with each other, but you could find almost any facet of human experience and play to that, and it would fit. The bigger the better. “I started experimenting with the music itself,” Broughton added, “making the music more strident or more dissonant, almost more elegant, and [the show] actually just sopped it all up. I always loved working on Dallas.” While the orchestra numbers usually averaged 20, Broughton enjoyed mixing up the ensemble: “one was all strings and a flute; another was for English horn, trombone, and strings; another was practically all woodwinds.” When Dallas creator David Jacobs spun off Knots Landing (1979–​1993, CBS), he again turned to Immel. “I looked at it as four marriages on a cul-​ de-​sac,” the composer explained, “and went for a much gentler, more lyrical theme,” including an alto sax solo that was performed, in early seasons, by the great Bud Shank. As with Dallas, Immel would return to score an episode or two at the start of each new season. For five years toward the end of the Knots run, however, Immel (together with synth expert Craig Huxley) created and performed all of the Knots scores electronically. With Dynasty (1981–​1989, ABC), composer Bill Conti (b. 1942) created what may be, next to his score for Rocky (1976), his most iconic theme. The Rhode Island native and Juilliard graduate spent seven years studying and composing in Italy before returning to the United States to score films, notably Harry and Tonto (1974) and An Unmarried Woman (1978), and scoring a number-​one hit with Rocky. He would later win an Academy Award for writing the heroic score for The Right Stuff (1983). Conti came to Dynasty at the suggestion of actor George Peppard, who played the role of Blake Carrington in the original series pilot and who liked Conti’s score for his film Five Days from Home (1978). Peppard was replaced by John Forsythe, but Conti stayed with the project. According to the composer, creators Esther and Richard Shapiro asked for “an elegant, movie-​ like, rather than television-​like” main theme. The problem was the original title of the script, which was not Dynasty but Oil—​a concept that Conti found hard to musicalize. Once the network changed the title to Dynasty, however, the composer was immediately inspired and, in his words, “came up with the theme and wrote it before dinner. It was one of the only times in my life that it actually flowed through me. I’m not a mystic,” Conti added. “I know how to write music in a prepared way and feel quite craftsman-​like about it. But not with Dynasty. I sat down and played it. It was so painless.” Conti’s demand for a minimum orchestra of 32 on the pilot (“Nineteen guys is not going to sound like a movie,” he explained to the producers) turned out to be less of a problem than expected. A musicians’ strike forced the Aaron Spelling production to record the score in France, although Conti did not go abroad for the recording.

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Bill Conti.

The Dynasty theme, particularly as heard throughout Conti’s pilot score, said “elegant” from start to finish. The flourishes, the classically styled bridge, and the beautifully played trumpet solo set against strings provided a lush backdrop for the Shapiros’ Denver-​based, wealthy Carrington family melodrama (with Linda Evans as Blake’s long-​ suffering wife Krystle, Pamela Sue Martin and later Emma Samms as daughter Fallon, and Joan Collins as Blake’s scheming ex-​wife Alexis). For Falcon Crest (1981–​1990, CBS), Conti got a very different kind of direction. For this serialized drama of an ongoing battle for control of a northern California winery—​starring Jane Wyman as its ruthless matriarch—​creator Earl Hamner asked the composer for an “Italian baroque” sound. “I could tell you what that meant in terms of Italian baroque composers,” Conti said, “but I don’t know what he meant in terms of his own musical contacts. But I obviously understood something conveyed by that term, because when he heard it, he liked it.” Conti’s soaring theme, set to visuals of the lush Napa Valley vineyards, began with a regal brass fanfare—​perhaps suggested by the winery’s coat of arms in the title—​and had an “ltalianesque” style, in the composer’s view. And, like Dynasty, it had a timeless quality that only an orchestral theme can provide. “That was, I thought, the era to not do what everybody was doing in the genre, stylistically putting it in a place that time-​ dated it. Once you take away the rhythm section, you take away the time element.”

The Dynasty spinoff The Colbys (1985–​1987, ABC), which brought Charlton Heston to series television as a billionaire businessman, inspired another thrilling orchestral fanfare from Conti, probably better than the nighttime soap deserved. One of the most musically interesting dramas of the late 1970s was Lou Grant (1977–​1982, CBS), which ran at the height of the MTM dynasty of high-​profile comedies and drama series. The music was entirely entrusted to one composer: Patrick Williams. Williams (1939–​2018) was the only active Hollywood composer to have won a Pulitzer Prize nomination (for his American Concerto, a 1976 work for orchestra that combined jazz and classical elements). He studied music at Duke and Columbia Universities and became active as an arranger-​conductor in New York in the 1960s. He moved to California in 1968 to write for films and television. An Oscar nominee for scoring Breaking Away (1979), Williams was practically a house composer for MTM, having scored the popular Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart Shows (and more short-​lived efforts including Paul Sand’s Friends and Lovers and The Tony Randall Show); his hour dramas included The Streets of San Francisco and Bill Bixby’s The Magician (1973–​1974, NBC). He won a Grammy for his 1974 LP, Threshold. Lou Grant was a dramatic spinoff from The Mary Tyler Moore Show, sending Ed Asner’s gruff newsroom character to Los Angeles to become the city editor of a major newspaper. Emmy-​nominated as Outstanding Drama Series for each of its five seasons, it won twice. In the 1979–​1980 year alone, it received 15 nominations (including seven for writing and direction) and won in six categories—​including one for Williams for original music composition. He was nominated three other times for Lou Grant scores. The Lou Grant main title was one of the cleverest in television drama: a 60-​second look at the life of a page of newsprint. Starting quietly with a chirping bird on a tree branch in the woods, it chronicled a logging operation, the manufacture of pulp, the delivery of paper to the newspaper operation (followed by an interlude for scenes of the cast in the newsroom), newspapers rolling off the presses, delivery to a suburban home, someone reading the paper over morning coffee, and finally a section being shoved into the bottom of a bird cage—​under, once again, a chirping bird. As for music, Williams recalled: “The idea was something that had some energy and some hipness, because it wasn’t supposed to be serious like The Defenders. But we wanted it to cook.” And cook it did, with Tom Scott performing the alto saxophone solo in the original main title and a rhythm section composed of the best players in Los Angeles. About the individual episodes, Williams said: “It wasn’t formula time. Every show had a different theme, so there was a different musical approach for each. And [producers] Gene Reynolds and Allan Burns pretty much left me alone. . . . We had great success using smaller, interesting

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combinations of players you wouldn’t normally put together, [for example] a show using a small string section and two or three classical guitars. Things that would be stimulating to write for.” After the barrage of electronic sounds throughout the 1970s and 1980s, a fresh voice emerged—​and it was a throwback to yesterday: acoustic guitar. W. G. Snuffy Walden (b. 1950) introduced it on thirtysomething (1987–​ 1991, ABC), kept it fresh through The Wonder Years (1988–​1993, ABC), and augmented it with solo piano on I’ll Fly Away (1991–​1993, NBC). Born in Louisiana and raised in Texas, Walden got his training in Texas clubs and as a rock ’n’ roll road musician, touring with his own bands and others (including Emerson, Lake, and Palmer, Donna Summer, Laura Branigan, and Chaka Khan) before he began playing on film and television scores for other composers. Without prior experience in the field, Walden found a partner in Stewart Levin (b. 1954), who not only was a talented keyboard player, but also understood the technical aspects of scoring to film and had a studio. Detroit-​born Levin grew up in Los Angeles, studied classical piano, became a studio musician, and acquired a facility with synthesizers. Together, Walden and Levin performed the pilot score (along with a percussionist and an accordion player) for thirtysomething. In fact, their main title theme was “a demo that we actually sped up to make it run

W. G. Snuffy Walden.

60 seconds,” Walden laughed. “It didn’t fit a minute, so we sped it up. Drama It’s now in E-​flat instead of D.” The other fresh sonority in the theme, 193 playing the melody, was Levin’s Kurzweil-​sampled sound of air blowing across the mouth of a soda bottle. “It was a really neat sound, and not like anything else in the world,” Levin said. The guitar-​and-​piano approach resonated with viewers who identified with the realities of this original baby boomer series, about the daily lives of seven Philadelphia friends: two couples (Ken Olin and Mel Harris, Patricia Wettig and Timothy Busfield) and three singles (Melanie Mayron, Polly Draper, Peter Horton), with its life’s-​ big-​ questions scripts, often so superbly written and played. Walden and Levin created and performed the scores for the first season; they dissolved the partnership but continued to score the remainder of the series on an alternating-​ episode basis. Walden and Levin also began The Wonder Years, a critically acclaimed comedy-​drama set in 1968, with Fred Savage as 12-​year-​old Kevin Arnold, trying to make sense of the world and relationships, particularly that with his sometime girlfriend Winnie (Danica McKellar), which was narrated by Daniel Stern as the adult Kevin. Because the score turned out to be largely acoustic guitar–​based, Walden became the sole composer after several episodes. For I’ll Fly Away, the critically praised civil rights era drama with Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor, Walden said, “I wanted it to be gospel in nature without being over the top. So I bought a piano.” Although the pilot featured a 35-​piece orchestra, Walden created many of the first-​ season scores on his own at the piano, and returned to score the two-​hour series finale, the PBS-​aired “Then and Now.” Walden and Levin were jointly Emmy-​nominated for their thirtysomething theme; Walden, nominated for his I’ll Fly Away main title; and Levin, nominated for his sensitive, piano-​dominated theme for Picket Fences (1992–​1996, CBS), the first of creator David E. Kelley’s quirky, issue-​ oriented dramas, which starred Tom Skerritt as a small-​ town Wisconsin sheriff and Kathy Baker as his wife. Walden’s finest hour in television came with his music for The West Wing (1999–​2006, NBC), writer Aaron Sorkin’s incisive look at the inside workings of the White House with a liberal president (Martin Sheen), his chief of staff (John Spencer) and deputy chief of staff (Bradley Whitford), communications director (Richard Schiff) and his deputy (Rob Lowe), the press secretary (Allison Janney), the president’s personal aide (Dulé Hill), numerous other staffers, and political allies and foes. Walden was contributing “electric guitar, rocky-​ bluesy stuff ” to Sorkin’s Sports Night (1998–​2000, ABC) when Sorkin sent him the West Wing pilot script and suggested “an Americana guitar score” might be appropriate. But as scoring time neared, Sorkin began favoring more of an orchestral approach. “I had never taken an orchestration class,” Walden

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conceded, “so I just dove in, studied Copland and James Horner, and just tried to put a simple melody to it. “I was writing for that first orchestral session,” he remembered, “and I got to the end of Episode 3. It’s an expansive shot, you see the Oval Office for the first time, and I wrote this little gospel melody. [Director] Tommy Schlamme came over to my house, heard it, and said, ‘That’s our theme.’ When Aaron heard the first run-​through of the orchestral version of the main title, I looked at him to see if it was okay, and he had a tear in his eye. That’s the biggest compliment he could have paid me.” Walden won an Emmy for his stirring theme, one of 10 the series received that first season, including Outstanding Drama Series. He was nominated for the score for the first episode of the second season, about the aftermath of an assassination attempt. Although budgetary considerations precluded orchestral sessions after the initial six episodes, Walden’s Americana sound continued, as produced in his studio using orchestral samples. “As we got deeper and deeper into the show,” Walden recalled, “less and less music was required. The characters became so well established, you had to paint with a really fine brush. We went from about 18 minutes of score per episode to about six.” Prior to West Wing, Walden said, “I was your warm family-​music guy, a little piano, a little guitar. This was the first time I stretched out to something really large. I learned a lot.” Two series starring Kyle Chandler earned Walden further acclaim: the speculative-​fiction concept Early Edition (1996–​2000, CBS) and the Texas high-​school football saga Friday Night Lights (2006–​2011, NBC). The former earned him two more Emmy nominations, while the latter became especially popular with audiences. “I played more bass on that show than I did guitar,” Walden recalled. “The guitar needed to be singular in sound; that was achieved by doing it note by note, as overdubs with delays. It created a sound that’s really open, like the plains of Texas. We had a lot of driving shots and just flatlands. It was pretty much open expanse and open textures—​electric guitars and a few synth colors.” Walden’s other notable assignments included the underrated My So-​ Called Life (1994–​1995, ABC) with Claire Danes, Felicity (1998–​2002, WB) with Keri Russell, and Once and Again (1999–​2002, ABC) with Sela Ward, all sensitively written shows requiring a delicate musical touch. Dramatic scoring became more complicated in the 1990s and early 2000s, not only because of the growing influence of synthesizers (a financially attractive alternative to orchestras for budget-​minded producers), but also because of the increasingly prominent dramedy form, which enabled the most talented writers to tell stories that leavened the drama with touches of humor. Creators Joshua Brand and John Falsey had done a lot of this on St. Elsewhere, and took it a step farther with the more outrageous Northern Exposure (1990–​1995, CBS). It was the story of a New York physician (Rob

Morrow) who must pay off his student loans by practicing in the tiny town of Cicely, Alaska, where he meets a tomboy bush pilot (Janine Turner), a retired astronaut (Barry Corbin), and the bar-​owning mayor (John Cullum), and is alternately confused and aggravated by the offbeat goings-​on. The theme by David Schwartz (b. 1952) was as quirky as the show: harmonica, accordion, bass, and Latin percussion against a backdrop of an early morning Cicely, deserted except for a wandering moose. Schwartz recalled writing it as an audition piece, based on the pilot script; the producers liked it enough to replace the temporary theme, a David Byrne Talking Heads song. Schwartz went on to score the entire series. “We almost never did the same kind of music twice,” he said, from West African to Cajun to Latin and beyond. “I had played in every band possible,” Schwartz noted, from jazz to R&B to country to pop to orchestra, and so he wound up writing an eclectic variety of music for the radio station where Chris (John Corbett) was the DJ. And in an early instance of music supervision, producers would also choose preexisting songs to be licensed, mostly for Cicely radio airplay. Schwartz was nominated for a 1992 Grammy for his Northern Exposure theme as extended for the soundtrack album. Desperate Housewives (2004–​2012, ABC) combined elements of drama, comedy, and mystery in its tale of four neighbors (Teri Hatcher, Felicity Huffman, Marcia Cross, Eva Longoria) who are initially mystified by the suicide of a close friend (Brenda Strong, who narrates the entire eight-​season saga). Affairs, failing marriages, murders, new neighbors with secrets: all became part of the amusing turmoil on Wisteria Lane. Created by Marc Cherry, the continuing saga became a ratings hit and critical favorite. Danny Elfman’s 40-​second theme won a 2005 Emmy. Deceptively lighthearted, featuring orchestra and choir, adding a pop rhythm section and speeding up near its end, it captured the series’ offbeat sensibility—​ especially when paired with the clever animated title sequence, depicting oppressed women throughout history (Eve in the Garden, the worshipful wife of an Egyptian pharaoh, a pregnant wife in van Eyck’s fifteenth-​ century Arnolfini Portrait, Grant Wood’s American Gothic, a World War II housewife poster, and “girl slugs guy” in a takeoff on Robert Dale’s pop-​art Romantic Couple). A producer suggested Steve Jablonsky (b. 1970) as possible composer; he was one of three to work on the first four episodes, and he remained with the series until its end, never varying his palette of seven string players plus synths. “The tone of the pilot was funny stuff, but also a thread of ‘something’s not right.’ That’s what I leaned towards,” Jablonsky said. “It’s such a deliciously specific kind of music,” Cherry added. “The comedy should have a sense of darkness and the drama should have a twinkle in its eye. Steve really captured that. I describe to him in very distinct terms the emotions that I want the audience to feel as the scene is playing. He heard the tone of my writing, and he managed to musicalize it.”

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As digital music became the rule rather than the exception, and series budgets continued to skimp on the costs of hiring Los Angeles musicians, orchestral scores on network television continued to decline. The rare ones stood out, and producers who fought for them inevitably found their shows benefited immensely. Revenge (2011–​2015, ABC) was a case in point. Emily VanCamp played a brilliant young woman bent on avenging the murder of her father, with a billionaire socialite (Madeleine Stowe) as her primary target. Composer Fil Eisler (b. 1973), billed for the first two seasons as “iZLER,” was a Czech-​ born, England-​ raised multi-​ instrumentalist who toured and recorded with such pop acts as Robbie Williams, Dave Stewart, and Imogen Heap. He launched his scoring career in 2005 and later scored the music-​industry drama Empire (2015–​2020, Fox). But his Revenge was notable for its rich string sound and noirish tone. Pilot director Phillip Noyce had asked for “the mother of all theme melodies,” Eisler said; he went on to deliver weekly scores, often with a 50-​piece orchestra, that deepened the drama and gave the series a big-​screen feel. The Good Wife (2009–​2016, CBS) was a legal and political drama starring Juliana Margulies as a lawyer whose husband has been jailed as part of a political corruption and sex scandal. Classically trained, English-​ born composer David Buckley (b. 1976) came aboard halfway through the first season and “landed on this sort of classical, high-​baroque idiom . . . a musical language that lets [the producer] move between something serious and something comedic. “This is a real breath of fresh air,” Buckley added, noting that he had written a fugue for a 2013 episode. With spinoff series The Good Fight (2017–​), another legal drama with Christine Baranski as a top Chicago attorney, the producers urged Buckley to retain the faux-​classical approach. His Renaissance-​style main title theme, including recorders, mandolins, violin, cello and voices—​set to startling imagery of exploding laptops, liquor bottles, phones, and legal textbooks—​was nominated for a 2017 Emmy.

6 “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale”

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ne of the most familiar tunes in the history of television, the theme for I Love Lucy (1951–​1957, CBS) was dashed off in an afternoon, for a pilot that no one knew would sell. Eliot Daniel (1908–​1997), the composer of I Love Lucy, had been an arranger and pianist for Rudy Vallee in the 1930s, composer-​arranger for Frank Morgan’s radio show in the late 1940s, and an Oscar-​nominated songwriter (for “Lavender Blue” from 1949’s So Dear to My Heart and “Never” from 1951’s Golden Girl) at both Disney and 20th Century-​ Fox. Daniel had known Lucy producer Jess Oppenheimer from radio in the early 1940s; Oppenheimer had gone on to produce Lucille Ball’s My Favorite Husband radio show and was part of the planning process for the I Love Lucy pilot. Oppenheimer asked Daniel to write the theme for the proposed sitcom about a Cuban bandleader (Desi Arnaz) and his madcap wife (Ball). Daniel was reluctant at first because of his already heavy studio commitments, primarily at Fox. “But Jess really wanted me to do it, and all it was, was a pilot show,” the composer recalled. “That’s all we thought at the time. I thought it would be done one day and they’d forget about it.”

Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0007

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Elliot Daniel.

Daniel knocked out the tune in an afternoon. “I wrote the first phrase of the song so that it matched ‘I love Lucy and she loves me.’ . . . It came pretty easily after I got that first phrase.” The complete lyrics, by Harold Adamson (who would pen the words for The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp), were written much later, specifically for Arnaz to sing in a 1953 episode about Lucy’s birthday. Daniel’s instrumental main-​ title arrangement, set to 20 seconds of simple visuals featuring the title and cast members’ names on a satin heart, featured Latin percussion. But the theme itself, Daniel said, was not specifically conceived as a Latin number. Daniel also composed the bridges and occasional underscore for the first few seasons. Arnaz’s band, onstage for the filming of the innovative three-​camera, live-​audience show, would—​earlier the same day—​perform the score for the show shot the previous week. The composer also wrote occasional special material for the cast (including a mini-​operetta for a 1952 episode and a baseball number for a Bob Hope episode in 1956). Longtime Desilu musical director Wilbur Hatch—​a composer in his own right, having scored Our Miss Brooks (1952–​1956, CBS) and later The Lucy Show (1962–​1968, CBS) and Here’s Lucy (1968–​1974, CBS)—​ conducted the music. Also for Desilu, Daniel later wrote the themes for December Bride with Spring Byington (1954–​1959, CBS), Willy with June Havoc (1954–​1955, CBS), and Those Whiting Girls with Margaret Whiting (1955, 1957, CBS); and for Jess Oppenheimer, Angel with Marshall Thompson (1960–​1961, CBS).

Most situation comedies of the 1950s contained, like nearly all TV se- Comedy ries, instrumental themes. For The Honeymooners (1955–​1956, CBS), 199 star Jackie Gleason (1916–​1987) used his own song “You’re My Greatest Love.” In addition to his fame as a television star, Gleason recorded nearly three dozen popular-​music albums in the 1950s and 1960s, choosing the tunes, overseeing the arrangements, and actually conducting them himself. (He had no musical training, and composed many songs, including his variety-​show theme “Melancholy Serenade,” by picking out the tunes at the piano and turning them over to an arranger for orchestration.) A handful of shows featured songs with lyrics, but most themes—​like the Lyn Murray–​Richard Mack title song for I Married Joan (1952–​ 1955, NBC) and the Lionel Newman–​Max Shulman theme for The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis (1959–​1963, CBS)—​were almost generic in their approach: “I married Joan /​What a girl, what a whirl, what a life . . .” and “Dobie wants a girl who’s dreamy /​Dobie wants a girl who’s creamy. . . .” An early instance of a theme hinting at the premise and backstory was The Real McCoys (1957–​1963, ABC, CBS) starring Walter Brennan as patriarch of a West Virginia family that moved to central California. Veteran tunesmith Harry Ruby (1895–​1974), whose career dated back to Broadway in the 1920s and whose film career included songs for the Marx Brothers movies Duck Soup and Horse Feathers, wrote a country-​flavored title song that included the lyric “ . . . from West Virginny they came to stay in sunny Californiay. . . .” But the tune otherwise spoke only generally about the family, in particular Grandpappy Amos, and was not a ballad describing their life’s journey (as would come about a few years later with another rural-​themed comedy). As the 1960s rolled around and television as a medium began to mature, a few especially creative producers began to take risks with their themes. For Car 54, Where Are You? (1961–​1963, NBC), producer Nat Hiken—​who created and produced the hit The Phil Silvers Show (1955–​ 1959, CBS)—​penned a clever lyric, set to music by Phil Silvers composer John Strauss (1920–​2011), that clearly established the setting in less than half a minute of screen time: “There’s a holdup in the Bronx /​Brooklyn’s broken out in fights /​There’s a traffic jam in Harlem /​That’s backed up to Jackson Heights /​There’s a Scout troop short a child /​Khrushchev’s due at Idlewild /​Car 54, where are you?” Set against comic visuals of Officers Toody and Muldoon (Joe E. Ross, Fred Gwynne) playing checkers while on patrol in New York City’s 53rd Precinct, this tune (sung by a male chorus) didn’t introduce the characters so much as it suggested the kind of wacky cop antics to which viewers would be treated. It also marked the first time that a living political figure was mentioned by name in, of all things, a sitcom theme. Hiken was “a distant relative” of Strauss’s wife, singer-​comedienne Charlotte Rae, when producer and composer first met in 1955. “We started talking, he realized the musical background I had, and he asked me if

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I would help out on the first of the shows we did together, which was The Phil Silvers Show,” Strauss remembered. He later became a music editor for such high-​profile films as Slaughterhouse-​Five, Hair, and Ragtime, and won a 1984 Grammy for producing the best-​selling soundtrack album for the acclaimed film Amadeus (in which he appeared, briefly, as a conductor). The real breakthrough occurred the following season with “The Ballad of Jed Clampett,” written for The Beverly Hillbillies (1962–​1971, CBS). The long-​running comedy starred Buddy Ebsen as head of a clan of Ozark country bumpkins who became millionaires when oil was struck on their land and they decided to move into a southern California mansion. Ebsen played Jed, Irene Ryan his mother-​in-​law Granny, Donna Douglas his naive daughter Elly May, and Max Baer Jr. big, dumb Cousin Jethro; helping to “civilize” them were their Beverly Hills banker (Raymond Bailey) and his assistant (Nancy Kulp). Paul Henning, the creator-​producer of the show, auditioned a songwriting team for the theme but didn’t care for their approach. Having been a singer on the radio as a youth, he knew a little about music. “So, of necessity,” Henning said, “I did something I had not done before. I just composed a song, words and music, and performed it for a musician who played piano and who simply wrote out the music.” From the time he conceived it, the Beverly Hillbillies theme was designed to outline the show’s basic premise. “I thought it would save a lot of time and exposition on the screen,” he explained. Those now-​famous lyrics chronicled, in 55 seconds, the entire story of the Clampett family: “Come ’n listen to my story ’bout a man named Jed /​A poor mountaineer, barely kept his fam’ly fed /​An’ then one day, he was shootin’ at some food /​An’ up through the ground come a bubblin’ crude. . . .” Henning again broke with TV tradition by writing different lyrics for the end-​title version of the theme: “Well now it’s time to say goodbye to Jed and all his kin /​An’ they would like t’ thank you folks fer kindly droppin’ in /​You’re all invited back next week to this locality /​T’ have a heapin’ helpin’ of their hospitality. . . .” Henning’s composer for the pilot and the first two seasons, Perry Botkin (1907–​1973), was Bing Crosby’s longtime guitarist and a network-​ radio veteran (playing, at various times, for Crosby, Eddie Cantor, Al Jolson, and Fibber McGee and Molly). At Henning’s direction, Botkin went to Nashville, Tennessee, in August 1962 to sign popular country artists Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs to perform the theme. Botkin then brought in Jerry Scoggins (a Texas singer who came to California in 1946 to perform on Gene Autry’s Melody Ranch radio show) to sing the vocal. Flatt and Scruggs’s bluegrass style, Henning reasoned, was “the music most descriptive of what I was trying to say,” both for the theme and the show’s underscore.

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  Paul Henning.

“I compose and play most of the music myself,” Botkin said in 1963. “I’ve tried to work out identifiable themes with special instruments for each member of the cast: Jed Clampett is a banjo, Granny is a lap organ, and for Elly May, we’ve used sweet music.” Elly May’s theme was played on the electric guitar. Adding to the country flavor were the occasional use of harmonica, fiddle, mandolin, and autoharp. The composer’s son, Perry Botkin Jr. (1933–​2021), had his own sitcom hit years later with Mork & Mindy (1978–​1982, ABC), which catapulted Robin Williams to comedy fame. Composer Curt Massey (1910–​1991) retained the Botkin approach when he inherited Hillbillies in its third season. Massey was “one of the most talented, versatile musicians I’ve ever known,” Henning said, noting that Massey both wrote and performed (via overdubs) nearly all of the music for Hillbillies and its spinoff, Petticoat Junction (1963–​1970, CBS), by himself in his Los Angeles recording studio. Henning went on to write other songs for the show, notably “Pearl Pearl Pearl” for Flatt and Scruggs when they made their first of several appearances playing themselves. In the 1963 episode “Jed Throws a Wingding,” they played competing former suitors for Jethro’s mother, Pearl Bodine (recurring guest star Bea Benaderet). Flatt and Scruggs recorded both “Pearl Pearl Pearl” and “The Ballad of Jed Clampett.” The latter shot to Number 1 on the Billboard country chart (Number 44 on the pop chart) within the series’ first year, becoming the first sitcom theme to

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score big with the record-​buying public—​just as the series became a giant hit in its first season and remained in the Nielsen top 20 throughout its nine years on the air. Massey composed the music, Henning the lyrics, for Petticoat Junction: “Come ride a little train that is rollin’ down the tracks to the Junction. . . .” The tune was sung to shots of the Hooterville Cannonball steam locomotive that passed by the Shady Rest hotel run by Kate Bradley (Bea Benaderet) and Uncle Joe Carson (Edgar Buchanan), with Kate’s three attractive daughters (originally Jeannine Riley, Pat Woodell, and Linda Kaye Henning) apparently bathing in the town water tower. Flatt and Scruggs’s recording of Petticoat Junction went to Number 14 on the country charts. With most series, the music comes long after principal photography has been completed and the producers’ attention has shifted to post-​ production. But in a rare exception, the theme came first, and became one of the most famous tunes in TV history: “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle.” Sherwood Schwartz, a former writer on I Married Joan and later Emmy-​winning head writer on The Red Skelton Show, created Gilligan’s Island (1964–​1967, CBS). The idea was a comic variation on the classic Daniel Defoe novel Robinson Crusoe: a tropical storm throws off course a Honolulu cruise boat carrying several sightseers, stranding them on an uncharted South Pacific island where they manage to survive while awaiting rescue. Schwartz sought funding from CBS for the pilot. But he fought a running battle with then-​ CBS president James Aubrey. Recalled Schwartz: “Aubrey contended that it was impossible to do the show because of the background that would have to be explained to the audience each week as to why these people were on this island. He said it would be deadly exposition.” Schwartz’s answer: incorporate the back-​story into the lyrics of the show’s theme, “an amusing, rollicking kind of song that will tell the audience, in 60 seconds, why they’re there, how they got there and so forth.” Aubrey apparently wasn’t convinced. So, at the urging of his agent, Schwartz stayed up late the night before his presentation to CBS executives creating a song designed to assuage Aubrey’s concerns. “I’m not a songwriter,” admitted Schwartz. “I used to play the violin, I have a good ear, and I can pick out a tune on the piano.” But believing that CBS would not commission a pilot unless Aubrey’s perceived problem was resolved, Schwartz went to work. “At that time, 1963, calypso was very popular. So I tapped out a calypso tune on the piano, and wrote those lyrics. I must say, it took me from 7 in the evening to about midnight to get the lyrics and music together.” According to Schwartz, Aubrey insisted that he sing the song to a roomful of CBS brass. “Opportunity sometimes just knocks once,” mused Schwartz. “So even though I couldn’t sing and I might kill the

pilot, I knew that if I didn’t get up, there would be no pilot. So I had little choice. I got up and I sang. When I was through, there was silence in the room until big Jim had to make a decision. “All he said was, ‘I think you could work a little on the middle lyric.’ Which meant, ‘Okay, now I understand. With that song, there will be no exposition problem.’ That’s the test that I had to pass.” Schwartz was given the go-​ahead to produce the pilot for Gilligan’s Island. Later, after the pilot was produced, Schwartz decided to ask a professional to help him revamp his theme song, so he called a composer friend, George Wyle (1916–​2003). Wyle, then the music director on The Andy Williams Show and later music director for The Flip Wilson Show, was also a successful songwriter (he penned the Christmas standard “It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year”). As Wyle pointed out: “The boat goes down in the Pacific and [Schwartz] had written a Caribbean melody, a calypso.” Wyle suggested setting the lyrics to a sea chantey. “I wasn’t really sure what a sea chantey was,” he laughed, “but it sounded good.” At the time, he was writing relatively simple arrangements for the Christy Minstrels on Williams’s variety series, and he felt the same approach would also work for the Gilligan’s Island theme. Within hours, Schwartz and Wyle retooled the lyric to fit a traditional-​sounding sailor tune. Schwartz’s main-​title lyrics are familiar to anyone who has watched television in the past 50 years: “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale,

  Sherwood Schwartz.

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George Wyle.

a tale of a fateful trip /​That started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship. . . .” Against scenes from the never-​aired pilot episode and shots of the crew and passengers, the song detailed the “three-​hour tour” that ended with the S.S. Minnow’s shipwreck on an “uncharted desert isle.” Five of the seven castaways were shown during the first-​season opening; the Professor and Mary Ann were added for the second and third years on the air. And, as Henning had done previously with The Beverly Hillbillies, Schwartz wrote different end-​title lyrics that urged the viewer to “Join us here each week, my friends, you’re sure to get a smile /​From seven stranded castaways here on Gilligan’s Isle.” Wyle also found The Wellingtons, the vocal trio, who literally recorded the song in the living room of Schwartz’s old friend, film director Mel Shavelson, because there were only days left to complete post-​production. (The Wellingtons later appeared in a second-​ season episode as The Mosquitoes, a rock group seeking rest and solitude for a month.) “It was the song that sold the show,” said Schwartz. Gilligan’s Island ran just three seasons but became a huge success in syndication and continues to rerun endlessly to this day. Schwartz later came to believe that Aubrey’s original concerns were justified. “I believe that a puzzled audience cannot laugh. If they’re trying to figure something out, the joke has passed them before they can analyze it. A song can bring people out of the kitchen, or wherever they are: ‘Oh, I know that show.’ It’s highly identifiable when you can tell the

story of a show in a lyrically and musically interesting way. It nails down the focus of the audience.” As for the underscore, Schwartz was fortunate to land a budding feature film composer early on: Johnny Williams was nearing the end of his stay at Universal and was signed to score the Gilligan’s Island pilot in January 1964. Williams’s comedy-​scoring experience included music for Bachelor Father (1957–​1962, CBS, NBC, ABC), including a theme for its 1959–​1960 season. In addition to interpolating the title tune in his underscore, Williams composed a lively theme for Gilligan that opened and closed nearly every episode. Later in the first season, Gerald Fried joined the Gilligan crew, providing a further sense of fun in his inventive use of offbeat percussion instruments. Schwartz created and produced several other shows in the 1960s and 1970s, each with a distinctive theme song that featured lyrics he had written. It’s About Time (1966–​1967, CBS), a sitcom about time-​traveling astronauts who had become stranded in the caveman era, lasted only one season. Yet the opening phrases of its theme—​“It’s about time, it’s about space, about two men in the strangest place”—​were instantly memorable. “Strangely enough, that’s true,” observed Schwartz. “I know people who never heard of the show but can sing the song.” Schwartz’s other big hit of the 1960s—​and, in its many incarnations, the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s—​was The Brady Bunch (1969–​1974, ABC). The premise had a widow (Florence Henderson) with three daughters marrying a widower (Robert Reed) with three sons. The result was TV’s first blended-​family comedy, after two decades of nuclear-​family and single-​parent sitcoms. Again, Schwartz chose to explain the concept via an opening title song: “I explained what this marriage consisted of: two prior marriages, one with three girls and one with three boys and so forth. You now start fresh: you don’t have to worry about how it happened.” For music this time, Schwartz turned to Frank DeVol (1911–​1999). DeVol was a veteran bandleader and five-​time Oscar nominee for films including Pillow Talk (1959), Hush . . . Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), Cat Ballou (1965), and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967). He scored more than a dozen films for producer-​director Robert Aldrich, including Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), The Dirty Dozen (1967), and The Longest Yard (1974). The appropriately dark musical tone DeVol brought to Aldrich’s suspenseful and action-​filled films contrasted sharply with the composer’s television reputation, which was based on his success writing upbeat, happy music for lightweight comedy series. It began with My Three Sons (1960–​1972, ABC, CBS), about a consulting engineer (Fred MacMurray), a widower raising three boys with the help of his father-​in-​law (William Frawley, previously best known as Fred Mertz on I Love Lucy). DeVol’s clever conception for the My Three Sons theme began with knowing that MacMurray had been, back in vaudeville, a saxophone

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Frank DeVol.

player with a band called the California Collegians. This immediately suggested a saxophone as the lead instrument. For grumpy old Uncle Bub (Frawley), he added a bassoon (“a low comedy thing,” DeVol said). “And for the children, I thought, well, I’ll lay this very simple melody over ‘Chopsticks.’ ” The casual viewer, caught up in the animated title sequence of toe-​tapping and hand-​clapping, might not have noticed the piano playing a variation of the traditional child’s tune (although it was hard to miss the intentionally off-​key harmonica that interrupted the melody, another musical reference to the kids). DeVol’s second hit was Family Affair (1966–​1971, CBS), which, like My Three Sons, was from producer Don Fedderson. This one starred Brian Keith as a Manhattan bachelor (with Sebastian Cabot as his English valet) whose well-​ordered life is disrupted by the arrival of three young orphans, the children of a brother and sister-​in-​law who died in an accident. This time, DeVol composed a jaunty tune featuring the harpsichord. The Brady Bunch became one of those shows whose popularity long after its network run far outshone its original Nielsen ratings success. Reed, Henderson, Ann B. Davis (as nutty maid Alice), and the kids resurfaced time and again—​in The Brady Bunch Hour (1977, ABC), The Brady Brides (1981, NBC), The Bradys (1990, CBS), and ultimately a 1994 feature—​always accompanied by the Schwartz–​De Vol theme song (sung, in the first season, by the Peppermint Trolley Company) that began,

“Here’s the story of a lovely lady /​Who was bringing up three very lovely girls . . .” and continued with “It’s the story of a man named Brady /​Who was busy with three boys of his own. . . .” Schwartz “came to me with the lyrics,” DeVol recalled, “and I wrote the music to his words.” The composer scored nearly three dozen episodes of the series over its five-​year run, and even appeared in a 1972 episode. DeVol gained a modicum of fame for his on-​screen performance in the syndicated talk-​show sendup Fernwood 2-​Night (1977–​1978). DeVol’s role as Happy Kyne, leader of the house band The Mirth Makers, was perfectly suited to the composer’s ham-​actor side. He was one of the original panelists on Pantomime Quiz in the 1950s and even played a recurring role as building contractor Myron Bannister in the John Astin-​Marty Ingels sitcom I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster (1962–​1963, ABC). Words like “zany” and “wacky” now seem irredeemably associated with television comedy. Perhaps no composer in television history wrote more music that could be characterized in those terms than Vic Mizzy (1916–​ 2009). Mizzy composed the themes and weekly scores for two of the 1960s’ most beloved comedies: The Addams Family (1964–​1966, ABC) and Green Acres (1965–​1971, CBS). And, in a highly unusual collaboration with the producers, he even conceptualized both main-​title sequences and directed the one for The Addams Family himself. Mizzy came to TV from the songwriting world. Born in Brooklyn, he appeared on radio’s famous Major Bowes Amateur Hour; arranged for bandleader Ray Bloch; composed special material for singers like Perry Como and Frank Sinatra; and wrote the popular songs “There’s a Faraway Look in Your Eyes,” “My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time,” and “Pretty Kitty Blue Eyes,” several of which wound up on radio’s famous Hit Parade. David Levy, who was then a programming vice president at NBC, gave Mizzy his first television assignment on a live, summer-​replacement dramatic anthology called Moment of Fear (1960). Shirley Temple’s Storybook, which had just moved to NBC from ABC, and the James Coburn action-​ adventure series Klondike (1960–​ 1961, NBC) quickly followed. Mizzy moved to Los Angeles, where he scored episodes of The Richard Boone Show and the Dennis Weaver comedy-​drama Kentucky Jones (1964–​1965, NBC). Levy, who by this time had gone into the production side of the business, was shepherding a risky, offbeat concept in 1964: turning Charles Addams’s macabre magazine cartoons into a series called The Addams Family. According to Mizzy, Filmways had made a 10-​minute presentation reel to screen for ABC executives. To save money, they planned to track in preexisting music rather than commission an original score. Mizzy loved the outrageousness of the concept—​a dark-​humored comedy about an endearingly ghoulish family with bizarre tastes and hobbies—​ and volunteered to write a theme gratis.

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Mizzy recalled demonstrating the theme for Filmways executive Al Simon at an appropriately cobweb-​covered rehearsal piano in the rear of a dimly lit soundstage. For the recording sessions, however, Mizzy chose a harpsichord because “it denoted something quaint, something outside the realm; a small, intimate sound.” In fact, the composer played the harpsichord not only for the main title but in all the cues (including the many occasions when butler Lurch was seen playing for the family in the Addams living room). That was also Mizzy’s voice singing his lyrics (overdubbed three times) because budget-​conscious Filmways, again, “didn’t want to pay for singers”; and actor Ted Cassidy, who played Lurch, uttering “neat, sweet, petite” in those familiar sepulchral tones. Nearly the entire series was scored with the same five-​piece ensemble: harpsichord, two woodwind players (usually clarinet and flute), bass, and drums (doubling on other percussion instruments). Mizzy composed themes for most of the main characters, including a graceful flute motif for Morticia (Carolyn Jones), a merengue for Gomez (John Astin), and even signature themes for the Addams mansion (which opened every episode), and Thing, the hand that mysteriously appeared from ornate tabletop boxes scattered throughout the house. The composer’s musical conception was so specific that he became deeply involved with the filming of the main-​title sequence, which involved all seven actors snapping their fingers in carefully timed rhythm to Mizzy’s music. The composer remained on the set to guide the actors in specific movements designed to coincide with his individual character themes. He recalled advising Astin to “walk pseudo–​Groucho Marx” and Jones to “take little short steps” so that she would appear to glide along the floor, both in time to Mizzy’s music. “It’s strictly a songwriter’s crazy imagination,” he said. Perhaps no composer in TV was more suited to The Addams Family than Mizzy. The theme reappeared in the 1991 feature film of the same name, but without those famous lyrics: “They’re creepy and they’re kooky, mysterious and spooky, they’re altogether ooky: the Addams Family. . . .” Green Acres followed the next season. The show, a spinoff of Petticoat Junction with a similarly rural theme, cast Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor as New Yorkers who escaped the hubbub of city life for the more bucolic existence of farming. Again, Mizzy conceived the title song as intertwined with the visuals of the main title, beginning with an aerial shot of the barn emblazoned with the words Green Acres, and telling the story of Oliver and Lisa Douglas (Albert, Gabor) moving from city to country. The final scene, as Mizzy envisioned it, would be an amusing variant of Grant Wood’s classic Midwestern-​farmer painting American Gothic, with Albert stamping a pitchfork in time to the final notes of the song. Mizzy described the Green Acres theme as “bright country,” with downhome instrumentation including fuzz guitar and bass harmonica. The lyrics were instantly memorable: Oliver begins with “Green Acres is

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Vic Mizzy (center) with Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor on the Green Acres set.

the place to be /​Farm livin’ is the life for me . . .” while Lisa responds with “New York is where I’d rather stay /​I get allergic smelling hay. . . .” Unlike The Addams Family, the stars of Green Acres also sang the title song. Albert had a background as a musical-​comedy star, so Mizzy knew that he could perform; Gabor was “a sweetie pie,” Mizzy recalled, but after several tries, she was unable to sing the lyrics properly. Finally, he asked her to “talk it. Blasé. Park Avenue. Do it in that bored, rich tone that you can do so well”—​which she managed. The only line she had to sing was the final one (“Green Acres, we are there!”) in harmony with Albert. “That was the biggest luck-​out in the history of singing,” Mizzy said, “but she hit the right notes.” Mizzy did other comedies with Levy, including The Double Life of Henry Phyfe with Red Buttons (1966, ABC), The Pruitts of Southampton with Phyllis Diller (1966–​1967, ABC), and Captain Nice (1967, NBC). At the movies, he scored the William Castle spine-​tingler The Night Walker (1964), the Tony Curtis satire Don’t Make Waves (1967), and five Don Knotts films including The Ghost and Mr. Chicken (1966) and The Reluctant Astronaut (1967). Competing with The Addams Family during the same two seasons was another monster-​family comedy, The Munsters (1964–​1966, CBS) with Fred Gwynne and Yvonne DeCarlo as Herman and Lily Munster, and Al Lewis as Lily’s father Grandpa. Herman may or may not have been the original Frankenstein monster, and Grandpa may or may not have been Dracula. Little Eddie Munster (Butch Patrick) sported a definite werewolf look, and niece Marilyn (Beverly Owen, later Pat Priest) was the “normal”-​looking one of the family.

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Unlike The Addams Family, the humor of The Munsters wasn’t dark but rather sunny: a broadly played, traditional family sitcom that happened to star a bevy of happy monsters in a literally haunted house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane. Guitarist-​composer Jack Marshall (The Deputy) wrote the theme and scored the episodes in a cartoony Halloween fashion, with organ, brass, and twangy electric guitar, for a kind of Bernard Herrmann-​meets-​Duane Eddy sound. “He loved that kind of dark humor,” his son, producer Frank Marshall, remembered. “It was his favorite thing, reflected in the theme that he came up with.” Legendary studio guitarist Bob Bain—​who also played guitar on the Bonanza theme—​was lead guitarist on The Munsters. He recalled that, unlike most of his TV work, the actors often stopped by the recording sessions, especially Gwynne and Lewis, often in their monster makeup. “Jack Marshall was so funny,” Bain told an interviewer 40 years later. “It was like one big three-​hour laugh session. When you had the likes of trombonist Frank Rosolino along with trumpeters Uan Rasey and Jack Sheldon, and Shelly Manne on drums, it was great. The music was funny to begin with, and then to see all of the shenanigans that went on in the show, like smoke coming out of Herman’s ears, was a lot of fun. It didn’t pay a lot, but you did it because it was with Jack Marshall and there were always a lot of laughs.”

Jack Marshall.

At virtually the same time, Marshall was also responsible for what is believed to be television’s first true rock ’n’ roll theme, for Karen (1964–​ 1965, NBC), which starred Debbie Watson as a “typical teenager” who lived at 90 Bristol Court (the umbrella title for a trio of sitcoms also including Harris Against the World and Tom, Dick and Mary; only Karen survived the entire season). Marshall wrote it with series writer-​creator Bob Mosher, but their genius was in convincing a well-​known pop group to perform it. The Beach Boys were riding high in the summer of 1964 with their first Number 1 smash, “I Get Around,” after earlier hits “Surfin’ U.S.A.” and “Fun, Fun, Fun.” Their sound is unmistakable, and the shame of Karen is, because of the failure of the series, no single was ever issued. As the lyrics reminded us every week: “She sets her hair with great precision /​it’s her favorite indoor sport /​and by the light of television /​she can even write a book report!” Vic Mizzy wasn’t the only television composer to write wild music for wild concepts. Veteran songwriters Jay Livingston and Ray Evans, who wrote the title tune for Bonanza, came up with the perennially popular theme for Mister Ed (1961–​1965, CBS). Mister Ed was essentially a variation on the Francis the Talking Mule pictures of the 1950s. Arthur Lubin, who directed the first six of the seven Francis movies, created Mister Ed, about a palomino whose new owner (Alan Young, as architect Wilbur Post) is startled to discover that the horse can speak. He only talks to Wilbur, naturally, and most of the episodes centered on Ed getting Wilbur into one jam after another. Livingston and Evans’s memorable lyrics (“a horse is a horse, of course, of course . . .”) were actually performed by Livingston on the soundtrack. Recalled Livingston: “Raoul Kraushaar, who scored all of Filmways’s pictures, went to Rome to record it. They got an Italian opera singer to sing ‘Mr. Ed.’ I’d like to have heard that,” he laughed. According to Livingston, producer Al Simon called just a week before the show was to go on the air, panicked because the operatic version was—​to no one’s surprise—​unusable. Simon had liked the way Livingston had performed the song at an early demonstration, and asked if he would pinch-​hit until a professional singer could be engaged to perform the song for the show’s soundtrack. “I said, okay. I thought it was a temporary track. And I had a lot of trouble with it because there’s no place [for a singer] to breathe. My wife coached me; otherwise I would never had gotten through it.” Livingston’s voice was never replaced. That was even Livingston saying, in his deepest bass tones at the end of the song, “I am Mister Ed.” Even though longtime B-​western star Allan “Rocky” Lane did the voice of the horse—​and was, according to some reports, originally considered to perform the entire song—​he apparently wasn’t approached.

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Livingston and Evans’s Oscar-​winning “Que Sera, Sera (Whatever Will Be, Will Be),” originally written for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1956 thriller The Man Who Knew Too Much and thereafter star Doris Day’s signature tune, later became the theme for The Doris Day Show (1968–​1973, CBS). They also wrote the title song for the John Forsythe comedy To Rome with Love (CBS, 1969–​1971), for which Frank DeVol supplied the underscore. Earle Hagen’s first job in television lasted more than a decade: The Danny Thomas Show (1953–​1964, ABC, CBS). He and partner Herbert W. Spencer spent the late 1940s and early 1950s as arranger-​orchestrators at 20th Century-​Fox (including work on two films that won Oscars for musical direction, 1947’s Mother Wore Tights and 1953’s Call Me Madam). “In 1953, when the studios cut back [on music departments], Herbie and I formed a partnership and we went into television,” Hagen recalled. “We did three pilots that year, and two of them sold: The Danny Thomas Show and The Ray Bolger Show. Ray stayed on two years and Danny stayed on eleven.” Both were filmed situation comedies. The Thomas show secured Hagen’s future in the business, not just because of its longevity but because of the professional relationships Hagen forged. Six weeks after the launch of the Thomas series, Sheldon Leonard came aboard as director and executive producer. The former B-​movie character actor would go on to become one of TV’s most successful producers, and Hagen scored nearly all of his shows.

Earle Hagen.

“Sheldon was unique,” Hagen said. “The first time I met him, he said, ‘Do you know your business?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He said, ‘Good, you’ll never hear from me.’ In 17 years, he never ran a picture with me, he never went to a dubbing or a recording, and he never second-​guessed me. It was like Camelot. The implication was that he hired the best people he could get and then stayed out of their way. He had plenty to do himself.” Leonard broke with then-​standard television practice of tracking shows. “Every episode of every show that Sheldon Leonard ever did was scored,” Hagen said, recalling a memorable Leonard quip that the practice of tracking music originally intended for another show would be like “wearing somebody else’s underwear.” The Danny Thomas Show, originally titled Make Room for Daddy, was a family comedy that cast Thomas as a nightclub entertainer. Jean Hagen played his first wife, Marjorie Lord his second, and Rusty Hamer, Sherry Jackson, and Angela Cartwright played his children. It was filmed before a studio audience. Hagen recalled the showmanship that was involved with staging an episode: “I would come in at 6 o’clock and record the two previous weeks’ scoring to stopwatch. Then we would rehearse; if there were any [live] numbers, we would rehearse them. And then we would go on the stage and introduce people [the cast] with fanfares. During [camera] setups, we would play dance music. And we would go home at 9 o’clock.” The same routine was followed later on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Hagen arranged “Londonderry Air” (“Danny Boy”) as the theme for The Danny Thomas Show. He composed most of the incidental music for the show and conducted; Spencer composed some of the cues and wrote most of the arrangements. Their partnership, publicly known as the Spencer-​Hagen Orchestra, lasted until 1960. Spencer went on to score the Thomas-​produced Joey Bishop Show (1961–​1965, NBC, CBS) with its sing-​song “Joey” theme by Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn. Thomas and Leonard, now production partners, sold The Andy Griffith Show (1960–​1968) to CBS in the spring of 1960. Griffith was to play widower Andy Taylor, sheriff of tiny Mayberry, North Carolina, raising a young son named Opie (Ronny Howard) with the help of his maiden Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier); his high-​strung deputy, Barney Fife (Don Knotts), was among the many townspeople whose stories would make up the series. “We had a whole summer to come up with the theme,” recalled Hagen. “Herbie and I fiddled around with it—​we were still partners at that time, and it was after the show sold that we went our separate ways—​and we couldn’t get anything that we really liked. One day I got up and I just thought, here’s a guy who’s a simple character. And I started whistling a theme. I called a bass guitar-​and-​drum session in a little studio on Fairfax Avenue, and I whistled the theme. My son, who was 11 years old at the time, did all the finger snapping. I played the demo for Sheldon and he said, ‘That’s perfect. I’m going to shoot the main title next week and I’ll

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just have Andy and Opie walking along the lake with a couple of fishing rods.’ That was it. And I’ve never whistled since.” For The Dick Van Dyke Show (1961–​1966, CBS), another Leonard series, Hagen opted for a big-​band sound, although Hagen noted, “our bands weren’t that big. I think I had five brass, four saxes, probably four rhythm: 15 or 16 pieces total.” Van Dyke’s penchant for physical comedy was apparent from the beginning, so Hagen recalled adding “that little fillip” in the main title, “and they shot a scene with him tripping over a couch.” Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (1964–​1969, CBS), a spinoff from The Andy Griffith Show, had the naive gas-​station attendant enlisting in the Marine Corps. Hagen composed a lively military march for the main title, in which the hapless Pyle (Jim Nabors) was being screamed at by his tough sergeant (Frank Sutton). Still another Thomas-​Leonard show, That Girl (1966–​1971, ABC), starred Danny’s daughter Marlo Thomas in the first of a trend of young-​career-​woman comedies. Hagen’s theme for That Girl was light and airy (pizzicato strings) with a brassy jazz kick. Amazingly, every episode of these sitcoms boasted an original score (although sometimes only a few minutes of music, in addition to the main-​and end-​title themes, was required). For most of the 1960s, Hagen was juggling three shows at once: at one time, the Thomas, Griffith, and Van Dyke shows; later, the Griffith, Van Dyke, and Nabors series; still later, Nabors plus I Spy and That Girl. Observed Hagen: “We had it better than anybody before or since. Thomas and Leonard had [their own] post-​production company. We were so organized that we would book our studios a season in advance. There was a discipline involved. We had one producer/​story writer per show. In the case of Dick Van Dyke, it was Carl Reiner; for Andy Griffith, it was Aaron Ruben. There was a minimum amount of duplication. And the head honcho, the executive producer of all the shows, was Sheldon Leonard. “Today you look at a credit and you see two executive producers and nine other producers, so that in order to get a decision you have to have a committee meeting. Anybody down the line can hang up the turning-​ over of a film. The way we had it organized, they had a certain amount of time to prepare the film, and if they were supposed to turn it over on a Thursday, it was turned over Thursday, not a week from Thursday. So that we [composers] had two weeks on an hour show, a week on a half-​ hour comedy show. Today you get a day. And nobody wasted anybody’s time. It was totally professional.” The Patty Duke Show (1963–​1966, ABC) featured another favorite TV theme. This comedy was about look-​alike cousins, both played by young Oscar winner Duke (The Miracle Worker). She played Patty Lane, a fun-​ loving teenager from Brooklyn Heights, New York, and Cathy Lane, her elegant and refined Scottish cousin who lived with Patty’s family (the parents were played by William Schallert and Jean Byron). This typically

silly 1960s sitcom—​ identities switched, mischief ensues—​ joined the trend of shows whose themes outlined the series’ premise. With lively music by Sid Ramin (1919–​2019) and clever lyrics by Robert Wells, the song introduced each twin and described them in a memorably sixties fashion: “. . . where Cathy adores a minuet, the Ballet Russe and crepes suzette /​our Patty loves her rock ’n’ roll, a hot dog makes her lose control /​what a wild duet!” Ramin began his television career as an arranger on Milton Berle’s Texaco Star Theater (NBC, 1948–​1956) and became a well-​known Broadway orchestrator, winning an Oscar and a Grammy for his work on the 1961 film version of West Side Story. He landed The Patty Duke Show when writer Robert Alan Arthur (with whom he had been working on the stage show Kwamina in Toronto) introduced him to series creator-​producer Sidney Sheldon. Wells had written the lyrics for Mel Torme’s internationally popular “Christmas Song” (“Chestnuts roasting on an open fire . . .”). Ramin recalled that their approach was upbeat: “I composed the front of [the song]. Then I presented that to Bob and he put lyrics to it. Then we both sat down and extended it; that we kind of worked out together from his lyric. We practically wrote the song side by side, sitting on his piano bench.” Ramin achieved the honor of composer credit during the main-​title sequence, a then-​unprecedented move that he attributed to his friendship with creator Sheldon. Few other composers (aside from Dave Brubeck on Mr. Broadway in 1964, and Mike Post on several Stephen J. Cannell shows more than two decades later) received such front-​end credit during the first five decades of television. While scoring The Patty Duke Show in New York, Ramin gained considerable fame on Madison Avenue for writing commercial jingles, notably the “Come Alive” campaign for Pepsi-​Cola (1964). He then was signed to score Peter Falk’s first series, The Trials of O’Brien (1965–​1966, CBS), about a disorganized but brilliant lawyer. Ramin composed a jaunty theme for O’Brien (and got the great Johnny Mercer to write a lyric, which the producers never used) as well as subsidiary themes for several of the series’ running characters. The series died but the main theme lived on, in a way: it was quite similar to Ramin’s 1966 Diet Pepsi jingle, “Music to Watch Girls By,” which became a worldwide hit and was recorded nearly two hundred times. It is hard to imagine a greater contrast between a composer’s film and television careers than that of Jerry Fielding. In films, he was well known for his music for the grim, often bloody pictures of directors Sam Peckinpah and Michael Winner (The Wild Bunch, The Mechanic), yet in TV, he was often called to score light music for half-​hour comedies. Fielding lent an appropriately military tone to the music for the Ernest Borgnine wartime comedy McHale’s Navy (1962–​1966, ABC), although its jaunty theme was actually composed by former Frank Sinatra

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bandleader Axel Stordahl (1913–​1963). Fielding wound up scoring both big-​screen films based on the show (about the misadventures of the crew of a navy PT boat in the South Pacific), as well as Broadside (1964–​1965, ABC), a female variation on the formula that starred Kathy Nolan as one of a quartet of women mechanics stationed on a South Pacific island. McHale’s Navy was just a warmup for Fielding’s most popular series, another World War II sitcom titled Hogan’s Heroes (1965–​1971, CBS). Bob Crane starred as an American officer in charge of Allied soldiers in a German prisoner-​of-​war camp run by an incompetent colonel (Werner Klemperer). The show’s content offended some survivors as making light of Nazi atrocities and remains controversial in reruns decades later. Fielding’s main theme was a bouncy march that made an impression because of its surprising orchestration and dynamics: starting boldly with heavy, military-​style percussion (establishing the POW camp locale) then segueing to a jovial mood with woodwinds and brass, as the individual cast members were introduced and the lighthearted premise became clear. Fielding, who also composed the incidental music for the series, would work on about two dozen other comedies in his career but would never have a bigger hit. Many lasted just a season or two: Run, Buddy, Run (1966–​1967, CBS) with Jack Sheldon as a man on the run from inept mobsters; The Good Guys (1968–​1970, CBS), a Bob Denver–​Herb Edelman show about a diner; The Governor and J.J. (1969–​1970, CBS) with Dan Dailey and Julie Sommars as a Midwestern state’s chief executive and his daughter;

Jerry Fielding.

The Little People (1972–​1974, NBC) with Brian Keith and Shelley Fabares as father-​and-​daughter pediatricians in Hawaii; and Diana (1973–​1974, NBC), Diana Rigg’s disastrous American debut as a sitcom star. Three of Fielding’s series became minor classics. The critical favorite He and She (1967–​1968, CBS) cast real-​life spouses Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss as a cartoonist and his wife, along with Jack Cassidy as the egomaniacal star of a TV series based on Benjamin’s comic strip. The short-​lived Chicago Teddy Bears (1971, CBS), set in a 1920s Chicago speakeasy, was renowned for its classic cars and Fielding’s delightful score, which incorporated both ragtime and Dixieland elements. Bridget Loves Bernie (1972–​1973, CBS) was much debated, and finally canceled (despite its top-​10 ranking in the Nielsen ratings), because of its interfaith marriage theme: Catholic girl (Meredith Baxter) wed to a Jewish man (David Birney). Bewitched (1964–​1972, ABC) was the longest-​running of the Screen Gems comedies and an early beneficiary of the coming trend of pop songwriters involved with television music. Music producer and publisher Don Kirshner had, in 1963, sold his Aldon Music to Columbia Pictures-​Screen Gems and was named president of the company’s music division. The deal included the contracts of several top songwriters for the pop market, including Neil Sedaka and the hit-​producing songwriting teams of Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, Carole King and Gerry Goffin, and Howard Greenfield and Jack Keller. Composer Keller (1936–​2005) and lyricist Greenfield (1936–​ 1986) wrote the hits “Everybody’s Somebody’s Fool” and “My Heart Has a Mind of Its Own” for Connie Francis, and “When Somebody Loves You” for Frank Sinatra. With Neil Sedaka, Greenfield had also written “Breaking Up Is Hard to Do,” “Calendar Girl,” and “Where the Boys Are.” Greenfield and Keller, still writing in New York’s Tin Pan Alley, were assigned to view the pilot for the Elizabeth Montgomery sitcom about a witch named Samantha who was married to an advertising executive (Dick York, later Dick Sargent). “The pilot had used [Frank] Sinatra’s ‘Witchcraft,’ but they didn’t want to pay for ‘Witchcraft,’ so they asked us to write something,” Keller recalled. “We only had a week to write the song, do the demo, and get it out to California. And they accepted it and they put it on. The show was a smash. We had 13 recordings the first year [including] Peggy Lee and Steve Lawrence.” The series, however, adopted an instrumental version. The animated main title—​of a gorgeous witch riding sidesaddle on a broom across the night sky, writing the word “Bewitched” over the city—​was underscored with a light orchestral arrangement by series composer Warren Barker. (There was talk of a vocal during the second year, Keller said, but “they didn’t want to spend $2,500 to pay for that portion of the session that Jerry Vale agreed to do.”) Barker (1923–​2006) was called to do Bewitched on the basis of an album that he had recorded using the exotic instruments that actor William Holden

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had collected on his around-​the-​world travels. “The producer thought it was exactly the type of music that they were looking for. It was full of bells and tinkling sounds, and they thought that it fit the mood of Bewitched,” Barker recalled. The xylophone signature for Samantha’s trademark nose-​twitch was Barker’s idea, and he incorporated it into the main title. “We caught a lot of the action musically,” Barker said, “and because things happened so fast on the show, most of the music cues were very short. If we had a cue that lasted 10 to 15 seconds, that was a long piece of music.” Greenfield and Keller went on to write the theme for Gidget with Sally Field (1965–​1966, ABC)—​“Wait’ll you see my Gidget /​you’ll want her for your Valentine . . .”—​as well as lesser Screen Gems efforts, Camp Runamuck (1965–​1966, NBC) and The Wackiest Ship in the Army (1965–​ 1966, NBC). They also penned a new theme for the hugely popular Hazel with Shirley Booth (1961–​1966, NBC, CBS), although its original Sammy Cahn–​Jimmy Van Heusen theme song also continued to be used (one as the main title, the other for the end credits). Keller had an even bigger hit with “Seattle,” the theme for the lighthearted David Soul–​Bobby Sherman western Here Come the Brides (1968–​ 1970, ABC), which he co-​wrote with Ernie Sheldon. Hugo Montenegro, who arranged the main title (in its original instrumental version, replaced after a few weeks by a vocal version by The New Establishment), also received songwriting credit. Perry Como’s version of the song went to Number 2 on the adult contemporary charts and was a top-​40 hit on the pop charts.

Hugo Montenegro.

Montenegro (1925–​1981) had an earlier Screen Gems hit of his own: I Dream of Jeannie (1965–​1970, NBC), with the outlandish premise of a genie (Barbara Eden) in love with the astronaut (Larry Hagman) who discovers and frees her from her 2,000-​year imprisonment in a bottle. Montenegro’s charming samba, with its pizzicato-​string opening followed by a big brassy statement, captured both the femininity and the power of the character in the series’ second season and beyond. As creator Sidney Sheldon explained in his memoirs: “I hired Dick Wess, a talented composer, to write the music for the first season, but after hearing it, I felt it was wrong for the show. [For the second year] I used a bright, upbeat melody written by Hugo Montenegro.” Montenegro’s theme was an instrumental (set to an amusing animated title sequence by Warner Bros. great Friz Freleng), but there were lyrics (by Buddy Kaye) that were later heard in the composer’s 45-​rpm single. The composer received his only Emmy nomination for an episode of another Screen Gems show, the post–​Civil War western The Outcasts (1968–​1969, ABC). Songwriters Mann and Weil, meanwhile, wrote the theme for The Farmer’s Daughter (1963–​1966, ABC), and producer Kirshner went on to oversee the music for the first season of The Monkees (1966–​1968, NBC), including hiring pop writers Tommy Boyce and Bobby Hart to compose the title song (“Hey, hey, we’re the Monkees . . .”). Mike Nesmith, Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork were the fictionalized, fun-​loving rock ’n’ roll group based loosely on the Beatles (and their antics on the freewheeling format of the Fab Four’s 1964 film A Hard Day’s Night). Stu Phillips composed the scores, but the songs—​including the hits “Last Train to Clarksville,” “I’m a Believer,” “Pleasant Valley Sunday,” and “Daydream Believer”—​were written by established rockers such as Boyce and Hart, Neil Diamond, King and Goffin, and John Stewart, respectively. Two sitcoms took to the airwaves with outrageous songs in the fall of 1965. F Troop (1965–​1967, ABC) sent up the western with Forrest Tucker and Larry Storch as scheming, Bilko-​style con artists at a cavalry post in the post–​Civil War West. The song, a snappy march by William Lava (Cheyenne) with a lyric by Irving Taylor, explained how their bumbling captain (Ken Berry) took command of Fort Courage. Its funniest line would later become politically incorrect: “. . . where Indian fights are colorful sights and nobody takes a lickin’ /​where paleface and redskin both turn chicken. . . .” My Mother the Car (1965–​1966, NBC) was one of a kind as a sitcom. Not only did it open with a song that set up the bizarre premise, the lyrics were actually printed, follow-​ the-​ bouncing-​ ball-​ style, on the screen during the entire main-​title sequence. Written and sung by Paul Hampton (b. 1937) to a bouncy Dixie accompaniment (plus ooga horns) and images of Jerry Van Dyke tooling around town in his 1928 Porter, it

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explained: “. . . Well you all may think my story is more fiction than it’s fact /​But believe it or not my mother dear decided she’d come back—​as a car. . . .” Oklahoma-​born Hampton was an actor and songwriter (he starred in 1958’s Senior Prom and co-​wrote the 1961 country hit “Sea of Heartbreak”; later, he was a semi-​regular in James Garner’s Nichols and co-​starred in Lady Sings the Blues). He ran into My Mother the Car producer-​director Rod Amateau at the gym, heard the plotline, and thought, “that’s a good title for a song.” Later that day, he dashed off the song “in a minute” and, the next day at the gym, convinced Amateau to let him demonstrate it before the United Artists executives bankrolling the series. The on-​screen lyrics and bouncing ball were also Hampton’s idea “because the song is so peppy and has a great feel to it.” He also recommended composer-​arranger Ralph Carmichael to write the Dixieland-​style arrangement (and score the episodes). Hampton overdubbed himself four times on vocals. “That song, to me, was a lark,” Hampton said. “I did it just for the fun of it. It was a really wacky premise.” My Mother the Car earned terrible reviews and would eventually be denounced as one of the worst series in the history of television—​but its title song remains a memorable, if kitschy, footnote in TV-​music history. The potential for controversy surrounding another strange sitcom actually trickled down to the composer. “I was doing a pilot,” Dominic Frontiere recalled, “and I got a call from Leonard Goldenson.” Goldenson was the president of ABC; Frontiere was floored. “Are you sure he wants to talk to me?” he asked the secretary. According to the composer, Goldenson expressed enormous concern about the show he was scoring. “I hope you realize what a serious situation you’re in. Sixty million dollars worth of product is hanging on your shoulders, and you’re going to be totally responsible if you do this wrong,” Frontiere remembered Goldenson saying. The series was The Flying Nun (1967–​ 1970, ABC), about Sister Bertrille (Sally Field), a novice at a Puerto Rican convent who discovered that, owing to her stature and her cornette, she could easily become airborne with the winds. “They were so worried about Catholicism, and how the music would play,” Frontiere said. He described his approach to Goldenson: “As far as I’m concerned, it’s a Broadway musical. I’m going to write a show opener, and the title of the song is, ‘Who needs wings to fly? Certainly not I.’ “I had already come to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to write any organ music. And in those days, we had a brand-​new music that didn’t have any gender attached to it, called the bossa nova. So I put a lot of bossa novas into the show, because it could represent almost anything.” Three 1960s and 1970s comedies took the then-​unusual tack of hiring pop singer-​songwriters to supply distinctive themes: The Courtship of Eddie’s Father (1969–​1972, ABC), whose title tune was penned by Harry Nilsson;

Chico and the Man (1974–​1978, NBC), by José Feliciano; and Welcome Back, Kotter (1975–​1979, ABC), by John Sebastian. All three had one individual in common: producer James Komack. Komack’s surprising composer choices extended back even farther, to his role as producer on Mister Roberts (1965–​1966, NBC), a sitcom adaptation of the Broadway and movie hit starring Roger Smith in the title role. Komack had been president of the first Stan Kenton fan club back in the 1940s, so for his World War II comedy he decided to hire the bandleader to score his show (although his original, quickly discarded, notion was to have Kenton play the captain). Kenton (1911–​1979) actually scored the first two episodes. “It was a terrific score, a lot of great Kenton music,” Komack recalled. “But it wouldn’t fit [the picture].” Both scores were thrown out as unusable, with Warner composer Frank Perkins writing a new theme and scoring the first episode, and Johnny Mandel replacing the second score. The Kenton music went into the library, but during the entire 30-​episode run only one piece of original Kenton material (a cue called “Elysium Anchorage,” lasting all of 23 seconds) was ever used in the series. For Eddie’s Father, about the relationship between a widower (Bill Bixby) and his constantly matchmaking son (Brandon Cruz), Komack went searching for a fresh sound: “something that hadn’t been done before,” he said. “Otherwise, with a standard music track, The Courtship of Eddie’s Father would sound like every other show on television: Father Knows Best or My Mother the Car. I didn’t want that. I wanted to do something that was very up, and hip, and accessible.” He discovered Nilsson, whom he had not heard of, by listening to a stack of contemporary pop records he had been loaned. At the time, by coincidence, Nilsson was actually on the MGM lot (where Komack was making Eddie’s Father) acting in director Otto Preminger’s all-​star bomb Skidoo (1968), which he later scored. Nilsson (1941–​1994) came up with a song that began, “People, let me tell you ’bout my best friend . . .” and included, at the end, a number of offbeat vocal effects, which sounded a bit old-​fashioned to Komack. “It sounds like Rudy Vallee with a megaphone,” the producer recalled telling Nilsson. Still, Komack liked it and went a step further, asking the singer-​songwriter to interpolate musical commentary within the episodes themselves. Nilsson’s happy tune played over main-​and end-​ title visuals of Bixby and Cruz strolling, running, and frolicking along the seashore. The performer’s end-​title credit was certainly unique in television history: “music and lyrics written and sunged by Nilsson.” Nilsson’s friend George Aliceson Tipton arranged and conducted the scores (Tipton would later go on to write the music for the 1970s and 1980s sitcoms Soap and Benson). To Komack’s chagrin, however, Nilsson never recorded the theme for commercial release. He later wrote and sang the delightful song score for the animated TV-​movie The Point (1971, ABC).

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When he created Chico and the Man, a sitcom set in East Los Angeles, Komack again sought a musical sound that would seem right for the story: the often comic relationship between a white garage owner (Jack Albertson) and his Mexican-​American employee (Freddie Prinze). Prinze played a Chicano, although he was of partly Puerto Rican descent; José Feliciano (b. 1945) was also Puerto Rican and, a few years earlier, had a top-​10 hit with his cover of the Doors’ “Light My Fire.” Komack traveled to Las Vegas, where Feliciano was performing, to ask him to provide a theme. Later, the producer played the pilot for the blind musician. “He listened to the entire dialogue,” Komack said, “and I told him what it was about.” Feliciano and his wife, Janna Merlyn Feliciano, wound up writing not one but two songs: the Latin-​flavored title tune (“Chico, don’t be discouraged /​the man, he ain’t so hard to understand . . .”), featuring Feliciano’s trademark acoustic guitar sound, which won an Emmy nomination; and a second song (“Hard Times in El Barrio”) that Komack chose to play under the end titles. Feliciano also appeared in a 1976 episode. On Welcome Back, Kotter, Komack never even met his composer, former Lovin’ Spoonful singer-​songwriter John Sebastian (b. 1944); they only spoke on the phone. It was Alan Sacks, co-​creator (with Gabriel Kaplan, the star) of the series, who initially suggested a John Sebastian–​ style, easy-​rocking theme for the show about a teacher (Kaplan, a popular standup comedian) who returns to his old Brooklyn high school to instruct a group of hopeless misfits known as the “sweathogs” (including later film star John Travolta). Sacks spoke with agent Dave Bendett, an old friend and fellow Brooklynite; as it happened, Bendett had just taken over management of John Sebastian, and a meeting was set. Sebastian had not previously written a TV theme, although the Lovin’ Spoonful had contributed songs and music to the 1966 films What’s Up, Tiger Lily? and You’re a Big Boy Now. Sebastian did not see the pilot; he read a 10-​page synopsis and two scripts before calling Sacks back to say: “Look, Alan, I know you want this [series] to be called Kotter, but don’t make me write something called ‘Kotter’ because nothing rhymes with it except ‘otter.’ Let me go for the gist of the story and put it together that way.” The songwriter recalled spending about 20 minutes on one tune before deciding that “it was only close” and discarding it. “I started again, and I really wasn’t halfway through writing ‘Welcome Back’ before I thought that this thing could not only go on the television [show], it could go on the radio.” Sebastian’s “Welcome back /​your dreams were your ticket out . . .” hooked Sacks, Komack, and company—​so much so that they actually changed the title of the series from Kotter to Welcome Back, Kotter to capitalize on Sebastian’s catchy tune. On the television theme, Sebastian both sang and played acoustic guitar; in the single version, he played harmonica as well. Commenting on the sound, Sebastian said, “We

knew what guys from Brooklyn would sound like. So part of the spirit in the studio was being the ‘sweathogs’ for the afternoon. Just being very New York in everything that we played.” The song went to Number 1 on the Billboard pop charts in 1976, the second TV tune to do so that year (the S.W.A.T. theme preceded it by several weeks). No one had more hit sitcom themes than Charles Fox. One of the busiest film and TV composers of the 1970s and 1980s, Fox counted among his successes Love, American Style (1969–​1974, ABC), Happy Days (1974–​ 1984, ABC), Laverne & Shirley (1976–​1983, ABC), The Love Boat (1976–​ 1986, ABC), Angie (1979–​1980, ABC), and The Hogan Family (1986–​1991, NBC). Fox (b. 1940) arrived in Hollywood just in time to update the sound of the television underscore. He was in the vanguard of composers who brought a more contemporary sensibility to TV music after a decade of classically oriented composition. Fox graduated from New York’s High School of Music and Art, and continued his musical studies with Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Robert Russell Bennett introduced him to bandleader Skitch Henderson, who hired Fox to write original material for The Tonight Show band in 1962. After scoring documentaries, writing sports themes (including ABC’s Wide World of Sports in 1965 and the original Monday Night Football in 1970), and scoring a rare dramatic special (Mia Farrow’s Johnny Belinda, 1967, ABC), he entered the film-​scoring arena with songs and underscore for the Jane Fonda sci-​fi picture Barbarella (1968).

Charles Fox.

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While working on Goodbye, Columbus (1969) at Paramount, he was offered the pilot of Love, American Style. “It was a great experience for me, because music was very much a part of that show,” Fox recalled. “They wanted to go with a more contemporary-​sounding score, as opposed to a more traditional one. “Love, American Style may have been one of the first television series that really used a pop rhythm section,” Fox said. “It was like a record-​ oriented score. I had completely free range to develop my musical ideas, which combined pop sounds and styles with classical music influences.” Fox worked with writer-​producer Arnold Margolin on songs for the pilot (which was “almost a musical,” Fox recalled) and remained with the series for its entire run. Of four consecutive Emmy nominations, Fox won twice for his Love, American Style music: the first season for his title song with Margolin; and the fourth season (1972–​1973) for his scores. Because Love, American Style was essentially a comedic anthology (three or four different segments per hour, usually light, amusing romantic tales with new casts), Fox was expected to create original scores for each. Yet some of his most creative work was reserved for the blackouts, brief (sometimes just 20 seconds) bits between playlets. “I either scored them with the theme, crisper, faster-​moving versions, or in the style of a classical composer, like a Chopin waltz or a Beethoven sonata,” Fox said. “So if you had a silly romantic scene and played it with a Brahmsian kind of piano flourish, the juxtaposition of the two things made it fun.” The pilot for Happy Days was a sketch on Love, American Style. The show, according to Fox, didn’t initially sell; only when the movie American Graffiti became a hit did ABC buy the series, which was set in the 1950s and, like the movie, starred Ron Howard as a high school kid, this time in Milwaukee. Fox and lyricist Norman Gimbel (who together had written the Grammy-​winning 1973 hit “Killing Me Softly”) were asked to write a song similar to the Bill Haley tune “Rock Around the Clock,” which was such an important component of the American Graffiti score. Gimbel’s response to “one, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock” became “Sunday, Monday, Happy Days /​Tuesday, Wednesday, Happy Days. . . .” “I wasn’t into the pop music of the fifties,” Fox admitted. “I really had very little familiarity with those records at that time. I started listening to pop music in the sixties. So for this project, I immersed myself in the records of the fifties in order to write a new song that would sound like a hit from the fifties, and yet one that could become a hit in the seventies.” ABC decided against using the Fox-​Gimbel song and, for the first season, bought “Rock Around the Clock” for use over the series’ main title (again, to reinforce the actually nonexistent American Graffiti connection). An instrumental version of the Happy Days theme ran over the end titles. Only later, as part of the many changes made during the series’ run (shooting with three cameras before a live audience, playing up Henry Winkler as the Fonz), did Happy Days make its main-​title debut as a song.

The show, and the song, were almost immediate hits. Happy Days shot to the top of the Nielsen ratings for the 1976–​1977 season, and the single, sung by Pratt & McClain, reached Number 5 on the Billboard charts in 1976. For its first spinoff, Laverne & Shirley, Fox and Gimbel were again enlisted for a title song, although the presentation reel was hastily assembled before the characters were fully developed. According to Fox, the producers’ original descriptions of the girls (played by Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams) were “two blue-​collar brewery workers who had dreams of getting out and achieving things in life.” So Fox and Gimbel wrote a song about “these girls wishing and hoping that their dreams would come true.” The producers’ reaction to that initial effort, however, was that the girls “were not going to sit around and just wish and hope—​they’re going to make it happen, come out and take the world by storm.” That, said Fox, is how the Laverne & Shirley theme went from “wishing our dreams will come true” to “Making Our Dreams Come True.” Cyndi Grecco’s vocal, produced by Fox and Gimbel, climbed the charts at about the same time that Happy Days was also a hit record. Between feature assignments (The Other Side of the Mountain and Foul Play, both Oscar-​nominated for Best Song) Fox found time to write still another now-​classic theme. The Love Boat was written for the 1976 TV-​ movie pilot. Producer Doug Cramer, according to the composer, had told him that he and Aaron Spelling were effectively shooting “Love, American Style on the ocean,” and that the theme should be “filled with romance and adventure and the kind of excitement that you’d get from taking off on a cruise.” Fox reprised the theme in the 1977 sequel; for a third movie, also in 1977, he asked Paul Williams (with whom he had collaborated on the movie One on One, writing songs for Seals & Crofts) to pen a lyric (“Love, exciting and new /​Come aboard, we’re expecting you . . .”). Jack Jones sang it, and the song accompanied the series when it premiered that fall. Jones’s vocal was heard every season except the last; Dionne Warwick performed a new version in 1985. For Angie, a sitcom about a poor waitress (Donna Pescow) who fell for a rich doctor (Robert Hays), Fox and Gimbel wrote “Different Worlds,” sung by Maureen McGovern (the vocalist who had made a hit of “The Morning After” from The Poseidon Adventure). The series lasted only a year and a half, but McGovern’s record went to Number 18 on the charts. Other memorable Fox themes included “The First Years” for The Paper Chase (1978–​1979, CBS), with a Gimbel lyric sung by Seals & Crofts, and, with lyricist Stephen Geyer, “Together Through the Years” for Valerie/​ Valerie’s Family/​The Hogan Family (1986–​1991, NBC, CBS), performed by Roberta Flack. Fox also wrote several acclaimed scores for television films, including Victory at Entebbe (1976, ABC), Baby M (1988, ABC), and Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232 (1992, ABC).

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“Who can turn the world on with her smile? Who can take a nothing day and suddenly make it all seem worthwhile? . . .” A tune that is as instantly identifiable as the image of Mary Tyler Moore tossing her hat in the air on the streets of Minneapolis: “Love Is All Around,” singer-​songwriter Sonny Curtis’s theme for The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–​1977, CBS). The premise had the ex–​Dick Van Dyke Show co-​star playing a single young career woman, associate producer at a second-​rate TV news operation with a gruff boss (Ed Asner), a moronic anchorman (Ted Knight), and a cutup newswriter (Gavin MacLeod); and, at home, a wisecracking neighbor (Valerie Harper) and a vain landlady (Cloris Leachman). The Mary Tyler Moore Show went on to become one of the most beloved of all television comedy series. Texas-​born Curtis (b. 1937) had played guitar behind Buddy Holly in the late 1950s and had written hits for other artists (including “I Fought the Law” for Bobby Fuller in 1966 and, later, “More Than I Can Say” for Leo Sayer in 1980). As it happened, an old friend was working in the office of Arthur Price, manager for Mary Tyler Moore (and later president of the MTM production company), and tipped off Curtis that they might need a theme song. “He came by my house that very day at lunch and dropped off a four-​page format—​just a treatment of what the show was going to be about,” Curtis recalled. “So I wrote [the song] in about two hours. And I called him back and said, ‘Where do you want me to go sing this thing?’ ” Curtis, who lived in Studio City at the time, was sent over to the nearby offices of co-​creators James L. Brooks and Allan Burns. They had barely settled into their new digs, Burns remembered: “Sonny Curtis, a bearded guy, walked in. He was very shy, kind of mumbled in his beard. He took out a scrap of paper, put it on his guitar case and just started singing this song. And Jim and I just looked at each other [and said] ‘It’s perfect. How can this be so easy?’ We never wanted anything else other than that song.” At the time, Curtis had the title “Love Is All Around” and a verse that asked, “How will you make it on your own?”, reflecting Mary Richards’s new arrival alone in Minneapolis. “Fortunately, Doug [Gilmore, his pal at the Price agency] didn’t give me very much information,” the songwriter explained. “I think too much information can really bog things down. You don’t want to write too much. What Doug gave me was a story about this girl from a small town in the Midwest who had been jilted and gotten a job at a TV station in Minneapolis, and couldn’t afford her apartment, that sort of stuff. That’s all I had to go on, so I just took it from there. Of course, it wasn’t like rocket science or anything, just a one-​verse little song,” he laughed. “Jim called a whole bunch of people in, had me sing it five or six times, and finally ordered a cassette recorder and put it down. He wanted to take it to Minneapolis with him,” Curtis said. “They were going to shoot the [main title] that weekend.” Curtis originally concluded the song with the

line, “You might just make it after all . . .” but, at the request of the producers, altered it for the second season to a more assured “you’re gonna make it after all.” It was also in the second season that Curtis added that memorable opening line: “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” (Curtis later wrote the theme for the short-​lived 1977 Ned Beatty sitcom Szysznyk and one of the themes for Burt Reynolds’s Evening Shade, in 1991.) That “Love Is All Around” seemed so right for Moore was a testament to the sound that arranger-​conductor Pat Williams was able to achieve, with a little orchestral massaging. Williams’s assignment was also something of a fluke. In 1970, the former New York big-​band arranger had only been in Hollywood for two years. His wife and Burns’s wife had been friends; Burns knew of Williams’s jazz records. Recalled Williams, “It wasn’t a particularly big deal. I don’t think the network even cared about it that much. It was just a three-​camera show.” Curtis had already composed the song, so there was never any intent for Williams to compete. “My job was to do whatever the underscore situation was, mostly bridges,” he says. And, when it came time to record the theme, “we put some strings on it, tried to warm it up a little bit so that it fit [Moore’s] character. Make the arrangement somewhat appropriate. Years later, one of the things that [20th Century-​Fox musical director] Lionel Newman told me was that he really liked what I had done with The Mary Tyler Moore Show and some of the other [MTM] shows. “It’s very difficult to write all those little bridges and make them sound reasonably interesting. It may be a three-​or four-​bar cue but there are so many starts on a [recording] date. You have to do maybe 10 or 12 cues a particular show, so there are 30 to 35 starts to record. And you have to keep the orchestra’s attention level up. It’s not as easy as it sounds.”

Patrick Williams.

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Williams struck gold with The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The series became a hit, and MTM Enterprises became one of television’s leading independent production companies. Williams—​while also pursuing other scoring opportunities, like Quinn Martin’s The Streets of San Francisco—​ became a fixture at MTM, scoring all seven seasons of Mary Tyler Moore as well as The Bob Newhart Show (1972–​1978, CBS), Paul Sand’s Friends and Lovers (1974–​1975, CBS), The Tony Randall Show (1976–​1978, ABC, CBS), Lou Grant (1977–​1982, CBS), FM (1989–​1990, NBC), and many others. The original Bob Newhart Show, like the Moore series, posed an arranging as well as a composing challenge. The comedian played a Chicago psychologist, harassed at work by clients and fellow office denizens (Peter Bonerz as an orthodontist and Marcia Wallace as their receptionist) and at home by an airline navigator (Bill Daily), with only his understanding wife (Suzanne Pleshette) to provide some stability in a life filled with crazies. Producer Lorenzo Music and his wife Henrietta had composed a theme that Williams was asked to adapt for the series’ main-​title sequence. Williams’s brassy sound, designed to establish the Chicago setting, bookended the more relaxed love theme (composed by the Musics). As for the underscore, “the approach was not wildly different,” Williams recalls, “but the bands were completely different. Newhart had a couple of saxophones and some brass. It was more like a little hot jazz band, with no strings at all. On Mary’s show, we always used a string section, which was more feminine. Newhart was a little edgier.” Producer Jay Tarses, whom Williams met on the Newhart show, continued to commission music from the composer into the eighties and nineties. Williams’s theme for The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd (1987–​ 1991, NBC, Lifetime), the thoughtful and nuanced Blair Brown comedy-​ drama about a single woman in New York, featured jazz violin as the solo instrument. “We talked about an uptown kind of jazzy feel,” Tarses said, “and he came up with that Stephane Grappelli kind of ‘le jazz hot’ violin” as the musical voice for Molly. Her boyfriend was a jazz saxophonist, so music became an integral part of many scores; Williams was twice Emmy-​nominated for Molly Dodd. The most music-​centric of the MTM shows was WKRP in Cincinnati (1978–​1982, CBS), set at an Ohio radio station whose new program director (Gary Sandy) has just installed a rock ’n’ roll format, including outrageous DJs (Howard Hesseman, Tim Reid), while the manager (Gordon Jump) worries and tries to maintain a degree of sanity. Creator Hugh Wilson had been in the advertising business in Atlanta before becoming a TV writer in the mid-​1970s. When he got his own show, he recruited his old commercial-​jingle friends Tom Wells (1941–​ 2012) and Jim Ellis (b. 1948) for the opening and closing music. “We had

done quality work for him before, and he liked the way we worked,” Ellis recalled. Wells and Wilson wrote the title song, arranged by Ellis and sung by Steve Carlisle (“Baby if you’ve ever wondered /​wondered whatever became of me /​I’m living on the air in Cincinnati /​Cincinnati WKRP . . .”). “WKRP had been the MOR [Middle of the Road, a radio term] station for years,” Ellis said. “They had been losing money so they became a rock ’n’ roll station. The opening song was going to be a hip MOR, so it fell to me to write the rock ’n’ roll ending song; it was never going to be sung, it was meant to be an instrumental.” But when Ellis recorded the end-​title track, he was inspired to sing gibberish lyrics, which Wilson loved and retained for the show. “I was mimicking a rock ’n’ roll singer,” Ellis says with a laugh. Wells later wrote the theme for the George Dzundza convenience-​store sitcom Open All Night (1981–​1982, ABC), with hilarious lyrics by producers Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses that, in classic sitcom form, related the sad backstory (“he went away to college but he didn’t do that good /​so the army drafted him and he got sent to Fort Hood /​served a two-​year hitch, never went overseas /​spent a year peelin’ potatoes and a year coppin’ Z’s”). For the Patchett-​ Tarses series Buffalo Bill (1983–​1984, NBC) with Dabney Coleman as an obnoxious talk-​show host, they used a Wells-​Ellis anthem written two years earlier for a Federal Express industrial film “almost note for note.” A different kind of ensemble comedy, Taxi (1978–​1983, ABC, NBC), was distinguished by music from a major jazz artist. A motley crew of New York cab drivers (Judd Hirsch, Marilu Henner, Danny DeVito, Tony Danza, Christopher Lloyd) gather daily at the company garage and swap stories about their lives; it won three Emmys as outstanding comedy series. Jazz keyboardist Bob James (b. 1939) supplied all the music, but in a surprising departure from tradition, he never saw any footage and never recorded in Los Angeles. James’s fourth album of contemporary jazz was a favorite of producer David Davis. “Based upon the fact that they had liked my record, I was immediately concerned that it would be difficult to re-​create that sound for a 30-​minute sitcom where the cues were only 10 seconds long, or whatever,” James later said. “The moods that he liked were from tunes that were five, six, seven minutes long.” James proposed retaining his New York band and recording “a sort of library of music: what if I gave them six or seven songs and tried to make as wide a variety of moods as I could, happy, sad, fast, slow, whatever. So that’s what we did on the first session. It turned out to be great.” He proposed a main theme—​“I was thinking taxi, New York City, fast paced, car horns, something with high energy,” James recalled—​that was turned down by Davis and his fellow producers (and, retitled “Touchdown,” became the title tune for James’s sixth album).

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One of his other tunes, inspired by a script in which Alex (Hirsch) arranges a blind date with a woman named Angela, was much more what they had in mind. With James on electric piano and George Marge on recorder, it was both hip and sweet at the same time. “It threw me for a loop because I didn’t know about the footage of the cab going across the bridge at dusk, which was a very mellow kind of mood. I wasn’t a part of that discussion, but when they heard my ‘Angela’ composition, they loved it and thought it fit the mood of the show perfectly.” James returned to the studio “at least three or four times” to record new material for the series. “We almost thought of it as them commissioning me to do an album. They ended up agreeing with my idea of not treating it in the conventional TV scoring way. They gave me total freedom. I got spoiled and never did another TV show after that.” The groundbreaking comedy series of producer Norman Lear, from All in the Family to Maude and Sanford and Son, made him the single most successful TV producer of the 1970s. Unlike Sheldon Leonard, however, Lear rarely stuck with the same composer. For All in the Family (1971–​1979, CBS)—​Lear’s controversial sitcom about Queens, New York, bigot Archie Bunker, his good-​hearted wife Edith, daughter Gloria, and liberal son-​in-​law Mike—​the producer defied TV conventions not only in program concept but in theme music as well. Having worked with Broadway songwriters Charles Strouse and Lee Adams on his 1968 feature film The Night They Raided Minsky’s, Lear asked them, rather than the usual Hollywood-​based composers, to write a theme. Strouse (b. 1928) and Adams (b. 1924), who had a major hit with Bye Bye Birdie and who would later write Annie, came up with “Those Were the Days,” a nostalgic paean to simpler times in America, with a hint of ragtime influence: “Boy, the way Glenn Miller played /​Songs that made the hit parade /​Guys like us, we had it made. . . .” Strouse recalled: “He paid us a few hundred dollars; it was all he could afford. And he said that he would like it scored for chorus and orchestra. I told him at the time that you couldn’t even get a studio for that amount of money. I suggested that, when I was a kid, my mother used to sit at the piano and we all stood around to sing. [The Bunkers] are a lower-​middle-​ class family; why doesn’t somebody sit at the piano and everyone just gather around and sing?” In fact, Strouse added, “There was no choice because there was no money to do anything else. So I sat down and played it, off-​camera,” while Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton (as Archie and Edith) sang on-​camera. (Strouse’s original piano performance, heard in the initial episodes, was eventually replaced with that of a studio pianist.) Surprisingly—​considering Stapleton’s in-​character screeching of lines like “and you knew who you were then”—​the song, as released commercially, went to Number 30 on the Billboard easy-​listening chart. The

Strouse-​Adams tune was used only over the show’s main title. Jazz composer Roger Kellaway (b. 1939) contributed a player piano-​style tune (subsequently titled “Remembering You” with an O’Connor lyric, one he sang on an album but that was never heard in the show) for the end titles. The immediate success of All in the Family led to the inevitable spinoffs. First was Maude (1972–​1978, CBS), Edith Bunker’s loud, outspoken cousin, winningly played by Beatrice Arthur. Again, Lear called for a vocal to accompany the main title, but this time he turned to composer Dave Grusin (another previous collaborator, having scored Lear’s 1967 feature Divorce American Style) and legendary lyricists Marilyn and Alan Bergman (Oscar winners for “The Windmills of Your Mind” and, the year after Maude, for The Way We Were). Alan Bergman recalled that Lear initially asked for “something like Mame. And we said, ‘That’s already been written.’ ” Added Marilyn Bergman: “That was really obvious. We knew that we wanted something to set up the entrance for Bea.” Grusin, they said, came up with a novel concept: a gospel-​flavored song. Donny Hathaway, with piano, organ, and small choir, performed the tune. The Bergman lyrics introduced the character by recalling, with a cheeky wit, courageous women throughout history: “Lady Godiva was a freedom rider /​She didn’t care if the whole world looked /​Joan of Arc, with the Lord to guide her /​She was a sister who really cooked. . . .”

   Marilyn and Alan Bergman.

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Good Times (1974–​1979, CBS) was spun off from Maude, although this time the gospel approach of the title music seemed a little more obvious. Esther Rolle, as Maude’s ex-​maid Florida Evans, was the focal point of this sitcom, about a lower-​class black family in Chicago. Grusin and the Bergmans penned a theme similar in style but with a lyric that characterized the series’ underlying premise of a positive outlook despite trying economic times: “Temporary layoffs, easy-​credit ripoffs /​scratching and surviving . . . Ain’t we lucky we’ve got ‘em /​Good times. . . .” The Jeffersons (1975–​ 1985, CBS) was another All in the Family spinoff, this time about know-​it-​all neighbor George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley) and his long-​suffering wife (Isabel Sanford), whose business success enabled them to move from Queens to Manhattan. “Well, we’re movin’ on up /​to the Eastside /​to a deluxe apartment in the sky . . . we finally got a piece of the pie” nicely summarized the concept. This time, Lear turned to a well-​known pop songwriter, Jeff Barry (b. 1938), whose hits had included “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” “Da Doo Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby” and “Sugar, Sugar.” His co-​writer was an actress who also happened to dabble in songwriting: Ja’net Dubois (1945–​2020), who was then playing Willona Woods on Good Times. Dubois “practically dared” Lear to let her co-​write the song, she told a columnist. “I came up with the hook and the concept,” Barry later remembered. “Ja’net gave me lots of stuff to work with, certainly in the bridge of the song. And most importantly, she sang it. Just the way she sang it was perfect. I’ve written a whole bunch of pop hits, but ‘Movin’ on Up’ is one of the biggest copyrights,” Barry added. “Everybody knows it.” Lear came back to Barry for One Day at a Time (1975–​1984, CBS), a show about a divorced mom (Bonnie Franklin) raising two daughters (Mackenzie Phillips, Valerie Bertinelli). “Norman sent me the script, which had some other name,” Barry recalled. “They weren’t thrilled about the name of the show, and Norman said if I had any ideas [about a different title] to let him know.” Barry suggested One Day at a Time, “and I heard two or three beats of silence. I berated myself, thinking, ‘Who am I to suggest to Norman Lear a name for his show?’ And then he said, ‘I love it, that’s the name of the show.’ ” Barry was, at the time, in the middle of his own divorce (although he gave co-​writing credit to his wife Nancy), and put it this way: “This is it /​ this is life /​the one you get /​so go and have a ball. . . .” Barry considers it among his favorite songs. Lear often turned to the Bergmans for TV themes in subsequent years and, in turn, they turned to composer Marvin Hamlisch as their musical collaborator. They wrote blues numbers for both The Nancy Walker Show (1976, ABC), sung by Walker herself, and another sung by Stephen Bishop for the political satire The Powers That Be (1992–​1993, NBC) starring John Forsythe as a US senator.

Hamlisch and the Bergmans also wrote an evocative, nostalgic title song for Brooklyn Bridge (1991–​1993, CBS), producer Gary David Goldberg’s 1950s paean to his New York childhood, starring Marion Ross. Art Garfunkel sang “a world of its own /​the streets where we played /​the friends on every corner were the best we ever made. . . .” Said Goldberg: “Garfunkel was our first choice. There was something about his voice, so pure and wonderful, that for me goes with that era.” Hamlisch also penned a delightful rag for producer Norman Lear’s short-​lived comedy Hot L Baltimore (1975, ABC). Three of Lear’s top 1970s writers—​Don Nicholl, Michael Ross and Bernie West—​developed and produced Three’s Company (1977–​1984, ABC), a farce about platonic Southern California roommates (John Ritter, Joyce DeWitt, Suzanne Somers) and their landlords (Norman Fell, Audra Lindley). New York–​based Joe Raposo (1937–​1989), who had famously written the Sesame Street theme and many of its classic Muppet songs, wrote the theme with Nicholl. The original plan had been to have the three stars perform it. The producers called in music director Ray Charles (the veteran singer and choral director, not the R&B legend). “I went up there and worked with them for about an hour,” Charles (1918–​2015) later recalled. “We went over and over it,” and when the producers privately asked Charles’s opinion, he told them, “Well, it’s possible.” Having heard Charles perform it, however, they decided they would get a stronger performance from a professional singer and not the actors. So Charles called in another veteran studio singer, Julia Rinker, and the two of them created the now-​famous duet (“come and knock on our door /​we’ve been waiting for you /​where the kisses are hers and hers and his /​three’s company too”). Rinker later said that Charles liked the “loose, jazzy kind of vibe” her voice projected, and that the song “needed to sound youthful, young and alive.” She remembered Raposo conducting from the piano. Charles and Rinker received screen credit for their performance, a rarity for studio singers in that era. Lear (with partner Bud Yorkin) Americanized another British series (as they had with All in the Family) and turned it into another top-​10 hit: Sanford and Son (1972–​1977, NBC), with Redd Foxx and Demond Wilson as a crotchety old junk dealer and his restless son, living together in Los Angeles. Yorkin chose Quincy Jones, at that time Hollywood’s leading African-​American composer, to compose an instrumental theme. Recalled Jones: “I said, Redd Foxx on nationwide TV? I had worked with him thirty years ago at the Apollo in Billy Eckstein’s band, and I couldn’t believe it,” based on Foxx’s reputation for blue material. Yorkin asked Jones to look at the pilot, but the composer replied, “It’s Redd Foxx. I don’t need to see the first episode.” Jones remembered

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having to compose a play-​on for Foxx in a hurry at the Apollo, and the Sanford theme (subtitled “The Streetbeater”) came just as fast: “In about 20 minutes, and we recorded it in about 20 minutes, too, because I had known Foxx so well for so long. It just fell out.” The sound was decidedly funky, featuring a harmonica and an organ. “It was an Earl Bostic kind of feel,” Jones said. “We used a washboard and it felt just right. Dave Grusin [on keyboards] and [bassist] Chuck Rainey were on that date, and Ernie Watts [on electric sax], and it just happened so fast.” Jones’s most creative work in the comedy genre actually came three years earlier, on The Bill Cosby Show (1969–​1971, NBC). Cosby, then a major TV star coming off his triple-​Emmy win for I Spy, had asked his old friend to contribute the music for his new sitcom, about a Los Angeles physical education teacher and coach named Chet Kincaid. Jones had written a lighthearted jazz theme featuring a tenor saxophone. What happened at an early scoring session, which Jones described as “an accident,” led to his first Emmy nomination (1969–​1970) for music composition in a series. “Bill loves jazz so much,” Jones pointed out. “That’s his real frustration. He’d rather be a jazz musician, and he knows a lot about it; he hears it and he understands it. He used to come over from the shooting stage all the time [to the scoring stage]. So one day, I’m watching the screen with the streamers and everything else, and I hear all this noise coming out of the earphones. I said, ‘What the hell is that?’ I look back and there’s Cosby with a sweatsuit on and he’s playing Coltrane on a bassoon! “You know, Cosby can’t play a bassoon. But he knows what Coltrane’s attitude is about. He’s such a maniac. I said, ‘No, Bunions’—​I’ve been calling him Bunions for years—​‘Bunions, you got to get up out of that chair. Here’s a cowbell.’ And he took the cowbell and he had a cigar in his mouth and I’ll never forget it, we went into the theme and he said, ‘Woooo Lord! Hikky-​burr!’ ” And he continued with the half-​spoken, half-​sung but undeniably funny gibberish that Jones then incorporated into both the main-​and end-​title themes. The tune, which Jones later recorded as “Hikky-​Burr,” was co-​credited to Jones and Cosby. Even more interesting was Jones’s handling of the individual scores, which were largely improvised using an all-​star jazz group whose membership changed from week to week. “We had a very unusual style,” Jones explained. “Only Bill would let you get away with that. I had a whole sheet of themes for the orchestra. I never wrote the scores; it was like free-​form, right to synchronization and everything. I would point to the guys and we would go through it once with the thematic material and it was just like creating on the spot. Bill loved that, because every week we’d have Oscar Peterson or Roland Kirk or Cannonball Adderley or Jimmy Smith or Milt Jackson. Every week they’d check in, they’d play the theme and all of the spots, and we’d

have those little bridges, and so forth. Just the most incredible lineup of musicians you ever saw. “I wrote a lot of thematic material. I’d have bass lines and three or four different themes, and we had a kind of master sheet. It was like skydiving. You have to have somebody that understands and lets you do that, like Cosby. He really knew where I was coming from; I said, ‘Let’s try it, it’ll be fun.’ And it was.” Jones became musical director for Cosby’s first variety series, The New Bill Cosby Show (1972–​1973, CBS), composing with Cosby a main theme he called “Chump Change.” But by the mid-​1970s, Jones was busy with other projects and Cosby turned to an old friend, Stu Gardner (b. 1939), to handle musical chores first on his sketch-​comedy series Cos (1976, ABC) and later on his monumentally successful sitcom The Cosby Show (1984–​ 1992, NBC). Cosby and Gardner met in the late 1950s, while the former was serving in the Navy and the latter was playing piano in a Richmond, Virginia, nightclub. “He used to sit in with me on drums,” Gardner remembered. “He couldn’t play drums, but he made a lot of faces. It was a comical routine. We had a lot of fun.” A few years later, when Gardner was playing clubs in Northern California, he read about Cosby’s groundbreaking performance in I Spy, visited him on the Paramount lot, and, Gardner quipped, “we’ve been together ever since.” On his own, Gardner recorded for both Motown and Stax; he also collaborated with Cosby on a pair of “Badfoot Brown and the Bunions

Bill Cosby (left) with Stu Gardner (center) scoring a Cosby Show episode.

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Bradford Funeral & Marching Band” jazz-​funk LPs in the early 1970s. “He’d call me and say, let’s work on some music. Cosby would sit with me and tell me what he wanted. He’d hum it, I’d put it on the piano, and the two of us would write these things. He gets a lot of credit for the writing.” The Cosby Show was an eighties phenomenon: for five of its eight seasons, it ranked as the most popular program on television. Cosby and Phylicia Rashad played Cliff and Clair Huxtable, a doctor and a lawyer, respectively, living in a Brooklyn townhouse with their five children (played by Lisa Bonet, Malcolm-​Jamal Warner, Tempestt Bledsoe, Keshia Knight Pulliam, Sabrina LaBeauf) who laughed with, and learned life lessons from, their smart, patient, and inevitably wise parents. As for the theme, “we both came up with it,” Gardner said. “At one point we started singing the same thing. It’s very simple notes; [we thought] people will identify with it, walk around the house singing it and not know why. Plus,” he said to Cosby, “I could do maybe 25 different arrangements of it.” That proved to be prescient, as Cosby agreed and Gardner created radically different arrangements every season. For the first season titles, as the family is playing ball in a park, Grover Washington Jr. played the saxophone solo. Starting with the second season, the family is dancing, initially to a brassier version; for the third, they were moving to a Latin beat; and for the fourth, they donned formal attire while jazz vocalist Bobby McFerrin performed an a cappella rendition. “It was the most amazing thing I’d ever seen,” Gardner recalled. “He recorded with himself about 10 times. He did the drums as a beat on his chest; he did all of that vocal stuff with his lips and breathing and certain sounds; he harmonized with himself.” For the fifth season, “we recorded a version that was very classical,” Gardner said. Cosby’s old Philadelphia high-​school friend James DePreist was then conductor of the Oregon Symphony, and he arranged a symphonic version for an elaborately choreographed, colorfully costumed title sequence. For the sixth season, Harlem’s famous Apollo Theater was the backdrop for a more raucous recording, with shouts and crowd noise (and Cosby ending with “this is the best elevator music I’ve ever heard”). The seventh season briefly featured the cast dancing in front of a brightly colored mural inspired by one painted by Harlem schoolchildren, with jazz trumpeter Jon Faddis featured on the track. In what must be one of the most unusual TV-​theme stories ever, Gardner enlisted an up-​and-​coming singer-​songwriter to co-​write the theme for the Cosby Show spinoff A Different World (1987–​1993, NBC). Dawnn Lewis wrote the words, contributed to the tune (atop a track created by Gardner), and sang the original demo (called “Stepping Up to Step Out”). Unbeknownst to Gardner, she was also scheduled to audition for a part in the show, and within a matter of days, she was cast as Jaleesa—​having already penned the show’s theme. When the title

was changed to A Different World, Al Green was brought in to record the slightly rewritten track, but even he was replaced by Phoebe Snow, who sang the first-​season version. For the second season, Gardner flew to Detroit to record Aretha Franklin singing it; in the final season it was recorded anew by Boyz II Men. One of the most innovative themes in sitcom history was heard only a handful of times. Steve Dorff, whose track record included the driving alto sax and electric guitar theme for the Robert Urich detective series Spenser: For Hire and two Emmy nominations for Growing Pains, wrote a highly unusual a cappella vocal for Murphy Brown (1988–​1998, CBS). Series creator-​producer Diane English initially briefed Dorff on plans for the main-​title sequence, which was to feature hard-​nosed TV reporter Murphy (Candice Bergen) “walking through the streets of Washington, D.C., coming upon a doo-​wop standing around a barrel singing, and following Murphy past the White House and the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials,” the composer recalled. Dorff and his frequent collaborator, lyricist John Bettis, wrote a clever and musically sophisticated song called “Like the Whole World’s Watching,” designed to underscore the shot-​on-​location titles and establish Murphy as a TV news personality. English, as well as executives at Warner Bros., were pleased, and Dorff recorded the theme in Nashville with the then little-​known Take 6. Unfortunately, an executive at CBS latched onto an element of Murphy’s character as mentioned in early scripts—​her love of Motown music—​and insisted that Motown hits be inserted under the titles instead. Dorff, despite his disappointment over the loss of what he felt was his best work, wrote a Motown-​style tune for the end credits. His subsidiary theme for Brown’s newsmagazine “F.Y.I.” continued to be used in the show, which otherwise featured little or no original score on a weekly basis. But “Like the Whole World’s Watching,” which, as later recorded by Dorff and Take 6, received a 1989 Grammy nomination for Best Jazz Vocal Performance (Duo or Group), was only used on rare occasions. Dorff began as a songwriter, creating such hits as “Every Which Way But Loose” for Eddie Rabbitt, “I Just Fall in Love Again” for Anne Murray, and “Through the Years” for Kenny Rogers. His film scores included five Clint Eastwood pictures (including Bronco Billy and Honkytonk Man), the George Strait film Pure Country, and several made-​for-​TV movies. Growing Pains (1985–​1992, ABC) was Dorff ’s first hit TV theme (“As long as we got each other /​we got the world spinnin’ right in our hands . . .”) for a comedy built around working parents (Alan Thicke, Joanna Kerns) and their three kids (Kirk Cameron, Tracey Gold, Jeremy Miller). Dorff later confessed that he and Bettis banged it out in “roughly 30 minutes”; B. J. Thomas sang the first-​season version. For the second season, they turned it into a duet and added Jennifer Warnes; Dusty

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Springfield replaced Warnes on the commercially released single, which went to Number 7 on the Billboard pop charts in 1989. Dorff and Bettis also wrote the upbeat theme for My Sister Sam (1986–​1988, CBS), “Room Enough for Two,” sung by Kim Carnes. The 1970s and 1980s saw a series of half-​hour shows with sunny, upbeat title songs. Diff’rent Strokes (1978–​1986, NBC, ABC)—​about two African-​American boys (Gary Coleman, Todd Bridges) adopted by a rich white New Yorker (Conrad Bain)—​and its spinoff The Facts of Life (1979–​ 1988, NBC), about the housemother (Charlotte Rae) at a girls’ boarding school, boasted theme songs by a surprising trio: actor Alan Thicke, his actress-​singer wife Gloria Loring, and producer Al Burton. Thicke (1947–​2016) already had a track record writing game-​show themes (The Wizard of Odds, The Joker’s Wild) and, according to Loring, Burton called him and suggested a collaboration. “Alan was definitely the driving force; that was his arena, writing special-​material pieces of music. I was invited to be part of the process. The opening line of Facts of Life—​ ‘you take the good, you take the bad, you take ’em both and there you have the facts of life’—​is pure Alan Thicke. He was wonderful with words and images.” Loring sang the longest-​running and best-​known version of the Facts of Life theme, but there was an earlier, lyrically different version sung in part by star Rae. Thicke himself was among the singers on Diff’rent Strokes (“now the world don’t move to the beat of just one drum /​what might be right for you may not be right for some . . .”). Jeff Barry and Tom Scott wrote “Without Us” for Family Ties (1982–​ 1989, NBC), about liberal parents (Meredith Baxter-​Birney, Michael Gross) and their conservative kids (Michael J. Fox, Justine Bateman, Tina Yothers). Barry’s lyrics (“I bet we’ve been together for a million years /​and I bet we’ll be together for a million more . . . What would we do, baby, without us?”) came first, Scott recalled. Scott, the well-​known jazz saxophonist, played on the end-​title instrumental; the first-​season vocal by singers Dennis Tufano and Mindy Sterling was replaced by the more famous duo of Johnny Mathis and Deniece Williams when Columbia Records agreed to release a single. The theme for Who’s the Boss? (1984–​1992, ABC), with Tony Danza as housekeeper for a divorced executive played by Judith Light, was written by Robert Kraft (b. 1955), then a New York songwriter and later president of music for 20th Century-​Fox. Kraft was in L.A. to write songs for the TV version of Fame when the call came. “I knew nothing about TV theme songs,” Kraft said. “I was the perfectly Bohemian New York Westside songwriter who wouldn’t even think of watching TV.” Without seeing a script or a pilot, “in 30 seconds of C-​major riff, I wrote the whitest, squarest thing I could write,” Kraft quipped. Then, with the help of guitarist-​producer Larry Carlton (who shared writing credit), he produced a one-​minute instrumental demo. A few weeks later, series

creators Blake Hunter and Marty Cohan penned lyrics to it, and Carlton recruited singer-​songwriter Larry Weiss (“Rhinestone Cowboy”) to perform the newly rechristened “Brand New Life.” Kraft later penned the instrumental theme for the short-​lived Bess Armstrong–​Terence Knox sitcom All Is Forgiven (1986, NBC). ABC’s kid-​friendly Friday-​night strategy (often billed as “TGIF,” for “thank goodness it’s funny”) turned out to be a boon for producers Thomas Miller and Robert Boyett, and in turn for songwriters Jesse Frederick (b. 1948) and Bennett Salvay (b. 1957). Salvay had been at Paramount TV for several years, working as music coordinator on several sitcoms, and he had been writing songs with Frederick (and singing on films like The Idolmaker and The Flamingo Kid). Their first hit was Perfect Strangers (1986–​1993, ABC), with Mark Linn-​Baker and Bronson Pinchot as cousins in Chicago (one American, the other a madcap European shepherd). Frederick and Salvay wrote “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Me Now,” sung by David Pomeranz. “Tom and Bob always wanted a very aspirational theme song,” Salvay remembered. “These were young guys living in an apartment, following their dreams.” Full House (1987–​1995, ABC) was their biggest hit, about a widowed San Francisco dad (Bob Saget) whose musician brother-​in-​law (John Stamos) and comedian friend (Dave Coulier) help raise his three daughters. They wrote “Everywhere You Look” along with series creator Jeff Franklin and Frederick sang this one himself (“everywhere you look, there’s a heart, a hand to hold onto . . .”). Bluesier than the Perfect Strangers theme, this was “more like a universal feel-​good song,” Salvay noted. And when Netflix revived the series in 2016 as Fuller House, pop star Carly Rae Jepson sang a new version produced by Butch Walker. Frederick and Salvay wrote others for Miller-​Boyett, including “As Days Go By” for Family Matters (1989–​1998, ABC, CBS), the show that made a star of Jaleel White as Steve Urkel; and “Second Time Around” for Step by Step (1991–​1998, ABC, CBS), a blended-​family sitcom starring Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers. “At one point we had six shows on,” Salvay recalled (including Going Places with Heather Locklear and The Family Man with Gregory Harrison, both single-​season shows in 1990–​1991). A rarity in sitcoms of that period was the use of a preexisting song as the main theme for a series. For The Golden Girls (1985–​1992, NBC), a Susan Harris–​created series about four women in Miami (Bea Arthur, Betty White, Rue McClanahan, Estelle Getty), the producers balked at the fee to license the Bette Midler hit “(You Got to Have) Friends,” so they turned to a different song: “Thank You for Being a Friend,” which singer-​songwriter Andrew Gold took to Number 25 on the Billboard pop charts in 1978. “The song took about an hour to write,” Gold later said, “it was just this little throwaway thing.” But it not only became a hit, it was deemed just right for the strong bonds of friendship among the women

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on the TV show. Cindy Fee, an in-​demand session singer, was called in to create the cover version for the series. Music for The Golden Girls, as well as its spinoff Empty Nest (1988–​1995, NBC), was written by arranger-​ conductor George Aliceson Tipton (1932–​2016). “Making your way in the world today takes everything you got /​Taking a break from all your worries sure would help a lot . . .”: the opening of the Cheers theme, perhaps the most famous song about a bar ever written. It was certainly the most memorable sitcom tune in years, owing partly to the series’ longevity and partly to its clever lyric and infectious melody. Cheers (1982–​ 1993, NBC) centered on a Boston bar, its management and patrons. Ted Danson (as Sam Malone, a former Red Sox pitcher and the tavern’s proprietor) remained a constant presence over the show’s many seasons, although other key players changed; Shelley Long began the run as Sam’s literate waitress, replaced later by Kirstie Alley as his boss and, still later, bar manager. The story of the Cheers theme, also known as “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” illustrated the often-​haphazard way that crucial elements were arrived at in contemporary network TV. In the spring of 1982, New York songwriters Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo were working on a new musical called Preppies. Angelo had sent a cassette containing several of the numbers to a California friend whose brother happened to be Emmy-​winning director James Burrows (Taxi). With writers Glen and Les Charles, Burrows was developing Cheers at the time; he heard the tape and thought that one of their songs, “People Like Us,” would make a fine theme for their new show. Angelo recalled: “You have to understand that we now were caught between a rock and a hard place. Since ‘People Like Us’ was essential to our theater project, we knew that we couldn’t remove it; what we did do was look at each other and quickly blurt out over the phone that we would be happy to write another theme song for their new television show. And they said, ‘Great, go to it.’ “Now, it would be nice to be able to say that we went to the piano and promptly tossed off the theme to Cheers as it is known today. In actuality, since they already wanted our other song, we did what any songwriter would do: we sat down and attempted to clone it. The new song was promptly rejected. But, along with the rejections came their encouragement to not box ourselves into our original concept and to do whatever we felt was right for the show. “Thus freed,” Angelo said, “we wrote two more potential themes. One of them pleased us enough to write a full-​length version in which we speculated on all sorts of life situations that might compel a person to take refuge at a place like Cheers. That song was ‘Where Everybody Knows Your Name.’ We immediately went into a tiny eight-​track studio and made a piano-​voice demo.”

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Gary Portnoy (at piano), Judy Hart Angelo singing the Cheers theme with Jay Leno during the May 1993 post-​Cheers finale celebration.

The original opening lines (“Singing the blues when the home teams lose /​it’s a crisis in your life /​On the run ’cause all your girlfriends wanna be your wife . . .”) were changed when the producers asked for a “more general approach [that] might wear better over the course of what everyone hoped would be a long run for the show,” noted Angelo. “And thus, ‘making your way in the world today. . . .’ They were happy. We were happy.” Portnoy, who sang the original demo, was asked to perform the theme for the show itself. Enhancing the song were the creative graphics behind the titles, a series of drawings and still photographs of people in taverns over the past century (which won an Emmy at the end of the show’s first season; the song was nominated as well). Portnoy and Angelo subsequently supplied the themes for the comedies Punky Brewster (1984–​ 1988, NBC) and Mr. Belvedere (1985–​1990, ABC), with a vocal by cult favorite Leon Redbone. When standup comedian Roseanne Barr got her own sitcom, Roseanne (1988–​1997, ABC), creator Matt Williams (The Cosby Show) was very specific about the music he wanted, according to composers Dan Foliart and Howard Pearl, who cowrote the theme and scored the series’ first five seasons. Oklahoma native Foliart (b. 1951) and Connecticut-​born Pearl (b. 1948) become songwriting partners in the mid-​1970s and scored several of Paramount’s popular sitcoms, including Angie and Bosom Buddies. They

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met Williams and, according to Pearl, “Matt had definite ideas about what he wanted the tone of the show to be. He told us that he wanted some kind of raw, rural feel.” Foliart recalled coming up with an early version of the theme that Williams rejected as “not earthy enough,” yet close enough that the producers gave the team a go-​ahead to modify their musical ideas and make a studio demo. “We had the germ of the theme, but it had to be a lot bluesier,” Foliart said. They recruited six key musicians and went to Sound City, “the funkiest studio in L.A.,” where Bob Dylan had often recorded in the past. “We started jamming,” Foliart said. “It was the same melody that Howard and I had written, but there was something about the mood of the studio, having these great players, and also having Matt sitting there where he could immediately say ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ “The sound of Roseanne—​ tenor sax, harmonica, acoustic guitar, bass, drums, and piano—​was “accomplished in no small part by the musicians,” Pearl said. “I would say that a good part of that theme song was ad-​libbed around the melody. And it’s their performances that really made it come to life.” On-​screen, the theme accompanied a camera panning around the Conner family dinner table, with Barr’s laughter added to the end of the sequence. Foliart was called again when Williams created Home Improvement (1991–​1999, ABC) for comedian Tim Allen. According to the composer, Williams asked for “something primitive and visceral” to fit Allen’s standup persona of a grunting, tool-​obsessed, macho guy with little understanding of women. Foliart saw Allen’s standup act and decided to interpolate not only tool sounds but also Allen’s apelike noises into the theme. As a result, the Home Improvement theme was assembled with as many as 50 tracks of various sound effects (jackhammers, drills, breaking glass, wheel sounds, even trains crashing) combined with a small band including electric guitar, organ, and bass harmonica: as Foliart described it, “a hip-​ hop groove underneath a tapestry of all these different tool sounds,” plus Allen’s trademark grunt. A flute track was added to represent Tim’s wife Jill (Patricia Richardson); Foliart added even more percussion the second season and “a raunchier guitar, with more bite” the third. Foliart’s predecessor as president of the Society of Composers & Lyricists was another sitcom composer, Ray Colcord (1949–​2016), whose theme for 227 (1985–​1990, NBC), “There’s No Place Like Home,” was sung by series star Marla Gibbs. Colcord earned an Emmy nomination for his theme for the short-​lived Singer & Sons (1990, NBC), with Harold Gould as the proprietor of a New York delicatessen; for the title sequence, charting nearly 100 years in the history of the deli, Colcord invoked ragtime piano, Gershwin-​esque orchestra, swing-​band jazz, and electric-​ guitar rock. For The Torkelsons (1991–​1993, NBC), about “this poverty-​stricken girl in Pyramid Corners, Oklahoma, who talked to the man in the moon,”

recalled his longtime producer Michael Jacobs, “Ray came back with the most glorious music he had ever written.” Popular country duo The Judds sang Colcord’s song, “A New Day Promises,” with Jacobs’s lyrics. For Boy Meets World (1993–​2000, ABC), starring Ben Savage as “a confused 11-​year-​old kid,” Jacobs said, “he wrote three or four themes,” including with one with circus overtones and another featuring surf guitar. Standup comics doing TV had become a trend. Richard Lewis enjoyed success with Jamie Lee Curtis in Anything But Love (1989–​1992, ABC), about two writers at a Chicago magazine who tried to keep their friendship from becoming a full-​fledged love affair. Lewis’s friend, veteran songwriter J. D. Souther (whose 1970s and 1980s work was performed by everyone from Linda Ronstadt to The Eagles), wrote a warm and inviting title song (“something a little bit counter to the prevailing attitude; Richard and Jamie are both people with a lot of attitude,” Souther said), sung by another pop-​music veteran, Mike Finnigan. Another standup comedian who achieved major television success commissioned a wildly different musical approach. For Seinfeld (1990–​ 1998, NBC), comedian Jerry Seinfeld came to composer Jonathan Wolff (b. 1958) with “more of a sound design problem than a musical one,” in the words of the composer. The main title sequence (at the time a pilot called The Seinfeld Chronicles) featured the standup comic, in a nightclub setting, performing material that related to the episode’s storyline. Recalled Wolff: “He wanted a catchy, recognizable signature theme that would play along with his comedy monologue but not interfere with the audio of his standup material. So I watched a lot of his comedy material and noticed that his delivery had a unique, quirky rhythm to it. The pacing of his words, phrases, and inflections has a musical quality. So I based the rhythm of the Seinfeld theme on the rhythms of his speech patterns. Jerry’s human voice became the ‘melody’ of the theme, and I built the rest of the music around him. Instead of using drums and percussion, I used digital samples of my finger snaps, and tongue, mouth, and lip noises, to accompany him. The prominent bass line of the Seinfeld theme is in an audio range that does not compete with his voice.” According to Wolff, Seinfeld—​who had previously rejected another composer’s music for the pilot—​“wanted it to be weird and unique, as all [producers] claim they want their themes to be. When it comes right down to it, a lot of people are scared. They hear something unique and they say, ‘That’s too weird,’ and you have to bring it back to conventional standards. Jerry was not afraid of theme music from Mars.” Because the routine was different every week, Wolff had to modify the music to match the monologue. “The Seinfeld music theme remains basically the same from week to week,” Wolff explained, “but since he says different things every episode, each week his ‘melody’ is like a variation on the Seinfeld theme.”

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Jonathan Wolff (center) with the Will & Grace cast.

Wolff, a Louisville, Kentucky, native who played keyboards on hundreds of sessions before making it big as a TV composer, wrote nearly four dozen themes for network series during his 29 years in network TV. Wolff ’s other long-​running hit was Will & Grace (1998–​2006, NBC), about a gay attorney (Eric McCormack) and his roommate, a straight interior designer (Debra Messing), often hanging out with his flamboyant friend Jack (Sean Hayes) and her daffy assistant (Megan Mullally). Wolff recalled telling the producers that “the piano, like your characters, can be supercharged different personalities: earthy like Elton John, funny like Chico Marx, flamboyant like Liberace, or hip like Chick Corea. I just played, improvisationally, little 12-​second compositions, seven or ten of them. We picked one, and that became the theme for Will & Grace.” Half-​hour comedies were Wolff ’s specialties. For Caroline in the City (1995–​1999, NBC), with Lea Thompson as a Manhattan cartoonist, Wolff illustrated the opening animated vignettes with, as he put it, “Brazilian party music, a New York jazz combo” spotlighting saxophone; for the second season, the network asked for a more aggressive treatment, “more drum-​driven rock,” the composer said. Among his many other credits were music for Married . . . With Children (1987–​1997, Fox), which licensed Frank Sinatra’s recording of “Love and Marriage”—​which had won a 1955 Emmy for songwriters Sammy Cahn and Jimmy Van Heusen as part of their song score for the Producers Showcase adaptation of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. One of Wolff ’s most original themes was Double Rush (1995, CBS), a short-​ lived series with Robert Pastorelli as the owner of a Manhattan bicycle courier service; he rode a bike every day to his Burbank studio, so he started by sampling the sounds of his bicycle gears. To drive “the frenetic,

frazzled energy that these bicycle couriers live with, I wanted some urban drums . . . then the sounds of the city whizzing by, people shouting, taxi horn honks, jack-​hammers. . . . It was seven parts sound design, one part music,” he explained. Yet another standup-​comedian-​turned-​actor, Paul Reiser, co-​created and starred in Mad About You (1992–​1999, NBC) along with Helen Hunt as a young, newly married Manhattan couple. Hunt, a friend of music producer Don Was, introduced him to Reiser who, Was said, “wanted Lyle Lovett to write the theme song.” Was got Lovett on the phone and the singer “respectfully turned him down. Paul was so gracious about the fact that I had done this for him that he said, ‘Well, how about you and I write it?’ ” Reiser visited Was’s studio, “sat down at the piano and started playing that riff. I was drumming on the back of a guitar, and we wrote the song in about 12 minutes.” Reiser wrote the words (“Tell me why I love you like you do . . .”) and “I just helped him fill in some blanks,” Was added, noting the calypso feel emerged from that initial session (“I was just twiddling my fingers on the back of an acoustic”). They flew back to L.A. the next day, recruited drummer Jim Keltner and singer Andrew Gold, and “the first take was it.” They called the song “Final Frontier,” and, Was recalled, “Paul was very serious about trying to accurately portray the comic pitfalls of keeping a relationship together.” Anita Baker re-​recorded the song for the season’s sixth season. Comic actress Fran Drescher created and produced The Nanny (1993–​ 1999, CBS), about a Jewish fashionista from Flushing, Queens, who becomes nanny to the children of a British theatrical producer (Charles Shaughnessy). Drescher had seen and admired New York cabaret artist Ann Hampton Callaway (b. 1958) and asked her for a theme song. Reflecting years later on the needs of a sitcom theme, Callaway said: “It has to be really crisp, you have to understand all the words, it has to be fun and perky, and there’s a certain thing that you do in a TV theme to make sure it’s an earworm. “I wanted to be able to tell this story really, really well in 42 seconds [because] that’s all I had,” she said. She got a complete rundown on the character from Drescher, then wrote and sang a clever, amusing jazz ditty (“she’s the lady in red when everybody else is wearing tan /​the flashy girl from Flushing /​the nanny named Fran”). Callaway recommended other performers, including the vocal group Manhattan Transfer, but Drescher preferred Callaway’s own vocal and, set to animated titles, the song became as well-​known as the show itself. The producers of Frasier (1993–​2004, NBC) wanted a song that alluded only obliquely to the content of the Cheers spinoff starring Kelsey Grammer as a Seattle psychiatrist and radio personality. Bruce Miller (b. 1944), veteran composer for Designing Women (1986–​1993, CBS) and

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Wings (1990–​1997, NBC), submitted a tune that was not only accepted but also sung by the show’s star and Emmy-​nominated in its first year. According to Miller, the producers told him: “Don’t mention shrinks, don’t mention radio, don’t mention crazy people—​which is what the show’s all about—​but do something that’s appropriate.” Miller came up with “a real light, quirky, jazzy, upscale” tune and called an old friend, lyricist Darryl Phinnessee, to write a few lines that might meet the parameters. Phinnessee’s line “tossed salads and scrambled eggs” actually refers to “things that are mixed up,” like so many of Frasier Crane’s callers, Miller explained. They wrote the tune with someone like Mel Tormé in mind, but the producers offered it to Grammer instead. Grammer, a trained singer with off-​ Broadway credits, initially performed a straightforward version of the tune at the recording session. “Then the producers said, ‘Stretch out with it, have more fun,’ ” Miller recalled. “Kelsey came up with all the shtick, all the laughs, and the funny stuff. At the end, he did a little line over the guitar lick: ‘Goodnight, Seattle!’ and everybody started getting into that—​‘give us more of those.’ ” Then came “Frasier Crane has left the building” and others, five or six in all. “It was just a kick,” Miller said. “So Kelsey essentially took this silly little ditty and made it his own. I’m a great fan of the recognized jazz singers, but Kelsey brought a real personality to this song that may not have happened with somebody else. He made it the Frasier theme.” By this time, the networks were demanding reduced or nonexistent main-​title sequences (see sidebar), so Miller created 20 variations on the tune for the six-​second animated opening, all featuring the sophisticated sound of a jazz quintet featuring vibraphone. Similarly, his funky blues-​ guitar urban-​shuffle theme for Ted Danson as the irritable doctor Becker (1998–​2004, CBS) required new versions every week. The most unexpected hit of all may have been the theme for Friends (1994–​2004, NBC), an ensemble comedy about the lives of six friends (Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, David Schwimmer) in Manhattan. “I’ll Be There for You,” the infectious, lighter-​than-​air song by composer Michael Skloff (b. 1959) and lyricist Allee Willis (1947–​2019), spent seven weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard adult contemporary charts, and eight weeks at Number 1 on its radio airplay chart, during the summer of 1995. Skloff had written the theme for HBO’s Dream On, which, like Friends, was created and produced by his then-​wife Marta Kauffman and her longtime partner David Crane; Willis was a 1985 Grammy winner for her contribution to the Beverly Hills Cop soundtrack, the Pointer Sisters smash “Neutron Dance.” The song was performed by The Rembrandts, a pop duo who only reluctantly added an extended version of the TV theme to their 1995 album when it became clear that the series was shaping up into a giant hit and the demand for a recording of the theme was growing.

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  Michael Skloff.

Skloff was initially inspired by the Beatles’ “Paperback Writer”: “It just felt so right for the show, that sort of happy, guitar-​riff feeling.” Skloff came up with the song hook, the title, and the melody; Willis, brought in by another of the series’ producers because of her pop-​tune track record, wrote the now-​famous words: “So no one told you life was gonna be this way /​Your job’s a joke, you’re broke, your love life’s D.O.A. . . .” “The bulk of my hits have been very black, funky, pop stuff, and this was as white as could be,” Willis laughed. “However, for some bizarre reason, I actually had a very good time writing it.” The lyrics “went back and forth on rewrites” (with Crane and Kauffman, who had written musical theater works with Skloff, including a musical based on the movie Arthur) until just two weeks prior to the series’ premiere. For the extended version, Crane, Kauffman, and Rembrandts Danny Wilde and Phil Solem received additional writing credit. Those famous hand claps originated when the producers cut together footage of the cast dancing (in a fountain on the Warner Bros. lot) to Skloff ’s demo; but when the Rembrandts’ final version was added, it was missing Skloff ’s original drum fill. So Skloff and three studio colleagues clapped four times, and TV history was made. Only when Skloff attended one of the Friday-​night tapings, and witnessed the studio audience clapping perfectly in time to the theme, did he realize the impression it had made. “What seems like something so insignificant became a signature of the song,” he later said.

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Added Skloff: “It’s a perfectly likable song that’s reminiscent of the Beatles and the Monkees, which is from a time in our history that was idealistic and fun, that whole ‘our generation’ kind of thing, and just brings back good feelings. And it’s connected with a wildly popular show. People like the song on its own, but they also say, ‘Oh, God, I love that show.’ ” The commercial success of the Friends theme caused network executives (temporarily, at least) to rethink earlier policies about cutting back main-​ title themes to just a few seconds. Sitcoms featuring primarily African-​American casts often boasted hipper, more cutting-​edge music. The Fresh Prince of Bel-​Air (1990–​1996, NBC), which catapulted Will Smith to acting fame, sported an audience-​friendly rap by Jeffrey Townes and Smith, better known as hip-​hop duo DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (“now this is a story all about how my life got flipped, turned upside down /​and I’d like to take a minute, just sit right there, I’ll tell you how I became the prince of a town called Bel-​Air . . .”). The amusing title sequence, with graffiti-​style graphics (not unlike the duo’s 1988 “Parents Just Don’t Understand” video), provided Will’s backstory, explaining in one minute how the Philadelphia teen came to live with his well-​to-​do uncle and aunt in Los Angeles. “From the beginning of the pilot process, there was never any doubt that Will would rap the opening theme,” creator Andy Borowitz later said. “The song was supposed to be a hip-​hop answer to classic sitcom themes that explained the premises of the shows.” As Townes noted, “I programmed the first thing that came to my mind and Will wrote something. I recorded it, we mixed it and I gave it to the guy at NBC, and next thing you know it was on the show.” Executive producer Quincy Jones’s son QD III, already a top music producer, created the underscore: “I just

THE END OF NETWORK TV THEMES? In the summer of 1994, ABC Entertainment president Ted Harbert (in response to a question from this writer at a network press conference) admitted that he was asking his producers to eliminate the traditional main-​title sequence—​and with it, the musical theme—​from all new shows. “I think it’s an antiquated practice,” he said. “It gives the audience an opportunity to take the little remote and zap around. We really have to find ways to stop them from doing that. The 60-​second, or in some cases 90-​second main title that they see week after week, given all the choices they have, just doesn’t make sense to me anymore.” The growing trend of channel-​switching by anxious viewers instilled fear in network executives.

Their radical decision turned TV themes (both songs and instrumentals) into collateral damage, destroying any chance for a composer to make a definitive opening musical statement—​a long-​held and appreciated television tradition. TV critics were outraged. “Are you robbing a future generation of theme songs?” New York Daily News critic David Bianculli demanded to know. (The headline on his next column read: “Ban theme songs? Dumb-​dee-​dumb-​dumb,” a clever reference to the famous Dragnet signature.) In fact, the practice had already begun. CBS’s Murphy Brown and NBC’s Frasier and Wings featured brief openings; ABC was making it mandatory except in rare instances. “A theme song that really adds to the enjoyment of the show? I just think they’re few and far between,” Harbert insisted,

added a little bit of an underground hip-​hop sound. I feel like I had a lot to do with keeping it authentic, also a lot to do with how hip-​hop scores actually started. That was the first one in a lot of ways.” Chicago-​born Kurt Farquhar (b. 1957), whose education included both Berklee in Boston and the Paris Conservatory, carried the hip-​hop torch through the 1990s and beyond, adding contemporary-​music touches to several network series. They included Sister, Sister (1994–​1999, ABC), with twins Tia and Tamera Mowry as the title characters and Tim Reid and Jackee Harry as their adoptive parents; South Central (1994, Fox), the critically acclaimed, realistic dramedy about a divorced single mom (Tina Lifford) in an inner-​city neighborhood; Moesha (1996–​2001, UPN), whose theme song was a collaboration between Farquhar and series star Brandy; The Parkers (1999–​ 2004, UPN) with Countess Vaughn and Mo’Nique; and Girlfriends (2000–​2008, UPN, CW) with Tracee Ellis Ross as a Los Angeles lawyer. “People hadn’t really heard hip-​hop done in a way that it actually worked as score,” Farquhar said. “I was starting to feel the importance of this urban type of sound. I was trying to push the envelope every chance I could. Nobody else was doing it.” Girlfriends, he added, “was very neo-​soul. We gave it everything we could to make it sound like a Jill Scott record, a combination of hip-​hop beats and R&B rhythm tracks. That hadn’t been on TV before.” Girlfriends had a theme, and first-​season score, by another African-​American composer, Baltimore native and Stu Gardner protegé Camara Kambon (b. 1973).

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With the substantial reduction in time available for main-​title sequences, few themes stood out in the post-​2000 period. Two and a Half Men (2003–​2015, CBS) managed to create something distinctive and funny

admitting, “the research is inconclusive. It’s based on a ton of anecdotal experience. I need to stop people from zapping.” NBC president Warren Littlefield dismissed lengthy title sequences as “clutter.” He cited Seinfeld, where “we keep the action going even though the titles are over the picture. We have to keep more entertainment on the air so people don’t race away from the screen.” Yet David Poltrack, CBS’s executive vice president for planning and research, found that “in the early stages [of a series], title sequences are important if they provide a prologue to viewers who are coming for the first time. It’s a mistake to categorically make a creative decision like that based on imprecise minute-​by-​minute ratings.” TV veterans were skeptical. Producer David E. Kelley (Chicago Hope) felt that “a theme sets a

mood for the show. I like having that table set for me. Is it hugely crucial to a show? Probably not. Is it subliminally important? I think so.” And, asked about the elimination of TV themes, actor James Garner (who was then launching a series of Rockford Files TV-​movies on CBS) responded: “Maybe they ought to eliminate some of the TV executives. If they’re going to eliminate the music, let’s get rid of some of them.” Still, the die was cast, and as the years progressed, more and more network shows—​not just the half-​hour comedies but also hour-​long dramas—​were forced to skip a traditional opening title sequence. Titles, from the names of the actors to writer and director credits, tend to be superimposed over the first few minutes of the action. (Composers, with rare exceptions, have long been relegated to the closing credit roll.)

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in 22 seconds. The premise concerned a California jingle writer (Charlie Sheen) whose brother (Jon Cryer) moves in, post-​divorce, with his young son (Angus T. Jones), complicating his freewheeling lifestyle. Guitarist-​ songwriter Grant Geissman (b. 1953) had previously worked for co-​ creator Lee Aronsohn, and the latter suggested a vocal theme “that would have the word ‘men’ in it, with a Monty Python kind of vibe,” Geissman remembered. Co-​creator Chuck Lorre suggested an intro and “had this vision of the three guys around a microphone” as the visual backdrop. The final version (credited to Geissman, Aronsohn and Lorre) has all three tuxedo-​clad actors lip-​syncing to the doo-​wop style three-​part harmony vocal (“men, men, men, men, manly men men men . . .”). Longtime Lorre collaborator Dennis C. Brown (Grace Under Fire, Dharma & Greg, later Mike & Molly) worked with Geissman on the scores, which often involved teaching Sheen some of the commercial “jingles” he would sing and play in the stories. Mitchell Hurwitz, creator of Arrested Development (2003–​2006, Fox, 2013–​2019, Netflix), stumbled upon composer David Schwartz’s demo tape in a storage closet at the production company where he worked. “That’s the story I remember,” said Schwartz. Arrested Development was the result of a wild concept, telling a serialized “riches to rags” family saga and shot reality-​TV style with multiple cameras and using cutaway gags. The wacky family included one sane person (Jason Bateman), who tries to keep the family business going despite his corrupt, imprisoned father (Jeffrey Tambor); materialistic mother (Jessica Walter); a son, siblings, and other family members. “Mitch is always into old jazz,” Schwartz said, and the use of an eight-​ string Tahitian ukelele (which Schwartz discovered on a trip to Bora

And end-​ title sequences, which once lasted a full minute or more, now rarely exceed 30 seconds and the credits fly by so quickly it is impossible to read most of them. The business of creating television for a mass audience is much different than it was 50 years ago: then broadcast network shows were 50 minutes long, allowing for 10 minutes of commercials, promos, and other material; today that number is approximately 42 minutes. Everything, including those credit sequences, has shrunk. A perfect example was Castle (2009–​2016, ABC), a smartly written dramedy about a best-​selling crime author (Nathan Fillion) who consults with a New York police detective (Stana Katic) about unusual crimes. Composer Robert Duncan (b. 1971) struggled to come up with a five-​second theme that captured the tone, which would eventually score an animated

sequence depicting a dip pen spilling blood instead of ink. He agonized over three bars of music that, the producers hoped, would suggest “hijinks” and “rockstar,” two aspects of the writer’s personality. “I was fooling around with a mandolin, using it like a percussion instrument, with wire brushes, and layering it with a ceramic drum (udu) for hijinks, then brought in the electric guitar and bass for the rockstar bit.” Voila, a three-​bar, five-​second intro that subtly suggested the title character. For the 30-​second end title, Duncan whistled the melodic riff, added a drum fill, and brought back the electric guitar. “No one ever micromanages the end titles,” Duncan noted, because they are rarely heard on network broadcasts. Duncan’s pilot score was Emmy-​nominated (in part because the voters were able to watch and listen to the full, unexpurgated episode).

Bora) was the result of a last-​minute need for logo music for Hurwitz’s company. “What is that? We’ve got to use that!” Schwartz recalled Hurwitz saying. “I had been into Django [Reinhardt] and different gypsy jazz things,” Schwartz said. “That was the start of the sound.” Whistling and organ soon were added, and by the fourth season “he wanted me to add a different instrument in every episode. Slide guitar, trombone, a violin, my daughter improvising singing. . . .” Hurwitz also encouraged the creation of songs, many of which he wrote with Schwartz and fellow composer Gabriel Mann, and which provided additional comedic punctuation to the insanity. Mann (b. 1973), meanwhile, wrote his own hit theme, for Modern Family (2009–​2020, ABC), the Emmy-​winning comedy-​mockumentary about three interrelated families (the adults played by Ed O’Neill and Sofia Vergara, Ty Burrell and Julie Bowen, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson and Eric Stonestreet). Jason Winer, director of the pilot, contacted Mann, who—​working from Winer’s suggestion about a big-​band drum break—​ came up with the pounding drums and trumpet blasts, punctuated by Mann shouting “hey! hey!” set against images of each family holding a framed photo of the previous ones, all managed in a total of 13 seconds. Mann’s other job was providing the heartwarming music that closed many episodes. The score of 30 Rock (2006–​2013, NBC) was unlike any other on TV: variously retro, quirky, winking and sometimes heartfelt, in part because the series was creator Tina Fey’s satirical take on the network TV business. The title refers to 30 Rockefeller Plaza, NBC’s Manhattan address, and Fey played the head writer of a sketch comedy series; Jane Krakowski and Tracy Morgan were stars of the show, Alec Baldwin a controlling network executive.

Premium-​cable and streaming options are different (see Chapter 12). Without the need to sell commercial advertising time or worry about bored viewers switching channels (because subscribers are paying for the service), producers are able to make the shows they want to make—​often including a traditional main-​title sequence, providing the composer an opportunity to musically set the stage, and lengthy end-​credit rolls complete with uninterrupted score.

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Composer Jeff Richmond (b. 1961), one of the show’s executive producers and Fey’s husband—​they worked together in improv comedy in Chicago, then on Saturday Night Live—​remembered a time when “really cool instrumentals, tunes you could hum,” were the norm in TV. Because 30 Rock’s “show within a show” was originally titled ‘The Girlie Show,’ Richmond thought “burlesque stripper drums” would be a good start, hence the main title’s Gene Krupa–​style drumming. Baritone sax offered “something that felt new, but also traditional,” Richmond added, and when the 30 Rock team approved, he completed the track by “making it sound like a Jackie Gleason orchestra” and adding voices. Edited to a fast-​moving series of images of NBC’s home base, the 17-​second theme was Emmy-​nominated in its first season. It took a few episodes to get the balance right, Richmond said: “Once the show started to take shape, the score gave it permission to go into crazy territory. The show could be as elastic as we wanted to make the world, because music could make it palatable, easy to get on board. It can be weird and still grounded at the same time. Characters actually wink at the lens; I always feel like I have permission to do that with the music.” Perhaps the wildest TV theme of its time was for The Big Bang Theory (2007–​2019, CBS), the comedy about Caltech physicists (Jim Parsons, Johnny Galecki), their waitress neighbor (Kaley Cuoco), and their co-​ workers (Simon Helberg, Kunal Nayyar). Creators Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady contacted the Canadian rock band Barenaked Ladies after seeing a live show in which the band’s singer-​guitarist Ed Robertson “made up a song about cosmological theory,” Robertson remembered. “It was pretty serendipitous.” “. . . Math, science, history, unraveling the mystery that all started with the big bang!” Against a rapid-​fire collection of drawings and photographs depicting momentous events throughout the universe and human history, it was a science and history lesson in 22 seconds. Not since It’s About Time had a sitcom dared to depict space, time, and civilization in under a minute, and it was just as funny.

7 “Your mission, should you decide to accept it”

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elevision, particularly in its infancy, frequently looked to the movies for inspiration. The advent of the James Bond films in 1962, and their increasing popularity, sent producers scurrying for material with which to emulate the successful Bond formula. As it happened, producer Norman Felton (who had a top-​10 hit in NBC’s Dr. Kildare) had long wanted to do an escapist hour of pure entertainment. Even before the arrival of the 007 movie extravaganzas—​but during the heyday of Ian Fleming’s popular Bond novels, which were said to be a favorite of President John F. Kennedy—​Felton had met with Fleming in hopes of enticing him to create an American TV series, perhaps based loosely on his nonfiction travelogue Thrilling Cities. Fleming came up with very little: a vague concept about a mysterious man, named Napoleon Solo, who was a globe-​trotting troubleshooter frequently seen near centers of power in Washington and Moscow. Felton turned to producer Sam Rolfe (who had created the western Have Gun—​ Will Travel and was then working on Felton’s psychiatry series The Eleventh Hour), who invented a fictitious worldwide peacekeeping organization, some subsidiary characters, and a format for weekly adventures—​ to be filmed on the “international” locales of the MGM backlot in Culver City, California. The result of their labors was The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0008

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TV’s first successful spy show and the vanguard of an entire subgenre of action-​adventure series that would dominate the medium throughout the mid-​1960s. U.N.C.L.E. (1964–​1968, NBC) starred Robert Vaughn and David McCallum as the American-​born Solo and his Russian partner Illya Kuryakin, doing constant battle with larger-​than-​life, world-​threatening villains, often in the service of the evil organization Thrush. Leo G. Carroll played their boss, Alexander Waverly. Felton’s sole choice for composer was Jerry Goldsmith. The two had collaborated on several previous projects, and Goldsmith’s Kildare theme had become a pop hit. In fact, by the time he scored the U.N.C.L.E. pilot (then called simply Solo), Goldsmith was a fast-​rising feature film composer with an Oscar nomination (for 1962’s Freud) and more than a dozen other movies (including the critically acclaimed Lonely Are the Brave, 1962, and Lilies of the Field, 1963) to his credit. The involvement of Goldsmith was of such significance that he merited a photo and biography that was the same size as those for Felton and Rolfe in the lavish advertisers’ brochure—​a rare tribute to a composer in television. As with all of his television scores, Goldsmith derived most of his musical material for The Man from U.N.C.L.E. from his distinctive, and quite unusual, 5/​4 theme. “If you noticed,” he recalled, “every one of the themes I wrote for television, including U.N.C.L.E., had two elements. There are a main theme and a secondary theme, a countermelody. [In the

Jerry Goldsmith, 1964.

scores] I milked the hell out of them. That’s how I could do those shows so Action-Adventure fast. That, I believed, was the way to do it. In those days, we took pride in 255 what we did for television.” The striking look and sound of U.N.C.L.E. was established in the opening sequence of its first episode, “The Vulcan Affair,” as viewers were introduced to the high-​tech, concrete-​and-​steel structure of the organization’s headquarters behind an innocent-​looking tailor shop facade. A Thrush operative, bent on assassinating Waverly, manages to enter the building but is confronted by Solo. The killer fires four shots in rapid succession, only to find that Solo is behind a wall of bulletproof glass—​a moment of high drama that cuts directly to the series’ main title (and, in fact, was used as a teaser for most of the first season). Goldsmith’s orchestra was without strings, and its small size (27 musicians for the pilot; usually just 15 players during the first season) forced the composer to become particularly creative in his use of brass, woodwinds, and percussion. His three original U.N.C.L.E. scores (a dozen other episodes were tracked with the same music) accompanied early, dark episodes that were less characteristic of the series than its later, more widely popular tongue-​in-​cheek shows. The unconventional main-​title theme contained both jazz and martial elements: wild trumpet flourishes over militaristic snare drums that musically conveyed both the high-​style heroics and serious drama elements of the series. Deceptively simple upon first hearing, it was also the source for Goldsmith’s secondary action theme (which was extensively developed in chase and suspense sequences). Stylistically, his music for U.N.C.L.E. resembled his score for MGM’s all-​star thriller The Prize (1963) and presaged the action music in the war picture Morituri (1965) and the far more flamboyant spy spoof Our Man Flint (1965). He also wrote a pretty love theme, “Meet Mr. Solo,” which received considerable airplay on easy-​ listening radio stations. Goldsmith’s U.N.C.L.E. theme was nominated for an Emmy, surprisingly during the series’ second season, which didn’t even use his powerful original arrangement; Lalo Schifrin created a “cooler” version in 4/​ 4 for flute and the then-​popular bongo drums. Schifrin was one of several composers who followed Goldsmith on the series; they, together with fellow first-​season composers Morton Stevens and Walter Scharf, were nominated for a Grammy for their music as it appeared on the first of two soundtrack albums. Gerald Fried and Robert Drasnin wrote most of the music for the series’ second and third seasons; Richard Shores worked on the fourth. Its spinoff, The Girl from U.N.C.L.E. with Stefanie Powers (1966–​1967, NBC), also used Goldsmith’s theme but in a harpsichord-​ dominated arrangement by jazz composer Dave Grusin. Because The Man from U.N.C.L.E. started as a serious spy drama and gradually became lighter and broader in approach, the underscore naturally reflected these changes. It was during its second season that the

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debonair Vaughn and the turtleneck-​wearing McCallum became teen idols and the show jumped into the Nielsen top 10. That’s when Fried signed on, eventually composing some two dozen scores for U.N.C.L.E., more than any other single composer on the series. “It was just plain fun,” he recalled. “Nobody took it seriously. The more gimmicks and the more smartass things we could do, and the stuntmen and prop men could do, the better [the producers] would like it. It wasn’t challenging musically; it was a craft job. You’d use the same material basically, just with an Arabian version, a Japanese version, a Greek version, being imaginative in those prescribed areas. This was a game, and a very enjoyable game.” Fried’s scores sported a lively, jazzy feel, befitting the series’ less serious tone as the seasons wore on. By the fall of 1965, TV’s spy craze was in full swing. The most successful, creatively speaking, of the season’s new espionage-​themed entries was I Spy, from producer Sheldon Leonard (whose previous hits had all been in the comedy field, from Make Room for Daddy to The Dick Van Dyke Show). Whereas U.N.C.L.E.’s derring-​do was rooted in a utopian fantasy about a global peacekeeping organization, I Spy (1965–​1968, NBC) took Cold War politics somewhat more seriously. What distinguished I Spy from the many other cloak-​and-​dagger series of the period was the casting of comedian Bill Cosby as one of the two leads, and producer Leonard’s insistence on shooting the series on location around the world. Robert Culp played American agent Kelly Robinson, whose cover was that of a top tennis player on the international circuit; Cosby was his partner, Alexander Scott, a Rhodes scholar and linguist who was supposed to be Robinson’s trainer. Cosby, the first Black actor to star in a dramatic series, won three consecutive Emmy Awards for his performances. As he had before, Leonard turned to composer Earle Hagen to provide the musical score. As a valued and longtime member of Leonard’s production team, Hagen often traveled with the company. In fact, he recalled: “Before we started the show, Sheldon and his wife and my wife and I went around the world, scouting locations for the show. We went west from here [California] to Japan, Hong Kong, Bangkok, India, Israel, the Greek islands, Rome, Paris, New York, and home. Fifty-​two days. It was a great trip. And wherever I went I sampled [indigenous music] and bought records. I probably had, at one time, about as good an ethnic [music] library as you could get.” The result was among the richest musical palettes composed for any series in that era. Although the scores were recorded in Los Angeles, Hagen regularly visited the company’s far-​flung locations to record, on-​ site, the unique local sounds that would provide authentic musical flavor for each episode. “For example, in the marketplace in Marrakech,” Hagen recalled, “they had Berber tribes’ bands with just clapper cymbals and drums.

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Earle Hagen accepting the 1968 Emmy for I Spy.

You’d have had to hire one hundred men to duplicate that [in the states], and then you’d never get it right. So we just shot them, recorded them, and synced the tracks.” On a Mexican location, Hagen said, “they shot in the Floating Gardens in Chapultepec and there were seven different mariachi combinations playing at the same time. We had to build that, do that from scratch, because they would cut to Culp sitting in the middle of a marimba band, playing just odd notes, and an accordion would go by in another boat. There were seven orchestra tracks going at the same time.” The globetrotting even became a little dangerous on one occasion. Flying into Athens after the coup in Greece in April 1967, “We were the first plane to land after the military takeover,” Hagen said. “We were taken into custody and we had to get off the mainland the next day. Sheldon had chartered a boat that slept 60, which he used in a couple of the shows. And that was our hotel; we stayed on the boat. Two weeks later I came back into Athens alone and set up a recording with a bouzouki player.” The majority of on-​location source recordings—​many made using just a battery-​pack tape recorder—​were mixed into the background. For his dramatic scoring, Hagen generally used an orchestra of 18 to 20 players. And, as with his experiences in comedy, every one of the 82 episodes boasted an original score (two-​thirds by Hagen, nearly all the rest by Hugo Friedhofer, a longtime friend and colleague).

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Hagen’s main-​title theme was an exciting, up-​tempo melody for saxophone, and then strings, over a bass guitar ostinato, all liberally flavored with brass. According to the composer, the I Spy title sequence was the first to combine live action, animation, and graphic art: it was cut specifically to a tempo that Hagen had requested, so that the transformation of the animated tennis player into an armed spy, running into the “I” of the title, was perfectly timed. Sometimes the editors working on individual episodes would even consult Hagen when cutting chases, so that the tempo of his score would match the rhythm of the editing. “The approach was semi-​jazz,” Hagen said, although the range and depth of I Spy scores actually defied easy labeling. Hagen and Friedhofer lent orchestral color to the varied locales, paced the drama, enlivened the humor, and underscored the emotion of the moment. Hagen’s personal favorite, the 1967 “Mainly on the Plains” (with Boris Karloff as a college professor in Spain who thinks of himself as a reincarnated Don Quixote), featured flamenco guitar; his Emmy winner, music for the 1967 “Laya,” was set in Greece with a bittersweet denouement underscored by a vocal version of Hagen’s romantic theme. Hagen became, in January 2011, the first dramatic-​score composer to be inducted into the Television Academy Hall of Fame. Then, in the fall of 1966, came the most famous spy music ever, for what certainly qualifies as one of television’s most dynamic series: Mission: Impossible (CBS, 1966–​1973). A veteran intelligence agent (Steven Hill in the first season, Peter Graves in succeeding years) would assemble a team of experts—​most often, in the first few seasons, a master of disguise (Martin Landau), a model-​actress (Barbara Bain), an electronics whiz (Greg Morris), and a strongman (Peter Lupus)—​to undertake an espionage mission, often abroad, that was deemed too dangerous or difficult for most agents. And, many years before the phrase “plausible deniability” entered the public discourse, the voice on all of the assignment recordings invariably cautioned, “Should you or any member of your IM Force be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions.” Lalo Schifrin wasn’t sure why producer Bruce Geller called him to score the pilot for Mission. “He asked specifically for me to do this show,” the composer later recalled. “I don’t know who else he had in mind, but he called my agent—​and this was quite unusual—​to say that he wanted me to go to see the sets while they were shooting the pilot.” For Mission, Geller asked Schifrin to compose themes for each of the characters. Schifrin declined. “When I saw the pilot, I said I think that would be wrong. There are so many characters, it would be confusing,” he told Geller. “There would be no cohesion. They have one common goal; it’s almost a paramilitary operation.” His solution was a march, “but a march with suspense.” Called “The Plot” on the best-​selling LP recording,

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Lalo Schifrin conducting in the 1960s.

Schifrin’s familiar Mission march worked (in dozens of variations over the series’ seven-​year life) to link visually disparate scenes. (As often happened in television scoring, a theme that becomes famous for one show may, in reality, have had its germination in another. “The Plot” was a variation on a theme Schifrin had already composed for U.N.C.L.E. producer Norman Felton’s World War II spy drama Jericho, whose pilot Schifrin scored at MGM in December 1965. Schifrin had been ideally suited for this episode, about underground efforts to spirit a famous conductor out of Germany. Schifrin used a 48-​piece orchestra to record classical music for several concert-​hall scenes. The march, with a few variations identical to “The Plot,” bound together the military operation scenes. Felton later asked his old friend Jerry Goldsmith to score another episode and used Goldsmith’s own, quite different, march as the Jericho theme.) But “The Plot” was not the Mission theme. According to Schifrin, “We needed a theme for the main title that had to be a little more tongue-​in-​ cheek. I wanted a little humor, lightness, a theme that wouldn’t take itself too seriously.” He chose (like Jerry Goldsmith two years before, with The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) 5/​4 for his time signature. “There is something unpredictable about 5/​4,” he said. At the time, there were no main-​title visuals per se. In fact, according to Robert H. Justman, who was associate producer on the pilot, what became the Mission: Impossible theme “was a cue that Lalo had written for an escape sequence on the road, after they get away from the dictator.” Added Jack Hunsaker, music editor on the pilot: “A piece of music came up that was really exciting, that had nothing to do with the rest of the show. Bruce [Geller] got very excited about it” and decided to use it as the main-​title theme. Said Geller, in his liner notes for the Mission: Impossible

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LP: “So integral to the show did Lalo’s themes become, that when the main title of Mission: Impossible was made, it was built around the music, not scored afterwards. Many times since then whole sequences of film have been handled the same way: the music dictating the editing.” The Mission theme was built around a series of three-​note phrases for flute, punctuated by sharp brass notes over a driving, heavily percussive beat (featuring those great 1960s bongos). The now-​famous 50-​second main-​ title sequence opened with a hand lighting a match that ignited an animated fuse which, in turn, crossed the screen six times over a rapid-​fire sequence of exciting scenes from that night’s episode. The word “Mission” appeared in typescript, timed precisely to Schifrin’s music, before the camera zoomed in on a series of cast portraits. The word “Impossible” appeared, “stamped” diagonally across the screen, as Schifrin’s music reached its climax. No music accompanied scenes of Hill (or later, Graves) receiving his assignment; it routinely began after the voice announced that “this tape will self-​destruct in five seconds” and smoke began rising from the tape or record. Schifrin cleverly intertwined the Mission and “Plot” themes as Hill/​Graves evaluated the various Impossible Missions Force member dossiers for the week’s assignment. Music was more important in Mission than in any other action drama of its time. In most of the early episodes, the missions were complex and often were accomplished by team members working silently behind the scenes; Schifrin’s music, mostly variations on the “Plot” theme—​the backbone of most Mission scores—​served as the connective tissue for many sequences and made a major contribution to the suspense. In all, Schifrin scored a total of 12 episodes, including three in the first season and one or two for most succeeding years. Many of Mission’s other composers were spy-​show veterans: Walter Scharf, Gerald Fried, Robert Drasnin, and Richard Markowitz; jazz-​oriented composers like Jerry Fielding, Jack Urbont, and Richard Hazard also contributed music. All were obligated to use Schifrin’s “Plot” theme extensively throughout. Schifrin was nominated twice for Emmy Awards for his Mission scores (in the 1966–​1967 and 1968–​1969 seasons). Although denied the statue from his peers in the television industry, other and perhaps more satisfying rewards followed: the soundtrack album was nominated for four 1967 Grammy Awards, and Schifrin won two (for Best Instrumental Theme and Best Original Score for a Motion Picture or TV Show). It spent 31 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart and, to this day, remains Schifrin’s best-​known work (despite six Oscar nominations, scores for film classics such as Cool Hand Luke and Dirty Harry, and a busy career as a classical music conductor). The Grammy win as Best Original Score remains, in the six-​decade history of the category, the only time that a soundtrack from a weekly TV series has ever won. The irony of a Mission LP was that, despite the crucial role of music in the series, Schifrin had only two major themes (along with dozens of

fragments, phrases, and musical devices that worked well in the context of the show but weren’t substantial enough to make album cuts). So, belatedly following Geller’s original instructions, Schifrin composed all-​new leitmotifs for the characters to fill out the album. These surfaced in later seasons of the series, but only occasionally and usually as source music. That Schifrin failed to compose a single score in the series’ second season is not surprising considering his next major assignment: Geller’s new series Mannix (1967–​1975, CBS), with Mike Connors as a contemporary private eye whose agency was heavily computerized. The Mannix theme broke with detective-​show tradition by being in 3/​4 time. According to the composer, Geller had heard a jazz tune he liked on the radio and tried to hum it. Schifrin interpreted Geller’s suggestion as “a syncopated jazz waltz” and proceeded to create the Mannix theme. Again, Geller created the main-​title visuals as a showcase for Schifrin’s surprising music. After the first season (a more conventional opening in which a computer punch card emerged with the show title), the main title was redesigned. A brassy opening with timpani introduced the character, who appeared in various scenes (making breakfast, shaving in the car, shooting a gun, practicing judo, and others) that multiplied into split screen as the six letters of the title appeared. The lively tune, beginning with saxophones playing the melody and trombones the countermelody,

CBS composers at the network’s West Coast offices in 1966. Back row, left to right: Morton Stevens, George Duning. Middle row: Cyril Mockridge, Muzzy Marcellino, Wilbur Hatch, Richard Shores, Nelson Riddle, Curt Massey, Harry Sukman, Van Alexander, John Parker, Nathan Scott, Jack Pleis, Perry Botkin Sr., Harry Zimmerman, Paul Weston. Front row: Harry Geller, Jeff Alexander, Lalo Schifrin, Perry Lafferty (head of CBS West Coast programming), Leon Klatzkin, Richard Markowitz.

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swept the viewer away, and its upbeat tone belied the frequent mayhem during the hour to come. Mannix thrived on two-​fisted action. In the second season, Joe Mannix left his high-​tech agency, hired a smart secretary (Gail Fisher), and opened his own one-​man firm. Although the series ran longer than Mission: Impossible (eight seasons), Schifrin scored just eight episodes. And, as he had with his two Mission albums, the composer created mostly original material for the Mannix LP, which became one of his finest efforts in the realm of orchestral jazz of the sixties: alternately charming and beautiful, dark and exciting. Schifrin created the musical formats for several other action-​adventure shows of the 1960s and 1970s, but none would match the longevity and popularity of his Mission and Mannix. A cult favorite was T.H.E. Cat (1966–​1967, NBC), a half-​hour drama in the Peter Gunn mold with Robert Loggia as a former circus aerialist and cat burglar turned professional bodyguard. Schifrin’s theme for flute and brass had an appropriately stealthy feel, and he filled many moments in Cat’s hangout (a nightspot called the Casa del Gato, “House of the Cat”) with Latin jazz; he even appeared in one episode, playing piano in the club. Later came Starsky and Hutch (1975–​1979, ABC), a buddy-​cop show with David Soul and Paul Michael Glaser as unconventional, odd-​couple plainclothes detectives in Los Angeles. Schifrin’s theme, drawn from a chase scene in his pilot score for the Aaron Spelling–​Leonard Goldberg–​ produced action hour, seemed inspired by the Scorpio motif from his Dirty Harry score and elements of its sequel Magnum Force in its grim tone, electronic textures, and heavy beat. For its second season, Tom Scott supplied a much more contemporary jazz-​funk theme that he called “Gotcha”; Mark Snow wrote yet another one for the third season; and Scott’s, in a new arrangement, returned for the fourth season.

THE SECRET AGENT THEME When Patrick McGoohan’s British-​produced Danger Man series was retitled Secret Agent for its American run (1965–​1966, CBS), the network commissioned a new theme. The precise circumstances of the commission are not clear; in any case, the “Secret Agent” song broke new ground as the first successful television theme with a rock ’n’ roll beat. CBS went to Lou Adler, who managed then-​hot rocker Johnny Rivers, for the new theme. Adler asked two of his staff writers, Phil Sloan and Steve Barri (who would, later in 1965, have a number-​ one hit with “Eve of Destruction,” sung by Barry McGuire), to compose a title song. According to Barri, they never even saw the program: “We were just trying to write something that fit what we were told the show was like. They said it was like a TV

version of James Bond—​it’s British and not as much action, but it’s pretty intelligent, a real spy kind of thing.” John Barry’s Goldfinger theme, sung by Shirley Bassey, was riding high on the charts at the time and may have been a factor in CBS’s decision to replace Edwin Astley’s instrumental with a title song. “Basically, we were thinking that we were writing a James Bond theme,” Barri recalled. A further influence was the guitar sound of the original “James Bond Theme,” because, said Barri, “we wanted to come up with a guitar hook for the beginning, since the Bond theme had a guitar hook.” Sloan (1945–​2015), the guitarist of the pair, wrote the now-​ famous opening guitar riff. “And then we both sat down and basically came up with the melody together, and we both worked on the lyrics,”

Inevitably, the success of the spy genre led to spoofs, only one of which lasted for more than a season: Get Smart (1965–​1970, NBC, CBS), starring Don Adams as Maxwell Smart, bumbling Agent 86 of US spy agency CONTROL, with Barbara Feldon as his endlessly patient partner Agent 99 and Edward Platt as their longsuffering Chief. Created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, it added several catchphrases to the popular lexicon of the time: “sorry about that, Chief,” “would you believe . . .” “missed it by that much,” “. . . and loving it.” CONTROL was constantly battling the evildoings of KAOS, and Smart generally came out on top despite his incompetence. Adams’s longtime writing partner was fellow comedian Bill Dana, whose brother was big-​band arranger and conductor Irving Szathmary (1907–​1983), who had already scored the comedies I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster (1962–​1963, ABC) and The Bill Dana Show (1963–​1965, NBC). Get Smart producer Leonard Stern created Dickens/​Fenster, and offered Szathmary the spy sendup. “I compose for what Maxwell Smart feels within himself,” Szathmary said in 1966. “I play him straight. In his heart he is the great savior of his country, a hero fighting all the forces of evil. He’s in there pitching, no matter how stupid he looks, and things come out great in the end in spite of what he does.” Added producer Stern: “The music required humor, mystery, suspense and action, but from a different perspective.” Szathmary’s opening theme accompanied Smart speeding around a Washington, DC, corner in his red Sunbeam Tiger, entering a nondescript building where he passed through multiple banging doors until he reached a phone booth, dialed a number, and descended out of sight—​presumably into CONTROL headquarters. Written in 12/​8 and powered by a seemingly unstoppable electric-​guitar ostinato, the music was part sitcom-​funny,

said Barri (b. 1942). “I remember we were laughing through most of it, because the lines just seemed so silly to us. At that particular time we were trying to get away from writing surf songs and hot-​rod things—​and it was about the time that [Bob] Dylan was starting to become a really important artist, and the Beatles [were popular]—​so we were trying to write songs that had some kind of political commentary, or that were a bit more serious. And here we are writing about a guy laying in a Bombay alley. It was kind of dumb, but obviously it worked.” Barri’s reference to the “Bombay alley” (“sunnin’ on the Riviera one day, then layin’ in a Bombay alley next day”) was to a later verse heard on the record but not in the TV version. In fact, correspondence between Adler and then-​ CBS music head Lud Gluskin indicated that Sloan and Barri wrote the

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song in March 1965 as “Danger Man,” but a last-​ minute title change resulted in the alteration of the song to “Secret Agent Man.” The demo featured Sloan singing “look out, Danger Man” and “think fast, Danger Man” (along with a female backup group echoing “Danger Man”) in the spots where we became accustomed to hearing “Secret Agent Man.” “We wrote and submitted it as ‘Danger Man’ and then, for some reason and I have no idea why, they decided they wanted to change the show to Secret Agent. So all we did was change the line. It worked okay, although it never really worked as well as ‘Danger Man’ as far as I was concerned,” Barri said. CBS replaced the brief, 13-​second Danger Man main title (which contained the opening of original composer Edwin Astley’s theme) with a 40-​second

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part espionage-​serious. Szathmary conducted a 16-​piece band for all of Get Smart’s five-​year run and retired not long after the show’s cancellation. “Oh, look, Al, I’m not asking you to spy . . . I’m just asking you to steal.” The words of Noah Bain (Malachi Throne), government handler of Alexander Mundy (Robert Wagner), halfway through Dave Grusin’s theme music during the opening of It Takes a Thief (1968–​1970, ABC), last of the great 1960s spy shows. Wagner, in his first TV series, played the suave criminal-​turned-​spy, having been blackmailed into undertaking a series of heists for the US government. Wagner’s movie-​star past helped attract fellow film stars like Bette Davis, Joseph Cotten, Senta Berger, Ricardo Montalban, and Adolfo Celi in guest roles. After a one-​hour pilot (with a Benny Carter score) failed, Universal made a second, 90-​minute pilot with a score by Ernie Freeman (1922–​ 1981), who won a 1966 Grammy for arranging Frank Sinatra’s hit “Strangers in the Night” and had recently scored the Yul Brynner spy film The Double Man. Freeman’s jazzy score fit nicely, but when the series debuted it sported a new, more memorable theme by Grusin, who was then a favorite of Universal music director Stanley Wilson. Grusin scored just one episode, Richard Shores another (the Grusin-​Shores duo having recently done The Girl from U.N.C.L.E.) and jazz great Benny Golson (b. 1929), composer of “Killer Joe” and “I Remember Clifford,” three more. This was the beginning of an eight-​year period of TV scoring for Golson that also included work at Paramount (Mission: Impossible) and 20th Century-​Fox (Room 222). He would score seven more It Takes a Thief episodes over the next two seasons, joining fellow jazzman Oliver Nelson, veteran Lyn Murray, and up-​and-​coming Universal stalwart Billy Goldenberg, the latter of whom lent an elegant musical touch to the

opening, part animation and part live-​action clips of McGoohan, scored with Johnny Rivers’s vocal version of the Sloan-​ Barri tune. Within months, thousands of kids taking guitar lessons would spend hours learning to play the memorable opening electric guitar riff; and the lyrics—​“There’s a man who leads a life of danger /​To everyone he meets he stays a stranger /​With every move he makes, another chance he takes /​Odds are he won’t live to see tomorrow . . .”—​were burned into the minds of spy-​ show fans nationwide. Astley’s original music was relegated to the opening first-​act credit sequence of each episode. Sloan’s memoir suggested that Rivers recorded the TV version “and was glad to be done with it . . . he felt this type of thing was a step backward.” After the show went on the air, Rivers was asked to record a

single but “he didn’t want any part of it and repeatedly turned down the idea.” But after The Ventures recorded and released their own version, “Adler twisted Johnny’s arm to do a full-​length version of his own,” and a live performance (recorded at L.A.’s legendary Whisky a Go Go) was finally released and went to Number 3 on the Billboard pop charts.

debut of Fred Astaire as Mundy’s father, master thief Alistair Mundy, in the third season, much of which was filmed on location in Europe. Grusin would later make a final contribution to TV spy music with a jazzy, cimbalom-​flavored theme for the short-​lived Assignment: Vienna (1972–​1973, ABC), starring Robert Conrad. The Wild Wild West actor would conclude his trilogy of spy series with A Man Called Sloane (1979–​ 1980, NBC), a none-​ too-​ convincing hour of derring-​ do with Daniel O’Herlihy as his boss, Ji-​Tu Cumbuka as his sidekick with a mechanical hand, and a guitar-​driven, synth-​spiced theme by Patrick Williams. The Dukes of Hazzard (1979–​1985, CBS) was among the most unusual action shows in TV history. Based loosely on writer-​director Gy Waldron’s 1975 action-​ comedy Moonrunners, about Southern bootleggers, Dukes starred John Schneider and Tom Wopat as cousins Bo and Luke Duke, constantly outrunning the law in their souped-​up red, Confederate-​flag-​adorned Dodge Charger “General Lee” and foiling endless schemes by corrupt politician Boss Hogg (Sorrell Booke). Cousin Daisy Duke (Catherine Bach) and Uncle Jesse (Denver Pyle) figured in most episodes, all of which were narrated by “balladeer” Waylon Jennings (1937–​2002). Country-​music icon Jennings filled the same role on Moonrunners, and Waldron enlisted him once again for Dukes. “He not only did the title song, he did the theme and action music for the first four or five shows,” Waldron said. “I think I gave him a script to read, and said ‘take it from there.’ He got with his band, and I produced the session. We put bluegrass banjo in our chase music!” Jennings’s theme song for Dukes (“just two good ole boys /​never meanin’ no harm /​beats all you never saw /​been in trouble with the law since the day they were born”) became the nation’s top-​selling country single in the summer of 1980, and as Jennings himself later recalled, his first million-​selling record. “Every time I look out on my driveway and see General Lee, the orange Dodge Charger they gave me with the rebel stars and bars painted on its roof, it makes me laugh,” he wrote in his autobiography. “Great car for eluding a sheriff.” He finally appeared in a 1984 episode as an old friend of Uncle Jesse. Jennings’s Dukes theme was not, however, the first country-​flavored TV theme to hit number one on the country charts. Flatt and Scruggs achieved it in late 1962 with “The Ballad of Jed Clampett” from The Beverly Hillbillies, and fellow country star Merle Haggard (1937–​2016) hit the top in July 1975 with the title song from Movin’ On (1974–​1976, NBC). The latter, starring Claude Akins and Frank Converse as long-​haul truck drivers, was (like Route 66 a decade earlier) shot on location around the country. Haggard’s theme (“big wheels rollin’, movin’ on”) mentioned the names of both lead characters Will and Sonny. Reba McEntire’s sitcom Reba (2001–​2007, WB, CW), about a single mom in Texas, adopted her song “I’m a Survivor” with slightly altered lyrics; it hit Number 3 in November 2001.

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The most unusual backstory of a country TV theme is probably “The Unknown Stuntman,” which actually inspired the Lee Majors series The Fall Guy (1981–​1986, ABC). Producer Glen A. Larson heard a song by old friend Dave Somerville (part of the Canadian quartet The Diamonds), written for a CBS special about stunt performers, modified it with new music and lyrics, and the two performed “The Ballad of the Unknown Stuntman” before an audience of ABC executives—​who, on the strength of the song alone, with no script even written, green-​lit the pilot. (Singer-​ songwriter Gail Jensen, a 1970s collaborator with Somerville, is co-​ credited on the song; both appear in the pilot.) Majors, who played a Hollywood stuntman who moonlights as a bounty hunter in the series, sang the song under the surprisingly lengthy 1 minute, 40 second main-​title sequence (which sported such clever lines as “I’ve been seen with Farrah,” a reference to Major’s ex-​wife, and “I’m the unknown stuntman that made Redford such a star . . . that makes Eastwood look so fine,” referring to top box-​office stars Robert and Clint). Miami Vice may have been the musical trendsetter with its all-​synth score in 1984, but it wasn’t the first to employ synthesizers in its main theme. Two years earlier, Stu Phillips scored Knight Rider (1982–​1986, NBC) for his Battlestar Galactica producer Glen A. Larson. Its futuristic premise—​a crime-​fighting ex-​cop in a high-​tech car—​suggested a musically high-​tech solution. He used four synthesizer players and a small rhythm section for the catchy theme (credited to both Phillips and Larson) as the narrator introduced us to the sleek black Pontiac TransAm named KITT: “Knight Rider . . . a shadowy flight into the dangerous world of a man who does not exist.” David Hasselhoff became a star with this series, and William Daniels provided the voice of KITT. Don Peake (b. 1940), former guitarist for Ray Charles and a member of pop music’s famous Wrecking Crew, inherited the show halfway through the first season and scored dozens of episodes through the next three seasons. Post–​Miami Vice, however, producers began lining up around the block for all-​electronic scores. Tangerine Dream, the German techno-​pop group that won fans with its synthesizer scores for Sorcerer (1977) and Thief (1981), provided the propulsive music for Street Hawk (1985, ABC) with Rex Smith on a high-​powered motorcycle. MacGyver (1985–​1992, ABC), too, incorporated substantial electronics in its memorable and fun opening theme by songwriter-​turned-​film composer Randy Edelman (“Weekend in New England”) for the adventure series starring Richard Dean Anderson as the ever-​resourceful American operative righting wrongs around the world. Edelman (b. 1947) had already written a winning 90-​second theme for the short-​lived Tom Skerritt medical series Ryan’s Four (1983, ABC) and tackled the MacGyver pilot using only his newly acquired Jupiter 8, Roland’s first analog synthesizer. Edelman recalled that “everybody

hated” the pilot, and that both the writer and director had removed their Action-Adventure names from the show, never a good sign. “I never thought about it as a 267 series,” the composer said, “it was sort of a not-​very-​good TV movie.” Yet it sold, Edelman was enlisted as composer, and he wound up doing 16 episodes during the first three seasons. He remembered a “20-​to 25-​piece orchestra every week” after the initial all-​synth episodes and that “it was great training for later on” when he did big-​budget film projects like The Last of the Mohicans, The Mask, and XXX. Dennis McCarthy’s fast and effective work on many of the series’ later episodes made him first choice for composer on Paramount’s subsequent Star Trek series. Edelman was a well-​known songwriter in the pop world. The composer for The Equalizer (1985–​1989, CBS), however, was a familiar name and face: Stewart Copeland (b. 1952), drummer for The Police. Having composed only a single film score, Rumble Fish (1983) for Francis Ford Coppola, he jumped into the TV fray with a highly percussive, all-​ electronic approach to the urban-​ paranoia series starring Edward Woodward as an ex-​intelligence agent helping New Yorkers in distress. “They offered me a stupendous amount of cash,” Copeland admitted a few years after the series ended. “That first year, I did every week. The show would come in Tuesday and I’d ship the music on Friday. At first, I played a lot of guitar myself, but it all got so fast that I didn’t have the time.” So everything, from drums to bass to guitar to woodwind sounds, was created using, Copeland said, “this tiny little eight-​voice computer.” Contributing sounds to many episodes was his engineer and co-​producer Jeff Seitz. “That was a really great year that I spent doing The Equalizer,” Copeland remembered, “a happy and productive time.” Although he hadn’t planned on doing a second year, the producers convinced him to stay on (he even did a cameo as a pickpocket in one episode); a third season was largely tracked with material recorded those first two seasons. He went on to score films including Wall Street and Talk Radio, and the Showtime series Dead Like Me (2003–​2004). The superhero subgenre that began with the syndicated Adventures of Superman in the 1950s hit the network big time with Batman (1966–​1968, ABC). A sensation upon its first appearance, in the middle of the 1965–​ 1966 season, Batman became synonymous with the newly coined term “camp”: an outrageous takeoff on a serious subject. Like Superman, Batman brought a DC Comics hero to life. Unlike Superman, however, executive producer William Dozier saw the exploits of the Caped Crusader as more effective when played for laughs. So Adam West and Burt Ward, as Gotham City crimefighters Batman and Robin, played their roles absolutely straight. But writer Lorenzo Semple Jr.’s loony dialogue, and the cockeyed pilot direction of Robert Butler, made quite clear that none of this was to be taken seriously. The villains—​Joker (Cesar Romero), Penguin (Burgess Meredith), Riddler

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Neal Hefti.  

(Frank Gorshin), Catwoman (Julie Newmar), and others—​were all far larger than life, their schemes diabolical, and their gadgets wild. Even the colors in Batman were garish, the violence so cartoonish that animated titles containing words like “pow” and “bam” were superimposed during fight scenes. Dozier asked Neal Hefti (1922–​2008) to score the presentation film for Batman. Hefti, a veteran jazz arranger and bandleader who had composed such standards as “Girl Talk,” had only recently moved into the film-​scoring arena, doing such comedies as Sex and the Single Girl and How to Murder Your Wife (both 1965). Hefti was stumped. What should the musical approach be when the heroes are deadly serious, the villains are smirking madmen, the situations are ludicrous, and the audience is expected to howl with laughter? “I tore up a lot of paper,” Hefti recalled. “It did not come easy to me. It sounds easy, after it’s all over; it sounds so natural. But I just sweated over that thing, more so than any other single piece of music I ever wrote. I was never satisfied with it. “This was not a comedy. This was about unreal people. Batman and Robin were both very, very serious. The bad guys would be chasing them, and they would come to a stop at a red light, you know. They wouldn’t break the law even to save their own lives. So there was a grimness and a self-​righteousness about all this,” the composer said. It took him “the better part of a month” to come up with the theme. “I was almost going to call them and say, I can’t do it. But I never walk out on projects, so I sort of forced myself to finish.”

Hefti’s Batman tune wound up winning a 1966 Grammy as Best Instrumental Theme (beating out entries by Henry Mancini and Alex North, among others). His musical solution to a combined dramatic and comedic problem was perfect: bass guitar, low brass, and percussion to create a driving rhythm, while an eight-​voice chorus sings “Batman!” in harmony with the trumpets. It was part serious, part silly: just like the series. Hefti’s theme played against animated images drawn, for the main-​title visuals, in the style of the DC Comics characters. For the presentation reel, he also wrote a chase-​sequence variation on the main theme. Hefti recalled the makeup of the band: two trumpets, four trombones, two keyboards, four guitars, a bass, and two drums. The eight singers (four sopranos, four tenors) “sang in perfect unison, not octaves apart,” Hefti said. “The tenors were up there screeching, so they sounded like boy sopranos.” He offered to create separate tracks, so that Dozier could eliminate the voices if he desired, “but he liked the idea,” Hefti says, so the chorus stayed. Batman was originally planned as a fall 1966 entry, but ABC’s fall 1965 schedule was falling apart in a hurry. So Dozier was forced to speed up production to make a January 1966 airdate. Hefti, otherwise committed (with 1966 films including Duel at Diablo and Barefoot in the Park), was unable even to complete the pilot. Enter Nelson Riddle. With Route 66 and The Untouchables behind him, he had no trouble following Hefti’s lead in scoring Batman. Riddle frequently fell back on Hefti’s ostinato from the theme for the speeding Batmobile, but he wrote new themes for the villains: shrill, laughing brass for the Riddler; waddling woodwinds for the Penguin; a darker, cackling musical laughter for the Joker; and so forth. Riddle had previously worked for Fox TV head William Self as musical director on Frank Sinatra’s ABC variety show in 1957; Self suggested Riddle to producer Dozier. According to Riddle’s son, bandleader Christopher Riddle, his father saw scoring Batman as “an opportunity to enhance his BMI [royalties] by writing a lot of stuffing music, music to be punched by—​they even spelled it out on the screen, pow-​biff-​bash—​ despite the fact that he hadn’t been commissioned to write the theme.” Riddle scored most of Batman, although for the third and final season (1967–​1968) another big-​band veteran, Billy May, came aboard. He composed a theme for the new character of Batgirl (Yvonne Craig) that received unusual end-​title credit by itself. (Hefti, meanwhile, turned his quick stint on the series into two successful LPs, Batman Theme and Hefti in Gotham City, both comprising almost entirely original material.) The immediate success of Batman (whose Wednesday and Thursday half hours finished among the Nielsen top 10 for the season) led ABC to commission from Dozier another series about a masked crimefighter. The Green Hornet (1966–​1967) was adapted not from a comic book but from the long-​ running radio series about Britt Reid, crusading newspaper editor whose secret identity was that of the Green Hornet, wanted by the police but in reality

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a dedicated foe of organized crime. Van Williams (Surfside 6) played Reid, and Bruce Lee played his faithful manservant Kato (who demonstrated, for the first time to American viewers, the kung fu skills that would make him a movie star in the 1970s and an enduring cult figure after his death). Hefti was asked to pen this theme as well. But he turned down the assignment when Dozier asked him to base the music on Rimsky-​Korsakov’s famous “Flight of the Bumblebee,” which had been the theme of the radio show. Billy May agreed to the parameters, and came up with a clever reworking of the musical concept that, while taking its initial cue from the Russian composer, became an original theme on its own as played by trumpet virtuoso Al Hirt. May also scored the entire season (moving to Batman after The Green Hornet was canceled). May said that his longtime friendship with Fox music director Lionel Newman led him to do The Green Hornet, and that the idea of the theme was “to make it sound close enough that people would think it’s ‘Flight of the Bumblebee,’ but different enough so that we could get the copyright.” He had recently done some albums with trumpeter Hirt, so the connection with the New Orleans jazzman was both obvious and natural. May’s scores, while similar in tone to Riddle’s Batman music, were largely jazz-​ based and marked by plenty of blaring brass during action sequences. Says May: “You didn’t have to work as hard with Batman as you did with Green Hornet. Batman was easier because he had all those ‘pows’ and everything, you know. With both, you had your tongue in your cheek, a little bit.” It was 1974 before another network decided to take a chance on a superhero. ABC tried Wonder Woman, a 90-​minute pilot with former tennis star Cathy Lee Crosby as the Amazon princess of DC Comics fame, now an intelligence agency secretary in contemporary times. Its failure led

Billy May.

to a second pilot in 1975 by a new production team: The New, Original Action-Adventure Wonder Woman, with former Miss USA Lynda Carter in the title role. This 271 time, the show was set in the 1940s, with Wonder Woman and good guy/​ romantic interest Steve Trevor (Lyle Waggoner) fighting the Nazis. The campy attitude was reflected in the score, composed by sitcom veteran Charles Fox (Love, American Style, Happy Days). He set the tone with a title song that featured lyrics by his longtime partner Norman Gimbel: “All the world is waiting for you and the power you possess /​ ln your satin tights, fighting for your rights, and the old red, white and blue . . .” The lyric was funny, the music was bouncy, and the pilot sold. Recalled Fox: “We were dealing with a cartoon character, a superhero. The series was set in the forties, with the Nazis and all that. So everything was larger than life. We just went for a song that had a lot of energy, a dynamic quality.” Fox scored the pilot and first episode of the series, at first called simply Wonder Woman, then The New Adventures of Wonder Woman (1976–​1979, ABC, CBS), in lively, campy style, maintained by composer Artie Kane when an arm injury sidelined Fox. Kane, one of Hollywood’s most celebrated keyboard players, turned to a composing career in the early 1970s, and Fox became one of his early benefactors. Television shifted its comic-​book attention from DC to Marvel in 1977 with the addition of The Incredible Hulk (1978–​1982) to the CBS schedule. Universal’s adaptation of the legend of scientist David Bruce Banner (Bill Bixby)—​whose exposure to deadly gamma rays turned him, at moments of extreme stress or high emotion, into the green, superstrong, and primitive Hulk (Lou Ferrigno)—​was entrusted to composer Joe Harnell (1924–​2005), who came from the same studio’s Bionic Woman series after several years as music director of daytime’s Mike Douglas Show. Harnell had, earlier, studied with Nadia Boulanger, William Walton, and Aaron Copland, and won a 1962 Grammy for his Fly Me to the Moon LP. He eschewed the camp approach in favor of straightforward orchestral scoring. Explained the composer: “I really try to work up a feeling of empathy for a show, regardless of how silly it may seem. I’ve got to believe in it. “To me, the Hulk represented the human condition. Sometimes we don’t behave very well, and in my life, there’s been a lot of that. When I get angry, I don’t turn green but I get ugly. So I really searched for an identification with that character, and with David’s hysterical need to get rid of this thing.” Much of his music emerged from two key themes: his “lonely man” motif (for Banner, who remained aloof from most human contact, often scored for solo piano) and a “snarling” element for the Hulk. Harnell was nominated for a 1981 Incredible Hulk score, and went on to further success with his Emmy-​nominated score for the science fiction miniseries V (1983, NBC), also from Hulk producer Kenneth Johnson.

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Joe Harnell.  

It took the success of the big-​screen Batman (1989) to revive interest in comic-​book heroes. The Flash (1990–​1991, CBS) was the first to reach fruition, and, because it also was a DC Comics property (owned, like DC’s Batman, by Time-​Warner and therefore produced at Warner Bros.), the route was obvious: clone the many elements that turned Batman into a runaway box office hit, including the music. The producers immediately sought composer Danny Elfman, whose massive Gothic score for Batman complemented director Tim Burton’s grim vision of the Dark Knight. The Flash was a hero of superhuman speed. Central City police scientist Barry Allen (John Wesley Shipp), victim of a crime-​lab accident involving lightning and chemicals, donned a red suit and fought crime with the help of a smart researcher (Amanda Pays). Like the TV Batman, there were super-​villains (Mark Hamill as the Trickster, David Cassidy as the Mirror Master) and a healthy dose of tongue-​in-​cheek humor. The special effects were superb, but the show’s scheduling was so erratic that the expensive, beautifully designed Flash never caught on. Stylistically, Elfman’s theme for The Flash was virtually identical to his Batman motif: constantly moving, building to a big climax, fully orchestral, and—​because, like Batman, the show was about a reluctant hero out to avenge the murder of a family member—​essentially dark in character. As Elfman recalled, the producers essentially said, “Can you give us something with a Batman vibe for The Flash? And, as these things tend to be, it was real quick, I jotted something down, spent two hours, there it is.”

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  Shirley Walker.

Elfman submitted a sketch for the theme, but the orchestration, the score for the two-​hour pilot, and all of the episodic scores were the work of composer Shirley Walker. Walker had co-​orchestrated and conducted Elfman’s music for Batman (as well as other Elfman projects) and was the obvious choice for The Flash series. Warner Bros. wanted a big sound for The Flash, so Walker requested a big orchestra (for episodic TV) of 47 players. Unfortunately, China Beach was considered the studio’s “prestige” show and had been given 45 players, so for political reasons Walker wound up with 42. In Walker’s words, the series “started in Danny’s area, but I took it into regions away from there and in my own direction.” Her quirky villain themes and brilliant action scoring made The Flash one of TV’s richest-​sounding series. Variations on the Superman mythology dominated the field during the next two decades. Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (1993–​ 1997, ABC) cast Dean Cain and Teri Hatcher as a new Clark Kent and Lois Lane, fellow reporters at the Daily Planet. Jay Gruska (b. 1952) was Emmy-​nominated for his soaring theme for the Man of Steel, which he recorded with an unusually large 60-​piece orchestra. Although he was John Williams’s son-​in-​law at the time, Gruska “stayed a million miles away on purpose, because he wrote the consummate Superman score. I didn’t want to embarrass him or myself.” In addition to his thrilling title theme, he added a charming love theme, “snake-​like lines” for villain Lex Luthor (John Shea), and a piano-​blues gesture for the wry treatment of

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the “tongue-​in-​cheek nature of the Lois and Clark relationship,” Gruska recalled. Smallville (2001–​2011, WB, CW), which focused on Superman’s pre-​ Metropolis life as a Kansas teenager, followed. Tom Welling, Kristin Kreuk, and Michael Rosenbaum played the young Clark Kent, Lana Lang, and Lex Luthor, respectively, with a song, “Save Me,” by alternative rock band Remy Zero, as its theme. The producers, fans of Mark Snow’s music for The X-​Files, asked the composer to score their show. Snow, in turn, realizing the enormity of the task (often more than 30 minutes of music per week on top of his other commitments), enlisted Louis Febre (b. 1959), a recent Emmy winner for his music for the syndicated drama The Cape (1997–​1998). Together they produced the music, almost entirely using synthesizers and samplers, although the trend of adding contemporary songs to the narrative meant that traditional score sometimes took a back seat to tunes by the likes of R.E.M. and Coldplay. Heroes (2006–​2010, NBC) was a different approach to the comic-​book subgenre. Creator Tim Kring’s show was not based on stories from either the DC or Marvel universes, but rather was an original concept about ordinary people who discover they have superhuman abilities and must work together to prevent the destruction of Earth. Acclaimed in its first year, the series’ diverse cast included many actors who would go on to fame in other projects, including Masi Oka, Hayden Panettiere, Adrian Pasdar, Milo Ventimiglia, Zachary Quinto, and Kristen Bell. For music, Lisa Coleman and Wendy Melvoin reunited with their Crossing Jordan producer Allan Arkush to create a surprising world-​music soundscape—​as Arkush explained, “every character on Heroes has their own musical profile, a unique combination of sounds, instruments and musical themes.” Although Coleman and Melvoin played most of the sounds themselves, their addition and manipulation of human voices helped the Heroes score to stand out. As more and more super-​heroes were adapted for big screens and small in the second decade of the twenty-​first century, composers found fresh ways to interpret them musically. Texas-​born Blake Neely (b. 1969) created music of the music for the CW’s reimagination of Arrow (2012–​2020), The Flash (2014–​), Supergirl (2015–​2021), and Legends of Tomorrow (2016–​). An Emmy nominee for his warm, piano-​and-​fiddle signature for writer-​producer Greg Berlanti’s Everwood (2002–​2006, WB), with Treat Williams as a Colorado physician, Neely became Berlanti’s primary composer on many subsequent series including the DC hero shows. Berlanti recalled: “I went over to his house, we sat in his backyard and he composed the theme for Everwood right there in front of me. Whenever I’m working on anything new, a vital part of the process is visiting Blake and having an exploratory time with him where we find the musical voice of the show.”

“The most fulfilling thing,” Neely said, “is when I solve a puzzle, Action-Adventure finding what music makes a scene work, whether it’s a short little cue 275 or an epic eight-​minute one. How do I do this without being too manipulative, without stepping on the dialogue? It’s a puzzle. You figure it out.” For Flash (Grant Gustin), the fastest man on earth, the sound was “fast and propulsive”; for Arrow (Stephen Arnell), the bow-​and-​ arrow-​ armed vigilante based on Green Arrow, “darker, heavy and pounding”; for Superman’s cousin Kara Zor-​El (Melissa Benoist), “a more traditional sound, an homage to John Williams”; and for Legends, a time-​traveling team including Rip Hunter (Arthur Darvill) and Atom (Brandon Routh), “a jaunty, swashbuckling theme but with a rock ’n’ roll attitude.” Because each show required 30 to 40 minutes of new music each week, Neely adopted the “team approach” that became commonplace for TV composers doing multiple series: primary composer writes the main themes, often half the score, then has assistants write the rest, usually based on the new motifs created for that week. Marvel Comics adaptations soon followed. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (2013–​2020, ABC) imported agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg) from the big-​screen The Avengers to TV and demanded similar orchestral heroics. Composer Bear McCreary averaged 55 to 60 musicians for every episode and as many as 90 for the most important ones. “It was the first show from the new Marvel Studios brand,” noted McCreary. “There was a sense that it had to connect with the movies; you were plugging into the broader cinematic universe through a television lens.” As the seasons and stories have progressed, McCreary added, “the score became a little more intense and more electronically driven. But the orchestra is always our foundation.” The post–​World War II setting for Agent Carter (2015–​2016, ABC)—​the second Marvel series, about Captain America’s spy-​agency friend (Hayley Atwell)—​suggested a similarly orchestral setting, with period flavors and big-​band overtones. “We wanted to keep the grandeur of her story with Cap, but also explore the jazzier world of the 1940s, which worked perfectly for our super-​spy,” said composer Christopher Lennertz (b. 1972). He even wrote a lavish MGM-​style musical number for Peggy Carter (with lyrics by Tony winner David Zippel) in the series’ second season. The music of only a handful of animal-​adventure series stood out. The long-​running Lassie (1954–​1974, CBS, syndicated), a television adaptation of the 1943 film about a resourceful collie, began with library music supplied by former Republic composer Raoul Kraushaar. (Details of the various themes have become muddled over the years because syndication prints were often inconsistent; Kraushaar apparently used a William Lava theme from a 1940s RKO film for the series’ first season, then developed a new theme for subsequent seasons.)

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Starting with the fifth season (with Jon Provost as Timmy and June Lockhart as his mom Ruth Martin), the show switched to music by veteran composer-​arranger Les Baxter (1922–​1996) that included a whistled main theme. Baxter, a leading figure in the exotica movement of the 1950s who went on to score the Beach Party movies of the 1960s, also scored the single-​ season Walter Brennan comedy The Tycoon (1964–​1965, ABC). When Nathan Scott took over composing chores on Lassie in 1963, he was asked to create an arrangement of the traditional English folk tune “Greensleeves” that remained with the series to its end. Flipper (1964–​1967, NBC), spun off from the 1963 movie about a smart dolphin, utilized the same composer, Henry Vars (1902–​1977), and his familiar title song (“Flipper, Flipper, faster than lightning . . .”). Vars went on to launch the African adventure series Daktari (1966–​1969, CBS), including a drum-​dominated but otherwise conventional theme that was replaced at the start of the series’ second season. Daktari was also a spinoff, from the 1965 film Clarence the Cross-​Eyed Lion, starring Marshall Thompson as an American conservationist at an African animal-​behavior research center. Clarence and chimpanzee Judy were favorites of the youngsters who made up the bulk of the series’ audience. Producer Leonard Kaufman, while shooting location footage in Mozambique, was listening to native drums and happened across a magazine that featured a profile of the great West Coast drummer Shelly

Shelly Manne.  

Manne (1920–​1984). He vowed to contact Manne about a new score upon his return home. Manne, who was not a skilled composer, was reluctant (although he had dabbled in low-​budget films a few years before) but elicited a promise from Kaufman that he could have freedom to experiment and choose the instruments and players he felt appropriate. A student of African music, Manne used only three percussionists, two woodwind players, and an amplified bass guitar for all of his Daktari music over the next three seasons. Among his unusual choices were “hollowed-​out Thailand bamboo, suspended in a rattan framework, and an African marimba, which was more or less in quarter tones and which was employed for the main title. Once,” he recalled in 1970, “we did a whole cue with flute players just using the keys, not actually playing notes, but getting a wild percussive sound by striking the holes.” In his notes for the Daktari album, Kaufman also pointed out that Manne and company, all top jazz sidemen, often improvised to the on-​screen action during the recording sessions. Tarzan (1966–​1968, NBC), with Ron Ely as Edgar Rice Burroughs’s immortal ape man, sported two themes with strong martial elements, one by Sydney Lee for its first season and another by Nelson Riddle for its second. Both interpolated Johnny Weissmuller’s memorable original jungle call from the classic MGM films. Scarecrow and Mrs. King (1983–​1987, CBS) cast Kate Jackson and Bruce Boxleitner in a tongue-​in-​cheek spy adventure as a suburban housewife and an American intelligence agent with whom she becomes involved. The creator-​producers repeated a popular refrain to composer Arthur B. Rubinstein (1938–​ 2018): “We don’t want TV music.” According to Rubinstein, their suggestion was the music of Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, in which composer Bernard Herrmann elevated the stakes of an essentially larger-​than-​life intrigue scenario with a rich and exciting orchestral score. “I knew the slant they were taking on this,” Rubinstein said. “It was this frothy kind of thing, but they wanted to surround it with the doom and drama and humor of a feature. So it became like a sandbox for me.” The composer offered an example: “Kate Jackson is on this parapet; she’s been drugged, and she’s trying to keep her footing. I thought, this is a lot like a Prokofiev ballet. And I wrote this cue, which encompasses the spirit of a Prokofiev ballet score. Where else on television could I do that?” In another instance, he recast the Scarecrow theme in the style of a Bach Brandenburg Concerto for a scene in which Jackson was waiting for Boxleitner on a Munich bridge. Rubinstein won an Emmy for a third-​season Scarecrow episode. Born in Brooklyn, he studied at Yale, wrote music for plays in New York and Williamstown, and began his television career with the 1971 Hallmark Hall of Fame production of The Price with George C. Scott. His feature

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scores included the thrillers Blue Thunder and WarGames (both 1983). He preceded his clever work on Scarecrow with similarly lively scores for an earlier Boxleitner series, Bring ’Em Back Alive (1982–​1983, CBS), loosely based on the adventures of 1930s explorer Frank Buck, but styled more like a TV version of Raiders of the Lost Ark. When producer George Lucas decided to make The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–​1993, ABC), the story of the globe-​trotting archaeologist’s adventures as a boy, he faced extremely high expectations: Lucas’s Indiana Jones pictures, starting with Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), drew moviegoers with action-​filled, high-​adventure tales set in exotic locales. The series was more of a coming-​of-​age tale involving the 10-​year-​old Indy (Corey Carrier) and the 16-​year-​old Indy (Sean Patrick Flanery) encountering new ideas and new places, along with the usual bad guys. Set during the early years of the twentieth century and filmed around the world, the series was introduced by the 93-​year-​old Indy (George Hall) and—​because of its consistent placement of historical figures in fictional contexts—​was designed to educate as well as entertain. ABC aired 24 episodes over two seasons before giving up because of low ratings. Lucas had used John Williams for his features, including the Star Wars and Indiana Jones franchises, but could not expect the Oscar-​winning composer to return to episodic television. “I tend toward a more classical kind of composition in film scores,” Lucas explained. “In this case, I was looking for [a composer with] background in various ethnic areas of music. I talked to Johnny Williams about it early on, and asked for his recommendations. “One of the things that I’m trying to do,” he said at the time, “is a geography lesson: to introduce people to different parts of the world and give it a kind of authentic ethnic quality. So music is obviously very important in that.” Williams recommended Laurence Rosenthal (b. 1926) for the job. Born in Detroit, he studied with Howard Hanson and Nadia Boulanger, and wrote extensively for the Broadway theater beginning in the late 1950s. An Oscar nominee for Becket (1964), Rosenthal’s other film scores included The Miracle Worker (1962). For television, he had written the themes for Coronet Blue (1967, CBS) and Fantasy Island (1978–​1984, ABC), and won three consecutive Emmys (in 1986, 1987, and 1988) for his music for miniseries including Peter the Great. “When these assignments started coming in, of Egypt and Mexico and Kenya and China and India and Istanbul and Prague and Vienna and Ireland and northern Italy and Florence, it was overwhelming,” Rosenthal recalled. “There appeared a new range of possibility for me to pursue my lifelong interest in all kinds of ethnic and national music. This study has always fascinated me, even in early childhood. And here it was, handed to me on a platter. George was all for exploring it in depth. ‘I don’t want Hollywood Turkish,’ he said. ‘I want real Turkish.’ ”

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Laurence Rosenthal.

Rosenthal began by writing a rousing new theme for young Indy, quite different from Williams’s familiar Raiders music. “The feeling of youthfulness, lightheartedness, and humor, as well as great energy and excitement [was the intent] as contrasted with the more ‘grown-​up,’ almost militant heroism of John’s wonderful march. In 1916, Indy may have been a potential hero,” the composer explained, “but mostly he was a nice kid having a hell of a good time.” Lucas set Rosenthal’s theme to main-​title visuals of Jones’s diary, black-​and-​white photos of the young Indy, and his fedora and whip trademarks. The episodes themselves were like mini-​movies, each with its own themes and frequently indigenous musical sounds. Rosenthal’s score for the two-​hour pilot was recorded by members of the San Francisco Symphony at Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch. “I think in the first two shows we used up half the [music] budget for the whole season,” the composer said. Most later shows were orchestrated in London and recorded in Munich. Although ABC canceled the series in 1993, it continued with a quartet of TV-​movies on cable’s Family Channel (1994–​1996). The music of Young Indiana Jones received seven nominations over five successive Emmy periods, winning four: for Rosenthal’s “Ireland 1916” score, his “Young Indiana Jones and the Hollywood Follies,” and “Young Indiana Jones: Travels with Father,” and fellow composer Joel McNeely’s Gershwin-​flavored “Young Indiana Jones and the Scandal of 1920.” For “Peking 1910,” Rosenthal employed bamboo flute and a guzheng, a multi-​stringed Chinese zither; for “British East Africa 1909,” he delved into African folk music; for “Vienna 1908,” he evoked the music of Mahler and Hugo Wolf; for “Northern Italy 1918,” he turned to Italian lyricism and hints of Rossini. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles consistently featured some of the richest and most lavish orchestral scoring on a weekly basis in the history of television.

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Prior to his big-​screen fame with music for The Incredibles (2004), Michael Giacchino worked in television, writing music for the espionage drama Alias (2001–​2006, ABC). Series creator J. J. Abrams, who had liked Giacchino’s video-​game music, called the composer as he was about to shoot the pilot starring Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow, a double agent for the CIA and SD-​6, a supposed black-​ops division of the spy agency. “It was like a boot camp,” Giacchino said halfway through the series run. “Three days to write and orchestrate something like 25 minutes of music an episode. It was a way of learning to trust your instincts—​there’s no time to go back and look at it, it was get it out, get it done, record it.” The global adventure enabled the composer to evoke exotic sounds from many cultures, as well as delve into the complex relationship between Sydney, her mysterious father (Victor Garber), and other shadowy figures, including her long-​thought-​dead mother (Lena Olin) and the ruthless SD-​6 boss (Ron Rifkin). Abrams himself wrote and recorded the propulsive 25-​second techno theme (“he’s a closet musician,” Giacchino explained). Giacchino’s score began as a blend of traditional orchestra and very hip techno sounds, but “as the seasons progressed and the characters developed, there was less of a need to move the show along with these techno beats and electronic rhythms and more a matter of handling the emotional pull of the characters, and the orchestra is a better way to do that.” In the aftermath of 9/​11, producers began to focus on national-​security issues. The first, and many consider the best, of these shows was 24 (2001–​2010, Fox), with Kiefer Sutherland as a counter-​terrorism agent constantly racing against time to save his colleagues and his country. The action played out in “real time” in the sense that every episode covered 24 hours in the storyline and the actual time of day was indicated via a digital clock on the screen. In its fifth season, 24 won the Emmy as Outstanding Drama Series and Sutherland won as best dramatic actor. Composer Sean Callery (b. 1964), a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music and expert in the use of synthesizers, scored the cable action series La Femme Nikita (1997–​2001, USA) for five seasons, making him producer Joel Surnow’s only choice for 24. “From the beginning,” Callery recalled, Surnow and his producing colleagues “wanted a different, hybrid kind of sound that hadn’t been heard or explored before.” They weren’t seeking an orchestral score, but they also didn’t want a purely synth score, Callery said. “They knew they wanted a specialized kind of sound. Sound design plays a very big part in the 24 score, in conjunction with organic-​sounding things (done with samples, because the show doesn’t have a live-​orchestra budget) and electronics. It’s a fusion of effects, ambiences and music, affecting the viewer’s experience in almost subliminal, subtextural ways.”

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  Sean Callery.

Callery’s music encompassed synths, piano, plenty of electronic percussion, sometimes vocals, and even guitars. The pace was always fast, the music often dark, and Callery’s 10 Emmy nominations for 24 (and its 2014 sequel, 24: Live Another Day), including three wins (in the second, fifth, and eighth seasons), were proof that his composer peers in the Television Academy approved. It was a significant acknowledgment that dramatic music could be effective, even superior, despite being created almost entirely with artificial means. Callery was called by 24 producers Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa for their next, even more edgy, spy thriller Homeland (2011–​2020, Showtime) starring Claire Danes as a CIA operative. It too won an Emmy as best drama (in its first season) and Callery’s free jazz-​style theme was nominated. He was also Emmy-​nominated for his theme for the modern-​day Sherlock Holmes update Elementary (2012–​2019, CBS) with Jonny Lee Miller as Holmes and Lucy Liu as Watson, a 30-​second string piece set against images of a Rube Goldberg machine.

8 “You are there”

Documentaries, News, and Information Programming

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enry Salomon’s outlandish notion to have Richard Rodgers write the score for Victory at Sea met with skepticism, even derision, at the time. Yet the music for this landmark documentary on the maritime battles of World War II set the standard for all television nonfiction programming to follow. Victory at Sea (1952–​1953, NBC) was ex-​naval officer Salomon’s 26-​part history of recent naval warfare, drawn from millions of feet of footage from the archives of 10 different countries. It was his inspiration to ask the composer of such popular Broadway successes as Oklahoma!, Carousel, and South Pacific to supply a musical score. Even Rodgers wasn’t sure. According to Richard Hanser, co-​writer of the script, “Salomon screened some rough, uncut combat footage for him of a kind he had never seen before, and Rodgers came away with a dawning enthusiasm for the project. He sketched out some preliminary themes, but was still not sure enough to proceed until he had played them for Russell Bennett.” Rodgers (1902–​1979) had come to rely on the good taste and immense skills of Robert Russell Bennett (1894–​1981), who had orchestrated several of his shows, as well as many other classics of the American stage (Jerome Kern’s Show Boat, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, George Gershwin’s Of Thee I Sing, Irving Berlin’s Annie Get Your Gun). He had also written several symphonies, three operas, and a number of chamber works. Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0009

Rodgers first came up with the series theme, which he called “The Song of the High Seas,” and a fugue-​like motif for German U-​boats. Bennett’s approval and willingness to collaborate on an essentially new musical form—​original symphonic underscore for a television documentary series—​signaled the beginning of what Hanser called “the most fruitful musical collaboration in the history of television.” Rodgers later confessed that he had “neither the time, patience nor aptitude to sit in a cutting room hour after hour going over thousands of feet of film with a stopwatch in my hand in order to compose themes that fit an inflexible time limit. . . . As a result, what I composed were actually musical themes. For the difficult technical task of timing, cutting, and orchestrating, I turned to my old friend Russell Bennett, who has no equal in this kind of work. He fully deserves the credit, which I give him without undue modesty, for making my music sound better than it was.” But what themes: the majesty of the oceans, depicted orchestrally in “Song of the High Seas”; the Pearl Harbor bombing, realized in the urgency of the music in “The Pacific Boils Over”; the patriotic fervor of American resolve in the jaunty “Guadalcanal March”; the hopeful tone of “D-​Day”; an unexpectedly lilting “Theme of the Fast Carriers”; an insouciant tango for the South Atlantic in “Beneath the Southern Cross” (which Rodgers borrowed for a song, “No Other Love,” in his 1953 musical

Richard Rodgers.

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Me and Juliet); the fugue for the undersea wolf packs of “Danger Down Deep”; melancholy solo violin for memories of home in “Mediterranean Mosaic”; icily austere and howling, wind-​blown sounds for the Arctic in “The Magnetic North.” Still, as scriptwriter Hanser pointed out, the exigencies of film required a great deal of technical expertise: “The music had to be so arranged—​ conceived, designed, paced—​to coincide with the film as it raced through the projector at 90 feet a minute, 24 frames a second. Artistry and creativity had to conform to rigid and unbending mechanical requirements. It was Russell Bennett who mastered this complex procedure, besides contributing the soaring orchestrations that gave symphonic sweep and majesty to the Rodgers themes. He did more. The themes, superlative as they were, supplied only a part of the musical ideas and background which the 13-​hour score of Victory required. . . . Much of the music of Victory at Sea was originated, note for note, by Robert Russell Bennett.” Bennett described it this way: “Richard and I set to work on Henry Salomon’s magnificent film story, he composing his inimitable melodies based on broad situations, scenes, and events; and I putting in the colors of the orchestra and filling out the musical forms to cover every foot of 62,100 feet of film.” For the score, Bennett conducted the NBC Symphony Orchestra. Throughout the series, sound effects and narration were often bypassed in favor of music, which in conjunction with the visuals frequently communicated all that was necessary for the viewer to understand the scene. Critics were wowed. Partly because of the prominence of the score, partly because it was written by a famous composer (who, with Bennett, was given main-​title credit in the series), they actually noticed the music. Time said “[the] music is often the only description the action needs.” Newsweek called it “monumental.” Variety opined: “No small measure of credit for the series’ impact and success goes to composer Richard Rodgers.” The New Yorker termed it “an extraordinary achievement: a seemingly endless creation, now martial, now tender, now tuneful, now dissonant, but always reflecting the action taking place in the films.” Victory at Sea called attention to the potential of original music in television in a way that no previous score had done. The reaction was so great, to both the series and the music, that Bennett arranged a suite from the score that RCA Victor released in 1953 (followed in 1958 by a second suite and in 1959 by a third). All three became best-​selling albums. After the success of Victory at Sea, the same unit of filmmakers and craftspeople embarked on a new series of films under the umbrella title Project XX (1954–​1970, NBC), a reference to the century with an eye toward historical documentaries along the lines of Victory at Sea (although the scope later was broadened to include cultural and social issues as well). Bennett scored more than 30 of these programs, receiving three Emmy

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Robert Russell Bennett.

nominations, winning one for the 1962 “He Is Risen,” the second of three shows dealing with biblical subjects. The trilogy—​begun by “The Coming of Christ” (1960) and concluded by “The Law and the Prophets” (1967)—​utilized the unit’s innovative stills-​in-​motion technique, which photographed works of art with a subtly moving camera to create the illusion of movement. In “The Coming of Christ,” the entire half-​hour consisted of approximately 300 paintings, mostly from the Renaissance (including works by Rubens, Raphael, and Rembrandt), that depicted the life of Jesus through the Sermon on the Mount. The narration of Alexander Scourby (whose distinctive voice lent dignity to many documentaries of that era) was drawn largely from the New Testament, and Bennett created an evocative score whose main theme was based on the Gregorian chant “O Dulcissime Jesu.” The show met with unanimous critical acclaim, which led to the Easter-​week sequel, “He Is Risen,” using the masterworks of the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries (including paintings by El Greco, Velazquez, and Titian) to depict Christ’s later ministry, crucifixion, and resurrection. “The Law and the Prophets” used a similar technique to illustrate key moments of the books of Genesis and Exodus. As Bennett explained in a 1957 seminar, “Our music is emotionally deeper than Broadway music. It’s a much more responsible task than just bringing out the tunes of Broadway. For one thing, we use a symphony orchestra. There are many more notes to be written. The scope of

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the music is much wider—​[it] requires not prettier music, but in many cases better music.” He added: “An entirely original score fits the picture better, but arranging other men’s themes is easier and often more fun for all concerned.” In fact, several of Bennett’s scores incorporated popular tunes of the period under discussion, or were adaptations of classical works. His “Life in the Thirties” (1959) perfectly captured the sound of that era, from wailing clarinet solos to lively dance-​band arrangements of such tunes as “Anything Goes” and “Happy Days Are Here Again.” “Not So Long Ago” (1960), a Bob Hope–​narrated look at American life between the end of World War II and the start of the Korean War, interpolated some two dozen tunes, from “Beer Barrel Polka” to “Sentimental Journey.” For “Call to Freedom” (1957), a history of Austria that included footage of a Vienna production of Fidelio, Bennett built his entire 90-​minute score on themes from the Beethoven opera and elements from other Beethoven works. NBC president Sylvester “Pat” Weaver was credited with several innovative television concepts, including the creation of the Today and Tonight shows. Another was Wide Wide World (1955–​1958, NBC), a live, 90-​minute Sunday afternoon cultural and informational series that aired twice a month with Dave Garroway as host. Wide Wide World was designed to take advantage of the latest technology, using live remote cameras to take viewers around the country, and occasionally across the Atlantic, ambitiously exploring a single theme from many places and points of view. Despite the attention given to the complex visual elements, NBC also budgeted for original music for each program. David Broekman (1899–​ 1958) was the composer-​ conductor whose music immeasurably enhanced the series for its first two seasons. A native of Holland, he was a violinist with the New York Philharmonic under famed conductor Arturo Toscanini, had scored early sound films, including All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), and had worked as musical director on variety shows, including Ken Murray’s CBS series (1950–​1952). Broekman compared scoring the live Wide Wide World to “a helmsman steering 34 rowers in a frail craft down uncharted rapids at terrifying speed for 90 minutes, with scarcely a moment in which to draw a breath.” Given a week’s notice about the segments planned for the following Sunday, Broekman wrote the necessary music in five days and rehearsed it with the orchestra during a two-​hour run-​through a few hours before air. Because the shows were live, though, anything could happen, from cameras failing to segments running shorter or longer than planned. “The conductor must be alert for these changes, which come more frequently than is suspected,” Broekman wrote in 1957. “He must be able to communicate them to his musicians and they must be able to make the transition required in so smooth a manner that the right bar of music is always heard for the picture and action on the screen. To achieve this

‘instantaneous synchronization,’ I must work with two different headphones, one supplying the outgoing sound of the program and the other hooked up to Central Control and feeding me the conversation and instructions of the New York director and all of the location directors. At the same time I must keep one eye on the script and the other on the monitors showing me not only the picture being telecast, but the shots coming up next. I must instinctively be directing my score and bring forth a performance from the orchestra.” Broekman’s ability to write descriptive music served him well on Wide Wide World. For a segment set in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns, Broekman asked pioneering electronic music composers Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky to create strange electronic sounds, around which the composer then wrote orchestral music. But Broekman’s finest hour may have come with the April 29, 1956, telecast, in which instrumentalists stationed all around New York City played his “City Symphony” together with the ensemble back in the studio. He received a 1955 Emmy nomination for his efforts on the series. The success of Victory at Sea, both as a program and in terms of its music, was not lost on competing networks. CBS, with the cooperation of the United States Air Force, launched Air Power (1956–​1957) with similar fanfare. Writer-​producer Perry Wolff (who had made the educational series Adventure for the network) sought an even broader audience by exploring the entire history of aviation and not simply aerial combat during World War II. The footage was sometimes even more spectacular than that of Victory at Sea, and the score was equally impressive. Most of the music in Air Power was the work of Norman Dello Joio (1913–​2008), the composer and educator who had studied with Paul Hindemith and had won several awards for his concert music. His Meditations on Ecclesiastes for string orchestra, composed during roughly the same period as his Air Power score, won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1957; his opera The Trial at Rouen was staged on NBC in April 1956. The composer, interviewed at the time, explained his work process: “First, I met with the producers and musical director to determine just how many minutes of music was required for the half-​hour film. Then, I simply showed the movie over and over again to myself until it eventually gave me an emotionally binding unit, and I got an idea of the kind of music required.” Air Power differed markedly in style from Victory at Sea, every minute of which was scored. As CBS musical director Alfredo Antonini explained at the time, “Where the action is strong by itself, it would detract from the story to have a 50-​piece orchestra playing in the background. In fact, silence can be used sometimes with enormous dramatic effect. It’s all a question of sensing, of feeling spontaneously where music has to come into the picture.”

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Norman Dello Joio.

In addition, unlike the endless stream of unconnected melodies with which Rodgers filled Victory at Sea, Dello Joio’s concept was more one of theme and variations plus occasional stand-​alone pieces. “I want to make all the episodes I’m responsible for sound like a symphonic entity,” he said. “Musically, that is, they should be one profile from beginning to end.” (This became apparent when he arranged much of the basic musical material into a symphonic suite for recording by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra after the series ended.) For his main theme, Dello Joio stressed the romance of flying with a lyrical motif for the opening sequence of planes aloft and drifting through cloud-​dotted skies. For an early episode about the barnstorming daredevils of the 1920s, he created a buoyant, happy mood; for scenes of aerial warfare, orchestral bombast with especially difficult passages for brass and percussion. Individual highlights included an off-​kilter march for the German military, a sprightly dance for Russian soldiers, and Asian color for later episodes depicting the war with Japan. Also, unlike Victory at Sea, Antonini assigned other composers to specific Air Power episodes, including two fellow concert-​hall composers: George Antheil, who wrote what Antonini termed “very modern, mechanical, destructive-​sounding music” for the story of the bombing of German oil refineries in Romania; and Paul Creston, whose Italian heritage and lyrical bent were considered appropriate for the episode about the liberation of Rome. Both aired in early 1957.

Antonini returned to Antheil, Creston, and other notable composers outside of the usual film and television ranks when, the following season, CBS News inaugurated The Twentieth Century (1957–​ 1966). Walter Cronkite was the on-​camera host and narrator for this distinguished Sunday-​night series of documentary half-​hours that examined mostly historical subjects from the first half of the century. Burton Benjamin, who with Isaac Kleinerman produced most of the series, told an interviewer in 1959 that he believed that composers from the “serious” music field would supply more sophisticated music appropriate to a series devoted to historical events. Antheil (1900–​1959), who was no stranger to film scoring (with 25 films to his credit, including The Pride and the Passion, 1957), composed the Twentieth Century theme and wrote a dozen scores for its first two seasons, including music for profiles of Churchill and Gandhi and several programs relating to World War II. Creston (1906–​1985) produced nearly as many over the first five seasons. Alan Hovhaness (1911–​2000), who had scored NBC documentaries on India and Southeast Asia in 1955 and 1957, contributed music to Twentieth Century, as did Gail Kubik (1914–​1984), Ulysses Kay (1917–​1995), and, most intriguingly, Darius Milhaud (1892–​1974). Milhaud, who had been a member of France’s rebellious school of radical composers known as Les Six, was also familiar with film (having written more than two dozen scores, including Madame Bovary, 1934). His two Twentieth Century scores are believed to have been his only work for American television. Both were for subjects with exotic backdrops: the Argentina political story “Peron and Evita” (1958) and the World War II film “Burma Road and the Hump” (1959). Another member of Les Six, Georges Auric (1899–​1983), scored the series’ wartime story “Stalingrad” (1959), while Franz Waxman scored a two-​part 1960 examination of the world’s oceans that featured undersea expert Jacques Cousteau. Richard Rodgers was lured back to the documentary form for Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years (1960–​1961, ABC), a 26-​part adaptation of the British leader’s World War II memoirs in which Richard Burton spoke the words of Churchill. Daniel Melnick, later a producer who would make the films Straw Dogs and All That Jazz (and the man who introduced composer Jerry Fielding to director Sam Peckinpah, on television’s “Noon Wine” in 1966), was vice president in charge of programming at ABC at the time. Fellow network executives were reluctant to commit to a documentary series that was likely to garner only low ratings; Melnick convinced them that a Richard Rodgers score for The Valiant Years might turn into another bonanza, as Victory at Sea had been for NBC. Rodgers happened to be Melnick’s father-​in-​law. “It was after Oscar Hammerstein had died,” Melnick recalled, “and Dick became very depressed. I knew that if I could give Dick a project that allowed him

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to write but didn’t demand a lyricist, that could go a long way toward ending his depression.” Rodgers agreed to write The Valiant Years, and to do so in the same manner in which he had scored Victory at Sea. “He wrote for every section,” Melnick said, “but he wrote in chunks, the way he composed on Broadway. He would write the melody and the harmony, but then turn it over to an orchestrator. They were more than themes; they were really full-​blown pieces.” With Robert Russell Bennett busy on Project XX, The Valiant Years was orchestrated by Robert Emmett Dolan, Hershy Kay, and Eddie Sauter. Rodgers’s main theme for Churchill was a triumphal statement for orchestra that had decidedly Walton-​esque overtones. There were variations and secondary themes that represented Churchill’s various moods: determined, depressed, jubilant, and peaceful. He also wrote a hopeful motif for the survivors of Dunkirk; one of his most lyrical pieces, “Deep Sea,” for the Mediterranean Theater; a lightly pastoral theme for Churchill’s country home Chartwell; a hymn to suggest the spirituality of many of the Allied leaders, later associated with the death of President Roosevelt; and several marches, including a jubilant one for the English resolve and a triumphant one for the Allied victory. Rodgers won the Emmy for original music for his score. Producer David L. Wolper significantly altered the way documentary programming was produced and aired on commercial television. With The Race for Space (produced in 1958–​1959, aired on an ad hoc network of stations in 1960), which utilized then-​unseen film of the Soviet space program, he demonstrated that a public affairs program that had not been produced by one of the networks could not only be informative and compelling but also find an audience. Wolper was a filmmaker. A key element in his conception of documentary programming for a mass audience was music. “Music is a language of filmmaking,” he explained. “Words are one language, the photography is one, and music is another. It creates movement, tension, mood, beauty, fright. . . . With music, sometimes you don’t even need words. CBS said for a long time, ‘We don’t want any music in our documentaries.’ I always laughed when they said that. I said, ‘Well, let’s not have words or cameramen either.’ Music is part of the language of making films. If you don’t have that language, you don’t have a film. So why not use it?” In choosing composers for his early documentary films, Wolper started at the top. He hired Elmer Bernstein for The Race for Space, and returned to him again and again throughout the 1960s. Bernstein’s Hollywood: The Golden Years (1961, NBC) opened with an elegant theme and, because the subject was the silent-​film era, featured a score that ranged from the raucous (for two-​reeler comedies) to the grand (for D. W. Griffith epics) and melodramatic (for cliffhangers). He reprised the theme in two sequels, Hollywood: The Fabulous Era and Hollywood: The Great Stars (1963,

ABC), and for the subsequent series Hollywood and the Stars (1963–​1964, NBC), hosted by Joseph Cotten. For D-​Day (1962, NBC), Wolper’s definitive study of the Normandy invasion, Bernstein composed a score as dramatic as those for any of his war movies. He won an Emmy for his stirring music for The Making of the President 1960 (1963, ABC), based on Theodore H. White’s Pulitzer Prize–​winning chronicle of the Kennedy–​Nixon campaign. Still, none of this was easy, the composer said: “They were very, very difficult to do because you’re not dealing with specifically dramatic situations. You’re trying to keep something alive which is basically information. It’s very hard to write music for information. Being an emotional art, you [normally] write music for emotional situations.” Lalo Schifrin received his first Emmy nomination for a Wolper documentary: The Making of the President 1964 (1965, CBS), Theodore White’s examination of the Johnson–​ Goldwater campaign. Schifrin wrote themes for both candidates, but the highlight was his two-​minute fugue for strings that underscored a montage of Election Day scenes throughout the country. Even more impressive was Schifrin’s grim and complex score for the now-​classic The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (1968, ABC), Wolper’s three-​hour, three-​night adaptation of William L. Shirer’s history of Nazi Germany. Third Reich was particularly significant as the first television score to inspire a dramatic cantata, which received public performance even before its screen debut. Alternately dissonant, martial, bombastic, and mournful, Schifrin’s television score achieved much wider notice because of its development into the cantata (performed in August 1967 at the Hollywood Bowl, with Laurence Harvey narrating an Alfred Perry text). This was no Victory at Sea: no happy melodies here. As described in a 1967 Life review, the cantata ranged in idiom “from traditional German classicism to contemporary tone clusters that occasionally flirt with atonality. There are few jazz elements, beyond a section in which a banal fox-​trot conjures up, in the style of Kurt Weill, the decadence of post–​World War I Germany.” All of those elements could be found in the television documentary. TV Guide, rarely given to mentioning the composer, singled out “Lalo Schifrin’s powerful score” in its program preview. Reflecting later on the writing process, Schifrin said, “I went into a kind of madness, an intricate kind of writing, and I used that in the creation of [music for] Hitler.” The last of the outstanding weekly network documentary series was World War I (1964–​1965, CBS), produced by the Twentieth Century team of Burton Benjamin, Isaac Kleinerman, and John Sharnik. Narrated by Robert Ryan, it told the entire story of the Great War from its historical and social context to the aftermath of the 1914–​1918 conflict across Europe.

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Because all of the footage was silent, music was even more important to World War I than to most of its documentary predecessors. CBS News followed its choice of Norman Dello Joio to score Air Power with another leading figure in American symphonic music: Morton Gould (1913–​1996). Gould’s Spirituals for Orchestra, Latin-​American Symphonette, and Fall River Legend embodied a distinctly American flavor and were as accessible to popular-​music audiences as to concert-​hall regulars. A former radio conductor, he wrote for Broadway (including Billion Dollar Baby, 1945) and movies (including Windjammer, 1958) as well as symphony orchestras. His two earlier assignments on Twentieth Century—​a 1960 episode about turn-​of-​the-​century Europe and a 1963 episode about the bloody 1916 battle at Verdun—​led to his commission to write the music for World War I. Like the earlier series, World War I consisted of 26 half-​hour episodes, and like Victory at Sea, it was scored from beginning to end. With the exception of a 1965 episode, “Tipperary and All That Jazz,” that drew on songs of the era, Gould’s music avoided literal quotations from period tunes in favor of evoking the atmosphere; as the soundtrack liner notes put it, “the bittersweet nostalgia, the doomed romanticism, the optimism, the tragic human drama.” Gould’s main-​title theme was played against footage of a doughboy rising out of the trenches to aim his rifle over barbed wire-​fenced terrain. While it contained martial elements appropriate to a study of war,

Morton Gould.

there was also a melancholy element suggestive of the monumental loss of life and the permanently changed world that resulted from the conflict. And, although there was considerable lighter music when called for, that somber, even world-​weary tone pervaded much of Gould’s score. Other recurring themes included his lyrical waltz for Sarajevo; music of elegance for the royal courts of Europe; staccato bursts of percussion and brass for battle scenes, sometimes incorporating variations on the main theme; Americana, including parade music, for scenes of soldiers preparing to depart for Europe; and more ethnically flavored motifs for scenes of Russians, Frenchmen, and other nationalities. Gould recalled the circumstances: “They would screen a rough cut of [the episode]. I would look at this and jot down the general atmosphere. As an example, there was one segment that had to do with Jutland, the famous sea battle. Well, obviously that’s ocean music, you know, dreadnoughts and destroyers and all that business. Then the specifics would be done; I worked off a log and footage sheets. The log would have certain descriptive things, and I made my own pencil notations. Then I would do a very full sketch, or sometimes go right to the score.” CBS musical director Alfredo Antonini conducted the recording sessions in Bayside, Queens; the band, Gould said, averaged about 24 players. World War I was the lowest-​ rated series of the season and thus sadly forgotten—​yet Gould’s score was as effective and memorable as Rodgers’s more famous Victory at Sea music. One of the decade’s most remarkable documentary scores was composed by Alex North (1910–​1991) for Africa (1967, ABC), an unprecedented four-​hour, single-​night exploration of the land, the peoples, and the problems facing the continent at that time. North was one of the most highly respected composers in films. The composer of A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) and Spartacus (1960), he had studied with modern composers Aaron Copland and Ernst Toch, composed ballet scores for Martha Graham and Agnes de Mille, and continued to write for the concert hall. In 1986 he would be presented with the first Academy Award ever given to a composer for lifetime achievement. North had spent little time writing for television. His best-​known work was the grand and gorgeous theme for Playhouse 90 (1956–​60, CBS), although he had also scored the little-​seen documentary series F.D.R. (1965, ABC), which was made by the producing team from Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years and featured Charlton Heston reading the words of Franklin D. Roosevelt. About Africa, North later recalled: “This was a rare assignment from ABC. They were doing a four-​hour special on Africa, and I went to New York and looked at thousands of feet of the material as they assembled it. My unique commission was to write a four-​movement symphony and then the producers would lay in the music after the show had been properly put together. In other words, I was able to sit down and write a

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Alex North (left) with conductor Kurt Graunke during Africa recording sessions in Munich.

four-​movement work without the crutch of scenes and footage to catch and support. I did intensive research at the New York Public Library and collected some 30 or so records of authentic African music. “Finally, after all the study and assimilating of the rhythms and instrumental sounds, I decided to write music that would reflect the birth of a new continent with all its turmoil, joys, and dramatic upheaval. I just couldn’t include many of the hundreds of native instruments in existence, but I did have ABC ship over to Munich (where Henry Brant and I recorded the score) $17,000 worth of more-​or-​less orthodox percussion instruments.” In addition to his 30-​minute symphony, he wrote a main theme and additional music designed to meet a variety of dramatic needs. All of this was recorded with a 108-​piece orchestra in Munich, Germany, in March 1967—​possibly the largest orchestra in television history to that time. As producer Jerry Bredouw related in his notes for the soundtrack album: “During the actual tapings, the superb 11-​member percussion section wove subtle and intricate cross-​rhythms over unusual tonal combinations. A total of 38 pairs of mallets were employed. The battery of timpanists moved like ballet dancers from boo-​bam to log drum to lujons; from steel drums to a bank of odd-​looking, instantly tunable tom toms.” Africa aired September 10, 1967. Gregory Peck’s narration, together with North’s thoughtful, complex score, and the spectacular cinematography,

helped the program win an Emmy as the year’s outstanding news documentary.

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Throughout the 1960s, the documentary genre continued to attract a va- 295 riety of composers, often from outside the usual television ranks. English composer John Barry wrote two memorably lyrical scores for famous actresses touring their favorite cities: the Emmy-​ nominated Elizabeth Taylor in London (1963, CBS) and Sophia Loren in Rome (1964, ABC), which included an original ballet and a song performed by Loren. Elsewhere on the Continent, popular-​music conductor Percy Faith created a lush, evocative backdrop for Princess Grace in A Look at Monaco (1963, CBS). Two of producer Lucy Jarvis’s Emmy-​winning cultural documentaries prominently featured outstanding scores by major composers. Georges Auric wrote music of a decidedly Russian character for the extensive historical sequences of The Kremlin (1963, NBC), while Norman Dello Joio was inspired by the world’s great art masterpieces for The Louvre (1964, NBC). He won an Emmy for his score, which augmented the traditional symphony ensemble with a cathedral organ, and interpolated authentic Renaissance music for scenes of the changing face of the Paris landmark through the centuries. Three other composers drew inspiration from great painters for notable documentaries of the period. For “I, Leonardo da Vinci” (1965, ABC), part of the critically acclaimed Saga of Western Man series, Italian-​born composer Ulpio Minucci (1917–​2007, composer of the 1950s Julius LaRosa hit “Domani”) created Renaissance fanfares and, for “The Last Supper,” a fugue for orchestra. For Gauguin in Tahiti: The Search for Paradise (1967, CBS), Gerald Fried invoked South Seas rhythms and musically imagined the native innocence sought by the French post-​ impressionist artist. Both programs won Emmys; both composers were nominated for their scores. Laurence Rosenthal won his first Emmy for Michelangelo: The Last Giant (1965–​1966, NBC), a two-​part chronicle of the artist’s life, with Peter Ustinov reading the words of Michelangelo. Rosenthal, who scored the special in Rome (“echoing some of the feeling of late medieval and early Renaissance music,” the composer said), was given the rare opportunity to spend an hour alone in the Sistine Chapel prior to writing that sequence. Two documentary series carried the tradition of orchestral scoring from the 1960s into the 1970s and beyond: the National Geographic Specials (1965–​1994, CBS, ABC, PBS, NBC) and The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau (1968–​1976, ABC). David L. Wolper produced the earliest National Geographics, and it was his longtime relationship with Elmer Bernstein that led the composer to write the series theme, the familiar brass-​and-​percussion motif that the series retained throughout the next three decades. In creating the theme,

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Bernstein said, he sought to write music “with a sense of importance. I was thinking of fanfares that Aaron Copland had written during World War II, and I suppose I thought of [the National Geographic theme] as a fanfare for the world, which is really what National Geographic is all about.” Bernstein scored one of the earliest hours, “The Voyage of the Brigantine Yankee” (1966), a chronicle of the around-​the-​world trip of a Massachusetts sailing vessel for which Bernstein wrote a rousing hornpipe and similar seafaring music. For “The Hidden World of Insects” (1966), Lalo Schifrin contributed offbeat sounds that, he later observed, laid the groundwork for his brilliantly eclectic score for Wolper’s Oscar-​winning insect documentary The Hellstrom Chronicle (1971). His improvisational approach, essentially the creation of aleatory music, was highly unusual for television at the time. For the seventh National Geographic, Wolper initiated a relationship that would last for the next several years and result in some of the finest scores written for documentary television: he hired Walter Scharf (1910–​ 2003) to score “Alaska!” (1967). Scharf ’s career had embraced show music of all kinds. A multiple Oscar nominee, he was musical director for pictures such as Danny Kaye’s Hans Christian Anderson (1952) and the then-​in-​production Funny Girl with Barbra Streisand (1968). He scored several Jerry Lewis movies including The Bellboy (1960), would later have a hit single with Ben (1972), and scored dozens of television dramas including Ben Casey, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., and Slattery’s People. The playground of the National Geographic series was the entire natural world. Always informative, spectacularly photographed, and often enthralling, the programs quickly became the cream of commercial television’s documentary crop. It was through the Geographic series that the American public became familiar with Jane Goodall and her chimpanzees, Dian Fossey and her mountain gorillas, and numerous other pioneering researchers. This varied turf provided an endless series of fresh challenges to the composer, and the freedom permitted by the filmmakers often resulted in small-​scale tone poems within many programs. Scharf scored 16 National Geographics, including such diverse topics as “Siberia: The Endless Horizon” (1969), “Ethiopia: The Hidden Empire” (1970), “Journey to the High Arctic” (1971), the Philippines-​set “Last Tribes of Mindanao” (1972), the nocturnal species show “Strange Creatures of the Night” (1973), and the volcano study “This Violent Earth” (1973). “We went to terrific expense,” Scharf recalled. “We never had an orchestra of less than 35, all the way up to 50 and 60. We recorded at the major studios, at major prices. Mixing of these films took three, four, five days; ordinarily [in television], they take six to eight hours and slap it together.” Scharf avoided a simplistic approach. “I felt that we shouldn’t portray a bird with a piccolo or a whale with a tuba. I thought that was a little childish,” he said. “I felt that the music should be humane,

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Walter Scharf.

dramatic, and relate to people, giving heart to the creatures. I never regarded them as animals, or treated them in cartoon fashion. I tried to give them understanding.” Among Scharf ’s successors on the Geographic series were Billy Goldenberg, who successfully combined electronic and acoustic elements for a unique look inside the human body in “The Incredible Human Machine” (1975); Lee Holdridge, whose soaring theme musically captured the majesty of special creatures in “The Great Whales” (1977); Paddy Moloney, whose flavorful Irish music, performed by his group The Chieftains, lent authenticity to the equine study “Ballad of the Irish Horse” (1985); and Jay Chattaway, who combined a 26-​piece gamelan orchestra with conventional Western music for “Bali, Masterpiece of the Gods” (1990). Shortly after assuming musical direction of the Geographic series, Scharf was called to score the Cousteau series. Celebrated French oceanographer Jacques-​Yves Cousteau (who had been profiled on a National Geographic hour) and the crew of his research ship Calypso circled the globe studying undersea life in these acclaimed, highly rated specials. Scharf started with the initial offering, “Sharks” (1968), and as quickly as the second, “The Savage World of the Coral Jungle” (1968), his music was noticed in the press; TV Guide pointed out that “Walter Scharf ’s score accents the graceful movements of ocean life.” According to Scharf, narrator Rod Serling often attended the scoring sessions, making notes about the dynamics of the music that he would take into account when later recording his narration. “We did maybe 10 or 12 like that,” Scharf recalled. “It gave me the latitude to do what I wanted.”

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Scharf scored 28 hours in the Cousteau series, including studies of whales, manatees, walruses, penguins, and other species of marine life. For “A Sound of Dolphins” (1972), he reflected the intelligent mammals being portrayed with playful, exuberant music, including a miniature ballet. He received two Emmys for original music on the series, for “The Tragedy of the Red Salmon” (1970) and “Beneath the Frozen World” (1974), third in Cousteau’s four-​part series on the Antarctic. He also composed an original symphonic work, “The Legend of the Living Sea,” for a Cousteau Society museum exhibit in 1972. Succeeding Scharf on the retitled Cousteau Odyssey series (1977–​1981, PBS), with especially colorful scores, were international composers, including Elmer Bernstein, who penned a new series theme as well as a ghostly serenade for Cousteau’s exploration of a sunken World War I ship in “Calypso’s Search for the Brittanic” (1977); Greek composer Manos Hadjidakis (Never on Sunday), whose bouzoukis and panpipes lent authentic flavor to “Calypso’s Search for Atlantis” in the Greek islands (1978); and French composer Georges Delerue, whose threnody for a long-​ lost civilization haunted “The Blind Prophets of Easter Island” (1978) and whose music underscored the awesome power of a great African river in “The Nile” (1979). British composer John Scott (b. 1930) became the most consistent musical voice of the later Cousteau series. A former jazz musician and 1960s session player for colleagues including John Barry and Edwin Astley, his diverse scores for films included Antony and Cleopatra (1973) and Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984). Scott appreciated the broad scope and musical freedom afforded him by the producers. “Generally in feature films,” he said, “one doesn’t have the encouragement that I received from Jacques Cousteau and from [his son] Jean-​Michel Cousteau.” Their unusual interest in the music of their films led them to contract with London’s prestigious Royal Philharmonic Orchestra on several occasions. Scott composed memorable, richly melodic scores for the series. His sometimes extensive musical research paid dividends in scoring exotic locales, notably the six-​part Cousteau/​Amazon series (1984, syndicated), for which Scott utilized indigenous South American sounds, including Brazilian rhythms, Peruvian flutes, a guitar made from an armadillo shell, and various percussion ensembles. His three-​part “Papua New Guinea” series, part of Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World series (1985–​1994, TBS), took a daring approach involving jazz soloists performing on wind and percussion instruments. “The last thing that it [would have] called for was a big orchestral tapestry,” Scott explained. “The native instruments are all kinds of drums. Therefore I found every reason for using drums and jazz musicians. There is a definite relationship between jazz and primitive music; it’s music from the soul of the people.”

For “Cape Horn: Waters of the Wind” (1986), he created a forbidding musical landscape depicting the icy conditions at the bottom of the world, eliminating violins and utilizing a wordless soprano as a lament for the hundreds of wrecked ships and lost sailors over the centuries, evoking “a ghostly feeling of the presence of these souls,” Scott said. The score won an Emmy. Another Emmy winner for music was Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness (1982–​1987, syndicated), a Canadian-​produced wildlife series hosted by the famed Bonanza star. Filmed in exotic locales with plenty of real-​life animal adventure, it was scored by New York composer Jacques Urbont (b. 1930), who had already earned four Emmy nominations for scoring the Jack Palance police series Bronk (1975–​1976, CBS) and the TV-​movie The Supercops (1975). Urbont often recorded in Canada, including the famous Marvel Super Heroes cartoon theme songs (1966) and later the popular Canadian canine hero series The Littlest Hobo (1979–​1985). Urbont conceived and recorded a library of diverse orchestral music for New Wilderness that served every conceivable dramatic purpose, from depictions of industrious ants to playful pandas, stalking tigers to birds in graceful flight. He used about 40 members of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra and wrote approximately two hours of music. “I supervised the use of my material for each episode, and was line producer at the final mixes,” he recalled. “It was important to protect the show, dialogue, foley, effects and music, and keep them from clobbering each other.” Another round-​the-​world exploration turned out to be a multiple Emmy winner: The Living Edens (1997–​2003, PBS), with 24 original scores by Laura Karpman (b. 1959), who earned her doctorate from Juilliard and studied with some of the world’s finest composers (including Nadia Boulanger in Paris and Milton Babbitt in New York). “I was asked to do my most creative work for six years with producers who, the wilder I got, the more excited they got,” she said. “I was asked to come up with a different sound for each Eden. [The producers] were amazing in terms of their love of music and their feeling that music could create drama. They would often move lines of narration to accommodate the score, and did not bury the music behind sound effects. We spotted these shows very carefully and made sure that there was aural space for narration, music, and sound effects.” A mix of classical, jazz, and world-​music influences for exotic settings from Costa Rica to Tibet, Alaska to Africa, Pacific islands to Siberia, The Living Edens ultimately earned her nine news and documentary Emmy nominations, winning four. And just as Cousteau's shows moved from PBS to cable, the BBC's prestigious Natural History unit showcased their superbly made, multi-​ part films on American cable networks. Respected naturalist David Attenborough's The Trials of Life (1991, TNT), The Blue Planet (2002, Discovery Channel), Planet Earth (2007, Discovery) and Frozen Planet

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(2012, Discovery) benefited from the music of composer George Fenton (b. 1949), whose alternately grand-​scale and contemplative, otherworldly and inspirational scores were symphonic delights and the perfect accompaniment to these important films. He won Emmys for both Blue Planet and Planet Earth. "I'm very proud to have written for those films, and I think the films themselves have increased people's appetite for the natural world," Fenton said in 2016. "I think what the music contributed was a more emotional connection with the footage. This has been borne out by the concerts that I play of the material, which are more popular now than ever before. So perhaps in the programs, the films and the concerts, the music does, in its own very small way, increase awareness for what is the most important issue in the history of the human race." .

One of the most unusual documentary series of its time was In Search Of . . . (1976–​1982, syndication), a weekly spinoff of producer Alan Landsburg’s popular In Search of Ancient Astronauts and In Search of Ancient Mysteries (1973–​1974, NBC), nonfiction films that speculated about possible extraterrestrial visitors. Narrated by Leonard Nimoy, the weekly series examined “mysteries that have baffled mankind through the centuries,” including, as noted in the main-​title visuals, “extraterrestrials, magic and witchcraft, missing persons, myths and monsters, lost civilizations, strange phenomena.” The first season alone offered tantalizing looks at UFOs, ghosts, Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, Stonehenge, Easter Island, and Dracula. The hip-​sounding, synthesizer-​dominated score was by W. Michael Lewis (b. 1948) and Laurin Rinder (b. 1943), a Los Angeles–​based duo that was then busy producing disco-​music albums (notably the 1978 “Seven Deadly Sins,” later hailed as a disco masterpiece). Landsburg thought “electronic music would be a good way to go, because of the otherworldly ideas that the series was going to be about,” Lewis recalled. He played all the keyboards and bass, and Rinder played all the percussion. As Nimoy later wrote in a note for the soundtrack album: “They scored films dealing with every mysterious subject from Atlantis to voodoo.” The LP expanded on those first-​season scores in a highly listenable, jazz-​rock-​disco form, but the record was not widely distributed and quickly went out of print. Cutting-​edge musical technology was also the key to oceanQuest (1985, NBC), a five-​part oceanographic expedition undertaken by famed underwater cinematographer Al Giddings (The Deep) with former Miss Universe Shawn Weatherly as a novice diver exploring the seven seas. Composer William Goldstein (b. 1942) called his all-​electronic soundscape “the very first completely computer-​sequenced direct-​to-​digital score” for a television project. “I call this technique Orchestral Synthesis,” he wrote at the time, “the blending of this new technology and sound-​producing gear with orchestral compositional methods.” A trained orchestral composer

and three-​time Emmy nominee (Fame), he was able to evoke icy textures for Antarctic ice, a sense of terror for attacking sharks, and the eerie beauty of the ocean at night. News themes over the years have been contributed by an array of composers, usually anonymous. Often, they were little more than a variation on the old click-​clack teletype sound that was heard in the background of so many newsrooms of the 1960s (and, notably, on radio). The Huntley-​Brinkley Report (1956–​1970, NBC) concluded with an excerpt from the second movement of Beethoven’s Ninth symphony. The rechristened NBC Nightly News (1970) sported a new theme by composer Ray Ellis (1923–​2008), whose arrangements for Johnny Mathis, Barbra Streisand, and Lena Horne had made him successful in the popular-​music field of the 1960s; Ellis later composed a new theme for NBC’s Today show, which previously had used the standards “Sentimental Journey” and “Misty” as signature tunes. Henry Mancini created a new NBC Nightly News theme that ran for two seasons beginning in the fall of 1977. The use of rototoms (a drum with various pitches) made the sound highly percussive, but, Mancini reflected later: “I think it was a little too hip for its time. It was too involved. The news themes on now are [mostly] four-​and five-​note phrases, which is probably the only part of the theme that gets played a lot. So [mine] did not have that kind of identification.” Far more successful was a theme that Mancini wrote the previous year. His “Decision ’76” theme, an exhilarating march that NBC commissioned for its election-​night coverage, became the network’s standard election theme for years thereafter. Mancini recalled: “’Seventy-​six, you know, they wanted Americana. The original was written for band: six trumpets, six trombones, lots of French horns, baritone horns, clarinets, a bunch of piccolos, and percussion. It really sounded like a brass band coming down the street.” NBC radically altered the sound of all of its news programs in September 1985, when it debuted a new series of news themes by composer John Williams, who by that time was not only the world’s most famous film composer, but also musical director of the Boston Pops Orchestra. An NBC executive said at the time that the division’s intent was to replace the all-​too-​familiar “synthesizer ‘news noise’ ” that had become commonplace around the dial with a “world-​class composition.” The main theme, called “The Mission,” became widely known as the new signature music for NBC Nightly News; brisk, dignified, featuring a fanfare, and signifying a “nobility of purpose,” as Williams said at the time, it appeared in a number of versions throughout the day. Williams wrote three other themes, however, all classically styled, which were seldom heard in their entirety: “Fugue for the Changing Times,” sometimes used on special reports; the bright “Scherzo for Today,” written for, but only occasionally heard on, the morning news program; and “The

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Pulse of Events,” the urgent opening and closing of which became the theme for the Sunday interview show Meet the Press. Williams conducted these, plus four shorter versions of “The Mission” theme, and a number of five-​second “bumpers,” with an 80-​piece orchestra. He later arranged a three-​and-​a-​half-​minute concert version of “The Mission” and often played it in concert. Williams digitally re-​recorded his NBC News music, adding new material, with a 99-​piece orchestra in 2004. The composer’s long relationship with the network also led to a series of Olympic fanfares, although his original, the 1984 “Olympic Fanfare and Theme,” was actually commissioned by the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee for the summer games. Its thrilling debut at the opening ceremonies on July 28, 1984, played by dozens of trumpeters, was witnessed by a huge worldwide TV audience. Williams later explained that it was intended to represent, in musical terms, “the spirit of cooperation, of heroic achievement, all the striving and preparation that go before the events and the applause that comes after them.” He won a 1985 Grammy for it. If Williams’s 1984 theme suggested the dignity and grandeur of the Games, then his “Olympic Spirit,” written for NBC’s coverage of the 1988 Summer Games in Seoul, complemented it beautifully with its propulsive rhythms and sense of sheer joy in competition. The longer and more complex “Summon the Heroes,” composed for the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, featured antiphonal brass choirs and is the only one of Williams’s four Olympic fanfares to win an Emmy. “Call of the Champions,” written for the 2002 Winter Games in Salt Lake City, featured voices—​ appropriately enough, the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, singing “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (Latin for “faster, higher, stronger,” the Olympic motto)—​and in doing so, added a sense of nobility, wonder, and a soaring feel that suggests that these athletes are somehow superhuman. For NBC’s telecast of the 1992 Olympics, Williams not only reprised his 1984 fanfare, but also resurrected “Bugler’s Dream” by French composer Leo Arnaud (1904–​1991), which became famous as the theme for ABC’s Olympics coverage beginning with the Winter Games in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1964. As a trombonist, Arnaud had played with Williams’s father, a well-​ known jazz drummer in the 1930s. He had studied with Maurice Ravel in France and, after coming to the United States, joined MGM as an arranger-​orchestrator in 1936, working on more than 100 films, including The Wizard of Oz and Easter Parade. Arnaud’s solemn piece for brass and percussion was written for a 1958 Capitol album of martial music titled Charge! “Bugler’s Dream” was conceived as one-​third of a suite commissioned by veteran 20th Century-​ Fox concertmaster and sometime conductor Felix Slatkin. What was originally chosen, and is often still heard in Olympics coverage, is a 53-​ second excerpt from the middle of the piece, its most heroic and celebratory passage. (Arnaud drew inspiration from, and embellished upon, a

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Stanley Wilson (left) conferring with Leo Arnaud, early 1960s.

nineteenth-​century cavalry trumpet call by French composer Joseph-​ David Buhl, part of his “Salut aux etendards.”) The choice of “Bugler’s Dream” to herald Olympics coverage was made by Roone Arledge, then a producer at ABC Sports (and eventually its president), the day before he left New York for Innsbruck. According to ABC personnel present at the time, Arledge asked a member of the network’s engineering department to search the music library for a suitable piece of music, something that “somehow would symbolize the grandeur of the Games.” He came back with six albums. Arledge listened to only one—​Charge!—​and was immediately sold on “Bugler’s Dream.” It opened ABC’s Winter Olympics coverage in 1964 and 1968 and has been used off and on ever since. In September 2006, NBC Sports unveiled another Williams original, a dramatic march titled “Wide Receiver,” for the network’s Sunday Night Football telecasts. “The music has a sense of drama,” said NBC Sports chairman Dick Ebersol. “It’s some pretty breathtaking and powerful stuff.” Williams said he tried to invoke “a gladiatorial spirit, but also identifiable as an American experience.” He penned three other pieces for various uses (“Screen Pass,” “Taking the Field,” “Pigskin Vamp”). CBS News, on the rare occasions when it demanded a musical signature, often turned to the classics. Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring was the source of the main theme for CBS Reports (1959–​1971) for many years,

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while the “Abblasen” of eighteenth-​century German musician Gottfried Reiche (who played all of Bach’s first trumpet parts) became the opening fanfare for the network’s weekend news and cultural affairs magazine Sunday Morning (1979–​). The CBS Evening News, however, eschewed music during Walter Cronkite’s tenure as anchor (1962–​1981). “CBS News standards forbade using music in hard newscasts,” CBS Marketing Group president George F. Schweitzer reported. But in 1982, early in the Dan Rather era, CBS asked New York composer Walt Levinsky (1929–​1999) for a musical version of the traditional news teletype sound, although it was only heard under bumpers and closing credits. Then in 1988 (perhaps to compete with the new NBC News music) the network commissioned a more musical signature from commercial composers John Trivers and Liz Myers, who collaborated with jazz pianist Alan Pasqua on music that was both dignified and dramatic. “Americana was definitely a part of it. It had to be anticipatory and celebratory at the same time,” said Trivers. They enlisted Hollywood veteran William Ross to orchestrate and conduct the one-​minute theme, and a series of shorter variations and bumpers, with a 70-​piece orchestra. The Trivers-​Myers-​Pasqua theme was re-​recorded in 1990, succeeded by an even more dramatic version (that still incorporated the 1988 theme) by the San Diego–​based music-​production company Patterson, Walz, & Fox. As Neal Fox later recalled: “They wanted something big and orchestral like the one Trivers did for them, but they wanted a fresh theme. It was recorded at Abbey Road in London.” Added Ron Walz: “The new theme was a hit and we were assigned to write music for the evening news, morning news, and all special news events.” The 1990 Trivers-​Myers-​ Pasqua music returned in 2011. In the interim (2006–​2011), when Katie Couric anchored the CBS newscast, James Horner (1953–​2015) became the network’s highest-​profile composer. Horner, whose music for Titanic had earned him two Oscars and had made him among the most sought-​after composers in film, rarely worked in TV (a handful of TV-​movies including Between Friends, 1983, and Extreme Close-​Up, 1990, and an episode of Amazing Stories, 1985). Horner met with Couric and, as he recalled their conversation, she didn’t want “a Madison Avenue corporate logo [but] something much more cinematic, flowing, Americana.” Added the composer: “They needed something that was rather striking, and I wanted something that was rather sweeping. The various pieces had to be done not only in various lengths and textures, but also in various moods to be able to accommodate whatever the news of the day needed. It ended up being a huge assignment, technically.” Ultimately he conducted a 90-​piece Los Angeles orchestra in 70 short pieces (variously labeled quiet, pensive, regal, hopeful, funeral, war). Horner’s two-​ minute main theme combined a brass fanfare with the kind of symphonic

Americana that network executives, and Couric, sought (“very grand and very warm,” in the words of CBS News creative director Bob Peterson). As for the newsmagazines, 60 Minutes (1968–​, CBS) remains one of television’s few longtime hits without a musical theme. According to producer Jeff Fager, director Artie Bloom wanted to end the first program with a ticking stopwatch, and producer Don Hewitt, “seeking some kind of signature sound but not really wanting music,” liked it so much he added it to the start of the show. It was a very different story for West 57th (1985–​1989, CBS) and 48 Hours (1988–​, CBS), whose very contemporary musical themes were far afield from the classic Copland of an earlier era of CBS News broadcasts. The fast-​paced West 57th, with its younger reporters and generally youth-​ oriented stories, sported a two-​minute synth-​with-​saxophone theme by Edd Kalehoff (b. 1945). Kalehoff also wrote the slightly more intense but still synth-​based theme for 48 Hours, a Dan Rather–​anchored hour that essentially devoted all its resources to telling a single story every week, generally shot and reported over a two-​day period. He wrote a new 48 Hours opening in 1991, another high-​energy piece featuring guitar, brass, and saxophone solo. ABC’s Good Morning America (1975–​ ), initially produced by the network’s entertainment division, commissioned an upbeat theme by Marvin Hamlisch. The network’s news division, however, turned to New York music packager Bob Israel (b. 1928) and Bill Conti for most of its news music. In 1977, Israel created the ABC News “umbrella theme” whose first four notes became familiar as the opening of the themes for World News Tonight, Nightline, This Week, and various special reports. “In terms of news,” Israel said, “there has to be a very quotable entity in the theme. It has to say what it says quickly and to the point, so that if people are out of the room but hear that piece, they’ll know that it’s time to go and watch and listen. “It also has to have a kind of urgency, without resorting to the cliché of the ticker-​tape thing which goes way back to radio,” he added. “I think the reason [the ABC News theme has] been so successful is that anybody can hum it. We’ve developed that into endless variations for all kinds of subjects, from the inaugural of a president—​with a big orchestra—​to the beginning of 20/​20, or any of those [news] shows.” Conti was frequently signed to write new main-​title themes for ABC’s newsmagazines and specials, including the long-​running PrimeTime Live (1989–​2012). By the early 1980s, the documentary arena had largely been ceded by the broadcast networks to public television. Frontline (1983–​) has become one of television’s most trustworthy programs for in-​depth reporting and investigative journalism. Producer David Fanning sought Mason Daring (b. 1949), composer for filmmaker John Sayles, who in turn enlisted college friend Martin Brody (b. 1949) as co-​composer, for the Frontline theme.

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“We needed gravity,” Daring recalled, and a “subliminal teletype” rhythm. “You hear that sound, you think newsroom. You say to yourself, ‘This is news. This is information coming in over the wires.’ ” He hired members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, especially timpanist Vic Firth, to play the original two-​minute theme. (Its final three notes became a “sad joke,” Daring confessed, as they were meant to subtly suggest the three syllables of Jessica Savitch’s first name. She was the host of Frontline’s first season until her death in a car accident in October 1983.) Producer Paula Apsell subsequently called Daring for a new theme for PBS’s flagship science program Nova (1974–​) that was first heard in 1985. Daring (again co-​writing with Brody) supplied music that was bold and forward-​looking. “I think science can be romantic,” Daring said. “There is mystery and curiosity, the love of learning, inherent in it.” He recalls having “that starburst” imagery when they created the music, again recorded with members of the Boston Symphony. Daring scored numerous episodes of both series. Discussing the general approach, he notes: “You can’t get too sentimental. You can’t go over the line. You can’t be cloying, ever. You can’t get too romantic, or it will denigrate the integrity. You have to move things along, give it energy.” Also for PBS, Daring scored the Emmy-​winning World War I documentary The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (1996). Public television’s most-​watched nonfiction series was The Civil War (1990), Ken Burns’s landmark nine-​part, 12-​hour documentary on the War Between the States. The filmmaker had heard folk musician Jay Ungar’s “Ashokan Farewell,” written in 1982 in the style of a Scottish lament and performed by his group Fiddle Fever, and chose it as the primary theme of the series. Although not of the period, as associate producer Lynn Novick later said, “it expressed something of the complex feelings that they were trying to evoke in the film. The fact that it was a contemporary piece gave a kind of clarity and directness for the audience.” Fiddler Ungar, together with his bandmates, went on to perform many of the authentic nineteenth-​century songs heard in The Civil War. Jazz composer Wynton Marsalis consulted with Burns on his Jazz series (2001) and went on to compose original music for Burns’s seven-​part World War II documentary The War (2007). “We talked about, how do we set up this idea, and take our audience on a trip through these four towns,” Novick recalled. “He created a suite, basically, with different melodic themes for each town. It wasn’t scored to picture, but we talked about the feelings: there is tragedy, but also, what does America believe and stand for?” Burns and Novick collaborated on The Vietnam War (2017) and enlisted Oscar winners Trent Reznor (b. 1965) and Atticus Ross (b. 1968), who had won for The Social Network (2010), as composers. In a business where music is often needed in a week, they were given four and a half

years. “The decision we made was to work initially from a very impressionistic field,” Reznor said. “I asked Ken for a laundry list of different emotional themes that would be covered, a wish-​list of backdrop moods as a starting point.” Burns supplied such a list, Reznor related: “anxiety, doubt and dread; unbearable tension that never gets relieved or released; fear becoming terror; existential loneliness; momentum, forces gathering; exhilaration, euphoria, adrenaline rush; compassion, generosity of spirit,” and more. “We would deliver lengthy pieces, ruminations on all of those themes, and deliver in a malleable fashion, where we might explore a theme over six, eight, 10 minutes that had different degrees of intensity.” Yo-​Yo Ma and his Silk Road Ensemble also contributed “improvisations, and traditional Vietnamese tunes,” Novick said. Of all the news and information themes in commercial television history, perhaps the most unlikely success was that of Entertainment Tonight (1981–​ , syndicated), by New York composer Michael Mark (b. 1950). Its first six notes, which can be sung—​and, in jest, often have been—​as “en-​ter-​tain-​ ment to-​night,” are now among the most recognized in modern media. Mark was already a Broadway veteran, a Drama Desk Award winner for his supporting role in the 1977 musical I Love My Wife. He also wrote commercial jingles and worked with Harry Chapin on the off-​Broadway musical Cotton Patch Gospel before Chapin’s tragic death in July 1981. Later, he collaborated with Chapin’s brother Tom on children’s music projects. Mark’s stepbrother was Andy Friendly, who produced and launched what became known as E.T., the first daily newsmagazine devoted exclusively to news about movies, TV, and music. “Andy was tasked with finding theme music for the show,” Mark recalled. “He said to me, in the standard way, ‘they’re going to have a competition,’ and he reeled off a bunch of names. Henry Mancini, Mike Post. . . . ‘But if you want a shot, you can send me a cassette. A committee is going to listen to these things blind and pick one.’ ” Mancini, in fact, did write and record a proposed E.T. theme, at the behest of longtime friend Jack Haley Jr., who produced the original pilot before Friendly’s involvement. But Paramount executives disliked it, and it was discarded. Mark’s piano-​and-​percussion demo recording was catchy enough to win them over. “The demo is the tune you know,” the composer explained. “The original was in regular song form, verse, bridge, verse. Early on, they used to use the middle part when they were rolling the credits.” But although Mark hoped to produce the theme package, Paramount preferred to do it in Los Angeles. Bassist-​arranger Andrew Muson assembled a nine-​piece band, including three guitarists, an alto saxophonist, and two drummers (one playing the Syndrum for an electronic flavor), and recorded the E.T.

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theme on September 2, 1981. Muson considered it a “fusion” piece incorporating elements of both jazz and rock. The Entertainment Tonight theme—​as bright and perky as longtime host Mary Hart—​debuted 12 days later. The producers updated the sound in 1983 with a brass section; co-​host John Tesh, also a popular New Age musician, re-​orchestrated the theme twice during his 1986–​1996 tenure, adding more of a rock beat; and singer-​songwriter will.i.am undertook a more modern remix in 2012 (“a piece of American culture,” he called it). Mark recalled receiving an ASCAP award for the theme in 1986, and passing Mancini on the way back to his seat at the dinner. “Nice tune, man,” said the legendary composer. The original Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1980, PBS), astronomer Carl Sagan’s 13-​part exploration of man’s place in the universe, had no original score, although it introduced much of America to the music of Greek synthesizer specialist Vangelis (1943–2022), whose “Heaven and Hell” became the weekly theme. But producer Seth MacFarlane demanded the full power of an orchestra to support the stunning imagery and thought-​provoking scripts of the sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014, Fox). He enlisted Alan Silvestri (b. 1950), the Oscar-​nominated film composer (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump) who had largely avoided television since doing hours of disco-​styled music for four seasons of the police drama CHiPs (1977–​1983, NBC). Over three months, he would write nearly four hours of original music, “by far,” he said, the most he has ever composed for a single project. Silvestri met with MacFarlane and fellow executive producer Ann Druyan, Sagan’s widow, whom he knew from a previous Sagan project, the feature film Contact (1997), which she had co-​written with Sagan and

MUSIC FOR REALITY TELEVISION The rise of “reality television” in the early twenty-​first century led to a new subgenre of music for quasi-​ documentary programming. From Candid Camera in the 1940s to The Dating Game in the 1960s and That’s Incredible in the 1980s, network television loved showing “real people” in unusual, challenging or funny situations. As a semi-​documentary form, most shows didn’t demand much music. Themes were often deemed important, however: Henry Mancini contributed a synth-​flavored, ominous theme for the animated opening of the Jack Palance–​ hosted Ripley’s Believe It or Not! (1982–​1986, ABC); and Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys” became TV’s first reggae theme when producer John Langley, a Bob Marley

fan, thought it might be an interesting counterpoint to watching law enforcement in action on Cops (1989–​2013, Fox). The reality-​TV spurt that began with MTV’s The Real World in 1992 reached fever pitch a decade later when CBS launched Survivor (2000–​) and The Amazing Race (2001–​). In Survivor, a group of diverse strangers is stranded in a remote location and must use their wits to survive and best their fellow castaways. For the theme, Russ Landau (b. 1954), an Emmy nominee for seaQuest 2032, borrowed a musical idea from his days as bassist for the New Age Paul Winter Consort (a portion of a track from Winter’s 1987 “Earthbeat” album, a collaboration between musicians in New York and Moscow). Landau sought “ancient voices” and a “mystical vibe,” using a conch shell, a scream found in a music

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  Alan Silvestri.

which the composer had scored for his frequent collaborator, director Robert Zemeckis. For Cosmos, Silvestri wrote three main-​title themes before Druyan was satisfied. “My original approach was to accentuate the adventure, the wonder of it,” Silvestri said. “Although she wanted some of those elements, Annie wanted to leave people with more questions than answers . . . not just whisking and flying them through it. It was an

library, and mix of drumbeats and tribal-​sounding singers to realize his idea of music for exotic locales—​which he modified each season to reflect the specific locale, from Borneo to the Amazon, Africa to China. Landau’s theme was a 2001 Emmy nominee, but the greater achievement may have been his Emmy-​winning theme for Pirate Master (2007, CBS), a short-​lived treasure-​hunting quest series from Survivor producer Mark Burnett. For more than a decade, music on Survivor was the product of two composers: Landau and David Vanacore. Vanacore (b. 1962), a former studio keyboard player who toured with Cher and Poco and became composer on such Mike Post–​originated shows as Renegade and Silk Stalkings, began visiting the far-​flung locations and recording music prior to each new competition.

“These tiny little percussion beds, with indigenous instruments that felt organic to the area, a little rattle or a drum, turned out to be the ‘secret sauce’ that propelled you to the next scene,” Vanacore said years later. Over time, Vanacore visited Brazil, Africa, Fiji, Australia, and New Zealand, recording the music of each region. “I was always a world-​music guy,” he said. Landau left the series in 2013 and Vanacore continues to supply music to the series. It launched a thriving business as the leading purveyor of music for network reality shows, which eventually included Big Brother (2000–​, CBS) and The Apprentice (2004–​2017, NBC).

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interesting angle.” The final version, the one that opens every episode, is “pretty but introspective,” he added. Silvestri listened closely to the words of host-​narrator Neil deGrasse Tyson. “That, for me, was the way in. He has wonder in his voice; he speaks softly when it’s something mysterious, and he raises his voice when it’s expansive.” The Cosmos music was a blend of the orchestral and electronic. With deadlines looming, orchestrator Mark Graham flew to England to conduct a 53-​piece orchestra at London’s Abbey Road studios (with a brief side trip to Berlin, where the main-​title music was recorded). Four volumes containing more than 168 minutes of Silvestri’s score—​ music of wonder, awe, danger, humor, grandeur, and beauty befitting a series that spans all of time and the entire known universe—​were eventually released digitally, and Silvestri won two Emmys (one for the score, another for his main title theme).

9 “Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones!”

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Schlitz commercial changed Hoyt Curtin’s life. The composer, who had been writing music for industrial films and commercials since 1948, scored an animated spot for the popular beer in 1957. The animation directors happened to be former Tom and Jerry cartoon creators William Hanna and Joseph Barbera. So when the duo created their first Saturday-​morning cartoon series for television, Ruff and Reddy (1957–​1964, NBC), they called Curtin to supply the music. In fact, the process that began with that show remained nearly identical for the next 30 years of work with Hanna-​Barbera Productions: “I got a call, and it was Bill and Joe on the same line, asking me if I could write a tune to this lyric which they gave me over the phone. I said ‘Sure.’ I wrote down the lyric, I wrote the tune, and I called them back. It was about five minutes. Something like that.” Hoyt S. Curtin (1922–​2000), the king of television cartoon music, went on to create the music for nearly 150 series, including all of Hanna-​ Barbera’s primetime entries: The Flintstones, Top Cat, The Jetsons, and Jonny Quest. Along with the prime-​time series, Curtin was responsible for the music on nearly all of Hanna-​Barbera’s many syndicated and network cartoons airing during the afternoons and on Saturday mornings. The early hits included Huckleberry Hound, Quick Draw McGraw, Yogi Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0010

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Bear, and Magilla Gorilla; the later ones included Scooby-​Doo, Josie and the Pussycats, and The Smurfs. At the height of the studio’s success, Curtin wrote and/​or supervised music for nine series in one season. His most famous tune, the now world-​famous theme for The Flintstones (1960–​1966, ABC), didn’t even hit the airwaves until the series’ third season. Hanna and Barbera had borrowed an idea or two from Jackie Gleason’s 1950s comedy The Honeymooners but cleverly modified the setting to the Stone Age. The sitcom antics of suburban Bedrock neighbors—​ blustery Fred Flintstone, dimwitted but good-​hearted neighbor Barney Rubble, their wives Wilma and Betty, pet dinosaur Dino, and (later) their children Pebbles and Bamm-​Bamm—​kept audiences laughing for six seasons. Curtin’s original main-​title theme for the series was an instrumental he called “Rise and Shine,” a brassy, bouncy tune with lots of xylophone (for Fred’s foot-​powered car). The more familiar “Flintstones” theme actually originated as a part of the first-​season underscore (in a Dixieland arrangement for the pilot). “And the second year,” Curtin recalled, “we all decided to change it to a more ‘caveman’ sound. I had all the timpanists in town. It was like Swiss bell ringers, you play this note and you play that. And it was the present theme. That stayed on a year, and then Bill wrote a lyric to that tune. I got a jazz band and some singers and recorded that [for the third season], and they haven’t changed it since.” “Flintstones! Meet the Flintstones! They’re the modern Stone Age family /​From the town of Bedrock, they’re a page right out of history . . .” went the lyric, incorporating Fred’s familiar “yabba-​dabba-​doo!” that voice-​over artist Alan Reed came up with at a recording session.

William Hanna (left) and Hoyt Curtin working on a cartoon theme.

The jazz approach to the scoring of many Hanna-​Barbera shows was CARTOONS IN directly attributable to Curtin’s love of big-​band music, although the PRIME TIME composer points to Hanna and Barbera as his original inspiration: “Their 313 idea was to write a piece of music that’s happy. These cartoons are not World War III. They are happy, and if you write a piece of music that’s happy, it’s pretty much got to go with it. ‘Happy’ to me is jazz.” Curtin found comedic sounds throughout the orchestra, but especially in the contrabassoon, the tuba, and percussion. He even created a musical guffaw: an eight-​note, descending figure for clarinets and tuba that became an aural punch line on many Hanna-​Barbera series for years. The Flintstones often indulged in musical shenanigans, as when Leonard Bernstone conducted Rockmaninoff, or when songwriter Hoagy Carmichael performed in a 1966 episode, asking would-​be tunesmith Fred: “You want this allegro, pianissimo, or andante?” and Fred replied, “Look, I don’t want to talk about Italian food. Play.” For Top Cat (1961–​1962, ABC), “. . . the most effectual Top Cat /​whose intellectual close friends get to call him T.C.,” Curtin found the jazz approach especially appropriate for the story of a smart, urban, and very hip alley cat and his gang. A year later, Hanna and Barbera decided to follow up their Stone Age hit with a sitcom set in the future. The Jetsons (1962–​1963, ABC) would alternate its focus between the workplace (hapless George beset by his blowhard boss Mr. Spacely) and the home (his wife and two children, dog Astro, and domestic robot Rosie). Curtin recalled: “The first time I did [the Jetsons theme] was with a little band because nobody had any faith in the picture. It was from left field.” Positive network feedback, however, resulted in a new directive: “Rescore with a really big band. Instead of writing a whole new score,” Curtain explained, “I just had the musicians listen to, on headsets, the first tryout with a small band. I wrote an arrangement to include the large group, all the strings and everything.” In fact, the Jetsons’ main title is one of Curtin’s most orchestral. More of an instrumental intro than a song, the words simply introduced the cast (“Meet George Jetson, his boy Elroy, daughter Judy, Jane his wife”), leaving it to Curtin to score the action. Camera moves through the stars and galaxies to Earth, where George is piloting his family in an airborne craft to their various daily destinations: Elroy, off to the Little Dipper School; Judy (to the tune of a sexy-​sounding trumpet), to Orbit High School; and Jane, who grabs George’s wallet, to the local shopping center in the sky. In the final seconds, George arrives at Spacely Space Sprockets, where his entire craft folds up into a briefcase and he rides the conveyor belt into his office. In contrast to all this zany music was Curtin’s work on Jonny Quest (1964–​ 1965, ABC), television’s first prime-​ time animated action-​ adventure series. As created by comic-​book artist Doug Wildey, Jonny was

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the precocious 12-​year-​old son of world-​renowned scientist Dr. Benton Quest; they—​together with their bodyguard Race Bannon, his young Indian pal Hadji, and pet bulldog Bandit—​roamed the world, encountering villains and facing danger on a weekly basis. Curtin was always hearing trombone players complain about “falling asleep playing goose eggs,” a reference to whole notes, on other sessions. So he wrote the Jonny Quest theme to feature six trombones. “I wrote it in a killer key,” Curtin said, “and I know the hardest place to play is all of the unknown, odd positions [on the slide trombone]. There wasn’t anything open. Just murder, E-​flat minor . . . and they killed themselves because nobody wanted to make a mistake. I just sat in the control booth watching these guys. I about fell down laughing!” In addition to the trombones, Curtin said his Quest band included five trumpets, four woodwinds, three French horns, and rhythm section, all heard to spectacular advantage in the series main title: a series of action sequences designed to establish the fantasy, adventure, and science-​ fiction elements that would appeal to the target younger audience—​a flying pterodactyl, soldiers battling a spiderlike robot, a walking mummy, Bannon swinging to the rescue, and Quest preparing to fire some futuristic weapon, segue to scenes of Quest’s jet, piloted by Bannon, and introductory shots of the characters. Curtin began writing the Jonny Quest library in the spring of 1964, soon joined by fellow cartoon composer Ted Nichols (b. 1928). Recording separately, but using similar 18-​to 22-​piece orchestras, they created about two and a half hours of jazz-​based, dramatic music that helped create the sense of excitement and adventure that the series promised. Both demonstrated that they were as capable of scoring action and danger as well as lighter moments, as during the frequent antics of rambunctious Bandit. They also attracted star players, ranging from trumpeter Pete Candoli and flute player Buddy Collette to drummer Frank Capp and guitarist Barney Kessel. According to Curtin, plans for each new cartoon season would be made around April, with recording to begin in early June, whether or not film was available. Only a handful of shows would be individually scored “to picture”; in most cases, Curtin would time out storyboards, record enough music to meet union regulations, and track future episodes with music already recorded. (Curtin left Hanna-​Barbera in late 1964, during the run of Jonny Quest, leaving Nichols to score such subsequent Saturday-​morning staples as Space Ghost, Atom Ant, and Secret Squirrel; Curtin returned to the company to score Wacky Races in 1968.) Animation in prime time was not the sole province of Hanna-​Barbera. The Bugs Bunny Show (1960–​1962, ABC) drew on the vast backlog of theatrical cartoons produced by Warner Bros., but added new animation (directed by such Warner greats as Chuck Jones and Friz Freleng) to open, close, and bridge the various shorts aired during this weekly half hour.

As had become the custom—​given the success of such theme songs as 77 Sunset Strip and Hawaiian Eye—​the studio assigned songwriters Jerry Livingston and Mack David to create a musical signature for the show. What they came up with would ultimately rank as their most familiar Warners tune. 77 Sunset Strip was famous for years, but their theme for Bugs and company, “This Is It!,” lasted for decades, when The Bugs Bunny Show (later, The Bugs Bunny/​Road Runner Hour) became a fixture among Saturday-​morning cartoon shows. Bugs first appeared from behind the studio shield (“This, folks, is a Warner Bros. television production”). Four spotlights lit up with the words The Bugs Bunny Show, and a theater curtain rose to Livingston and David’s Broadway-​style melody as Bugs and Daffy Duck—​attired as song-​and-​dance men, wearing straw hats and carrying canes—​entered from stage right. A spotlight followed them across the stage as they sang: “Overture! Curtain! Lights! This is it! The night of nights. . . .” Nine of their fellow Warners cartoon stars (including Elmer Fudd, Pepe LePew, Porky Pig, Foghorn Leghorn, Sylvester, and Tweety) paraded across the stage behind them in time to the music, as the number ended and the announcer introduced “the Oscar-​winning rabbit” as host. The Warner cartoons were smart, often sassy, and superbly animated. The animation produced by Jay Ward’s studio, on the other hand, was often crude, but the writing was so satirical and so clever that it was soon obvious that The Bullwinkle Show (1961–​1962, NBC) wasn’t aimed at children at all. Bullwinkle was a prime-​time version of the earlier Rocky and His Friends (1959–​1961, ABC), which ran on weekday afternoons. Producer Jay Ward had made the cult favorite Crusader Rabbit (1957, syndicated), and partnered with writer-​director Bill Scott for Rocky and Bullwinkle; Scott did the voices of such characters as Bullwinkle, Dudley Do-​Right, and Mr. Peabody. In the adventures of Rocky the Flying Squirrel and his dimwitted pal Bullwinkle J. Moose, residents of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, the writers regularly lampooned Cold War politics, starting with the presence of sinister spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale. The nogoodniks reported back to the monocled Fearless Leader in the vaguely Eastern European dictatorship of Pottsylvania. No institution was safe. In one series of adventures, Rocky and Bullwinkle discovered that the world’s economy was actually based on the value of cereal boxtops; in a visit to alma mater Wossamotta U., they learned that American college fortunes rested entirely on the success of their football teams; mixed up with the government in a story involving space travel and moon men, they declared that “military intelligence” was “a contradiction in terms.” The puns alone were worth the tune-​in. Boris’s name was a funny turn on a Mussorgsky opera (Boris Godunov). The boys once climbed Whynchataka Peak; found a gem-​encrusted toy boat known as the Ruby Yacht of Omar Khayyam; came into possession of a hat known as the

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Kurwood Derby (a takeoff on 1960s TV personality Durwood Kirby, which got the producers into legal trouble); and became embroiled in the politics of Moosylvania, located on the Isle of Lucy near the shores of Veronica Lake. The irreverence extended to the series’ various subordinate features: “Fractured Fairy Tales,” twisted versions of classics drolly narrated by actor Edward Everett Horton; “Peabody’s Improbable History,” in which a canine scientist and his pet boy visited famous figures throughout time; “Dudley Do-​Right,” a silent-​movie sendup with Hans Conried as the voice of villainous Snidely Whiplash; and “Bullwinkle’s Corner,” outrageous variations on famous poems. For the prime-​time Bullwinkle, Ward commissioned Fred Steiner to do a Broadway show-​tune version of his carousel-​style Rocky and His Friends theme for a new main title that had the moose, in top hat and tails, kicking up his hooves. For the opening music of the adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, the mini-​fanfare and rollicking original music of Frank Comstock was heard on some cartoons, while Steiner’s new light and airy theme for Rocky could be heard in others. Steiner also wrote the silent-​ movie-​ style music of Dudley Do-​ Right, the idiot Canadian Mountie who usually managed to foil Snidely Whiplash in spite of himself. From Steiner’s galloping orchestral theme to his old-​fashioned, delightfully melodramatic four-​hand piano cues (which sported titles like “Chase the Heavy,” “Ardent Swain,” and “Our Hero”), played on a tinny-​sounding piano and speeded up to impossible tempos, the music of “Dudley Do-​Right” was as funny as the on-​screen antics of Dudley, beautiful Nell Fenwick, and the evil Whiplash. Steiner’s father George Steiner also contributed music to “Dudley Do-​Right.” Comstock (1922–​2013) wrote the charming lullaby for “Fractured Fairy Tales,” a demented march for “Peabody’s Improbable History,” and a comic tuba-​and-​bassoon motif for “Bullwinkle’s Corner.” The composer became far better known for his music for the Jack Webb crime dramas The D.A.’s Man with John Compton (1959, NBC), Adam-​12 with Martin Milner and Kent McCord (1968–​1975, NBC), and The D.A. with Robert Conrad (1971–​1972, NBC). When producer Lee Mendelson and animator Bill Melendez made the first of their Charlie Brown specials, “We didn’t want cartoon music,” Mendelson recalled. “We wanted something that had a different sound.” This “different sound” turned out to be jazz piano, as composed and performed by Vince Guaraldi (1928–​1976). Guaraldi’s music would come to be as integral an element of the specials as the writing and art of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz, and would be universally recognized as the aural signature of Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and the rest of the “Peanuts” gang. Guaraldi’s involvement with the comic strip and films based on Schulz’s famed creations actually predated the first animated special,

A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965, CBS). Mendelson had made a documentary, A Man Called Mays, about baseball player Willie Mays, which aired on NBC in late 1963. Having profiled “the world’s greatest baseball player,” he decided, “now I’ll do the world’s worst”: good ol’ Charlie Brown. So he made A Boy Named Charlie Brown, which featured Schulz and examined the Peanuts phenomenon; he needed a composer. “I had always been a jazz fan,” Mendelson said. “My dad used to play Art Tatum records. Everybody came through San Francisco: Shearing, Peterson, Garner,” added the Northern California–​based filmmaker. He called veteran jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason at the San Francisco Chronicle for advice. With the comic strip’s Beethoven-​loving pianist Schroeder in mind, Mendelson told Gleason: “I’m looking for a piano player who plays jazz, who reads and knows Peanuts, and who has his own children.” Gleason recommended Guaraldi, who had won a 1962 Grammy for his jazz tune “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” and recorded for Berkeley-​ based Fantasy Records. “I called Vince. It was that simple,” Mendelson recalled. “He lived and worked there, and I lived and worked there. It was just very fortunate. “About two weeks later, after we hired him, I remember he called me and said, ‘I’ve got to play something for you.’ That’s the first time I heard ‘Linus and Lucy,’ ” Mendelson said. “I just went crazy, because it was so right, just perfect. It set the standard not only for the first show, but for all of the other shows.” In fact, “Linus and Lucy” was just one of several

John Scott Trotter (left) and Vince Guaraldi.

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themes that Guaraldi wrote for the documentary that later became popular in the animated Peanuts specials. Mendelson couldn’t sell his documentary (it aired years later in a revised version) but Guaraldi recorded nine themes for a 1964 Fantasy LP, Jazz Impressions of “A Boy Named Charlie Brown.” That made Guaraldi the obvious choice when Mendelson and Melendez made A Charlie Brown Christmas. Although he revived his “Linus and Lucy” and “Charlie Brown” themes from the documentary, the main theme of the initial half hour was a new one, “Christmas Time Is Here,” a contemporary carol (with Mendelson lyrics) performed by a children’s choir and, later, Guaraldi’s jazz trio. Guaraldi wrote at least one new theme for every new Peanuts special that came along, scoring a total of 15 until his untimely death. Most memorable—​in addition to the energetic and undeniably catchy “Linus and Lucy”—​were his elegant waltz for the Halloween special It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown (1966), the “Pebble Beach” samba heard in Charlie Brown’s All-​Stars (1966), his fun theme for irrepressible Snoopy in He’s Your Dog, Charlie Brown (1968), and a wistful waltz for You’re in Love, Charlie Brown (1967). Snoopy’s sunglasses-​ wearing, ultrahip persona Joe Cool made his first appearance in You’re Not Elected, Charlie Brown (1972) to a funky new theme written and sung on the soundtrack by Guaraldi (“Joe Cool, back in school /​hangin’ round the water fountain, playin’ the fool . . .”). Later, for A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving (1973), he added another vocal, “Little Birdie,” as a theme for Snoopy’s hapless pal Woodstock. And he took second billing, behind Ludwig van Beethoven, as author of the score for Play It Again, Charlie Brown (1971), which focused on Schroeder’s classical-​music interests and featured a number of Beethoven sonatas. Guaraldi began with an all-​acoustic sound but, as time went on, went increasingly amplified, including not only electric piano and electric guitar but eventually synthesizers as well. It was a way of keeping up with the times, but the later music never seemed quite as simple and honest as in those early scores. “Linus and Lucy,” although initially written for the Van Pelt siblings in the documentary, was never specifically associated with them in the specials. Even in A Charlie Brown Christmas, it’s simply a lively piece to which the kids dance while preparing for the holiday pageant. It quickly emerged as the overall theme for all of the Peanuts specials, and was retained by later composers even after Guaraldi’s death. “There’s no doubt in my mind,” Mendelson said, “that one of the reasons for the longevity of [the series] is the music. It appealed to adults, and kids liked it. And it wasn’t ‘cartoon music.’ Jazz and the comic strip are very American, and that’s probably why they work so well together.” Sticking with the Guaraldi tradition, Mendelson later hired a star-​ studded group of jazz composers to score various segments of his

ambitious eight-​ part historical miniseries, This Is America, Charlie Brown (1988–​1989, CBS), including George Winston (“The Birth of the Constitution”), Wynton Marsalis (“The Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk”), Dave Brubeck (“The NASA Space Station”), Dave Grusin (“The Smithsonian and the Presidency”), and David Benoit (“The Great Inventors”). The Simpsons (1990–​, Fox) was not only an early hit for the fledgling network, it was also the first significant prime-​time animated offering in many years. Spun off from brief segments in Fox’s Tracey Ullman Show, it dealt with a dysfunctional middle-​class, Middle America family, including a not-​ very-​bright nuclear power plant technician named Homer, his wife Marge, and three children (smart Lisa, wiseacre Bart, and infant Maggie). When cartoonist Matt Groening created the series, he decided that Danny Elfman would be “a natural” to compose the theme. “I’ve been a fan of Elfman’s since the days of the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo,” Groening said, referring to Elfman’s eclectic Los Angeles rock band. But he didn’t know the composer, who by then had gone on to movie fame with his quirky carnival music for Pee-​wee’s Big Adventure (1985) and his dark orchestral score for Batman (1989). “Not only did I not know him,” Groening pointed out, “I used to be a rock critic, and during the days of Oingo Boingo, I gave them a review that annoyed Elfman so much that he wrote a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Reader.

  Danny Elfman.

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“I didn’t know if he would remember that I was the one who had panned him in this review, and when we had our first meeting, he said, ‘So you’re the one.’ But he forgave me,” Groening laughed, “because I also went on to make fun of rock critics a lot in my cartoon scripts.” Groening’s direction to Elfman: “I want something that’s frantic and frenetic, like the scores of the great shows of the 1960s. I always thought that the shows of the seventies and eighties were so wimpy and very tentative, saying, ‘Oh, here’s our little show, we’re trying not to be too offensive, please give us a chance.’ Whereas in the sixties, show themes were big fanfares and swoops and swooshes‚—​they said, this is a show!” Recalled Elfman: “I was inspired by a lot of different stuff including The Flintstones and The Jetsons, and just the style of those times. When they sent me a pencil sketch of their opening it really had, to me, the feel of a sixties-​flavored fun opening, and I should play it that way.” Elfman’s Simpsons theme began with, surprisingly, a choir singing the title as it emerged from the clouds. An aerial shot of Springfield, the animated family’s hometown, led to a look inside a school window where Bart was writing the same sentence over and over on the chalkboard (a line that changed every week). Scenes of Homer at work, Marge at the grocery store, and Lisa playing a saxophone solo (also different each week) during practice with her awful school band, followed; Homer driving home, Bart skateboarding, Maggie pretending to drive in Marge’s car, segued into a final scene of the family gathering in front of the TV (the “couch gag,” the third element to change from week to week). Richard Gibbs, former keyboard player for Elfman’s Oingo Boingo band, scored the first season of The Simpsons. Alf Clausen came in during the second season and remained with the show. Although he had not previously worked in animation, his versatility, speed, and familiarity with a wide range of musical styles made him perfect casting for the show (and resulted in Emmy wins in 1997 and 1998 and another 21 nominations between 1992 and 2011). “Early on, I was told that this is not a cartoon,” Clausen recalled. “This is a show where the characters are drawn. There’s a difference, according to [the producers]. They are saying that they want me to score the real emotion of the characters; they don’t want me to ‘Mickey Mouse’ anything.” Clausen found that his extensive variety-​show background came in handy “because I have to do everything under the sun on this show. I’ve honed the orchestra down to the smallest group of players [35] that can perform all of these styles without having to pay any extra people. “The basic premise of this whole series is the joke,” the composer explained, “and the jokes come rapid-​fire. An old bandleader friend once told me, ‘You can’t vaudeville vaudeville.’ Meaning, the joke is much funnier if you play the music real with the situation as opposed to playing the music funny. You pull the audience into the reality of the situation, so that the payoff becomes much more hilarious. . . . If you try

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  Alf Clausen.

to ‘Mickey Mouse’ it, or play the comedy of the situation, you’re already tipping your hand.” Clausen’s touch was also apparent with the sometimes subtle, often intentionally obvious quotations from classic film and television scores, and in some cases outright parodies of them. Among the many examples were his use of Elmer Bernstein’s theme from The Great Escape for Maggie’s day-​care adventures, John Williams’s Raiders of the Lost Ark opening for Homer chasing a mischievous Bart through the house, and even David Raksin’s Ben Casey theme as an intro for Homer’s hospitalization. For the “Itchy and Scratchy” cartoons that Bart and Lisa often watched, Clausen got to write real cartoon music; for the “McBain” action-​ movie clips, he adopted a “Michael Kamen-​esque Die Hard style”; his annual “Treehouse of Horror” Halloween show music ranged from Bernard Herrmann–​style suspense music to Jerry Goldsmith–​style alien cues. After scoring more than 560 episodes of the long-​running and still-​ popular series, however, Clausen was fired in August 2017, sparking outrage among fans and resulting in massive global media coverage. He was replaced by Bleeding Fingers Music, a music production house co-​owned by Hans Zimmer, who had written the theme for The Critic (1994–​1995, ABC, Fox), an animated series about a movie critic voiced by Jon Lovitz, and had gone on to score The Simpsons Movie (2007) for his producer friend James L. Brooks. Clausen was given the honorary end-​title credit of “composer emeritus” on the series.

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In the aftermath of the success of a prime-​time cartoon, other networks and production companies tried their own animated concepts, recruiting top composers to launch them. Bruce Broughton wrote a patriotic march for the mice-​in-​the-​White House cartoon Capitol Critters (1992, ABC) while James Horner created a fun, jazzy private-​eye vibe for Fish Police (1992, CBS) and Danny Elfman invoked a wild rock sound for the office chaos of Dilbert (1999–​2000, UPN). Yet if The Simpsons was the high point of comedic prime-​time animation in the 1990s, surely the dramatic summit was Batman: The Animated Series (1992–​1993, Fox; started on Fox Kids network in the afternoons, shifted briefly to prime time, then moved to Saturday mornings). Bruce Conroy was the voice of Batman. Acclaimed over time as the finest adaptation of the Caped Crusader, the series won the 1993 Emmy as Outstanding Animated Program and showcased the music of Shirley Walker even better than her already outstanding work on the live-​action DC Comics adaptation The Flash. Elfman adapted his Batman movie theme (1989) into a fast-​moving new minute-​long signature for the series, but Walker wrote her own Gotham City signature, as well as new motifs for such seminal characters as the Joker, Penguin, Mr. Freeze, Two-​Face, and Harley Quinn. “Shirley’s music was dark, romantic, exciting and barnstorming with blood and thunder,” artist and producer Bruce Timm later recalled. “It was everything we wanted.” As supervising composer, she wrote all of the key themes, scored more than a third of its 85 episodes, and oversaw the work of newcomers including Lolita Ritmanis (b. 1962), Michael McCuistion (b. 1965), Kristopher Carter (b. 1972), and Harvey Cohen (1951–​2007). As Warner Bros. had done with its daytime hit Tiny Toon Adventures, the studio budgeted for an orchestra of 25 to 40 players on a weekly basis,

HOLIDAY MUSIC: MAURY LAWS The animated specials of the Rankin-​Bass company, especially Rudolph the Red-​Nosed Reindeer (1964, NBC), remain among the most beloved in television history. Their music was largely the work of composer Maury Laws (1923–​2019). Laws’s greatest achievement was arranging and conducting all of the music for the stop-​motion-​animated Rudolph, which featured new songs by original “Rudolph” songwriter Johnny Marks, some of them sung by Burl Ives. Laws’s warm orchestral settings for such songs as “Holly Jolly Christmas,” “There’s Always Tomorrow,” and the title tune helped to make the hour-​long show a holiday season perennial. The success of Rudolph led to a series of animated specials by producers Arthur Rankin Jr. and

Jules Bass. Laws worked with Jimmy Durante on Frosty the Snowman (1969, CBS), Fred Astaire on Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town (1970, ABC), Danny Kaye on Here Comes Peter Cottontail (1971, ABC), and Judy Collins on The Wind in the Willows (1983, ABC), often writing the songs with lyricist and co-​ producer Bass and then creating the dramatic underscore. Laws was nominated for a Grammy for the music of The Hobbit (1977, NBC), a traditionally animated TV adaptation of J. R. R. Tolkien’s prelude to The Lord of the Rings novels; his folk-​guitar, harpsichord-​ and pennywhistle-​flavored music was just right for balladeer Glenn Yarbrough. Laws later scored its sequel, The Return of the King (1980, ABC), again with John Huston as Gandalf and more evocative songs inspired by the Tolkien text.

giving the animated Batman the kind of noirish symphonic sound that had worked so well for Elfman’s movie score (which Walker had conducted in London) and would supply the requisite atmosphere for the series. Walker spoke of the “dark, somber” chords that spoke to Bruce Wayne’s tragic past and the more “heroic, uplifted” presence of his Dark Knight alter ego. “Dark, majestic brass and big orchestra” were called for, she said. Walker and Cohen won a 1996 Daytime Emmy for a Batman episode; Walker, Ritmanis, McCuistion, and Carter later shared a 2001 Daytime Emmy for the music of a follow-​up series, Batman Beyond. Meanwhile, she and her Batman colleagues collaborated on the equally impressive Superman: The Animated Series, which aired on Kids WB starting in 1996. The team of Ritmanis, McCuistion, and Carter remained together, forming a company called Dynamic Music Partners and collaborating on multiple animated series, including two more DC Comics adaptations in prime time: Justice League (2001–​2004, Cartoon Network), which earned a 2002 Emmy nomination for Ritmanis’s heroic theme; and Batman: The Brave and the Bold (2008–​2011, Cartoon Network), which earned the trio a 2010 Emmy nomination for their original Batman musical “Mayhem of the Music Meister” starring Neil Patrick Harris.

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Writer-​ producer Seth MacFarlane’s later animated comedies, Family Guy (1999–​, Fox) and American Dad! (2005–​, Fox, TBS), pushed the envelope in terms of content and taste. MacFarlane, a talented big-​band singer, insisted upon orchestral scores for all his shows. Walter Murphy (b. 1952) and Ron Jones scored more than 300 Family Guy episodes, averaging 60 musicians a week (80 or more on special episodes), while Murphy, Jones, and Joel McNeely scored more than 250 of American Dad! with a 38-​to 40-​piece orchestra.

As Rankin-​Bass historian Rick Goldschmidt later said: “Maury’s music was full of magic. He wrote his music with a super-​ bouncy feel loaded with glockenspiels and xylophones. He said this came from his work on holiday commercials for General Electric, a few years before Rudolph the Red-​Nosed Reindeer. His songs are as much a part of Christmas as decorating the tree and exchanging presents.” Laws’s television credits also included the Saturday-​morning cartoon King Kong (1966–​1969, ABC), the Charles Dickens adaptation Cricket on the Hearth (1967, NBC), and the animated classic-​ literature anthology Festival of Family Classics (1972–​1973, syndicated). For the big screen, also for Rankin-​Bass, Laws scored the cult favorite Mad Monster Party (1967) with Boris Karloff, and the fantasy The Last Dinosaur (1977).

Once an arranger for singers Betty Hutton and Vaughn Monroe, he penned the arrangement of the hit novelty tune “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini” without credit in 1960. He met Bass while scoring TV commercials in 1962 and joined the Rankin-​Bass company, doing orchestrations for its Return to Oz special (1964, NBC) before Rudolph catapulted them into the major leagues. In his later years, Laws arranged a suite of his Rankin-​Bass music for orchestras. As he later said: “I can’t believe how much people really want to hear this music. We had no idea what it was to become when we first created it. Of everything I’ve ever done in my life, this has become the biggest thing to people, and I couldn’t be more delighted and gratified.”

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Both Murphy (whose disco-​flavored “A Fifth of Beethoven” was a pop hit in 1976) and Jones had worked for Mike Post and Pete Carpenter during the 1980s. Said Murphy: “Seth always felt that the music should take the show seriously. It was dramatic or adventurous, we’d write it as if it were really happening.” Added Jones: “Seth realizes that he’s in a two-​dimensional visual medium, and music brings it alive and makes the shows more compelling to the audience. The whole score is done at a feature level. Seth is always saying it’s like this movie or that movie.” MacFarlane co-​wrote and sang both themes: Family Guy, a rousing Broadway-​style opening number (“where are those good old-​fashioned values on which we used to rely?”) and American Dad!, a flag-​waving anthem, both boasting full orchestras and choirs. Murphy and MacFarlane won a 2002 Emmy for a song on Family Guy; Murphy was nominated for two more songs and a score; Jones received nominations for two other songs and two scores for the series, all generally sending up various aspects of pop culture. “Even if people don’t necessarily realize that they’re hearing live music,” said MacFarlane, “on a subconscious level it makes the show seem more important, gives it a little more gravity. That’s something all too many producers ignore, and by doing so, they do their shows a disservice. So many big-​budget, hour-​long shows on TV right now are using synths, and it’s crazy to me. You’re going to spend all this money to make a show that looks like a movie, and then you’re going to musically remind the audience that it’s still a TV show.”

10 “My name is Kunta Kinte”

Made-​for-​TV Movies and Miniseries

THE BEGINNINGS

As television matured and became, however slightly, more respected by filmmakers and artists in the theater, increasingly ambitious productions were mounted both in New York and Hollywood. The “dramatic special” of the late 1950s and early 1960s gradually evolved into what commonly became known as the “made-​for-​TV movie.” The dramatic anthology series of the late 1950s, notably CBS’s hour-​and-​a-​half Playhouse 90, led inevitably to larger-​scale, one-​shot film productions. Although billed as “dramatic specials,” these were essentially made-​for-​TV movies before the term was coined. Producers sought name talent both before and behind the cameras for these prestige projects. Norman Dello Joio wrote a symphonic score for a two-​night adaptation of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1961, CBS), while Laurence Rosenthal composed the darkly passionate music for Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory (1961, CBS) with Laurence Olivier and George C. Scott. Some historians mark 1964 as the starting point of the telefilm, with the launch of Revue’s “Project 120” series of two-​hour films made especially for the medium. The first of this series was The Killers, a remake of the 1946 film with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson, and Ronald Reagan that featured a fast-​moving, jazz-​driven score by Johnny Williams. Sadistically Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0011

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violent, The Killers was rejected by NBC and was released theatrically by Universal instead. The earliest “Project 120” films to make it on the air, both in late 1964, were two other crime melodramas: the Lalo Schifrin–​scored See How They Run and The Hanged Man, with music by Benny Carter. (Carter, with lyricist Sammy Cahn, wrote a Brazilian-​flavored song, “Only Trust Your Heart,” that was performed in the film by vocalist Astrud Gilberto and saxophonist Stan Getz, whose “Girl from Ipanema” was then riding high on the pop charts.) The television film attracted a number of high-​profile composers, several in the waning days of their careers: Franz Waxman’s last score was for a television film, The Longest Hundred Miles (1967, NBC). So was Hans J. Salter’s, with Return of the Gunfighter (1967, ABC), and Malcolm Arnold’s, for David Copperfield (1970, NBC), whose all-​star cast included Olivier, Ralph Richardson, Edith Evans, and Ron Moody. Arnold’s, especially, ranks among his very finest for the visual medium, from his bittersweet theme for David to his jolly clarinet figure for Mr. Micawber. Producer Norman Lloyd, who had frequently used Bernard Herrmann on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, hired the temperamental composer for Companions in Nightmare (1968, NBC), a psychological thriller with Gig Young, Anne Baxter, and Melvyn Douglas. “Benny liked the idea of the movie,” Lloyd recalled. “You had to get him to like the movie; if he didn’t, God help you.” Herrmann’s score, his only one for a two-​hour telefilm, was a particularly strong element, alternately melancholy and suspenseful, and in several respects hinted at his later score for Brian De Palma’s 1973 suspense film Sisters in the use of chimes and bells for scenes of murder and its aftermath. Waxman, Salter, and Herrmann were old pros who were finding big-​ screen assignments harder to come by. John Williams, on the other hand, was an up-​and-​comer who had toiled for years in episodic television, and, with a few feature films (mostly silly comedies) to his credit, was beginning to establish himself as a composer of talent. Heidi (1968, NBC) unveiled a Williams that television had not previously heard. This adaptation of the Johanna Spyri classic, written by Earl Hamner Jr. and directed by Delbert Mann (Marty), starred Michael Redgrave and, in the title role, Blake Edwards’s daughter Jennifer; Maximilian Schell and Jean Simmons completed the cast. Fox musical director Lionel Newman recommended Williams to producer Frederick Brogger. “The first thing he needed was a song for the little girl to sing,” Williams recalled. “The company was already in Switzerland shooting. So I wrote this little melody and had my daughter Jennifer, then about age six, tape the melody; I sent it to Delbert Mann, who loved it.” Postproduction, including scoring, was slated for Hamburg. “So I flew over to Germany, and it was during the holiday season,” Williams said.

“I loved the place, and I thought the film was exciting. . . . The members of the orchestra came from the Hamburg Opera. I met some of them before we recorded; I had gone to a few of the productions of the opera and heard them play, and I was inspired by that. . . . I did my best to write a score that would allow the orchestra to show some of their beautiful sound, to the degree that the film allowed the space to do that. We recorded it in the Deutsche Grammophon studio in Hamburg which was technically very advanced, so the original recordings were, I would say, superior to what I’d been used to getting in Hollywood. The whole experience was a happy one.” Williams’s song (with Rod McKuen lyrics) became the film’s main theme, although the score also contains a romantic secondary motif, and much of the music complements the spectacular Alpine scenery. Williams won his first Emmy for the score, but Heidi would become infamous in television history for a very different reason: to start the much-​ promoted movie on time, NBC cut away from a hotly contested football game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders, drawing the ire of thousands of gridiron fans who jammed the network’s Manhattan switchboard. Williams’s second Emmy was for another Brogger production: Jane Eyre (1971, NBC), based on the Charlotte Brontë novel and directed in England by Delbert Mann, with George C. Scott and Susannah York as the stars. The composer happened to be in Great Britain at the time, having finished the pre-​recordings for the film version of the musical Fiddler on the Roof. While preparing the score, Williams and Mann visited the fabled Yorkshire moors together. “We drove around that most beautiful county in England,” the composer remembered. “Del showed me some of the old castles and locations that he photographed in the film, and I found it all very touching. We also went to the Brontë house and parsonage, which are open to the public. I was interested in that because I’d heard Bernard Herrmann talk about that for years when he was writing [his opera] Wuthering Heights, and being so obsessed with the Brontës and all things relating to their short lives.” (Herrmann had also scored the 1944 film of Jane Eyre with Orson Welles as Rochester.) So while he was awaiting the Fiddler company’s return from filming in Yugoslavia, Williams—​inspired by the real-​life settings of the Brontë fiction—​composed the Jane Eyre score: “What I tried to do,” he explained, “was create ‘new’ folk material, if you like, which film composers have done so often all through the years. I wrote, I felt, in the modalities that gave the ambiance of nineteenth-​century Yorkshire, somewhat in the same way that Vaughan Williams had taken his Welsh and Celtic airs and put them into his works. I don’t mean to compare my humble scribblings with his great music, but the process of creating in the atmosphere and the modality of these folk tunes, new melodies which could then be manipulated and metamorphosed throughout the whole score.”

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Williams’s music for Jane Eyre remains one of the composer’s most haunting works. The 60-​piece orchestra eliminated all brass but included two harps, two pianos, an organ, and two harpsichords. The score included an evocative love theme for Jane, an ominous motif for Thornfield Manor, an exciting scherzando for the Yorkshire carriage ride, a quasi-​ liturgical theme for St. John Rivers, and even a string quartet for a celebration at Thornfield. During this early 1970s period, top feature-​film composers were still intrigued by the television medium and its possibilities, and knowledgeable filmmakers not only sought out the best collaborators but made sure the music budgets accommodated them. One of the earliest, and most celebrated, was Michel Legrand’s score for Brian’s Song (1971, ABC). The poignant story of the friendship between white football player Brian Piccolo (James Caan) and his black Chicago Bears teammate Gale Sayers (Billy Dee Williams), which grew even closer when Piccolo was diagnosed with terminal cancer, drew huge ratings and won five Emmy Awards (including Outstanding Single Program for the 1971–​1972 season). Producer Paul Junger Witt flew to Paris to convince Legrand—​the French composer whose music for The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) and Pieces of Dreams (1970) had been Oscar-​nominated, and who had won a Best Song Oscar for “The Windmills of Your Mind” from The Thomas Crown Affair (1968)—​to score the TV movie.

Michel Legrand.

“I had never done a film for television before,” Legrand said. “They had a working copy of the picture, black-​and-​white, ragged. I looked at it and I cried. I said, ‘This is extraordinary, beautiful: what a story, what a man.’ ” Legrand agreed to write the score but had to do so in just two weeks. “When I started to write the theme I knew it had to contain three elements: joy, death, and childhood—​childhood because they really were just boys at the start,” the composer explained after the sessions. As for the football sequences, he trusted drummer Shelly Manne and his fellow percussionists on the session: “I wanted improvisation and instinct, because that is what guides a football runner,” he added. “What we were after,” director Buzz Kulik later said, “was sentiment without sentimentality. Michel captured it.” Legrand’s music provided the tender touch that helped propel Brian’s Song into the hearts of 50 million viewers in a single night. Nominated for an Emmy, it won a Grammy and was the first theme for a television film to become a popular standard. Legrand received a second Emmy nomination for his score for another famous figure, A Woman Called Golda (1982, syndicated), with Ingrid Bergman as the late Israeli prime minister Golda Meir. John Barry’s first score for an American television film was also the most unique, for The Glass Menagerie (1973, ABC), the Tennessee Williams play starring Katharine Hepburn (plus Sam Waterston, Michael Moriarty, and Joanna Miles) and directed by Barry’s Lion in Winter colleague Anthony Harvey. The entire score was performed by the composer on piano. It hadn’t been planned that way. “I did a piano demo for Anthony, and he liked it very much. He laid it against the movie and it worked wonderfully well,” Barry remembered. Harvey thought it so effective that he asked Barry to write and play the entire score as a solo piano piece. The delicate, fragile nature of the theme was perfect for Williams’s wistful reminiscence of the 1930s, but it had actually been written somewhat earlier. “I was planning a concert work,” Barry said, “basically [about] my childhood in World War II, what it was like going through, and then the emotional reflection on that childhood when one became 16, 17, 18 years old and you really started to realize what it had all been about. That [theme] was the opening scene for the piece, very childlike, but it also had a strange kind of quality to it. . . . It was not written for The Glass Menagerie but it just had a fragility about it that worked for the story.” The playwright later told Harvey that he thought it was the best score his play had ever had. A few months later, the English composer was on holiday in Majorca when he got a call about Love Among the Ruins (1975, ABC), directed by famed filmmaker George Cukor (The Philadelphia Story). James Costigan’s charming, witty script cast Laurence Olivier as a brilliant barrister and Hepburn as his client, a wealthy widow whose recent affair with a much younger man has scandalized upper-​class London. The twist: he has been in love with her ever since their brief affair 40 years ago—​one she claims to have forgotten.

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Hepburn had been a fan since Barry had written the dramatic, medieval music for The Lion in Winter (1968), which had won Academy Awards for both of them. The idea to hire Barry for Love Among the Ruins had been hers. “So I got on the plane, flew back to London, and met with Cukor. We talked about it, he showed me some footage, and that was it,” the composer recalled. Upon his return to Majorca, he wrote a theme that was needed during shooting in the summer of 1974: a song that Olivier sings briefly to Hepburn in a restaurant. (Veteran Barry collaborator Don Black wrote the lyric.) The score was built around that theme. It had, said Barry, “a days-​ gone-​by, Old World charm.” Variety described it as music evoking “a mood of romantic nostalgia.” The main-​title sequence, in fact, consisted of color-​tinted photographs of turn-​of-​the-​century London; Barry’s simple waltz theme, flavored with the antique sound of a harpsichord, suggested an elegance and sophistication befitting the legendary actors and the romantic comedy to come. Barry would go on to score the final Hepburn-​Cukor collaboration for television, The Corn Is Green (1979, CBS). “All the years she’s been in the business, she’d never been to a recording session,” Barry recalled. “So she came down [to the sessions] and brought chicken sandwiches with grapes for lunch for everybody, and wine, and had a few cute comments. She was great; she loved it. And the orchestra, of course, were over the moon having her around.” Barry and Black also wrote five original songs for the remake of Svengali (1983, CBS), which marked another Lion in Winter reunion, this time with director Anthony Harvey and star Peter O’Toole. O’Toole played a demanding voice coach, Jodie Foster his protégé who becomes a rock star; their songs, especially “One Dream at a Time,” deserved better than the film, which Harvey disowned as ruined by network interference. The composer’s other major work in the television field was for Eleanor and Franklin (1976, ABC), a four-​ hour miniseries based on Joseph P. Lash’s Pulitzer Prize–​winning biography of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt. “I thought it was a wonderful piece,” Barry recalled. “It was a personal story; it wasn’t a grand political statement.” Barry’s main theme—​voiced first by solo horn and strings, then harpsichord and flute—​possessed a dignity and strength, touched by a hint of sadness, and much of the score was built around that motif. Highly acclaimed, with bravura performances by Jane Alexander and Edward Herrmann in the title roles, Eleanor and Franklin won the Emmy as Outstanding Special. Barry returned to score the three-​hour sequel, Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years (1977, ABC), and received an Emmy nomination. The miniseries—​multiple-​night airings, usually consecutive, of a single production, often mammoth in scope—​began in 1973 with the four-​night, four-​hour The Blue Knight (see Chapter 2).

QB VII (1974, ABC), however, convinced the networks of the creative viability of long-​form television. An adaptation of the Leon Uris bestseller, QB VII ran six-​and-​a-​quarter hours over two nights in April, and at $2.5 million was the most expensive television film made to that time. The story, loosely based on Uris’s own experience after writing Exodus, concerned an American writer (Ben Gazzara) who was sued for libel by a Polish physician (Anthony Hopkins) over accusations that the latter had committed war crimes while a surgeon in a Nazi concentration camp. Part one followed the parallel courses of their lives over a 30-​year period: the trash-​novel author who discovers his Jewish heritage and writes a book about the Holocaust, and the doctor who devotes his life to public service in the Near East and the London slums and is knighted for his efforts. Part two chronicled the lawsuit and trial in London’s Queen’s Bench courtroom No. 7. Leslie Caron, Lee Remick, Juliet Mills, and Anthony Quayle were among the supporting cast.

Jerry Goldsmith in the 1980s.

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Jerry Goldsmith agreed to write the score, the longest and most complex in his television career. He interwove more than half a dozen themes throughout the more than two hours of music. As he explained in his liner notes for the album: “One central musical statement or theme was impossible for a drama of this scope and dimension. It was necessary to treat each part with its own identifying musical statement, a formidable task considering the number of elements involved and the need to unify them overall.” Goldsmith wrote a fanfare for the exterior scenes of the royal court; a theme for each of the two protagonists; variations on them for different love relationships; and subsidiary themes that depicted the Kuwaiti desert, postwar Poland, and modern-​day Israel. His most significant musical problem, however, involved the concentration camps and the memories of human suffering, the composer explained. “Musically, there had to be pain but yet culmination in a feeling of hope,” he wrote. “I used the text of the Kaddish, the Jewish mourners’ prayer, as the words to this theme. The words, in Hebrew, were sung abstractly, spoken abstractly, and sung purely [at various points in the score].” The dramatic impact of the voices in the Jadwiga concentration camp sequences was stunning. The music suggested that the ghosts of the Jewish victims were all around; the wailings of a women’s choir were grim, echoing reminders of the hideous experiments that had gone on in these and other places. The complete choral performance of this theme, which Goldsmith subtitled “A Kaddish for the Six Million,” was heard as the finale of the miniseries. The score was recorded in Rome with a 60-​piece orchestra and (ironically, considering the Hebrew texts) the Sistine Chapel choir. Orchestrator Alexander Courage conducted the choral elements when Goldsmith took ill during the January 1974 sessions. The composer won his second Emmy for the score and received a Grammy nomination as well. QB VII broke new ground for television drama. Nazi horrors had never been discussed with such candor or conveyed with such shattering impact in an entertainment program. The nine-​and-​a-​half-​hour Holocaust (1978, NBC) addressed the issues even more directly, and as a result became one of the most controversial miniseries in television history. Gerald Green’s Holocaust script told the story of two German families and their changing fortunes between 1935 and 1945: a prosperous Jewish physician, his cultured wife, and their three children; and a struggling lawyer whose ambitious wife pushes him into service with the Nazi SS. Fritz Weaver, Michael Moriarty, James Woods, and Meryl Streep were among the stars. Critically praised but hotly debated among Holocaust survivors for its depiction of concentration camp life and Hitler’s “Final Solution,” the miniseries won eight Emmys, including Outstanding Limited Series. And regardless of its merit as drama, it called attention to the unspeakable crimes of Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Treblinka, and the other nightmarish sites of the attempted genocide like no previous mass communication effort.

To score this obviously important project, the makers of Holocaust, including former Playhouse 90 producer Herbert Brodkin, chose a composer with few credits in film: Morton Gould, who had done a stellar job with the 1960s documentary series World War I but who had not written for television drama apart from an earlier Brodkin film, F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood (1976, ABC). Gould looked at a rough cut and turned it down. “I felt that the picture did not need music. I thought, ‘How can you do music for this?’ It was such a powerful, wrenching show,” he said. His music publishers, and another conversation with the producers, changed his mind. He composed a score that touched on all of the themes, the characters, the locales, and the entire scope of the project. Yet there was very little music in Holocaust apart from source cues (Wagner played by Nazi leaders, Mozart performed by musicians in the camps). In fact, of 17 themes represented on Gould’s Grammy-​nominated Holocaust soundtrack album, only seven were actually heard in the program, and those mostly in severely truncated form (usually as “curtain music” at the end of an act). Although Gould had agreed with the producers on specifically where music should be included, all of which was recorded, the vast majority was removed before the film went on the air. “A tremendous amount of music was taken out,” Gould recalled. “I understand that there was some conflict within the production staff about doing it. Some felt that it should go out, some felt that it shouldn’t.” What remained were Gould’s profoundly mournful main theme, a trio of motifs for various members of the tormented Weiss family, music for the rail transport to the death camps, a portion of Gould’s exuberant finale, and, perhaps most dramatically, the dirge-​like music that underscored scenes of the slaughter of tens of thousands at Russia’s Babi Yar. The composer said that he hoped to “convey the tenderness and the tragedy in as unostentatious a way as possible. In the opening theme, I did something that I hoped would make an important statement. I did not want a trivial theme. I meant it to have a never-​ending sadness.” Despite the massive cuts in his sophisticated original score, Gould received an Emmy nomination from his peers in the Television Academy. It remained for War and Remembrance (1988–​1989, ABC) to deal with the Holocaust again, and in even more graphic visual terms. War and Remembrance was the 29-​hour, $100-​million sequel to The Winds of War (1983, ABC), an 18-​hour adaptation of Herman Wouk’s bestseller. For both scores, producer-​director Dan Curtis turned to his frequent collaborator Bob Cobert (1924–​2020), whose music had helped popularize the daytime soap Dark Shadows, and who had gone on to write the scores for virtually all of the director’s television and film projects. Just as the two films, considered together, are a massive historical-​fiction look at World War II, the music for The Winds of War and War and Remembrance is essentially one long single score: among the longest, in fact, in the history of television.

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Educated at Juilliard and Columbia, Cobert first met Curtis on Dark Shadows, when he was in New York City writing music for game shows (To Tell the Truth, Password) and soaps (The Doctors). The success of Dark Shadows, including a pop hit with his Grammy-​nominated “Quentin’s Theme” and a top-​20 soundtrack album in 1969, cemented the partnership between producer and composer. His memorable music for Curtis pictures included The Night Stalker (1972), the Jack Palance Dracula (1974), the period detective drama Melvin Purvis: G-​Man (1974), and his Western Heritage Award-​winning score for The Last Ride of the Dalton Gang (1979). Because Curtis had a long professional relationship with Cobert, he gave the composer more freedom than usual at the start of the Winds of War project. Cobert spent six weeks writing a total of 45 original themes, which were demoed at the piano for Curtis, who then pared them down to 20 for recording by a full 60-​piece orchestra. Having heard those, Curtis selected his five favorites for Cobert to utilize as his main motifs in the underscore. The main theme for The Winds of War and War and Remembrance, a simple but haunting melody that was published as the “Love Theme from The Winds of War,” was not conceived as such. It was one of several proposed main-​title themes that were auditioned for Curtis. “I wrote it not as a love theme but as an expression of the sadness and valor of World War II,” the composer recalled. But, because Curtis was not initially enthusiastic about the piece, “I only had 16 bars,” Cobert added. “I didn’t bother

Bob Cobert (left) with director Dan Curtis on the set of War and Remembrance.

to develop it because I thought, well, he’s not going to like it.” However, when a piano demo of that theme was played against the scene of Byron and Natalie (Jan-​Michael Vincent, Ali MacGraw) meeting in Siena, Curtis became excited, Cobert said. “We started running it against other Byron-​ and-​Natalie scenes. That’s how it became their theme,” and ultimately, the main theme for both series. In addition to that, Cobert’s score included a heroic fanfare and march for Pug Henry (Robert Mitchum); themes for Pamela (Victoria Tennant), Pug’s wife Rhoda and her lover Kirby (Polly Bergen, Peter Graves); and a theme for the Henry family. In addition, there were grim martial sounds for the Nazi leaders, a patriotic march for President Franklin Roosevelt (Ralph Bellamy), and considerable ethnic-​flavored music suggestive of Poland, Russia, and the plight of the Jews in Europe. Cobert recorded seven hours of music for The Winds of War. Besides writing the dramatic underscore, Cobert served as musical director on the miniseries, which involved responsibility for all of the source music—​ which ranged from Hitler favorites (Franz Lehar) to dance music (Glenn Miller and other period tunes). In all, there were more than 100 such pieces, all of which Cobert arranged; there were another hundred for War and Remembrance (including one big bash where Cobert can be spotted conducting the orchestra on-​screen). Veteran Jack Hayes orchestrated Cobert’s underscore on both miniseries. The Winds of War built up to the Pearl Harbor bombing and America’s entry into World War II. War and Remembrance followed the same characters through the war itself, including horrific scenes set in the Nazi concentration camps. Cobert devised a dirge-​like death march that first appeared in the Babi Yar sequences and reappeared in the Auschwitz gas chamber scenes where, in some of the most affecting moments in the series, Aaron Jastrow (John Gielgud) met his fate. “I wanted to do something that had dignity, that had heart, that was sad, that had power and dramatic value,” Cobert said. “I think I achieved it.” War and Remembrance contained approximately 12 hours of dramatic underscore alone, and interwove 15 different themes throughout the narrative, including all of the original ones from Winds and several new ones. As with Winds, Cobert conducted a 65-​piece studio orchestra. His War and Remembrance score complemented Curtis’s harrowing scenes of World War II, enhancing the high drama with music of emotion and intensity. He received an Emmy nomination for his efforts; War itself won as Outstanding Miniseries for the 1988–​1989 season.

AMERICANA

American history and Americana subjects provided the inspiration for several composers in the movie and miniseries realm. Among the earliest

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of these was Jerry Goldsmith’s music for The Red Pony (1973, NBC), an adaptation of the John Steinbeck novella with Henry Fonda, Maureen O’Hara, Ben Johnson, and Clint Howard as the boy Jody. The composer recalled the film as “one of the most joyous” experiences of his career. “I’d get up and I could hardly wait to get to work,” he said. The Aaron Copland score for the 1949 film version, in its concert suite form, had become a part of the American musical repertoire and so, Goldsmith acknowledged, “comparisons were inevitable. Note for note, no, there’s no resemblance. But stylistically, yes. It’s me, with a heavy influence of Copland.” Sweet and gentle, fully orchestral but flavored with traditional western sounds including acoustic guitar and accordion, Goldsmith’s Red Pony music beautifully complemented Steinbeck’s coming-​of-​age tale of a boy, his gruff father, and his ill-​fated pony. The composer won his first Emmy Award for the score (the third of four Frederick Brogger–​produced classics to win for its music); the film itself won a Peabody Award. For The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974, CBS), Fred Karlin (1936–​2004) drew on his extensive knowledge of American music and folk idioms. Cicely Tyson won an Emmy for her extraordinary portrayal of the title character, a 110-​year-​old woman whose life had begun in slavery but ended as a part of the civil rights movement. Eight other Emmys went to this sensitively written and directed character study, including one for Karlin’s heartfelt score. Karlin, whose film career had begun in New York with 1960s film scores including Up the Down Staircase and The Sterile Cuckoo, had won a 1970 Best Song Oscar for his “For All We Know” from Lovers and Other Strangers. A talented trumpet and flugelhorn player, Karlin had begun his career in jazz but grew to embrace all kinds of American music, particularly in the 1960s, when he and his wife Megan founded the Historical Institute of American Music. With only 10 days to score Miss Jane Pittman—​and a subject that covered an entire century of the Black American experience—​Karlin was the right composer for the film, with no time to spare for musical research. Karlin was moved from his first screening of the picture. “Pittman had the kind of depth of characterization and evolution that you don’t usually get within a two-​hour film. Usually it takes a miniseries or a longer feature. That’s one of the things that made it so extraordinarily successful, and such a landmark television project. I found the musical language that I thought was appropriate for the texture of the film and the characters.” His work included period military music for the Confederate soldiers at the start of the story; Southern folk and blues colors, including harmonica, banjo, guitar, and fiddle, for Jane’s cross-​country odyssey and plantation work; and ragtime for scenes set at the turn of the century. During the final five minutes, scenes of the 110-​year-​old Miss Jane walking slowly up to a “whites only” drinking fountain in 1962 are

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Fred Karlin.

accompanied only by Karlin’s quietly powerful, gospel-​flavored piano, flute, and strings, with touches of harmonica, banjo, and guitar. Karlin’s later Americana scores for television included Minstrel Man (1977, CBS), a turn-​of-​the-​century tale that included several original songs, as well as the seven-​hour miniseries The Awakening Land (1978, NBC) with Elizabeth Montgomery and Hal Holbrook, and the seven-​ hour Dream West (1986, CBS) with Richard Chamberlain as explorer John Charles Fremont. Roots (1977, ABC) is remembered today as one of the most important television programs of all time. But, during its production, it was considered a tremendous gamble. Hoping to maximize the credibility of a 12-​hour miniseries about the first Black Americans, producers David L. Wolper and Stan Margulies enlisted the one composer they felt was perfect for the job: Quincy Jones. Roots was a dramatization of journalist Alex Haley’s bestselling book that traced his ancestry back to eighteenth-​century Africa and a Gambian named Kunta Kinte. Wolper and Margulies had enlisted a notable cast including Cicely Tyson, Maya Angelou, Moses Gunn, and newcomer LeVar Burton for the opening two-​hour chapter set in Africa. The behind-​the-​camera talent was equally impressive; filmmakers and actors alike knew that Roots was special, although no one could have guessed that it would become the most-​watched miniseries in television history. Quincy Jones quit writing film scores in 1972, returning to the record world for the most part in a producing capacity. But Roots, written by his

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friend Alex Haley and undertaken for television on a large scale, seemed too important a project to pass up. Jones was signed to score the entire miniseries. In 1971 Jones had written Black Requiem, a 50-​minute work performed by the Houston Symphony Orchestra with Ray Charles, a gospel choir, a concerto grosso group, and jazz and soul musicians including Billy Preston, Grady Tate, Joe Newman, and Toots Thielemans; it traced the black experience from 1510 through the assassinations of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. Through the 1970s, Jones continued to research the evolution of Black music with an eye toward a concert work, a film, or both. “So,” Jones decided, “this was right up my alley. I had gone through a lot of credible research on African music back to 479 a.d.” But, he added, “emotionally, I fell in. We had a very limited budget to do the whole project, and I was concerned about that, and just a lot of things that happened. I was so focused on the importance of it—​it was just very meaningful to me, and that transcended the pragmatic aspect of it in terms of time and deadline.” Jones’s attempt to achieve an authentic African sound in the opening episode took longer than anyone expected. He hired vocalist Letta Mbulu and African-​music expert Caiphus Semenya to contribute their unique talents. “If the culture was going to get lost, stolen, or traded in the next episode,” Jones pointed out, “we really had to do something of significance in the first one, just from a musical standpoint. Dramatically [the producers] could have done without it, and I don’t think it was as important to them as it was to me.” Jones recorded most of the music for the opening installment, including three crucial and highly evocative pieces co-​credited to Jones and Semenya, all of which involved traditional African chants and phrases: “Mama Aifambeni,” the rhythmic main title featuring Mbulu; the dramatic “Behold, the Only Thing Greater than Yourself ” sequence, as the baby Kunta Kinte is held aloft to the stars; and “Oluwa,” the primary African motif. The words “ishe oluwa, koleba jeo,” from the Nigerian Yoruba tongue, mean “what God has created, no man can destroy.” Jones became consumed with the effort. “I was really almost unprofessional in terms of time,” he admitted, “because I was trying to solve the mystery of making it authentic and still do it within the constraints of the budget.” In addition, he said, “I was trying to get a theme that would last all the way through the 12 [hours] but still would have a strong African basis to it, and I hadn’t solved that problem yet musically.” Producer Stan Margulies became concerned. “It was an interesting phenomenon because it happened with a number of actors,” he pointed out, “and it happened with Quincy. They wanted to do the best work they had ever done, the best work they could ever imagine, because of the project. And that thought crippled them. Quincy kept saying, ‘It’s not good enough, I’ve got to work some more on it. Let’s not do the session today.’

Or tomorrow, or whenever. And eventually I had to say, ‘Quincy, we’ll never get this show on the air.’ We had a rush airdate. “There came a point where I couldn’t wait for Quincy anymore, and Quincy understood that,” Margulies said. “It broke his heart, but he totally understood it.” The producer called Gerald Fried, who had created authentic-​sounding Native American music for the Wolper-​Margulies TV film I Will Fight No More Forever (1975). “Part of what drew me to Gerry was the way in which he had immersed himself in Native American sounds and instruments, and I felt he would bring that sensibility to a combination of African themes for Blacks in America and various country music [sounds] for the whites in Virginia.” Fried remembered it this way: “I got a call from Wolper saying, ‘Gerry, we’re going to give you a thousand dollars to keep your pencils sharp and your mouth shut. But get a lot of sleep.’ I finished the first episode, wrote the main theme, and did everything from then on. The first three or four shows, we did in something like 20 days. It was madness. It was the most brutal schedule I ever had. But they warned me. I was ready and I did research.” Fried immersed himself for several days in ethnomusicological studies at UCLA and consulted with studio percussionist Emil Richards, whose fabled collection of unusual instruments from around the world also came in handy on the scoring stage (and was utilized in Jones’s score for the first episode).

Gerald Fried accepts the 1977 Emmy for Roots.

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Reflecting on his memorable main theme for Roots, Fried explained, “I wanted to write the strongest, most powerful [music] in a kind of early Americana way. There wasn’t time to be nervous or worried about it.” The bass marimba figure that opened the Roots theme, and Fried’s attempt to keep the notes within scales that would apply to West African music, immediately suggested Africa; the harmonica in the bridge reminded viewers of the South, where most of the series took place. As the series progressed, the Roots theme became a key musical subtext, a reminder of Kunta Kinte’s homeland and heritage—​still echoing with African percussion and flutes—​and finally emerging orchestrally triumphant when Chicken George (Ben Vereen) became the family’s first free man. Despite the haste in which it was written, Roots may have been Fried’s most inspired score. The rousing hornpipe with which he opened night two (as Edward Asner’s sailing ship brought the slaves to America); the down-​home banjo-​and-​harmonica theme for Lorne Greene’s Virginia plantation; lively new themes for Chicken George and for Kizzy (Leslie Uggams), daughter of the adult Kunte Kinte (John Amos); and dramatic passages for Civil War and Ku Klux Klan night-​rider sequences rounded out Fried’s music. The Roots sweep at the 1976–​1977 Emmy Awards resulted in nine wins, including one for Outstanding Limited Series and one shared by Jones and Fried for the music of part one. Controversy arose, however, when Jones quickly released an album titled “music from and inspired by” the series. Fried felt that the LP unfairly implied that it was the soundtrack of the series, when much of it was not, in fact, heard in the score, and, of the Fried score, only his main theme was included. Fried’s music could barely be heard in the “official” soundtrack, a three-​record set containing narration and dialogue drawn from the 12 hours. No true Roots soundtrack album has ever been released. Fried reprised his Roots theme but also created considerable new material for the 14-​hour sequel, Roots: The Next Generations (1979, ABC), which continued Haley’s saga to the present day (with James Earl Jones as Haley and, in one riveting sequence, Marlon Brando in his TV debut as American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell). Fried’s penchant for musical research and his ability to combine authentic sounds with the dramatic necessities of television made him the obvious choice for Wolper and Margulies’s next major miniseries on an American theme: The Mystic Warrior (1984, ABC), based on Ruth Beebe Hill’s novel Hanta Yo, about a band of Lakota Sioux in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Utilizing authentic Native American poems, chants, and writings, the composer created a wide range of music including choral anthems, ritualistic chants, ethereal voices, and a variety of exotic percussion and woodwind instruments designed to simulate authentic Native sounds. His efforts did not go unnoticed: Newsweek, for example, referred to “Gerald

Fried’s dazzling musical score, with its suggestions of Indian, Oriental and Gregorian chants.” The composer received another Emmy nomination, and the Roger Wagner Chorale performed a suite from the score while on tour for several months prior to its television airing. One miniseries dared to attempt an overview of the entire American experience: Centennial (1978–​1979, NBC), a sprawling, 12-​part, 26-​hour adaptation of James A. Michener’s epic saga of American history as seen through the people of fictional Centennial, Colorado. And, as with Eleanor and Franklin, this quintessential American story was scored by an English composer. Producer John Wilder, with whom composer John Addison had worked on The Bastard (1978, syndicated), called upon the Englishman again for Centennial. Addison wrote the theme and scored the three-​hour opening installment, which introduced the key early characters of French-​ Canadian fur trapper Pasquinel (Robert Conrad) and the Scotsman Alexander McKeag (Richard Chamberlain). “I had read Michener’s book,” Addison said, “and it was particularly interesting to me as a foreigner having come to live here on the West Coast. I was more or less an immigrant myself. As I got more involved in the show, there came a time when I really didn’t want to hand it over to anybody else.” Addison didn’t initially intend to score all 26 hours. But Wilder talked him into doing the second installment of two hours, and, according to

  John Addison.

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Addison, pointed out that “there are all these themes and many of them will go right through the whole thing.” So Addison stayed with the entire series, a six-​month commitment of time that resulted in approximately six hours of dramatic music, all recorded at Universal with a 45-​piece orchestra. For his Centennial main-​title theme, Addison composed a series of fanfares to suggest the heroism and courage of the pioneers who settled the West, along with a hint of Native American drums to remind listeners of the true Americans who were there long before the white people came. Within the body of each show, Addison said, “there were a great many themes. New characters would come in, but then there would be a reference to previous characters. Whatever situation the character was in, the music would be adapted to suit that. So there were endless variations on some of those themes.” (Among them: a theme for the majesty of the Native Americans; another for man in harmony with nature; a love motif; another for man in conflict with fellow man; even a theme for the small wandering river near Centennial.) Addison researched and consulted experts in ethnic instruments of the various periods chronicled. “Any research I did might have influenced the style,” the composer explained, “but the music I wrote was original to me and was inspired by the characters, situations, and mood of the film.” Addison effectively wrote a dozen full-​length film scores, reprising old themes and creating new ones as Michener’s tale developed through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, involving a German merchant (Raymond Burr), an army officer (Chad Everett) sympathetic to the Native Americans’ plight, a fanatic Indian-​hater (Richard Crenna), a German farmer (Alex Karras), a peacekeeper (Brian Keith), a trail boss (Dennis Weaver), a cowboy (William Atherton) who falls for a cultured Englishwoman (Lynn Redgrave), and a Mennonite trader (Gregory Harrison) who becomes the community’s founding father. David Janssen narrated the entire series and appeared in the final episode as a contemporary descendent of the founders of Centennial. Addison returned to early American history with another miniseries, the seven-​hour Ellis Island (1984, CBS), for which he composed nine Irving Berlin–​style songs (with lyricist Douglas Brayfield) that were performed by Peter Riegert (as the songwriter), Ann Jillian (as an ambitious music-​hall singer), and Melba Moore (as a Harlem nightclub performer). East of Eden (1981, ABC) was a milestone in the career of Lee Holdridge. An eight-​hour adaptation of the John Steinbeck classic, it explored the entire novel instead of just the final third (as had the 1955 film with James Dean). Holdridge had loved the book and, having been signed to write the music, knew that “this wanted a big dramatic score.” What’s more, the project was treated like a feature: Holdridge was given 10 weeks to write and orchestrate, and was, he recalled, “basically left alone.”

“What’s fun about a miniseries,” Holdridge observed, “is that you have a very big canvas to work with. It’s not unlike writing an opera in the sense that you spread yourself out over a long period of time. You can take a theme and develop it and come back and revise it later, do something different with it. It’s a very intriguing format for a composer.” Holdridge wrote “at least five or six” primary themes for East of Eden, including the main theme, motifs for the patriarch (Warren Oates) and his sons (Timothy Bottoms, Bruce Boxleitner), and the evil Cathy (Jane Seymour) who comes between them. Cathy’s theme was particularly interesting: “Early in the film, she’s very beautiful,” Holdridge said. “I remember scoring mostly classical piano and strings for her. As she becomes twisted and turned, all the themes become polytonal and atonal.” By late in the film, the disfigured Cathy was reflected in what Holdridge called “the ultimate evolution of this once beautiful theme, pulled apart into all sorts of discordant sounds.” The composer wrote about two hours of music for the score, which was recorded in Rome with a 55-​piece orchestra. He later extracted key themes for an 18-​minute concert suite. The Blue and the Gray (1982, CBS) required a different kind of Americana score. An all-​star cast populated this much-​anticipated, eight-​hour miniseries about the Civil War, based in part on a story by Civil War historian Bruce Catton. Gregory Peck made his dramatic television debut as Abraham Lincoln, as did Sterling Hayden as abolitionist John Brown. Stacy Keach and John Hammond were the leads, as a government agent and a newspaper artist, respectively; Rip Torn played General Ulysses S. Grant. For The Blue and the Gray, Bruce Broughton composed as authentic-​ sounding a score as any American historical miniseries ever had. His main-​ title theme opened with a barrage of military flourishes and fanfares, then segued into a memorable Americana theme (actually of Irish folk origin), all played against sepia-​toned drawings of the people and places of the Civil War era. The main title offered an appropriately grand sound (an orchestra of about 40), but Broughton was warned early on by one of the producers that they were looking for a smaller, simpler approach, “in the sense that you’d have a harmonica playing around the campfire. He wanted to play the people and the time,” the composer explained. As a result, much of the two-​and-​a-​half hours of music was for reduced ensembles, often incorporating highly atmospheric sounds that were period-​specific: fiddle, jaw harp, banjo, acoustic guitar, or dulcimer. The composer was rewarded with an Emmy nomination for the score—​ which subsequently was used as the temporary music track and partial model for the big-​screen western Silverado (1985), an Oscar nominee for its music and eventually Broughton’s most famous work. The much-​respected Broughton would eventually become the record holder for most Emmys for original music in television: nine primetime

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Bruce Broughton.

Emmys, another 13 nominations, plus one for daytime (the title song for the hugely popular animated series Tiny Toon Adventures, 1990–​1992, syndicated). Among the wins: his fanfare-​and march-​filled The First Olympics: Athens 1896 (1984, NBC); the Americana score for O Pioneers! (1992, CBS), based on the Willa Cather novel—​“music that spoke of the prairies,” Broughton said—​with Jessica Lange portraying a turn-​of-​the-​ century Nebraska farmwoman; a heroic score for Glory & Honor (1998, TNT), about Robert Peary’s North Pole expedition; the delightful music of Eloise at the Plaza and Eloise at Christmastime (2003, ABC), both high-​ energy pieces with, in the composer’s words, “an old-​fashioned New York feeling” for the adaptation of Kay Thompson’s children’s books about an impish, hyperactive six-​year-​old girl and her nanny (Julie Andrews); and music of dignity for the polio-​stricken Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1920s, as played by Kenneth Branagh, for Warm Springs (2005, HBO). When producer David L. Wolper hired Bill Conti to write the music for his lavish adaptation of John Jakes’s pre–​Civil War epic North and South (1985, ABC), he didn’t want a small score. “I really want Gone with the Wind,” he whispered. The composer was on the spot, not only in the sense of creating a theme to rival Max Steiner’s famous music for the 1939 classic—​but also due to the fact that the miniseries consumed 12 hours of television time, and he had only three weeks to write and record the entire score. The North and South theme, according to Conti, came quickly and easily. Grand and majestic, it was nothing like Gone with the Wind, but Conti had correctly interpreted Wolper’s request. Performed by a 60-​piece orchestra, Conti’s sweeping main-​title music played against beautifully drawn pen-​and-​ink portraits of the principals and scenes of antebellum

America, setting the stage for Jakes’s saga of two West Point soldiers—​ Pennsylvanian George Hazard (James Read) and South Carolinian Orry Main (Patrick Swayze) and their families and feuds. Key facets of the storyline involved Orry’s true love, the Creole Madeline Fabray (Lesley Anne-​Down), and Orry’s scheming vixen of a sister (Terri Garber). “I began writing from the minute that I could and [one week later] began recording every night, from seven until midnight, for two weeks,” Conti said, “because you could not stay ahead of them [the dubbing mixers].” He wrote about three hours of dramatic underscore, relying on the main theme for the large-​scale set pieces, “Dixie”-​style music for the Southern settings, and secondary themes for several characters throughout the drama. In terms of general approach, however, Conti chose an unlikely model. “I did it in a style that I was so familiar with: Italian opera,” he said. “It had nothing to do with the program itself, musically, but when you have to do stream-​of-​consciousness writing, you had better go to your strong suit. Because you’re not going to use your eraser.” It was a perfect choice. So much of North and South was melodramatic hokum that the grandiose musical gestures were entirely appropriate—​for example, Conti’s four-​minute buildup to the lovemaking scene of Orry and Madeline in a deserted chapel, as passion-​filled and overwhelming as any of its predecessors in the realm of romantic Hollywood. Conti received an Emmy nomination for his opening-​night score. He reprised all the themes in his score for the 12-​hour sequel, North and South, Book II (1986, ABC), which reunited the cast and crew for Jakes’s chronicle of the Civil War years in the lives of the Main and Hazard families. Basil Poledouris (1945–​ 2006), unlike many of his contemporaries, didn’t start out in television. A film major at USC, he counted among his classmates and friends future filmmakers John Milius, George Lucas, Caleb Deschanel, and Randall Kleiser. An aspiring concert pianist (who also sang in a folk group during the 1960s), his film studies made him unique among contemporary composers. He created the romantic score for Kleiser’s The Blue Lagoon, the powerful choral music for Milius’s Conan the Barbarian, and several subsequent Milius films, including the Soviet-​takeover thriller Red Dawn, all in the 1980s. Ironically, the militaristic Red Dawn did nothing to prepare the composer for his longest and most complex work: Amerika (1987, ABC). The 15-​hour Amerika was the most controversial and misunderstood miniseries in TV history: Donald Wrye’s political fantasy about the aftermath of a bloodless coup and Soviet occupation of the United States was thoughtful, provocative, and often moving. Kris Kristofferson played a recently released political prisoner who led the Resistance; Robert Urich, the well-​meaning politician who wound up collaborating with the new government despite the misgivings of his wife (Cindy Pickett); Sam Neill, the KGB colonel who oversaw the governing of Middle America while

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sleeping with an American actress (Mariel Hemingway); and Christine Lahti was the Resistance leader’s sister, who had been raped by the Soviet invaders. Amerika started out with a $300,000 music budget. By the time the show went on the air, it had ballooned to an estimated $1.25 million, and become the most expensive score in the history of television to that time. Poledouris wrote five-​ and-​ a-​ half hours of music in total. Wrye “wanted to have a real Americana flavor,” Poledouris recalled. “We both agreed that it shouldn’t be jingoistic from either side. In fact, what we tried to do musically was represent both the Russians and Americans as being the same, with the same kinds of concerns. I didn’t use balalaikas; I tried to give the KGB colonel a kind of jazzy, New York type of motif because he was so understanding of the American system.” Poledouris used a 65-​piece orchestra for much of the score and recorded off and on in an estimated 30 sessions between November 1986 and February 1987, with the final scoring session held literally the day before the final episode was televised. “The very last night was mixed down, dubbed, and finished one hour before it hit the air,” the composer said. “I didn’t receive the cut for the last two hours until 12 hours before I had to score it. And it went on the air 24 hours after that.” Variety, at least, noted that “Poledouris’s immensely profound score forcibly moves in lockstep with the action.” By contrast, Lonesome Dove (1989, CBS) was an undisputed masterpiece in every sense. Probably the finest western in the history of the medium, it won seven Emmys and restored faith (if only temporarily) in commercial television’s ability to do great things. Robert Duvall and Tommy Lee Jones starred in this eight-​hour adaptation of Larry McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize–​winning novel about a nineteenth-​century cattle drive from Texas to Montana, with an outstanding supporting cast that included Diane Lane, Danny Glover, Robert Urich, Ricky Schroder, and Anjelica Huston. Poledouris had not previously scored a western. It didn’t matter; his familiarity with folk music had already laid the necessary groundwork, and the film itself was inspiration enough. And, Poledouris believed, the folk idiom “is a wellspring for very powerful, simple, eloquently stated musical renderings of the human spirit. This is really what Lonesome Dove is about.” At the start, “I knew that I needed one very strong, central melodic notion for the piece,” the composer said. “In terms of scoring Gus [Duvall] and Call [Jones] specifically, it didn’t seem like that was necessary because they are so much one entity that I didn’t really feel the need to separate the two of them. They were Lonesome Dove.” In composing this main theme, Poledouris sought “a little bit of yearning, of longing . . . a kind of romance, a sense of lost youth, perhaps, and a sense of striving toward regaining some of that spirit.” (Later, each character would be associated,

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 Basil Poledouris accepts the 1989 Emmy for Lonesome Dove.

only briefly, with his own motif: philosopher Gus with a bawdy “whorehouse piano” tune, and stoic Call with solo trumpet playing the traditional song of the Texas Rangers.) Poledouris’s second major theme involved the cattle drive itself: “So I made up this cowboy song about driving cows along. And I knew that I wanted somewhat of an up-​tempo, galloping motif that would represent the excitement of going to Mexico and stealing horses: a kind of high-​adventure, high-​romance theme.” Within three days of landing the assignment, he had created three of the key themes in the score; later, at the request of director Simon Wincer, he wrote love themes that represented Gus’s feelings for Clara (Huston) and Lorrianna (Lane). Although most of the three-​hour, 45-​minute score was orchestral (58 players at its height), about 40 minutes—​notably those involving the Arkansas sheriff and his wayward, wandering wife—​featured a small band playing authentic-​sounding western music on instruments appropriate to the time and place: dulcimer, harmonium, banjo, guitar, mandolin, and fiddle. “We had talked about contacting the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, who were a favorite of mine, and other artists, but in the end, when you are confronted with the realities of picture-​scoring budgets, those sorts of ideas go out the door,” the composer explained. All of Poledouris’s themes embodied folk-​flavored Americana without resorting to Coplandesque cliche. His Lonesome Dove theme, at once elegant and bittersweet, captured the essence of the story in such a memorable

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and enduring way—​“reflecting both the intimacy and the grandeur of the work,” noted Variety—​that, four years after the composer’s Emmy win for Outstanding Achievement in Music Composition for a Miniseries or Special, an enterprising label finally released excerpts from his score and made a success of the album.

HISTORICAL, RELIGIOUS, AND LITERARY SUBJECTS

Moses: The Lawgiver (1975, CBS) not only was among the first of the network miniseries, it was the first to focus at length on a biblical subject, and a rare early instance of an international co-​production (by Britain’s ATV and Italy’s RAI) to be acquired by an American broadcast network. Burt Lancaster played the title role in this six-​hour miniseries (telecast on consecutive Saturday nights during the summer months) that was filmed on location in Israel. Anthony Quayle played his brother Aaron, Ingrid Thulin his sister Miriam, and Irene Papas his wife Zipporah; Lancaster’s son William played the young Moses in the first part. British novelist Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange) was one of the screenwriters who adapted the Old Testament chronicle, in unusually intelligent fashion (Moses’s debate with Pharaoh in the second hour being a particularly riveting example). Equally intelligent was the choice of the eclectic and innovative Ennio Morricone as composer. Morricone (1928–​2020) had written for television before, although not for a project of this size or one that required such an unusual musical backdrop. Only a fraction of his approximately two hours of original music was heard in the American version of Moses, although all of the key themes made at least abbreviated appearances. Morricone’s theme for Moses was the backbone of the score. Rendered variously for mixed chorus (over the main titles), for wordless alto with chorus, and for solo viola with strings, it was infused with a quiet spirituality that was quite removed from the large-​scale orchestral scores that Miklós Rózsa and Elmer Bernstein had written for big-​screen biblical epics. A second recurring theme was his song of joy for the Jews beginning their Exodus out of Egypt, featuring women’s and men’s choirs singing the single word “Israel,” over and over, to the accompaniment of organ and percussion. For scenes where Moses heard God’s voice, the composer created an atmosphere of strange percussive sounds. Only briefly heard was his mournful “Lamentation” (in scenes of a stoning in part five and Aaron’s death in part six), for female soloist and a cappella mixed chorus. Much of Morricone’s Moses music, particularly the source music for the Egyptian palaces and Jewish camps, was designed to imitate sounds

that might have been heard in the Middle East circa 1500 b.c.: music for voice, simple flutes, and harps. “I did keep in mind ancient Jewish music,” Morricone explained, “but in a very liberal sense. Otherwise we would have had to have the pieces played on original instruments; I did not have at my disposal the performers or the instruments to do that. I [scored] with modern instruments, so I could not be rigorously Jewish in style or form.” Morricone’s frequent collaborator, Bruno Nicolai, conducted the score in Rome. Music consultant Dov Seltzer created many of the songs and dances for the series, including an “Israel” chant (sung by Aaron as high priest in part six) that Morricone incorporated as a part of his main theme. Morricone returned to the ancient world for Marco Polo (1982, NBC), a 10-​hour miniseries that marked the first cooperative filmmaking venture between Western producers and the People’s Republic of China. Marco Polo, which by virtue of its mammoth spectacle won the Outstanding Limited Series Emmy, gave American audiences their first views of the Great Wall of China, Peking’s Forbidden City, and the steppes of Inner Mongolia in an entertainment program. Ken Marshall played young Marco Polo, the thirteenth-​century adventurer who accompanied his father and uncle on a 20-​year, 10,000-​mile journey from Venice to Cathay. The usual all-​star parade of cameos (Burt Lancaster as Pope Gregory X, John Gielgud as the Doge of Venice, and Anne Bancroft as Marco’s mother) was overshadowed by Chinese film star Ying Ruocheng in a completely convincing performance as the legendary Mongol emperor Kublai Khan.

Ennio Morricone.

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For Marco Polo, Morricone was reunited with two previous collabo­ rators: Moses producer Vincenzo Labella and director Giuliano Montaldo (Sacco and Vanzetti). On the project for 11 months, the composer responded with one of his most memorable and complex scores: more than six hours of music incorporating three major themes, 12 secondary themes, and an untold number of source-​music pieces appropriate to the many cultures visited by Marco Polo en route to the Far East. “That Marco Polo is an epic film is obvious,” Morricone told an interviewer in Rome during the recording. “But it also has a nostalgic side to it: Marco’s desire to return to Venice.” With that notion as his initial inspiration, the composer created a main theme for viola, orchestra, and chorus that embodied a sense of longing for home but also a touch of sadness for the profound level of human suffering Polo encountered in his travels. Viola solos often expressed the inner voice of Marco Polo. A second motif, effectively a love theme, was associated with the three women in Marco’s life: his mother; his first love as a youth in Venice; and a European woman named Monica whom he discovered in south China. Written for recorders, strings, harp, and women’s chorus, it may have been the most beautiful melody that Morricone ever wrote for television: at once haunting and heartbreaking. The third primary theme, “On the Way to the Orient,” was Marco’s traveling music: constantly in motion, arranged in its most prominent incarnation for strings, harp, woodwinds, and percussion. The secondary themes encompassed a wide range of styles and sounds: subdued brass fanfares and grim male chorus for the horrors of the Crusades; frenzied woodwinds for the first sighting of the Mongol hordes; a primitive march for Kublai Khan going to war; plaintive strings and male chorus for the story of the thousands who died building the Great Wall of China; and a graceful Asian-​flavored melody for Mai-​Li (Monica’s doomed stepsister). Morricone said at the time that he based his incidental music on forms of Eastern music and known instruments of the period, although (as with Moses) his challenge was to create a score that would resonate with twentieth-​ century viewers without negating thirteenth-​century musical principles. The composer came to Los Angeles to assist with the final music mix. The experience forever soured him on scoring for American television. “It was scandalous how they were treating the music,” he later recalled. “They should have been ashamed of themselves. I left before it was over. In America, they don’t care about the music in TV. All they care about is the dialogue. They sacrificed my music in a terrible way. . . . They reduced Marco Polo to a soap opera, cutting [the music] to a very low level [resulting in] a pure discussion, a verbal account.” Jesus of Nazareth (1977, NBC) bears a dual distinction. Not only was it director Franco Zeffirelli’s only work for American television, it is widely

considered the finest life of Christ ever committed to film. Originally aired as a six-​hour film over two nights, it was later expanded to eight hours over three or four nights for subsequent showings. Anthony Burgess, once again, created the original script outline. The great advantage Jesus of Nazareth held over other reverent big-​screen retellings of the story was his, and Zeffirelli’s, setting of the biblical accounts within a clearly defined historical and social context. Robert Powell’s outstanding performance as Jesus, and a number of memorable guest-​star turns (including Olivia Hussey as Mary, Peter Ustinov as Herod, Michael York as John the Baptist, James Farentino as Judas, and Laurence Olivier as Nicodemus), added to the credibility of the film. Zeffirelli’s insistence upon period realism (as in his previous films, 1968’s Romeo and Juliet and 1973’s Brother Sun, Sister Moon) gave Jesus of Nazareth, filmed in Tunisia and Morocco, an authentic look. That approach extended to the musical score, entrusted to composer Maurice Jarre (1924–​2009). Jarre had, by that time, written three scores for celebrated English director David Lean, and had won Academy Awards for two of them: Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. He had also collaborated with such directing giants as Alfred Hitchcock, Luchino Visconti, John Huston, and Elia Kazan. Apart from his Cimarron Strip theme and his romantic music for the Michael York–​Sarah Miles version of Great Expectations (1974), Jarre had written no significant music for American television. (In fact, like the Dickens film, Jesus was an international co-​ production, made by Moses and Marco Polo producer Vincenzo Labella for Britain’s ITC and Italy’s RAI.) According to Jarre, Zeffirelli’s first choice as composer was Leonard Bernstein. Bernstein had written only one film score (On the Waterfront) but had often collaborated on opera productions with the director; Bernstein recommended Jarre. “I worked very closely with Franco,” Jarre said. “He asked me to go on location, to a monastery in Tunisia. We talked, and he told me of his view: really to try to [tell the story] in a very human way instead of going to too much of the ‘miracle’ business with a lot of special effects. He wanted it to be more realistic, more human. And from there, I started to have my own view of Jesus. And I tried to use interesting instruments.” Jarre’s tasteful, often understated, three-​ hour score for Jesus of Nazareth reflected Zeffirelli’s vision. Although powerful and fully orchestral when called for throughout the miniseries, the music was more often subtle and reverent. His theme for Jesus suggested the gentle nature of the Galilean and the hopeful nature of his message—​yet was also transformed into music of overwhelming sadness during the crucifixion scenes. The composer also wrote individual themes for Mary and John the Baptist (and included all three themes during his overture to part one). Adding unusual colors throughout the score were an ondes Martenot, the electronic keyboard heard during the annunciation scenes; the santur, a

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dulcimer-​like instrument played in ancient times in Assyria, for scenes of the three kings arriving to worship the baby Jesus; the cithara, a lyre-​ like instrument popular in Greco-​Roman times; the uggav, a shepherd’s pipe; and the chalil, “a flute that one of the musicians in London found in Nazareth,” the composer recalled. Zeffirelli, in his memoir of the making of Jesus, praised the composer’s research into the “musical texts of the ancient Jewish tradition. He studied the poetic structure of the psalms for hints of possible musical cadences. He uncovered archaic instruments; others, he recreated, such as aulos, a flute that the apostle Thaddeus plays.” The director was especially impressed with Jarre’s handling of the Way of the Cross sequence: “[These scenes were] commented upon, animated and embellished by a heavy, provocative passage full of surprising blendings of sound, supported by a wealth of rhythm and a fury of percussion—​ harsh and disturbing sonorities over which, from time to time, an exalted but mournful theme emerges—​a funereal but at the same time triumphant march.” Jarre’s facility with unusual ethnic instruments within scores designed for Western audiences made him an obvious choice for Shogun (1980, NBC). Another expensive ($20 million) and ambitious effort, this 12-​hour miniseries was based on the James Clavell bestseller about the English captain of a Dutch vessel shipwrecked off seventeenth-​century Japan. Richard Chamberlain starred, along with Japanese actors Toshiro

Maurice Jarre conducting Shogun.

Mifune (as the powerful warlord) and Yoko Shimada (as Chamberlain’s interpreter and eventual love interest). Filmed entirely in the Far East, Clavell’s adventure introduced viewers to sights and, in fact, a culture not previously seen: samurai swordsmen, political intrigues in feudal Japan, even the language itself, since much of the original telecast was in Japanese without subtitles and with only occasional narration by Orson Welles to explain what was happening. “It’s like a ballet,” Jarre said at the time. “There is such grace and style to the film, I didn’t need to understand the scenes in Japanese to know what was going on.” Having studied Japanese music while a student at the Paris Conservatoire, the composer based much of his score on traditional Japanese scales. “For me, it was very interesting to [write for] some interesting ethnic instruments, not only Japanese but period [instruments], and I found a lot of great Japanese players,” he later recalled. The shakuhachi (a bamboo flute), koto (a Japanese zither), biwa (a four-​or five-​stringed lute), and shamisen (three-​stringed lute) were featured prominently in Jarre’s score. During one early recording session in Los Angeles, Jarre said, “the entire television department, from accountant to driver, probably, peeked into the studio just to see how the musicians were going to play all of these strange instruments.” Shogun won the Emmy as Outstanding Limited Series, as did Phill Norman’s titles—​twisting samurai swords that introduced images of the stars and scenes of Japan, all immeasurably enhanced by Jarre’s orchestral overture, flavored with the sounds of those colorful Japanese instruments. The composer intertwined themes for Blackthorne (Chamberlain), Mariko (Shimada), and Toranaga (Mifune), as well as non-​character-​specific music for the romance and adventure of the story. More than three and a half hours of music were recorded over 13 sessions between late May and late July 1980, several with a 60-​piece orchestra. Unfortunately, at the time, a musicians’ strike was brewing and the sessions had to be speeded up to the point that, Jarre confessed, “I was not very happy about the recording. We had a lot of problems.” The result was that not all of the miniseries was scored specifically “to picture,” and some tracking of earlier music was required in the later segments. Still, the American public tuned in to the five nights of Shogun in droves, re-​establishing Richard Chamberlain as a major television star, and setting a new high standard for miniseries production. Jarre’s last project as a film composer was a four-​hour miniseries, Uprising (2001, NBC), the story of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto revolt against their Nazi captors. Jerry Goldsmith’s final large-​scale work for television, and one that brought him a fourth Emmy for original music, was Masada (1981, ABC). Set in the first century a.d., it recounted the heroic struggle of 960 Jewish men, women, and children who successfully held off a 5,000-​man Roman

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legion for nearly six months in a mountaintop fortress in the Judean desert. Rather than face capture, the entire Hebrew contingent ultimately committed suicide. Part tragic history, part fictionalized duel of wits between military leaders, Masada benefited from Joel Oliansky’s fascinating script, the Israeli locations, and the Emmy-​nominated performances of Peter Strauss (as Eleazar ben Yair, leader of the Jewish Zealots) and Peter O’Toole (in his dramatic TV debut as Flavius Silva, the world-​weary Roman general). Key supporting roles were played by Barbara Carrera, Anthony Quayle, and David Warner. “I had wanted to do that story for so many years,” Goldsmith later recalled. “I had read it in the writings of Josephus, who first chronicled it, and I had read the Ernest Gann book [The Antagonists]. I had just been fascinated with the whole story of Masada and thought it would be a great movie. Sydney Pollack was going to do it [at one time], and like so many pictures it never got made. And it became a television show.” Goldsmith traveled to Israel to do musical research and write and record the martial source music. He found little guidance at a university in Jerusalem, however: “The only clue [a scholar] gave me was that the Romans beat their swords against their shields for rhythm to march to. That wasn’t very helpful, but it was interesting. You take dramatic license and write music to what you feel,” he explained. Because the Masada schedule fell hopelessly behind, Goldsmith was able to score only the first four hours of the eight-​hour miniseries. Committed to a big-​budget feature (the even more troubled Inchon), he turned over the task to old friend Morton Stevens, who scored the final four hours using Goldsmith’s themes (and earned an Emmy nomination for the moving finale). Masada turned out to be among Goldsmith’s most inspired scores. Much of the music derived from three primary themes: a motif for the freedom fighters atop Masada, of clearly Hebraic origin and employing a dancelike rhythm at its most joyous; a fanfare and march for the Romans; and a mournful theme for the oppressed Jewish people, many of whom became slaves. All three themes were heard to greatest advantage in the second part of the four-​night miniseries. Goldsmith skillfully blended the Roman and Masada themes in the main title, as the Roman legions marched toward the mountain and the Jews of Masada prepared for war. The music for the Jewish slaves made its most dramatic appearance as the Romans cruelly used the slave labor to build their ramp up to the fortress. Richly orchestrated throughout and performed by a 65-​member ensemble of Los Angeles musicians, Goldsmith’s music became a key element in the success of Masada. The first century in Rome and Palestine was also the setting for A.D. (1985, NBC), scored by Lalo Schifrin in his largest-​scale American television project. Producer Vincenzo Labella sought to create a sequel to his Jesus of Nazareth with this $30 million, 12-​hour chronicle of the early

Christian Church, the Jewish zealots, and the Roman Empire between the years 30 and 69 a.d.; Labella once again recruited Anthony Burgess as scriptwriter. A.D. meshed historical fact with dramatic fiction in its tale of a Roman soldier in love with a Jewish slave, a Jewish Zealot falling for a Roman senator’s daughter, and the experiences of the apostles Peter and Paul—​ coupled with the rise and fall of emperors Tiberius, Caligula, Claudius, and Nero (James Mason, John McEnery, Richard Kiley, Anthony Andrews). Critics found fault with much of A.D., dismissing it despite its lavish look and multiple guest stars (including Susan Sarandon, Ava Gardner, and Mason in his final role). Schifrin conducted the Paris Philharmonic and the chorus of the Paris Opera in the score. His main theme, associated with Jesus and the Christians, was gentle and uplifting; his “Golgotha” music, for the film’s post-​crucifixion scenes, was eerie and chilling. He wrote love themes for Valerius and Sarah (the soldier and slave) and Caleb and Corinna (the Zealot and senator’s daughter); strident marches for the Romans; a choral “Alleluia” for Pentecost; and, perhaps most striking, a theme for King Herod that coupled the expected martial rhythms with a bright choral accompaniment (this last theme was so memorable that NBC used it in all its A.D. promos). Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis (1925–​2021), responsible for such notable film scores as Zorba the Greek (1964) and Z (1969), wrote only one score for American television: The Story of Jacob and Joseph (1974, ABC), with Keith Michell, Tony Lo Bianco, and Colleen Dewhurst in the Old Testament tale of father, son, faith, and fate. It was a reunion with director Michael Cacoyannis, with whom he had done Zorba and such classics as Electra (1962) and The Trojan Women (1971). Cacoyannis shot the film on Israeli locations, although filming was interrupted in mid-​1973 when many of its actors and extras were called to fight in the Six-​Day War. Theodorakis was then in exile, having left Greece in 1970 after being imprisoned by the military regime that took power in 1967. His evocative score featured the dulcimer-like santur, and members of the London Symphony. A few months after the early 1974 recording, Theodorakis was allowed to return home after the collapse of Greece’s military dictatorship. Biblical films continued to be a staple of the TV-​movie genre, and several were scored by major names in film music: Maurice Jarre provided a romantic backdrop for Samson and Delilah (1984, ABC) with Antony Hamilton and Belinda Bauer; Patrick Williams, a reverent, inspirational approach for the four-​hour Jesus (2000, CBS) with Jeremy Sisto; and Bill Conti, a powerful one, setting the “Agnus Dei” of the Latin Mass for two operatic voices in the climax of Judas (2004, ABC) with Johnathon Schaech. (Cable’s TNT began to compete in this arena with

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a series of TV-​movies based on Old Testament figures, beginning with Richard Harris as Abraham in 1993. Part of the series’ prestige was Ennio Morricone’s contribution of 17 minutes of music, all contemplative and mostly featuring pan flutes.) After the phenomenal success of Brian’s Song, Michel Legrand returned occasionally to television, creating two memorable works for now-​ forgotten films, both with period settings: The Adventures of Don Quixote (1973, CBS) and Casanova (1987, ABC). Don Quixote was an American-​British co-​production based on the Cervantes classic, with Rex Harrison in the title role and Frank Finlay as his sidekick Sancho Panza. This quintessentially romantic tale of an avid reader who imagines himself as a knight-​errant in sixteenth-​century Spain inspired Legrand to write a score specifically for one instrumentalist: violinist Ivry Gitlis. “That was a condition,” the composer later recalled. The music publishers, who were paying for the London sessions, balked at the cost of engaging the well-​known Israeli soloist. “Listen carefully,” the composer insisted, “if I don’t have Ivry Gitlis, I have no score.” Gitlis was hired. “He plays with a tone like a real authentic, extraordinary gypsy,” Legrand explained. The result was an impressive display of the composer’s inspiration and some of the most exquisite violin sounds ever heard in a television score. Legrand’s main theme—​written for solo violin, flamenco guitar, strings, and harp—​captured the romantic soul of the hero. Together with his love theme for Dulcinea (Rosemary Leach) and his brass fanfares for the “tilting at windmills” sequences, it elevated the film to unexpected heights. For Casanova, a three-​hour biography of the legendary lover, Legrand was reteamed with several of the same collaborators who had made the

“CLASSICAL” COMPOSERS IN TV Three of America’s best-​ known classical composers—​ Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, and Virgil Thomson—​wrote original music for television, all for high-​profile projects at the time but mostly forgotten today. Virgil Thomson (1896–​1989), who won a 1949 Pulitzer Prize for his music for the documentary Louisiana Story, was the first to dive into the new medium with an original score for Orson Welles’s performance as Shakespeare’s “King Lear” in a live production for the Sunday afternoon, Ford Foundation–​ sponsored cultural series Omnibus (October 18, 1953, CBS). Although Variety praised the score as having “added another dimension to the performance

with its highly dramatic and interesting composition,” Thomson later recalled the experience as chaotic, with director Peter Brook revising and trimming throughout rehearsals and Welles improvising during the live telecast. Brook asked for seven more pieces mere hours before the telecast. Thomson conducted just eight musicians in a series of brief cues, including a muted-​brass-​and-​ drumbeat theme for the aging monarch, melancholy strings for daughter Cordelia (Natasha Parry), and an appropriately downbeat end-​credit roll. “I was in an upstairs studio,” he later wrote, “where I had a television set for watching the play, headphones for hearing it, a music stand, my score and my musicians. . . . I was scared, having to bring music in on word-​cues when almost nobody was saying the words he was supposed to say. . . . I was late by half a second on a

big-​screen adaptation of The Three Musketeers (1973) such an enjoyable MADE-FOR-TV MOVIES romp: stars Richard Chamberlain and Faye Dunaway, supporting players AND MINISERIES Frank Finlay and Jean-​ Pierre Cassel, and writer George MacDonald 357 Fraser. European film stars Ornella Muti, Sylvia Kristel, and Hanna Schygulla were also in the cast, and the lush settings in Spain and Italy enhanced its look (but not its ratings, which were disappointing despite the film’s many assets). Stylistically similar to his Musketeers score, Legrand’s Casanova music was variously swashbuckling, romantic, and comedic, achieving what the composer called “an eighteenth-​century flavor” appropriate to the time and the European locales. He composed in Paris over a three-​to four-​ week period, but flew to Los Angeles for three days of recording with an ensemble of 50 musicians. Legrand’s more than two hours of music included several major themes: a signature of pomp and grandeur for the title character; a tender love theme (that later became a bittersweet reminder of Casanova’s reckless past); a “traveling” motif of lighthearted adventure; classically styled music for swordplay; and many incidental pieces, ranging from chamber music for the salons of Europe to choral music for young Casanova’s brief stint as a novice priest. Period instruments, including harpsichord and crumhorn, helped achieve an authentic sound. Laurence Rosenthal has always been one of the finest composers active in films. His detailed knowledge of all facets of music, coupled with an unerring dramatic instinct, sets him apart from the vast majority of composers in the Hollywood musical community. It took the development of the miniseries, particularly those of a historical nature, to properly showcase Rosenthal’s talents. For the eight-​hour George Washington (1984, CBS), he suggested the late eighteenth century with music evocative of early America. For the sight-​cue; then right on the nose of my storm-​piece came a crash of thunder, thrown in by a watchful engineer just in case.” Four years later, Aaron Copland (1900–​1980) was convinced to write music for a similar live dramatic broadcast, and also for a Sunday afternoon cultural magazine: “The World of Nick Adams,” one of just a handful of episodes of The Seven Lively Arts (November 10, 1957, CBS). Writer A. E. Hotchner adapted five Ernest Heming­ way stories into an hour-​ long drama that would eventually star Steve Hill, Eli Wallach, and William Marshall. But producer John Houseman, Hotchner later recalled, demanded “serious music, not Hollywood’s weeping violins.” The writer professed admiration for Copland’s Appalachian Spring music, and Houseman prodded him into calling the composer. It was a rare

Aaron Copland.

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seven-​hour Mussolini: The Untold Story (1985, NBC), he created music of a “dark character” to reflect the Italian dictator. He won Emmy Awards for his music for Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna (1986, NBC) and the Robert Ludlum thriller The Bourne Identity (1988, ABC). Rosenthal’s score for Peter the Great (1986, NBC) may have been his masterpiece. The eight-​hour, $29 million production itself, the first to be made on location in the Soviet Union (under particularly arduous conditions), won the Emmy as Outstanding Miniseries. The all-​star cast included Maximilian Schell as Peter, Vanessa Redgrave, Omar Sharif, Hanna Schygulla, and, more briefly, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, and Mel Ferrer. Much of the composer’s homework was already done, by virtue of a film he had scored more than 30 years earlier. Attached to a documentary film squadron during his Air Force service in 1952, he was assigned to score a 90-​minute history of Russia (a Cold War “know-​your-​enemy” exercise). “I went to the New York Public Library,” he recalled, “and spent three weeks in the music department going through every volume of Russian folk songs they had, and they had many. I copied out hundreds of songs, whichever appealed to me. There were no Xerox machines in those days, and it all had to be done by hand. So I came away with a huge collection of Russian folklore. These songs have a kind of universal beauty. They can touch anyone. Many of them found their way into my score, often transmogrified or improvised upon. In any case, I had received a monumental dose of Russian music. “Curiously, when I sat down in the screening room for my first look at the rough cut of Peter the Great, I suddenly began hearing in my head those great folk songs I had collected for the Air Force film on Russia.” That, plus his already thorough knowledge of Russian composers from Glinka and Tchaikovsky to Prokofiev and Shostakovich, had prepared

instance where the writer of a TV show convinced a composer to accept a commission. The two met, talked about Hemingway (whom Copland had known in Paris), and Copland agreed to write the score. “I think he was intrigued by the brashness of somebody asking him to write the score for a live television show on a Sunday afternoon,” Hotchner said. Copland wrote about 20 minutes of music (conducted by CBS music director Alfredo Antonini), “a throwback to his somewhat more accessible style of the 1940s, from the height of his film music; it has that American sound,” said Copland House artistic director Michael Boriskin, who restored the score for live presentation in New York and Los Angeles in 2001–​2002. TV Guide hailed Copland’s involvement (“noted American composer of ballet and movie music

undertakes his first television assignment”) and the score won raves (“an original score by Aaron Copland added warmth and fire,” said Variety). “Composing for a television drama was similar in procedure to preparing a film score,” Copland later wrote. “I was sent a script with cues to indicate where and for how long music was required. I composed a kind of fanfare for the opener and music for such cues as ‘When a man comes face-​to-​face with death’ and ‘It’s fun all right.’ ” Copland returned to television just once more, a decade later: He composed the theme for CBS Playhouse (1967–​ 1970), a prestigious series of New York–​originated plays from Golden Age drama producer Fred Coe. Copland’s modernist, 40-​second fanfare for brass and percussion received an Emmy nomination as the year’s outstanding music for television. His theme—​“concise and right to the point,”

him well for the story of the seventeenth-​century czar who ushered his country out of the Dark Ages. More than any other element, it was the cinematography of Vittorio Storaro (Reds), shooting on historical Russian locations, and the authentic music of Rosenthal that, one critic wrote, “dynamically captured czarist Russia’s mood and majesty.” Explained the composer: “I wanted it to be drenched in Russian feeling. Not only in the folk songs but also in the choral liturgy of the Orthodox Church. All of this music has enormous richness and power, and its many emotional facets seem to reflect different aspects of the Russian soul.” Adopting the leitmotif approach, he composed individual themes for Peter and many of the characters in the epic. As Rosenthal wrote in his notes for the soundtrack: “Peter has his theme: triumphal, exuberant and full of energy. Other themes are associated with various key elements in the story: Peter’s group of supporters, especially Alexander Menshikov. The severe, almost Byzantine, theme of his two enemies: the religious establishment and his half-​sister Sophia, which opens the film. The theme of Moscow’s foreign colony and of Peter’s great friend, the Scottish General Patrick Gordon: a West-​European contrast. A winsome Russian folk song to reflect the short-​lived affection between Peter and his wife Eudoxia. Two original quasi-​folk melodies, one for Peter’s mother, the other for his ill-​fated son Alexis, and so on and on. Mingled with these are fragments of pseudo-​Baroque German court dances, and strains of the balalaika music of the peasants and Cossacks, with the charming triadic primitivity which so enchanted the young Stravinsky.” For the music of the many scenes set in the Russian Orthodox Church—​coronations, weddings, funerals—​Rosenthal realized: “there is no way I could hope to improve on that profoundly moving liturgy.

the composer told the New York Times—​played behind images of Alberto Giacometti sculptures. It debuted with the initial telecast, the videotaped “The Final War of Olly Winter” (January 29, 1967). In the summer of 1977, CBS President William S. Paley asked Leonard Bernstein (1918–​1990) to contribute music to the network’s 50th-​anniversary celebration, to air in the spring of 1978. Bernstein—​ a CBS veteran dating back to his Omnibus lectures and his years hosting Young People’s Concerts—​ composed five short pieces (“Fanfare and Titles,” “Quiet Music,” “Blues,” “Waltz,” “Chorale”) based on the notes C, B-​flat, and E-​flat (the latter, notated Es in German, representing S). This was written in October 1977, although ultimately only portions were used during the final night of the nine-​hour televised salute titled CBS On the Air (April 1, 1978).

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“Fanfare and Titles” became the score for a montage of classic images from the network’s half-​ century of radio and TV broadcasts. Bernstein’s assistant Jack Gottlieb arranged “Quiet Music” and “Chorale” into the underscore for an original Norman Corwin poem (“Network at 50”) read by Walter Cronkite during the final minutes of the week-​long series. Virgil Thomson’s music returned to television, briefly, as David Raksin adapted parts of his The River documentary score for the Kansas setting of The Day After (1983, ABC), Nicholas Meyer’s nuclear-​holocaust drama that became—​at 100 million viewers—​the most-​watched TV-​movie of all time.

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So to score the church sequences, we went to Paris, where we recorded the extraordinary male choir of L’Eglise Russe de Saint-​Serge. There were only 14 men, standing directly under the dome of the Russian Cathedral. The sound was unbelievable. We had shown them the specific ceremonies that had been filmed and they knew exactly, for example, which particular chants would be sung for the coronation of the czar, or for the funeral service of his mother.” Overall, Rosenthal composed more than three hours of music, recorded by the Bavarian State Orchestra in Munich. Peter the Great brought its composer another Emmy for original music. Composer Allyn Ferguson’s ongoing professional relationship with producer Norman Rosemont produced a series of impeccably scored remakes of literary classics, including The Count of Monte Cristo (1975, NBC) and The Man in the Iron Mask (1977, NBC), both with Richard Chamberlain; The Four Feathers (1978, NBC) with Beau Bridges; and Ivanhoe (1982, CBS) with Anthony Andrews. For the lavish, three-​hour Les Miserables (1978, CBS)—​which starred Richard Jordan as Victor Hugo’s hero Jean Valjean and Anthony Perkins as the police inspector Javert—​the time frame of the picture suggested the approach to Ferguson. “It should probably be Berlioz,” he told Rosemont, who promptly asked the composer to send over some musical examples. “I had at hand, for no particular reason, Harold in Italy, so I sent him a tape of it,” Ferguson said. Rosemont’s enthusiasm for the viola-​and-​orchestra form of Harold led the composer to utilize solo viola throughout his Les Miserables score. Interpreting Valjean as “a very strong but tender kind of guy,” Ferguson found similar qualities in the sound of the viola: the instrument became Valjean’s musical voice. Ferguson won an Emmy for his score for Camille (1984, CBS), with Greta Scacchi as the doomed heroine of Alexandre Dumas fils’s tragedy. Rosemont’s original inclination was to have Ferguson adapt La Traviata, since Verdi’s opera was based on the same novel. He had even told CBS executives to expect Traviata as the score. Although skeptical of the notion, Ferguson delved into the Verdi score. “It turned out that the preludes to act one and three are about the only musical [excerpts] that could have been used,” he said. “The arias, after all, are vocal music. I finally had to confront Norman,” he said, with the impossibility of adapting the opera into a cohesive dramatic score. Rosemont was disappointed. But Ferguson had, as a backup plan, been developing thematic ideas along the lines of “the great romantic music of Ravel. I wanted that feeling about it, without actually imitating Ravel,” he explained. His theme for lovers Marguerite (Scacchi) and Armand (Colin Firth), which featured prominent violin and cello solos, a “death” theme (inspired by the Verdi preludes), and some Offenbach-​inspired French party music, formed the basis of much of the Camille score.

Also for Rosemont, Ferguson scored Captains Courageous (1977, ABC), A Tale of Two Cities (1980, CBS), The Corsican Brothers (1985, CBS), and, in a very different vein, the six-​hour Sidney Sheldon miniseries Master of the Game (1984, CBS).

ROMANTIC, CONTEMPORARY, AND THRILLER FILMS

The Night Gallery pilot called attention to the talents of Steven Spielberg, but Duel (1971, ABC) established him as a first-​class filmmaker. A 73-​ minute exercise in terror, Duel was a man-​versus-​machine thriller about a traveling salesman (Dennis Weaver) who, for reasons he cannot understand, becomes the target of an apparently crazed, anonymous tanker-​ truck driver on deserted mountain roads. “ABC had been very low in the ratings, and they had to get something out really quickly to goose up their ratings,” composer Billy Goldenberg recalled. “They were going into [November] sweeps, one of those times when it was important that they have something that was dynamite. They really felt that this was it.” Goldenberg, who had worked with Spielberg on Night Gallery, Name of the Game, and Columbo, and had become one of his best friends at Universal, was signed to score the picture. “I don’t remember the exact time frame,” he said, “but it was really short, either two or three weeks to shoot, score, and dub the [entire] show.” Producer George Eckstein and Spielberg informed Goldenberg that he would have to write the music while the film was still being shot. “I said, how can I do that? I don’t have any edited film,” Goldenberg pointed out. Spielberg had a partial solution: invite the composer to the Soledad Canyon shooting location to give him a sense of the picture. When he arrived, Spielberg told Goldenberg that he wanted the composer to ride in the 10-​ton tanker truck that veteran stunt driver Cary Loftin was piloting down steep hills at high rates of speed. “Oh my God, what are you talking about?” was the composer’s initial reaction. Spielberg introduced him to Loftin, who was “this big red-​faced man who looked like he’d just gotten out of a bar or something,” Goldenberg recalled. “He slapped me on the back—​he was like a sea captain and said, ‘Lad, I hear you’re going to do the music.’ ” Spielberg reminded the composer, who was to be in the passenger side of the cab, to duck before approaching the cameras. “So we’re at the top of this hill, and the camera’s at the bottom of the curve,” Goldbenberg said. “We started down, and [the truck] is going like 70 miles an hour. I’m screaming, and the whole time Cary Loftin is telling dirty jokes and asking me about myself. I said, ‘How can I think? I’m going to die in a minute!’ ” They did this several times over the course of

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the next few days. “It was terrifying,” Goldenberg said, “although I got kind of used to doing it. And I met Dennis [Weaver] and watched a lot of the shoot.” He began watching dailies as well and then spent about a week writing the score. “I knew I was going to have to have music for the truck running, some slow music for the times that there was suspense, and then there would be music for the truck going over precipices. I wanted to write a Bernard Herrmann sort of score, but I wanted it to be a little metallic, rough-​ sounding, scraping. I recorded lots of different percussion sounds. I did very little with timing; I didn’t have anything to time to.” Goldenberg recorded about two hours of music—​“more music than we ever needed”—​ so that, with only a few days left before air to mix all of the sound effects, music, and what little dialogue there was, “I would go in with the music editors and we would just pick from all the pieces we had and cut it together.” The film’s only Emmy went to its film sound-​editing team, including sound effects editor James Troutman. Troutman and Goldenberg, working separately to devise a sound “for the final demise of the truck at the very end,” the composer recalled, came up with the same idea: a dying dinosaur—​Goldenberg’s created with percussion instruments, Troutman’s from an old monster movie. Spielberg loved them and combined the two. Goldenberg later won Emmys for Benjamin Franklin (1974, CBS), the six-​hour Martin Luther King Jr. bio King (1978, NBC), the four-​ hour Rage of Angels (1983, NBC), and the musical Queen of the Stardust Ballroom (1975, CBS), written with lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman. Goldenberg, the Bergmans, and writer Jerome Kass later expanded the show and score into the 1978 Broadway musical Ballroom (nominated for eight Tonys, including Best Musical). A handful of miniseries had preceded Rich Man, Poor Man (1976, ABC), but none met with the kind of ratings success that would ensure the future of the genre. Based on an Irwin Shaw book, this 12-​hour “novel for television” made stars of Peter Strauss, Nick Nolte, and Susan Blakely as the key protagonists of a 20-​year saga about three postwar teenagers whose lives took dramatic turns yet remained intertwined. Undeniably melodramatic yet thoroughly involving, Rich Man, Poor Man won four Emmys, including one for the music of Alex North. Rich Man, Poor Man was North’s longest score, written during one of the most difficult periods in his life. After he began the project in late 1975, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. “He decided that he was going to continue working as long as he could,” his wife Anne-​Marie recalled. “We then moved from here [Pacific Palisades, California] to Palo Alto, where he had all the radiation treatments. He wrote several episodes up there.” She would often rush his sketches from Palo Alto to the airport at San Jose, where they were pouch-​mailed to orchestrator Gus Levene back in

Los Angeles. “And the irony of this,” she added, “is that Alex survived the cancer and Gus contracted it a couple of years later and died of it.” North conducted the early sessions, but his illness prevented him from conducting all of the score; Universal music supervisor Hal Mooney completed the task. As North explained in his liner notes to the soundtrack LP, “the treatment of the score called for a virtual musical anthology spanning 20 years in the lives of the Jordache family.” Because the film was so long and encompassed so many characters, he wrote individual themes for several and described them this way: for Rudy (Strauss), “a rather sophisticated waltz”; for Tom (Nolte), “bluesy, virile and jazz-​oriented ‘carnal’ music”; for Julie (Blakely), “a thematic portrait of a lovely adolescent girl, her desires and sensual curiosity . . . both naive and at times richly textured”; for Rudy and Tom’s father Axel (Edward Asner), a German folk tune suggestive of his heritage. The main title was a “slightly flavored Americana theme,” he explained, designed to reflect Axel “as the hard-​working German emigré striving to fulfill the American dream for his wife and two sons.” Apart from accompanying the main title of each part, it did not appear in the score until the two-​hour conclusion, when it became the recurring motif for Tom’s newfound happiness as a yacht skipper in the south of France. North didn’t simply repeat themes: he developed, interwove, and modified them throughout the course of the miniseries, often creating new material for specific scenes in the drama: a bittersweet melody for Julie’s affair with Boylan (Robert Reed); a love theme for Tom’s brief fling with Clothilde (Fionnuala Flanagan); a “light, somewhat elusive piece” for Rudy’s flirtation with Ginny (Kim Darby); “heavy, forceful and dramatic” music when Tom beats up a boxer (George Maharis); a theme of “vivid tones and strong orchestral colors” for the brutal Falconetti (William Smith); and a poignant finale for Tom’s death and the scattering of his ashes at sea. North returned to the miniseries genre with a superb score for The Word (1978, CBS), an eight-​hour adaptation of Irving Wallace’s novel about the discovery of an ancient manuscript that may be an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus. North’s six-​minute main-​title music, set to a fascinating visual journey deep into the archaeological dig where the papyrus was found, explored the complex intellectual territory: hints of the purely religious aspects and the dark political undercurrents beneath the discovery haunt the piece. North’s Emmy nomination was the miniseries’ only one. After the success of Rich Man, Poor Man, NBC commissioned several miniseries from romantic novels and aired them on consecutive Thursday nights under the umbrella title of Best Sellers. The first, and best, was Captains and the Kings (1976), which composer Elmer Bernstein ranked as his “all-​time favorite” among 30 years of television projects. It was based on the Taylor Caldwell novel about an Irish immigrant who arrived in America in the 1850s, became a self-​made millionaire, and established a

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family dynasty with political as well as financial goals. The nine-​hour series was popular as much for the story’s obvious parallels to the Kennedy family as for its romantic, melodramatic saga of money, sex, and power. Richard Jordan became a star as a result of his Emmy-​nominated leading role as the ambitious Joseph Armagh; the supporting cast was a TV who’s-​who, including Charles Durning, Patty Duke Astin, Jane Seymour, Blair Brown, Perry King, Barbara Parkins, and even Henry Fonda. Bernstein’s Best Sellers theme incorporated a fanfare and sweeping melody (somewhat reminiscent of his Hollywood and the Stars music from the early 1960s) to which a fast-​moving montage of images from the miniseries was cut. For Captains and the Kings, he created a rich musical tapestry based on Irish folk music. “I love Ireland,” the composer said. “I’ve spent a lot of time there, and I loved the idea of being able to do anything that had the character of Irish music in it.” From a tender lullaby as the orphaned Joseph and his brother and sister arrived in New York to a sweet love theme for solo violin, and from music of dramatic urgency for the Spanish-​American War to a lighthearted turn-​of-​the-​century tune for an Armagh son’s aerial adventures, Bernstein’s Emmy-​nominated Captains and the Kings score fairly brimmed with Irish flavor. Jerry Goldsmith, who emerged from TV in the 1950s, often returned to the medium in the 1970s. Among his other notable projects were an inventive baroque, jazz, and avant-​garde combination for Brotherhood of the Bell (1970, CBS), his initial collaboration with writer-​director Michael Crichton on the political thriller Pursuit (1972, ABC), and his lonely trombone melody for Frank Sinatra’s detective character in the three-​ hour Contract on Cherry Street (1977, NBC). David Newman, now an Oscar-​nominated composer and conductor, recalled: “My first professional scoring session was a Jerry Goldsmith recording for a TV-​movie called Contract on Cherry Street. It starred Frank Sinatra, and there were nine trombones on the session. The way Jerry orchestrated and developed the music was nothing short of extraordinary. He made nine trombones—​kind of an aggressive instrument—​ sing and be wistful and be powerful. I will never forget that session. For a 23-​year-​old violinist, it was heaven. It was what film music should be: a master composer creating something magical for a TV-​movie, at the same time modern and populist.” As the 1970s dawned, Henry Mancini dipped a toe back in the television waters with themes like the country-​flavored Cade’s County (1971–​1972, CBS) and the minor-​key The Invisible Man (1975–​1976, NBC). But he jumped in fully with a compelling score for the six-​and-​a-​half-​hour adaptation of Arthur Hailey’s The Moneychangers (1976, NBC). “This was very attractive,” he told an interviewer at the time. “It’s a modern

sounding kind of score; the small orchestra is about 30 and the larger one’s 40, for the main title. Once you know what you’re going to do, and you have all your thematic material, then that’s when it’s a pleasure for me. I just sit down to see what’s coming next.” Producer Ross Hunter (Airport, 1970) sought a refined, classy sound for Hailey’s tale about U.S. financial institutions as viewed by two executives (Kirk Douglas, Christopher Plummer) vying for the presidency of a bank. Mancini’s main theme, set against piles of shiny coins, introduces the setting and cast, but was just one of several required. “Ross is a great friend, but Ross has one failing: He loves music too much,” the composer recalled. “He’s an old softie. There was a lot of music in that, believe me. A lot of times I tried to talk him out of it. Music was as important to him as the cameraman.” Mancini would go on to score two more Hunter television productions: the two-​hour A Family Upside Down (1978, NBC) with Helen Hayes and Fred Astaire, and the four-​hour The Best Place to Be (1979, NBC) starring Donna Reed. But the crowning triumph of Mancini’s television career was his unforgettable romantic score for The Thorn Birds (1983, ABC). Running 10 hours over four nights, the David Wolper–​Stan Margulies production was a superbly realized adaptation of Colleen McCullough’s bestseller, winning six Emmys and capturing the biggest audience for any miniseries since Roots. Richard Chamberlain, in his third great miniseries role (after Centennial and Shogun), was the tormented priest Ralph de Bricassart, whose lifelong passions for the Catholic Church and the beautiful Meggie Cleary (Rachel Ward) played themselves out over four decades in the Australian outback. Barbara Stanwyck, Richard Kiley, and Jean Simmons won Emmys for their supporting roles; Bryan Brown and Christopher Plummer were also featured. Mancini composed four hours of music for The Thorn Birds, the most ever for a single project in his career. In fact, he was hired months before shooting began because of the source-​music requirements that ranged from traditional Australian folk tunes to choral music for the several church sequences. “I tried to find church music that would fit the period we were depicting,” the composer said at the time. “The best-​known piece is [Cesar Franck’s] Panis Angelicus, which opens part two. We found a terrific boys’ choir to sing it. The arrival of the roving band of sheep shearers at Drogheda also required something traditional. I found a wonderful Australian folk song called ‘The Springtime It Brings on the Shearing,’ which fits the scene perfectly.” During the preproduction phase, Mancini did extensive research into Australian ethnic music. But, in searching for a main theme that would introduce Australia at the start of part one, he later recalled: “I couldn’t find anything that didn’t sound like it came out of early Nashville or the country gardens in England or the hills of Scotland. It was all very simple folk music.” He came up with the Thorn Birds theme but initially

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discarded it as “too simple.” A lilting piece with folk overtones reflective of the Clearys’ Irish roots, he “kept coming back to it because it seemed to be the only thing. I finally played it for Stan and David and they loved it. I was never sure that someone hadn’t written it before; it was so simple.” Adding to the Irish flavor was Mancini’s use of a dulcimer in the main title, as Father Ralph is driving through the outback en route to the Drogheda ranch. He had heard a dulcimer—​an instrument he had never used before in any of his many film scores—​in a record of Australian folk music. “I used it for the first notes in the main theme and I think it sets the Australian tone of the piece,” he explained at the time. Meggie’s theme, the other major theme in the Thorn Birds score, was one of Mancini’s most romantic compositions ever. In addition, he wrote two major set pieces that became a part of his concert suite from the score: a rousing four-​and-​a-​half-​minute cue for the sheep-​shearing contest in part two (“It’s Shearing You’re Hearing”) and a grand orchestral fanfare for the arrival of Father Ralph at the Vatican that was heard at the end of the same night. There was also a theme for Meggie’s marriage to Luke O’Neill and their life in Queensland, music of high drama for the fire that devastated Drogheda in part two, and a Greek-​flavored theme for Meggie’s children Dane and Justine frolicking on the beach during what becomes a tragic incident in part four. Mancini’s arrangement of Meggie’s theme for her holiday on secluded Matlock Island (with piano and organ embellishment) and his lush string arrangement for Ralph’s arrival made those already romantic moments at the end of part three even more memorable. And his music for the final moments of part four—​as Meggie cradles her head in the lap of the dead Father Ralph, while a plane carrying Justine flies off into the distance—​turned a sad finale into one of shattering proportions. Henry Mancini’s score (nominated, but shockingly not a winner, for an Emmy) elevated The Thorn Birds to all-​time classic status. Several years earlier, Mancini recorded a theme by French composer Francis Lai (1932–​2018) for one of the most controversial made-​for-​TV movies in history: The Sex Symbol (1974, ABC), a thinly disguised Marilyn Monroe story with Connie Stevens as a gorgeous but troubled movie star who has an affair with a Washington politician and dies of a drug overdose. Lai, famous for his romantic music for A Man and a Woman (1966) and Love Story (1970), penned only the theme, not the full score. “I didn’t see a single frame of the telefilm,” Lai recalled 41 years later. “All I had to work with was the French translation of the screenplay they sent to me. I read it through once, enough for me to try to show the dark, troubled side of Marilyn using notes of music: the solitude of being a star across the whole planet, yet dreading to find herself alone in front of a mirror. What I wanted was to avoid the glamour clichés, to keep away from the sophisticated femme fatale. This portrait had to be another Marilyn: the woman on the inside, not the outside.”

Lai succeeded with a haunting theme that Mancini (who had enjoyed a top-​20 hit with his arrangement of Lai’s Love Story) turned into a commercial single, and one that was used in the film itself, because of the seven-​month delay in its scheduled airing. ABC never clarified the reasons for the delay except to say the film was being re-​edited, presumably to tone down the Monroe-​Kennedy implications (the full version, complete with nudity, appeared in theaters in Europe). The Sex Symbol, however, wasn’t Lai’s first brush with American television. That was Berlin Affair (1970, NBC), a two-​hour spy thriller shot on location in Germany with Darren McGavin as an American investigator for a Geneva-​based organization that sends him after a former co-​ worker mixed up in the drug trade. Lai’s score was as rich with thematic material as any of his big-​screen work at the time (and the special nature of the circumstances, as TV producers rarely went outside Hollywood for music, was indicated by the unusual front credit: “music composed and scored in Paris by Francis Lai”). “I was considered a ‘romantic composer,’ so I saw it as a chance to broaden my potential for employers,” Lai said. “Berlin Affair was my first spy film, and it was for television. The soundtrack makes me feel as though I’m doing a balancing act: on one side there’s my sense of melody and harmony, with [arranger-​conductor Christian] Gaubert’s early seventies orchestral sound; and on the other, respect for the musical codes fashioned by

Left to right: Henry Mancini, orchestrator-​conductor Christian Gaubert, composer Francis Lai backstage at Filmharmonic concert, Royal Albert Hall, London 1974.

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two masters of the spy genre, Lalo Schifrin and John Barry,” via the jazz-​ pop rhythm section they added to the traditional orchestra. Lai recorded it in June 1970, just two months before he would record Love Story, the score that would bring him lasting fame, and an Academy Award. Lai inherited his last American miniseries, Sins (1986, CBS), from his French colleague Michel Legrand, who wrote an elaborate three-​minute “concertino” for piano and orchestra and considerable source music for this seven-​hour trash wallow starring Joan Collins as head of a Paris fashion empire, whose life is riddled with tragedy. (The faux classical work was for Gene Kelly, who plays an American composer who marries Collins’s character and “performs” it during the opening minutes of part two. Actor and composer went back to the mid-​1960s, when they did Jacques Demy’s Les Demoiselles de Rochefort together.) Legrand left the project after learning that there would be no budget for an orchestral underscore; Lai, who was willing to realize his music on synthesizers along with his signature accordion and piano, stepped in to create a score in “a modern romantic style with a soap-​opera feel.” What Lai most enjoyed was an unexpected collaboration with singer Carly Simon on a title song, which came to be called “It’s Hard to Be Tender.” “Initially, her name had been put forward simply to write the lyrics,” Lai recalled. “I didn’t believe a word. I believed it even less when [my publisher] told me she was also going to sing the song. I loved her voice, her folk influences, and it never crossed my mind that she might one day encounter my writing. We collaborated from different sides of the Atlantic; we just talked over the phone without ever meeting face to face. For Sins, Carly Simon was a gift from heaven.” Strangely, her single was released only in Europe and—​despite its relevance to the plot (“it’s hard to be tender /​it’s hard to stay open /​when you’re dizzy with anger /​and your dreams have been broken”) and her compelling performance—​never had the chance to reach the charts in America. Simon’s only other contribution to TV was her song “The Promise and the Prize,” for the single-​ season sitcom Phenom (1993–​1994, ABC) about a teenaged tennis pro. Eventually, the television film became the medium for dramatization of fact-​based contemporary stories, often involving complex psychological cases and sensational murder stories. Sybil (1976, NBC), a four-​hour story of a young woman with multiple personalities, and the psychiatrist who attempts to unravel the cause and help her cope, won an Emmy for composer Leonard Rosenman. At the time, he had been commissioned to write a double-​bass concerto, and he had been considering writing it for two double basses and four string quartets “which would be used in a very microtonal way.” He saw Sybil as a laboratory to experiment with this sort of advanced composition. “For any composer to write ‘crazy music’ is a cinch. I wasn’t interested in that,” Rosenman explained. “I was interested in something more

dramatically basic.” The score, as written, consisted of “this pure childlike tune, a waltz that could be played with one finger, which was distorted by microtonal aspects. The orchestra consisted of strings only; two harps that were tuned a quarter-tone apart; percussion; two pianos that were tuned a quarter-​tone apart; four children’s voices, and electronics.” Lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman wrote a lyric for a song that was used over the end titles (“Mirror, mirror, in my mind, there’s so much to see . . .”) that Rosenman then used as a dramatic device throughout the score: at first “in a non-​communicative fashion,” the composer said, then gradually, bit by bit, until the entire song was heard in the finale. Sybil won four Emmys, including one for the score, awarded to both Rosenman and the Bergmans. Miniseries based on Stephen King’s bestselling horror novels became a cottage industry in the 1990s. The harrowing score for the four-​hour It (1990, ABC) won an Emmy for composer Richard Bellis (b. 1946). He combined orchestra, piano, and synthesizers for a wide-​ranging emotional canvas, then added a calliope theme for the demonic clown Pennywise (Tim Curry). Bellis, a former child actor who became one of the most high-​profile television composers of his time, was also nominated for his Latin-​flavored score for Doublecrossed (1991, HBO), with Dennis Hopper as a cocaine trafficker who eventually turns informant for the Drug Enforcement Administration. The eight-​hour The Stand (1994, ABC) was King’s own adaptation of his apocalyptic 1978 novel about a plague that wipes out much of the American population, and the good-​versus-​evil struggle among the survivors starting anew. The cast included Gary Sinise, Molly Ringwald, Rob Lowe, Laura San Giacomo, and Ruby Dee. King became personally involved with the music, which was composed by W. G. Snuffy Walden. “We asked Snuffy to provide us with a mostly acoustic soundtrack, which I described as ‘blue-​jeans music,’ ” King explained in a letter to members of the Television Academy music branch. “I wanted music that would reflect the decency and growing spiritual commitment of the men and women.” The Stand was Walden’s favorite book. Searching for an approach, he decided: “It was all about the spiritual battle between good and evil. It wasn’t about people dying, about people turning into goblins, it was about these human beings having a devastating experience that changed their lives, wiped the slate clean, and they had to go forward from there.” From the slide guitar sounds that opened part one (a last-​minute inspiration), Walden created multiple themes for characters and situations, altering the sound of each episode and adding a new theme before the “to be continued” signoff. “Each night I would add a color change as well as a major theme,” he explained. “I wanted us to feel that we were growing and moving, with a purpose, towards something. Rather than just scoring

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every cue, I wanted to have a thematic build.” Steeped in Americana, finally more uplifting than frightening, Walden’s Emmy-​nominated score was his most massive project—​and one realized in just eight weeks. As composer fees improved, production values increased, and the business generally became more international, London-​based, primarily feature-​ film composers began to contribute music to TV-​movies and miniseries. Richard Rodney Bennett (1936–​2012) began with a delightful score for Sherlock Holmes in New York (1976, NBC), starring Roger Moore and Patrick Macnee as Holmes and Watson, Charlotte Rampling as Irene Adler, and John Huston as Moriarty. “I was initially nervous about what to do with the opening, the screen titles and all, and finally was relieved when what I chose to do—​a kind of energetic Rossini-​overture thing, almost like an old music-​hall curtain-​ raiser—​was well received and seemed to light the fuse for the melodrama to come,” Bennett later told an interviewer. “There’s also a lavish romance for solo violin that’s associated with [Irene Adler] and which comes on strong when she and Sherlock have their big farewell scene. I think there were 36 in that orchestra. Not one note, not one dynamic, nothing was changed in that entire score between composing and recording. It was just like a dream.” Bennett—​the Oscar-​nominated composer of Far From the Madding Crowd (1967), Nicholas and Alexandra (1971), and the all-​star Agatha

Richard Rodney Bennett.  

Christie mystery Murder on the Orient Express (1974)—​was Emmy-​ MADE-FOR-TV MOVIES nominated only once, for Murder with Mirrors (1985, CBS) another AND MINISERIES Christie tale with Helen Hayes as Miss Marple. He wrote a charming 371 piano melody for the elderly sleuth and added the eerie tones produced by the electronic ondes Martenot. Piano and ondes were again featured in Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story (NBC, 1987), a five-​hour biopic of the heiress, starring Farrah Fawcett. The most moving of all the Bennett scores was his music for the Holocaust-​themed The Attic: The Hiding of Anne Frank (1988, CBS) which required a more intimate sound featuring saxophone (“for its cool ironic sound,” he said), oboe, English horn, two horns, harp, piano, and strings. French composer Georges Delerue (1925–​1992), who had earned fame as Francois Truffaut’s favorite composer (Jules et Jim, Day for Night) and had earned an Oscar (1979’s A Little Romance), enjoyed the distinction of being the world’s most listened-​to film composer: His waltz theme for Our World, the first global satellite telecast (June 25, 1967, on NET, forerunner to PBS, in the U.S.), was heard by an estimated 400 to 700 million people around the world at the same moment. It won an Emmy. Delerue moved to the United States in 1983 and immediately began working in television. His best work tended to be for period pieces that celebrated heroism during wartime, and the triumph of humanity over the forces of modern-​day evil. He wrote a dramatic score for Sword of Gideon (1986, HBO) that served as an elegy for the Israeli athletes killed by terrorists at the 1972 Olympics, and won Canada’s Gemini award; an inspiring theme for Women of Valor (1986, CBS) about American nurses in Japanese prisoner-​of-​war camps; a heroic orchestral and choral score for the 1943 Jewish uprising against their Nazi captors in the concentration-​camp drama Escape from Sobibor (1987, CBS); a heartbreaking theme for Her Secret Life (1987, ABC), an unsuccessful pilot with Kate Capshaw as an American spy hoping to quit her dangerous profession; a sensitive score for the five-​hour miniseries Queenie (1987, ABC), the adaptation of Michael Korda’s roman a clef about actress Merle Oberon and her efforts to hide her mixed-​race background; and a CableACE-​award winning score for The Josephine Baker Story (1991, HBO) with Lynn Whitfield as the legendary African-​American entertainer who found success in 1920s Paris. South African–​born Trevor Jones (b. 1949) wrote a series of scores for the lavish, big-​budget fantasy projects of producer Robert Halmi. The military pomp of Lilliput and Indian musical touches for Laputa enlivened the four-​hour Gulliver’s Travels (1996, NBC) with Ted Danson as Jonathan Swift’s hero and the creations of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop (Jones had been Henson’s composer on the 1980s features The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth). Mysticism and medieval colors, played by

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the London Symphony Orchestra, haunted the four-​hour Merlin (1998, NBC) with Sam Neill as the wizard of King Arthur’s time. “The audience needs to feel comfortable about making that transition from reality into fantasy,” Jones said of his excursions into televised period adventure. “Music imbues the images with emotion and humanity. We’re taking things that really don’t exist and making them come alive on the screen. Music has to contribute a big proportion of that credibility.” Another four-​ hour mini, Cleopatra (1999, ABC), starring Leonor Varela as the Egyptian queen and Timothy Dalton as Julius Caesar, employed Arabic vocals, ethnic percussion, and unusual woodwinds (along with the London Symphony) to suggest the ancient world. And Jones’s soaring theme for the six-​hour, $85-​million Dinotopia (2002, ABC), and his wonder-​filled music for the strange future world where two young men crash-​land, was probably better than the poorly reviewed series deserved. Halmi’s longest miniseries were distinguished by scores by other composers. For Scarlett (1994, CBS), John Morris didn’t try to compete with Max Steiner’s immortal Gone with the Wind. He wrote a spirited waltz for Scarlett O’Hara (Joanne Whalley-​Kilmer), quoted nineteenth-​century folk tunes as appropriate, and provided a rich musical foundation for the eight-​ hour sequel to the Oscar-​winning Civil War epic. And for The 10th Kingdom (2000, NBC), a 10-​hour saga of parallel-​world fairy-​tale characters from Snow White to Cinderella, Halmi enlisted British Oscar winner Anne Dudley (The Full Monty) to supply the necessary symphonic sweep. “We had a massive orchestra on that,” Dudley recalled, estimating 60 musicians. “There were so many different colors. I tried to make the most of it, lots of big action sequences, some instances of solo instruments in intimate scenes. The balance in that show was quite difficult—​some of it was funny, some of it was quite threatening, and the whole premise turned out to be rather complex and psychological. It seemed like a great flawed ambition in a way, a glorious failure, I think.” The Hallmark Hall of Fame series of occasional, high-​quality telefilms inspired some of the medium’s finest scores of the 1990s and early 2000s. James Di Pasquale (b. 1941), who had already won two Emmys as a songwriter, won a third for his warm accompaniment for Angela Lansbury in The Shell Seekers (1989, ABC). His sensitive writing for strings and woodwinds shone in that score and such non-​Hallmark entries as In the Best Interest of the Children (1992, NBC). Ernest Troost (b. 1953) won the Emmy for his charming score for The Canterville Ghost (1996, ABC), an adaptation of the Oscar Wilde story starring Patrick Stewart and Neve Campbell. He was later nominated for his hornpipe-​style, seafaring score for Calm at Sunset (1996, CBS) with Michael Moriarty and Kate Nelligan, and again for Fallen Angel (2003, CBS) starring Gary Sinise.

Lawrence Shragge (b. 1954), a Canadian composer who worked on more MADE-FOR-TV MOVIES than 100 telefilms, was Emmy-​nominated for Hallmark’s When Love Is AND MINISERIES Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story (2010, CBS), with Winona Ryder as the 373 Al-​Anon founder. But even more meaningful, and also Emmy-​nominated, was his powerful music for the acclaimed, non-​Hallmark miniseries Haven (2001, CBS), with Natasha Richardson as an American Jew who accompanied concentration-​camp survivors to America. Its choral passages and heartfelt violin solos heightened the already emotional material. Yet the Emmy Awards in the music categories have, just as often, been hit-​or-​miss. None of these worthy scores for TV-​movies or miniseries was even nominated: Jerry Fielding’s brass-​choir opening for the Emmy-​winning drama of the conflict in Northern Ireland, A War of Children (1972, CBS), and his elegiac theme for the David Carradine–​ Richard Widmark western Mr. Horn (1979, CBS); Charles Gross’s colorful, Gershwinesque Jazz Age score for the six-​hour The Dain Curse (1978, CBS), starring James Coburn as Dashiell Hammett’s private eye; and Craig Safan’s haunting music for the George Armstrong Custer biography Son of the Morning Star (1991, ABC).

11 “Mrs. Peel, we’re needed”

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he story of music from British-​produced shows on American television begins with an unlikely combination of factors: a new production company, a risky venture with its first series, a lucky sale to a U.S. network, and a Brooklyn-​born songwriter imagining a ballad about a legendary English hero. “Robin Hood, Robin Hood, riding through the glen /​Robin Hood, Robin Hood, with his band of men /​feared by the bad, loved by the good /​Robin Hood . . .” went the title song for The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955–​1958, CBS), starring Richard Greene as the outlaw of Sherwood Forest. The song was by Carl Sigman (1909–​2000), whose hits included “Pennsylvania 6-​5000” and “Ebb Tide.” Heralded by a brass fanfare and sung by Dick James, Sigman’s song was like a modern-​day folk tune, introducing the character to a presumably young audience watching in the early Monday evening timeslot. As a Parlophone single, it was produced by a 29-​year-​old George Martin and reached Number 14 on the British pop charts in early 1956, and although issued on several singles in America (including a vocal by Frankie Laine and an instrumental by Nelson Riddle), it failed to chart in the States. Sigman got the assignment from song publisher Paul Barry, who had connections with visionary producer Lew Grade’s new ITC company. Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0012

“It’s one of the relatively few songs for which my dad wrote both words and music,” his son Michael Sigman said. “He did study the Robin Hood myth to know enough about it that it sounds like an English folk song.” English composer Edwin Astley, in his first of many assignments for ITC shows, supplied much of the medieval-​flavored underscore, including the opening fanfare and minstrel songs that opened early episodes; colleague Albert Elms (1920–​2009) later joined the crew and scored almost as many. ITC followed the same pattern with its next series, both of which also sold to American networks: The Buccaneers, starring Robert Shaw (1956–​1957, CBS), with an instrumental Astley opening and a closing sea-​ chanty-​ style song by UK writers Edward Horan and Norman Newell; and The Adventures of Sir Lancelot (1956–​1957, NBC), again with music by Astley and Elms and a lively closing song, “The Ballad of Sir Lancelot,” credited to famed American folklorist and ethnographer Alan Lomax (then working in England, compiling British folk songs, because of his leftist leanings during that period of the Hollywood Blacklist). Edwin “Ted” Astley (1922–​1998) was an arranger and bandleader who became ITC’s busiest and most creative composer, especially in the 1960s and early 1970s. Before the spy craze hit America in 1964—​specifically The Man from U.N.C.L.E., combined with the still-​growing popularity of the James Bond movies starring Sean Connery—​Astley scored the half-​hour Danger Man (CBS, 1961) with Patrick McGoohan as North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) operative John Drake. Astley’s Danger Man was very much rooted in his big-​band experience. “I decided to use both a jazz-​orientated theme and jazz-​based background music, which was quite unusual at the time,” Astley said many years later (although the swinging-​jazz approach was already de rigueur for private eyes in U.S. shows, dating back to Peter Gunn’s success in 1958). That was only the beginning for Astley’s involvement in global intrigue, however. His next series would be his biggest hit: The Saint, starring Roger Moore, began airing in America starting in late 1963, eventually becoming one of the biggest syndication hits of the 1960s. NBC picked up the series as a summer replacement for three years starting in 1967. The Saint wasn’t strictly a spy show, but the debonair Simon Templar was something of a jet-​setting troubleshooter in this latest incarnation of the Leslie Charteris–​created character (who had been played in the movies by the likes of George Sanders and Louis Hayward). Moore, in his best role ever—​and the one that ultimately persuaded the James Bond producers to cast him, a decade later, as 007—​played the charming rogue. Astley’s Saint theme was one of the most original and recognizable of the era. Templar’s calling card, which figured prominently in the graphics of the main title, was a stick figure topped by a halo. The teaser of every episode ended with an animated halo appearing over Moore’s head, accompanied by the opening of the Saint theme: a female voice with

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muted brass in a seven-​note intro, answered first by guitar and drums (in the black-​and-​white episodes), later by saxophone and piccolo (color episodes). Astley later recalled that author Charteris “was quite put out because we were not using his tune, as he called it.” The writer had, back in the 1930s, come up with an eight-​note whistled fragment (titled “No Saint Am I”) that often signaled Templar’s arrival on the scene, initially in the George Sanders Saint movies (1939–​1941) and then in the Saint radio series (1945–​1951) that mostly starred Vincent Price. Charteris had learned to play the violin as a youngster, according to biographer Ian Dickerson. “He would later admit that music was never one of his strongest subjects, but it wouldn’t stop him from dabbling,” Dickerson said. “When he started to explore the possibilities of exploiting The Saint in various media in the mid-​1930s, he played around on the piano and came up with the familiar theme. Commercially astute, he insisted on it being incorporated into every possible incarnation of The Saint, most famously the TV theme.” Astley was irritated by the author’s attitude: “Charteris accused me of plagiarizing from him and in turn I threatened legal action if he did not stop claiming that I had stolen his work.” Eventually, an unhappy compromise was reached: beginning with the color episodes (the last 47 of the 118 produced), Astley quoted the Charteris motif on rare occasions in the score and incorporated it into the end titles, mandating an end-​title credit for the author as “original Saint theme by Leslie Charteris.” The composer’s re-​energized revamping of his own theme for the color episodes may have been his best, with a more prominent (and 1960s sexy) soprano voicing the melody line. He redid the theme again for the final 18 episodes, retaining both the Charteris motif and elements of his own original theme, but moving in a more aggressive rhythmic direction. As for the episode scores, Astley followed his usual procedure: “The way I used to work on these film series was to score the first half-​dozen episodes and create a library of incidental music which could be reused later in other episodes; then the music editor would decide which tracks to use. Comfortably, I could do an episode a week. Together with the editor and the producer, we would agree on me providing so many minutes of incidental music, which I would write and then record with a 20-​piece orchestra.” Because the stories were as much mystery and romance as adventure, Astley added strings to the orchestra, and the music tended to be a touch more sedate than some of his more action-​oriented series. Astley’s greatest achievement in 1960s scoring may have been for the new version of Danger Man, wherein John Drake was now an agent of the British Secret Service, picked up by an American network just as the spy craze began (1965–​1966, CBS).

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Patrick McGoohan (left) with composer Edwin Astley at Shepperton Studios, 1964–​1965.

The one-​hour Danger Man was distinguished by a memorable main title theme that Astley called “High Wire.” Its sound was innovative: jazz harpsichord as the primary voice, with a boogie-​woogie rhythm in the left hand. Backed with brass and performed at a fast pace, it introduced the ultra-​serious adventures of Drake, the secret agent who rarely carried a gun or kissed a woman. It was the most unique sound of all the 1960s spy shows, and it influenced later seasons of The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and its spinoff, Girl from U.N.C.L.E. “He’d use the harpsichord theme in hundreds of different ways to get the mood of what was going on,” his son Jon Astley (singer-​songwriter-​ turned-​producer) recalled in 2008. “My dad would see Pat McGoohan at Elstree or Borehamwood [studios]. They met and joked and talked about things. My father turned up with a brand new Mercedes in ’65 and Pat was very taken with it. “He loved the whole medium of television,” the younger Astley continued, “the quick turnaround, and the buzz of working so quickly. An episode was made in four or five days in those days. He was a workaholic. My mum did complain when he was locked away writing. He was very dedicated.” Flutist-​saxophonist John Scott (later a composer), who played on many Astley TV scores, recalled: “We would record 30 or 40 minutes of music in a day. He would come in with a ream of scores that he had written. He was a very fast and very good writer. We used to enjoy it; everyone would give all they had.” For its American broadcast, the McGoohan series was retitled Secret Agent with a new rock ’n’ roll theme commissioned by CBS (see Chapter 7).

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Other Astley ITC series that aired in America included The Baron (1966, ABC), based on the John Creasey novels of a London-​based American antiques dealer (Steve Forrest) who routinely became involved in criminal cases; and Department S (1970, syndicated), about a specialized unit of Interpol that included a crime novelist (Peter Wyngarde), a computer specialist (Rosemary Nicols), and an American (Joel Fabiani). Astley’s Baron theme combined timpani, piping flutes, and a swagger, suggesting the title character’s American origins. Department S was perhaps the hippest of all, jazz-​meets-​rock-​with-​strings including an organ and electric bass. As the composer’s son-​in-​law, The Who’s Pete Townshend, later reflected: “There was something very English about it. It’s very sixties-​seventies swinging London.” Espionage (1963–​ 1964, NBC) was technically a co-​ production of ITC, NBC, and an American production company, but it was produced almost entirely in England with mostly British actors and crew. Effectively discarded in a Wednesday-​night time slot opposite the popular Ben Casey and The Beverly Hillbillies, it ranked among the lowest-​ rated series of the season. Yet it was television’s first serious attempt to examine the shadowy and dangerous world of the international spy, and not in a lighthearted or tongue-​in-​cheek way, as would shortly be seen in most of TV’s 1960s spy shows. Espionage won almost universal praise for its scripts, performances, and direction (legendary director Michael Powell of The Red Shoes fame even directed three installments). Producer Herbert Brodkin drew from London’s classical-​music community to add to the series’ prestige and insisted that every episode receive an original score. Malcolm Arnold, who had won an Oscar for scoring The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and had scored such other films as The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, composed the compelling theme (pounding timpani and dissonant brass for a title sequence designed by Maurice Binder of James Bond film fame) and 14 episode scores, his longest-​ever television commitment. The international settings (Ireland, Paris, China, Arabia, East Germany, etc.) demanded colorful musical backdrops. Succeeding Arnold, with eight more scores, was Benjamin Frankel (1906–​1973), whose own later film music included The Night of the Iguana (1964) and Battle of the Bulge (1965). Perhaps the biggest critical favorite of the mid-​1960s British imports was The Avengers (1966–​1969, ABC), a stylish hour of derring-​do that both emulated and parodied the big-​screen adventures of James Bond (and, by this time, Derek Flint, Matt Helm, and others). Bumbershoot-​ toting, bowler-​topped John Steed (Patrick Macnee) and the jumpsuited Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) took on a succession of outlandish villains bent on taking over England or the world. The plots were often so broad that the fun of The Avengers had less to do with the story’s resolution than in

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Laurie Johnson.

listening to the witty banter and savoring the sophisticated chemistry of Steed and Mrs. Peel. American audiences were treated to the third incarnation of The Avengers. The series began in Britain in 1961, with Macnee playing second fiddle to Ian Hendry. It was improved in 1962 after Hendry’s departure led to Macnee’s teaming with Honor Blackman (whose leather suits and black boots became a sensation in England). Composer Johnny Dankworth’s jazzy, quietly swinging Avengers theme accompanied those early episodes (not seen in the U.S. until 1990, on cable’s A&E). He revised it slightly for the third season in 1963, adding a xylophone for additional urgency, and that year Dankworth won an Ivor Novello Award for “best original music for a TV or radio broadcast.” When a new production team took over The Avengers in 1965, Laurie Johnson was signed to compose a new theme and write the episodic scores; that’s what American audiences heard when ABC picked up The Avengers in early 1966. Johnson (b. 1927), educated at the Royal College of Music, was already an old hand at film and TV music. He had written scores for Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove and the science fiction film First Men in the Moon (both 1964), in addition to composing for the London theater and the concert hall. Johnson’s approach was diametrically opposed to the dark ambience of Dankworth’s music, but perfectly in keeping with the fresh new tongue-​in-​cheek attitude of the series. His Avengers theme employed a wave of elegant strings over a rapidly moving, jaunty repeated figure for electric keyboard, all of which built into a big-​band sound. This synthesis of orchestral and jazz textures, very much in tune with

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the sixties, and the more generous orchestra (including strings) than was common in American television scoring, made The Avengers a surprising listening experience as well as fun to watch. Unlike the Astley model, which saw only an average of six to eight fully scored episodes per season, the idea for the new filmed Avengers was “special music would be composed for each episode, an unheard-​of extravagance,” Johnson later recalled. It was, inevitably, much more work. He would view a fine cut of the film on a Monday, compose Tuesday through Friday, have the music copied for the players over the weekend and record the following Monday. “Sometimes there would be as much as 30 minutes of music to be recorded and synchronized every week. Over the whole series I must have composed around 50 hours of music,” Johnson estimated. Johnson’s music was in on the joke from the beginning of the Rigg episodes of The Avengers, including silent-​movie piano chase music for “The Gravediggers” and an uncanny reproduction of Victor Silvester’s 1930s ballroom sound for “Quick-​Quick Slow Death” in the first Rigg season; gorgeous violin playing for the death-​rays-​from-​space “From Venus with Love,” a fun theme for the hunt in “Dead Man’s Treasure,” and a clever use of woodwinds for cats-​turned-​killers in “Hidden Tiger.” While Johnson continued into the series’ final season in which Linda Thorson (as the younger, less experienced Tara King) replaced Rigg as Steed’s partner, several episodes were scored in jazzy style by Johnson’s keyboard player Howard Blake (b. 1938). When the series was resurrected as The New Avengers in 1976–​1977 (screened on CBS in a late-​night time slot in 1978), with Macnee joined by Joanna Lumley and Gareth Hunt, Johnson—​now a full production partner with his 1960s producers Brian Clemens and Albert Fennell—​reprised only the opening bars of his original Avengers theme. He segued into military-​ style snare drums with a new brass fanfare, and (emphasizing the new younger partners) busy bass and electric guitar riffs. Later, when that same company produced a series of movies based on Barbara Cartland novels, he supplied some of the most sumptuous romantic scores of the era, often for up-​and-​coming British actors: a yearning theme for A Hazard of Hearts (1987, CBS, with Helena Bonham Carter), a royal touch for The Lady and the Highwayman (1989, CBS, with Hugh Grant), a grand waltz for A Ghost in Monte Carlo (1990, TNT, with Lysette Anthony), and a more melancholy theme for Duel of Hearts (1991, TNT, with Alison Doody). Australian-​ born Ron Grainer (1922–​ 1981) contributed three memorable themes that found their way to American television, although not in chronological order. Doctor Who was already a long-​running science-​ fiction series in Britain when it was first syndicated in the United States in 1972. Its inspired theme music, composed by Grainer and realized by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, has become one of the most beloved signature tunes in, well, the known universe.

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Ron Grainer around the time he composed Doctor Who, 1963.

Grainer had already written the Gallic-​flavored theme for the detective series Maigret (1960) and the lighthearted tune for the sitcom Steptoe and Son (1962), both for the BBC, when the network came to him with a surprising assignment for a children’s sci-​fi series about a “time lord” from the planet Gallifrey who travels through space and time in a ship that, to eyes on Earth, appears to be a police callbox. The title character was played by many different actors over the years; Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker, third and fourth to be cast as the eccentric Doctor, were the first two seen in America. Happily, Grainer’s original version, created in 1963, was still in use. Producer Verity Lambert sought an otherworldly sound for the series theme, according to composer Mark Ayres, who scored Who episodes in the late 1980s. “Ron provided a deceptively simple tune and harmonies over an ostinato bass with poetic indication as to the kind of sounds he envisioned (‘wind bubble’ and ‘cloud’), and Delia’s imagination went to work whilst Dick Mills stood by to assist with tape cutting and loop wrangling,” Ayres wrote. “There is no ‘performance’ in the music and no, that is not a Theremin. Every note, beat and pulse was hand-​crafted using test-​tone oscillators, noise generator and wobbulator, then painstakingly cut together on multiple layers of 1/​4-​inch recording tape before being manually synchronized to form the final mix.” Derbyshire later reminisced: “It was a great journey of discovery. Because it was generated by making short sounds on tiny bits of tape,

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we didn’t even know if it would work. People were so cynical about electronic music and so Doctor Who was my private delight. It proved them all wrong. But it was Ron’s genius that made the tune a success.” The Grainer/​Derbyshire version was heard for the series’ first 17 seasons and, while it has undergone various arrangements in subsequent years, the 1963 original was a landmark in electronic music for television. The early scores, too, were sometimes innovative, including work by electronic-​music pioneer Tristram Cary for the first Dalek story, Dudley Simpson (who would later pen the heroic theme for Blake’s 7, 1978) and Radiophonic Workshop mainstay Brian Hodgson (whose sound effects became an early example of sound design substituting for score). The original series ended in 1989. A TV-​movie followed in 1996, but BBC rebooted Doctor Who to worldwide success in 2005 (seen in America on the Sci-​Fi Channel beginning in 2006; BBC America began airing it in 2010). Murray Gold (b. 1969) became the series composer, was twice nominated for BAFTA awards for his work, and went on to compose the theme for the Who spinoff, Torchwood (2007). And when Jodie Whittaker was cast as the first female Doctor in 2018, British-​Nigerian composer Segun Akinola (b. 1993) became the first person of color to score the long-​ running series. Grainer’s distinctive sound and style were also featured in Man in a Suitcase (1968, ABC) an often grim affair starring the scowling Richard Bradford as McGill, an unjustly disgraced American agent on an odyssey that found him hopscotching all over Europe trying to clear his name. Any other composer might have taken a dark approach, but Grainer chose an entirely unorthodox musical route: lively, barroom-​style piano with peppy brass, saxophone, and even xylophone. Albert Elms provided the predominantly downbeat underscores. After the end of Danger Man, star Patrick McGoohan produced a 17-​episode series that contained elements of the fiction of Orwell and Kafka, called The Prisoner, which CBS aired during the summer of 1968; it became an almost immediate cult classic. McGoohan played an unnamed British agent (probably John Drake, although that was never formally stated) who resigned under mysterious circumstances, was abducted, and awoke in a seaside town with a carnival-​like atmosphere where the residents were identified only as numbers; everyone was under constant surveillance, and the ruthless captors would use any means to discover the reasons behind the agent’s angry departure from the Secret Service. Grainer’s theme for The Prisoner was a rousing piece for brass, electric guitar, bass, and percussion that was apparently intended to underscore the boundless determination of Number 6 (McGoohan) to escape. The end title, an even livelier arrangement, provided a strong musical finale, even though nearly every episode ended with Number 6’s efforts being foiled again.

The notoriously hard-​ to-​ please McGoohan ended up with Grainer after three false starts. He originally asked Astley (his longtime Danger Man composer) for a theme, but Astley gave up when McGoohan proved elusive. Potential themes by Robert Farnon and Wilfred Josephs were rejected, and even Grainer’s first attempt was dismissed when McGoohan felt it wasn’t sufficiently hard-​hitting. “He initially produced a likable and gentle version of a theme he called ‘The Age of Elegance,’ ” music editor Eric Mival later recalled. “Pat perceived Ron’s version was far too gentle, and I remember seeing him pacing up and down, gesticulating to Ron as to how he felt the pace of the piece should increase.” The end result was striking and powerful and today ranks among Grainer’s best-​known work. As he had done on Man in a Suitcase, Albert Elms followed Grainer and scored most of the incidental music for the series, often with a sense of humor, of the mundane or the bizarre. The final episode, the enigmatic and brilliant “Fall Out,” was among the earliest examples of what would later come to be called “music supervision”—​the effective placement of preexisting songs to make dramatic points—​via the use of the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love,” the Four Lads’ “Dry Bones,” Carmen Miranda’s “I Yi Yi Yi Yi (I Like You Very Much),” and two pieces from the Chappell music library (“Rag March” and “September Ballad”). Grainer’s last series theme was the charming and deceptively lighthearted Tales of the Unexpected (1979–​1981, syndicated), a half-​hour anthology based on the often macabre stories of Roald Dahl. The last of the great British adventure series on American TV was The Persuaders! (1971–​1972, ABC), Tony Curtis’s first and Roger Moore’s last series for television (the latter, just before he became the movies’ James Bond). Curtis played a self-​made millionaire from the Bronx, and Moore was a titled aristocrat with a penchant for daredevil adventure; both were playboys with lots of money and an eye for the ladies. Laurence Naismith, as a retired judge who sought to right wrongs outside of the legal systems of Europe, brought the two together and effectively blackmailed them into helping him achieve his goal. The show was light and often amusing, thanks to Curtis’s frequent ad-​libbing, which won him legions of fans in Britain. Saint producer Robert S. Baker sought an equally high-​profile talent for the music: John Barry, composer for the James Bond films and by then the recipient of three Oscars and a Grammy. At the time, he was arguably the world’s most in-​demand film composer. Roger Moore, whose own company was also involved in the production, “courted me with lunches and such,” Barry remembered. Barry’s Persuaders theme remains (despite the failure of the series after just a single season) one of the most stylish ever written for the medium. “The whole point about television,” Barry observed, “is that you’ve got so little time. People are looking at television, this wall-​to-​wall visual thing

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John Barry, 1970.

they’ve got, day in and day out. How do you break through that? I always went for a really intensely individual shot right off the top. You know, a sound that would grab you, very distinctive and very memorable. And you have to capture that audience within, hopefully, the first four bars.” So, as he often did, he sought out London percussionist John Leach, who played the Eastern European cimbalom on his mid-​1960s scores for spy thrillers The Ipcress File and The Quiller Memorandum. Leach later recalled how Barry achieved the most unique sound imaginable: He overdubbed four instruments, all playing the melody. “I played cimbalom and kantele [a Finnish plucked string instrument]. Hugo D’Alton played mandolin and mandola. The backing track was done. The first track we put down, Hugo played mandolin and I played cimbalom; on the second overdub, I played kantele and Hugo played mandola. John wrote the notes; if the notes weren’t possible, I retuned the kantele and dropped them in. That was done very quickly; I just played along with the track. We went away, and it was mixed; I only heard the finished product weeks later.” The Persuaders! theme, in 3/​4 time, also featured harpsichord doubling Moog synthesizer plus rhythm section. “I recorded it at George Martin’s studio,” Barry recalled, referring to the original AIR studios in London’s Oxford Circus, during the summer of 1970. “Although he’s not credited with anything, George actually hung around the booth when we were doing it and made one or two suggestions in terms of balance and little gizmos. He’s like a kid with a sand castle when he’s in the room there.

It was a rhythm section but with lots of reverb, a lot of studio effects around the sound.” The theme accompanied a very classy series of main-​title visuals that depicted the diverse backgrounds of the Moore and Curtis characters, then shifted to shots of their Aston-​Martin and Ferrari tooling around the French Riviera, plus champagne/​roulette wheel/​bikini beauty shots that told the viewer they were living the good life. Barry’s upbeat and undeniably catchy tune became a hit in England (reaching Number 13 on the charts in early 1972) but, because ABC relegated the series to a dismal Saturday-​night timeslot in the United States, never caught on with American record-​buyers. Barry later composed musical signatures for Gene Barry’s The Adventurer (1972) and the anthology Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries (1973), both produced for first-​run syndication, and both themes prominently featuring mandolin and synthesizers. Other ITC series with notable themes that made it to American television included The Champions (1968, NBC), about a trio of international operatives who have special sensory powers, with a theme by “Downtown” songwriter Tony Hatch; Strange Report (1971, NBC), a London-​based crime-​investigation series starring Anthony Quayle with a memorable theme by jazz composer Roger Webb that featured harpsichord and wordless soprano; and The Protectors (1972–​1974, syndicated), with Robert Vaughn and Nyree Dawn Porter as London-​based private detectives, with the song “Avenues and Alleyways” (by Mitch Murray and Peter Callander) sung by Tony Christie (“. . . where the soul of a man is easy to buy /​everybody’s wheelin’, everybody’s stealin’, all the low are livin’ high”) that climbed into the UK top 40 in early 1973. Most curious of all was The Zoo Gang (1975, NBC), based on a Paul Gallico novel about a quartet of World War II resistance fighters (John Mills, Lilli Palmer, Brian Keith, Barry Morse) who reunite decades later to fight crime, which sported an unusual theme for guitar and accordion by Paul and Linda McCartney. Even though the series only lasted six episodes, the theme became widely heard because it happened to be on the flip side of their band Wings’ “Band on the Run” single, which went to Number 3 on the UK pop charts in the summer of 1974. “Stand by for action!” That phrase, initially heard in the opening of the British children’s adventure Stingray, has over the years become associated with the many programs of English producer Gerry Anderson, who made his reputation with 1960s puppet shows but expanded into live-​ action programming in the 1970s. American audiences were first treated to Anderson’s “Supermarionation” techniques with Supercar (1962, syndicated), about a futuristic vehicle that—​in the words of the title song, “travels in space or under the sea /​it can journey anywhere”—​with pilot Mike Mercury at the helm. Anderson’s work achieved much wider exposure on Saturday mornings with Fireball XL-​5

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(1963–​1965, NBC), a sci-​fi series with astronaut Steve Zodiac and dramatic scoring by Anderson’s longtime collaborator, composer Barry Gray (1908–​ 1984). As sung by Australian Don Spencer, its end-​title song, “Fireball” (“I wish I was a spaceman /​the fastest guy alive /​I’d fly you ’round the universe in Fireball XL-​5”), was a top-​40 hit in the UK in 1963. Fireball XL-​5 would be Anderson’s only network show. His subsequent series were syndicated in the U.S. Gray’s drum-​driven opening theme for Stingray (1965), about a futuristic submarine, was complemented by his exotica-​styled end-​title song “Aqua Marina.” Gray’s lighthearted march for Thunderbirds (1967) became hugely popular in the UK and remains a favorite of 1960s youngsters who grew up with the twenty-​first-​century adventures of International Rescue operatives Jeff Tracy and Lady Penelope. Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons (1968), for a battling-​aliens premise, kept the beat going but added electronic sounds; Joe 90 (1969), for a child secret agent, sported a similar vibe. (An LP containing several of these themes was released years later bearing the clever title “No Strings Attached.”) Gray’s finest work in the medium was undoubtedly UFO (1972–​1973, syndicated), Anderson’s live-​action, adult-​oriented sci-​fi hour starring Ed Bishop as the head of SHADO, a secret organization established to combat invading alien forces. Its operations (on Earth, in space, and on the moon) were treated with dead seriousness—​ except for Gray’s jazz-​ oriented underscoring, largely based on his wildly catchy main theme featuring a then very hip Hammond organ. His final collaboration with Anderson, the big-​budget Space: 1999 (1975–​1977, syndicated) with Martin Landau and Barbara Bain—​in a ridiculous premise involving the moon being blown out of Earth’s orbit and traveling through space, encountering other beings and civilizations—​combined a large orchestra with more pop-​ oriented electric guitar figures. For its second season, Gray’s scoring was replaced by an energetic, hybrid orchestra-​with-​synthesizers approach by Derek Wadsworth (1939–​2008). In 1971, WGBH, the Boston Public Broadcasting Service station, launched Masterpiece Theatre, a weekly anthology of British-​ produced drama, mostly period pieces and adaptations of literary classics. Over more than 40 years, it (and its successor series Masterpiece Classics, or just Masterpiece) has showcased much of the best of British television—​and eventually helped to bankroll many of the more recent series, to the benefit of viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. It was the result of the success of The Forsyte Saga, a BBC-​produced, 26-​part adaptation of the John Galsworthy novels that aired on NET (National Educational Television, the forerunner of PBS) in 1969–​1970. (Curiously, Forsyte’s theme was not original but rather a 1944 work, “Halcyon Days,” by English light-​music composer Eric Coates.) For its first-​season entry The Six Wives of Henry VIII, which won an Emmy for Keith Michell in the title role, David Munrow and his Early

Music Consort supplied sixteenth-​century music that helped ignite a resurgence of interest in early music in the UK. The perennial favorite Upstairs, Downstairs (1974–​1977)—​about the lives of the upper-​class Bellamy family and their servants during the pre–​ and post–​World War I era in London’s Belgravia district—​contained a delightful waltz theme (“The Edwardians”) by Northern Irish composer Alexander “Sandy” Faris (1921–​2015), who had scored the hit movie Georgy Girl in 1966 and who had known producer John Hawkesworth dating back to their military service in World War II. Hawkesworth called and asked him to “submit a tune,” Faris later recalled. “I wrote one tune overnight and I didn’t like it very much, nor did they. They said ‘Could it be a bit more like [Sir Edward] Elgar and not so much like Eric Coates?’ I tried again, and wrote the one that they eventually used. At the very last minute, I was tinkling at the piano and found that it sounded rather nice in a waltz version.” That became the “Upstairs” theme, and for the “Downstairs” music he wrote his version of “an Edwardian music-​hall song” that he called “What Are We Going to Do with Uncle Arthur?” In 1976, he won the Ivor Novello Award for his Upstairs, Downstairs theme; he went on to write similarly lighthearted period music for Hawkesworth’s The Duchess of Duke Street, which aired during Masterpiece’s 1978–​1979 season. Welsh composer Kenyon Emrys-​ Roberts (1923–​ 1998) earned Masterpiece’s first Emmy music nomination for his theme for the

  Wilfred Josephs.

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romantic saga Poldark (1977–​1978), set in eighteenth-​century Cornwall. He went on to write a memorable school anthem for the public-​school drama To Serve Them All My Days (1982–​1983). Among the greatest of Masterpiece Theatre’s acquisitions was the 13-​part I, Claudius (which aired in the U.S. in 1977–​1978), the acclaimed and sometimes shocking version of Robert Graves’s history of the Roman Empire, with Derek Jacobi as the stammering emperor Claudius, Sian Phillips as the evil Livia, Brian Blessed as Augustus, and John Hurt as the mad Caligula. Its creepy opening had a venomous adder slithering across a tiled mosaic with the image of Claudius and the series title, accompanied by Wilfred Josephs’s weirdly compelling brass and woodwind figures merged with metallic percussion sounds (“that practically hissed evil intrigue,” wrote the New York Times). Josephs (1927–​1997) was a veteran British composer whose work had included the television documentary The Great War and the feature All Creatures Great and Small. Ron Grainer contributed scores for two memorable entries, Edward and Mrs. Simpson starring Edward Fox (a rare instance where the original Thames Television series had already played in American syndication, and in fact won the 1980 Emmy as outstanding “limited series,” prior to its 1981 telecast on Masterpiece) and Flickers (1982), an amusing sendup of the silent-​film era, starring Bob Hoskins. For The Jewel in the Crown (1984–​1985), a stunning adaptation of Paul Scott’s Raj Quartet novels about the last days of British rule over India (starring Art Malik, Tim Pigott-​Smith, Geraldine James, Charles Dance, and Peggy Ashcroft), composer George Fenton supplied a score that, like the 14-​part series, shifted between, and blended, British and Indian musical cultures. Interestingly, Fenton was asked to do the series before filming began, and prior to his work on the film Gandhi (which would earn him a best-​score Oscar nomination). “I loved doing all the empire-​type music,” he said in a later interview. “It’s such an enviable thing for somebody to say, ‘How would you like to write something like Elgar?’ ” So his opening music (for a title sequence depicting the end of the Raj) was an Elgar-​esque march appropriate for the period, but he also utilized such indigenous instruments as sitar, tabla, and sarangui during the underscore for an authentic Indian sound. In the year and a half between being asked to do Jewel and actually writing it, he had scored Gandhi with Ravi Shankar, so “I had to do a lot less work on it, research-​wise, because I had done Gandhi. The thing about Jewel is that it’s highly narrative. The fact that it is in India is by-​the-​way; it’s about the people and it just happens that the interrelationship of these people is tied up with their being in India, and where they are historically.” He won a 1985 Ivor Novello Award for his theme.

All of this heavy drama was relieved, and then some, by Masterpiece’s telecast of Jeeves and Wooster (1990–​1995), whose four series of 23 episodes—​ based on the P. G. Wodehouse stories of the 1920s and 1930s—​must qualify as among the funniest television ever produced. Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie played the title characters, a shrewd valet (“Very good, sir”) and his addlebrained, wealthy employer (“What ho, Barmy?”). Composer Anne Dudley came up with the ideal theme, rooted in the Bert Ambrose–​Jack Hylton recording style of the period. “American jazzers of the time would have been rather sniffy about the English dance-​band scene,” Dudley said. “They would have thought that it didn’t really swing. But there’s a lovely charm, an English sort of sophistication, about it. That’s what I tried to capture in the score of Jeeves and Wooster.” The titles were brilliantly animated (in Art Deco style) to Dudley’s theme, complete with jazz violin, muted trumpet, and saxophone section. Producer Brian Eastman was very involved with the music, she said. “We worked for ages on the theme tune,” Dudley recalled, and that once she had found it, “we had to find lots and lots of variations, things to do with the tune, so I had to be continuously inventive.” The music, she said, “was always filtered through the character of Bertie Wooster, who was English through and through.

  Anne Dudley.

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“The biggest fun you have is taking it to the studio and getting the musicians to play it. It all comes to life and everybody chips in with ideas. But the actual writing was solid work for about six months a year.” Dudley returned to the newly dubbed Masterpiece Classic series with a haunting and evocative score for the remake of Poldark (2015–​2019), starring Aidan Turner as the hero of Winston Graham’s novels. She found inspiration in the folk traditions of windswept Cornwall, then applied those modalities to her score, which featured violinist Chris Garrick. As Dudley explained, “I loved the idea of this folky violin rising up against the more classical undertow”: a musical metaphor for Ross Poldark battling the establishment, and the odds seemingly against him at every turn. Writer-​producer Debbie Horsfield “left a lot of room for music,” Dudley said. “There are a lot of landscape shots, lots of cutting between scenes where people are doing things without dialogue. I don’t think I’ve ever done a TV piece which left so much room for music. In that respect, it was a joy to work on. Music was not confined to the boundaries, it was a significant factor in the whole piece.” The soundtrack was an immediate best-​seller in both the UK and the U.S., prompting classical pianist Lang Lang to record a “Poldark Prelude” for a sequel disc. For Andrew Davies’s brilliantly written political drama House of Cards (1991), starring Ian Richardson as an amoral politician who uses any means to become prime minister, composer Jim Parker (b. 1934) wrote “Francis Urquhart’s March,” a triumphant piece that plays ironically in the sense that the music sounds completely legitimate but in fact accompanies the most heinous criminal activity to accomplish Urquhart’s ends. He reprised it for the sequels, To Play the King and The Final Cut (1994, 1996). For the period detective drama Foyle’s War (2003) with Michael Kitchen as a quiet and methodical police officer during World War II, composer Parker frequently employed English horn as a primary voice. “It is an instrument which I have always loved and seems to me to epitomize the essential loneliness and self-​containment of Christopher Foyle, a widower who misses a much-​loved wife.” His score, and especially his source music, reflected the period in an often lighthearted and fun way. Foyle’s War debuted on Masterpiece but migrated to its sister series Mystery! for its second season and beyond. Nostromo (1997), a six-​hour international co-​production based on the Joseph Conrad novel of greed and political upheaval in nineteenth-​ century Latin America, starred Colin Firth and Albert Finney and boasted a rich score by the legendary Ennio Morricone, on a par with his large-​scale Moses and Marco Polo scores from decades earlier. Producer Fernando Ghia had previously worked with Morricone on the film The Mission and on Bryan Forbes’s cable movie The Endless Game (1989). Adding unusual colors were wordless soprano (Morricone’s longtime

collaborator Edda dell’Orso) and the unusual Bulgarian kaval (an end-​ blown flute). Sherlock (2010–​2017), the modern-​day reinterpretation of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman as Holmes and Watson, was scored by English composers David Arnold (b. 1962, famed for his James Bond movie scores, including Casino Royale) and Michael Price (b. 1969, former assistant to Michael Kamen and later music editor on the Lord of the Rings films). They were Emmy-​nominated for the first installment, “A Study in Pink,” again for the second season’s “A Scandal in Belgravia,” and won for the third-​ season episode “His Last Vow.” Their distinctive approach combined traditional strings with modern guitars, percussion, and synthesizers. “There seems to be something about the emotional world of Sherlock,” said Price, “the heightened reality of the characters, the quicksilver changes of the mind of Sherlock himself, but also the way Holmes is utterly committed to being really funny and really angst-​y, very quickly. He’s a slightly unlikable figure, so insensitive to everybody around him. We found that by shaping cues and sound worlds, that enabled you to be with Sherlock when he was making deductions; it felt like you were included in things that you felt had a greater purpose; you felt that there was a heart and a moral compass.” One Masterpiece series stands by itself: Downton Abbey (2011–​2016), which, over its six seasons, became the most popular PBS program of all time. The lush strings and propulsive piano that introduced the aristocrats and the servants of Downton Abbey were the work of Glasgow-​born composer John Lunn (b. 1956), who won two Emmy Awards for his work and was nominated for a third. The serialized drama explored the lives of Yorkshire country aristocrats (Hugh Bonneville, Elizabeth McGovern, Michelle Dockery, Maggie Smith, and others) and their servants (Jim Carter, Phyllis Logan, Brendan Coyle, Joanne Froggatt, and others) from 1912 to 1926. Lunn had written sensitive and effective scores for period pieces such as Little Dorrit (which earned an Emmy nomination in 2009) and the remake of Bleak House (which had also aired on Masterpiece in 2006). Downton came to Lunn via executive producer Gareth Neame, who had previously worked with him on Lorna Doone and other BBC series. Lunn found his musical approach to Downton in the first few minutes of the first episode, which opened with a telegram being sent; a train containing a mysterious passenger; and the servants working around the house in the early morning hours. “The energy of the train is there in the music, and there’s a plaintive solo piano tune, then a more uplifting string melody that weaves its way through the telegram scenes,” Lunn explained. “In the following scene, the energy of the train music became the servants trying to get the house

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in order. The house itself was like a well-​oiled machine, and I suddenly realized that the same material worked very well. There was a cinematic sweep to the string tune. Once I’d done those two cues, I knew we had it.” Beyond the theme, there were romantic strains for Lady Mary and her beloved Matthew; alternately worried and hopeful themes for bad-​luck couple Anna and Bates; impassioned music for Lady Edith, separated from her daughter; exciting passages for the fox hunts, and much more. Lunn estimated that he wrote approximately 60 themes for characters, locales, and situations while musically chronicling the ups and downs of the Crawley family and their faithful butlers, cooks, housekeepers, valets, and maids. “Nobody knew how big this was going to be,” Lunn said. “I was very pleased with what I’d done on Series One. Then when it came to Series Two, we’d gone into a war, and I was worried that the material wasn’t going to work. But it was still Downton, and even though the war had its effect, it didn’t change all that much.” The music evolved slowly over the six series. “There have been some disasters,” Lunn admitted. “Matthew took some of my best tunes to the grave with him,” he quips, referring to the unexpected death of Mary’s husband at the end of the third season. Lunn’s musical palette remained the same: a large string section and piano, often supplemented with English horn, soprano saxophone, or French horn, averaging 35 musicians in total. Lunn’s music for Downton became his best-​known work. “Every time there’s a mention of the House of Lords on television, they wheel out the Downton Abbey theme,” he said with a laugh. “It’s become the symbol of the upper class.”

John Lunn at the piano during the final season of Downton Abbey.

In 1980, PBS complemented its Masterpiece Theatre with Mystery!, an- BRITISH SHOWS other weekly series of British imports but with a focus on detectives and AIRED IN AMERICA 393 mysteries. Among the first Mystery! series to achieve musical distinction—​and for the most unexpected reason—​was Reilly, Ace of Spies (1984). Producers asked veteran conductor Harry Rabinowitz (1916–​2016) to use Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s gorgeous “Romance” from The Gadfly (1955) as the main theme for this 12-​part dramatization of the life of Sidney Reilly (Sam Neill), the Russian Jew who became a master spy for the British government in the early twentieth century. (The real-​life Reilly was said to have been the inspiration for the novel on which the Soviet film was based.) The music was so popular that a cover of the theme spent 15 weeks on the UK pop charts in late 1983. Patrick Gowers (1936–​2014) had already won the 1983 BAFTA for original television music (including his especially bleak score for Smiley’s People, which aired as an Operation Prime Time special in 1982), but his most lasting achievement may have been the music for The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1985–​1986) and its sequels, The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1987–​1988), The Case-​Book of Sherlock Holmes (1991–​1993), and The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1995–​1996). “With its romantic violin solos, often performed by his daughter Katharine, the theme music was key,” wrote fellow composer Christopher Gunning, “and Patrick composed some of his most imaginative incidental music for the 40 episodes.” This was some of the most exquisite violin music of the era for the faithful adaptations of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s fiction, starring Jeremy Brett as Holmes and David Burke and Edward Hardwicke as Watson. “He did not come to the Granada series as a Sherlockian,” added author Steven Smith, “but enjoyed scoring it, and took pleasure in creating unusual variations of his main theme based on the setting or time periods of the episodes.” Among them: in counterpoint to Christmas carols in “The Blue Carbuncle,” with a boys’ choir in “The Priory School,” and utilizing period instruments for “The Musgrave Ritual,” whose story involved Restoration England. Inspector Morse (1988–​2000) was equally popular but demanded a different kind of musical approach. John Thaw played the morose and often cranky detective with a passion for the arts, especially music. But for Australian-​born, London-​based composer Barrington Pheloung (1954–​ 2019), it began with the theme: “We decided that Morse is a very melancholic character, so the tune had to be melancholic, and he was a lover of classical music, so it should be an orchestral score and not synthesizer. “The final thing is that he has a very cryptic mind, he loves doing crosswords. We came up with the obvious idea—​we use Morse Code in the music. It spells out his name in the main theme and that formed the rhythm. That suggested a harmonic structure, I picked up my guitar, and

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there was the tune.” Morse’s love of the classics, Pheloung added, “was one of the great parts of the job. They asked me what music he would be listening to, and in almost every case it’s one of my favorite pieces of music. All of them were especially recorded for the series.” He added that series creator Colin Dexter “is a very nice man and a great friend of mine [but] he loves Wagner and secretly I don’t. Over the course of the series, Morse became a great Mozart lover. That sums up my musical taste.” Of course, there was plenty more over the 33 episodes, from Debussy and Massenet to Puccini and Schubert. “They weren’t taken from records and we got to work with some of the best musicians in the world.” Agatha Christie’s Poirot (1990–​ 2004) was something else entirely: Christie’s legendary Belgian detective in a smart-​ looking period piece starring David Suchet. “A slightly comical figure, but at the same time intensely serious about his detective work,” recalled composer Christopher Gunning (b. 1944). “There had to be an element of the thirties, wit, and the tune had to be sophisticated but memorable.” He decided on an alto saxophone, “a slightly out-​of-​tune piano” and strings. Gunning composed about 40 scores for Poirot before a new production team took over in 2004—​yet, he notes, “Suchet’s Poirot has become the definitive portrayal of the character, and his music will always be associated with him.” Gunning’s first-​season Poirot scores won the 1990 BAFTA for original television music. Gunning’s music suggested the period, heightened the mystery and tension, and hinted at the various locales visited. “Because the films [were] incredibly varied in subject matter and the characters involved so disparate, the music for one film would often be quite different from the next,” he noted. His “Death on the Nile,” for instance, incorporated Egyptian colors. Later, he composed the dark, rich, classically styled score for a remake of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (on Masterpiece Theatre, 1997) that went on to win an Emmy for Diana Rigg as Mrs. Danvers and a BAFTA for Gunning’s score. For Prime Suspect (1992–​1996), starring Helen Mirren as Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison, composer Stephen Warbeck (b. 1953) wrote a theme for strings and voice that captured the downbeat tone of the script; it was reprised and developed through four gritty sequels (two of which aired on Mystery!, two on Masterpiece). A handful of excellent British-​produced series eluded Masterpiece Theatre. Great Performances, launched by New York PBS station WNET in 1974, first aired Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill (1975), the story of Winston Churchill’s American mother (played by Lee Remick) with a wistful waltz theme by André Previn, then conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. Great Performances was also responsible for introducing Americans to the music of Geoffrey Burgon (1941–​2010), initially in Tinker, Tailor,

Soldier, Spy (1980), a six-​part adaptation of John le Carré’s novel, starring Alec Guinness as British spymaster George Smiley. Burgon’s downbeat opening theme set the mood, but it was his end-​title music that caused something of a sensation. His haunting setting of the traditional “Nunc Dimittis” (“Lord, now lettest thy servant depart in peace”), sung by boy soprano against a backdrop of organ, trumpet and strings, landed on the British pop charts for four weeks near the end of 1979 after its original UK telecast. Burgon won an Ivor Novello Award for his music. Yet it was Brideshead Revisited (1982) that earned Burgon his greatest fame, and the series became among the most celebrated in television history. It was an 11-​part serialization of Evelyn Waugh’s novel of the pre-​war decline of the English aristocracy, starring Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews (and a stellar supporting cast, including Laurence Olivier, Claire Bloom, and John Gielgud). Burgon’s music captured the elegance and hinted at the heartbreak; much of the score was a series of variations on his stately and unforgettable main theme. “The Brideshead period and setting are so romantic,” Burgon said in 1983. “I always respond to the emotional world of the film. It was strong in Tinker, Tailor—​the pent-​up emotion of men doing that secret and dangerous job. And it was very strong in Brideshead, which portrays the end of the world the characters have been living in. Even when they were happy, you knew it would end in unhappiness all around. You felt their lives were all based on borrowed time.

   Geoffrey Burgon, 1982.

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“Everybody in Brideshead relates to the house. That and religion are what unites them and then splits them apart. So, the major theme was meant to give a feeling for the house and the characters’ lifestyle there. Looking back, I suppose it was the baroqueness of the place and its visual splendors that I tried to underline.” The score was played by a 26-​piece orchestra, mostly strings with substantial solo parts for oboe, trumpet, and horn. Burgon went on to score the eight-​part Dickens adaptation Bleak House (1985) with Diana Rigg and Denholm Elliott. His last significant work in television was for the remake of The Forsyte Saga (2002), for which he wrote a melancholy waltz theme; it won a BAFTA and later aired on Masterpiece Classic. New York–​born, London-​based composer Carl Davis (b. 1936) was introduced to American television audiences with his music for The Snow Goose, a Hallmark Hall of Fame acquisition (1971, NBC). Richard Harris and Jenny Agutter starred in this BBC co-​production based on a Paul Gallico story about a wounded bird that brings together an orphan girl and a lonely man during World War II; Davis earned an Emmy nomination for his subdued, touching score. He went on to score the 26-​part documentary The World at War (1974, syndicated). The Thames Television production recounted the history of World War II and, at the time, was believed to be TV’s most expensive documentary series; Laurence Olivier narrated. Davis’s sorrowful opening theme reflected the massive human toll of the conflict. Davis’s decades-​long work scoring classic silent films began with his work on Hollywood, a 13-​part Thames Television series (1980, syndicated) that looked back fondly at the silent era and was filled with clips from early classics, from D. W. Griffith to Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd.

PBS THEMES The Masterpiece Theatre theme was chosen by the series’ original executive producer, Christopher Sarson. He discovered French Baroque composer Jean-​ Joseph Mouret’s “Rondeau” (from his 1729 Suite de Symphonies) while visiting Italy in 1962. “I wanted to use it for Masterpiece Theatre,” Sarson recalled in 1996, “but there was no way I could bear to put a French piece of music on something that was supposed to be English. I went through all kinds of English composers and nothing worked. So, it became the theme.” A 1954 recording was used for many years, and as the opening title sequence evolved (from a British flag waving to a roving camera with views of classic book titles, photos, and knick-​knacks reminiscent of past series), new versions replaced it, including trumpeter

Wynton Marsalis’s performance from his 1996 album In Gabriel’s Garden. Famed film composer John Williams had already contributed a fun theme for a PBS series, the long-​ running Evening at Pops, also produced by Boston’s WGBH. Williams succeeded Arthur Fiedler as conductor of the Boston Pops in 1980 and became a familiar face in American homes as a result. WGBH came back to him for the Masterpiece spinoff The American Collection (2000–​2003, PBS), which consisted entirely of adaptations of great American authors, including Thornton Wilder, Willa Cather, and Henry James. Unmistakably American in tone and color, and featuring renowned cellist Yo-​ Yo Ma, Williams’s theme briefly alluded to the original “Rondeau” but (especially in its extended three-​minute version) was a wonderful symphonic piece all its own.

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  Carl Davis.

He scored a number of miniseries, including the lush, romantic, sitar-​ flavored The Far Pavilions (1984, HBO), set in nineteenth-​century India and starring Ben Cross and Amy Irving, but his finest work for television may have been Pride & Prejudice (1996, A&E). This hugely popular, six-​ part BBC adaptation of Jane Austen’s nineteenth-​ century novel of Lizzy (Jennifer Ehle) and her shifting

For Mystery!, WGBH enlisted renowned artist Edward Gorey to design its title sequence, animated by Derek Lamb. Montreal-​based composer Normand Roger (b. 1949) based his original theme on storyboards, but when he saw the completed animation, he told Lamb “the music I have done will not work so well. I’ll try something else.” He went home and wrote a new theme. This final version needed to be “suitable for dance,” he thought, because of a shot “showing a sophisticated group of people dancing. I thought that something tango-​ ish would be appropriate. The music also had to convey some mystery atmosphere as well as being a catchy tune,” Roger said. His wife supplied “the distinctive lady-​in-​distress sighs” that lent a touch of humor to the sequence. He recorded with a small ensemble of six

to eight musicians including a clavinet, flute, vibes, electric bass, and a saxophone. For a mid-​1990s revision, he switched to piano and violin. The WNET-​produced Great Performances theme has changed several times over the years; its most notable composers have been John Corigliano (b. 1938), who earned a 1988 Emmy nomination for his theme; Maurice Jarre, beginning in 1993; and John Williams, whose composition in 2009 won an Emmy for Main Title Theme Music. “It basically should be a lyrical and celebratory piece,” Williams said at the time, “that’s positive and promises something in the next hour that’s going to be exciting. I love the opportunity to frame, musically and melodically, the diverse repertoire that’s available in this program. Most serious music lovers feel indebted to Great Performances.”

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feelings for Mr. Darcy (Colin Firth) benefited from Davis’s clever approach: “I wanted the sense of a small town in 1810,” he said. “The merit lay in containing the sound. The model I started from was Beethoven’s marvelous E-​flat septet, which was written about that period. It was enormously popular at the time and I thought, ‘that’s the sound I want for the intimate scenes in this.’ ” Even the larger set-​pieces featured only 18 musicians. In addition, Davis used the fortepiano, also popular in that era. “The fortepiano produces a unique and fascinating sound, quite different from that of the modern instrument, and it was just the character of sound that I was after.” For his main theme, Davis attempted to capture the wit and vitality of the story: “I worked through something very lively and bright and then, without my being conscious of it, a slight hunting refrain crept in, which of course picks up one of the main drives of the book: the hunt for husbands. This linked to my second theme, which was marriage and affairs of the heart. Heart versus mind, practicality versus feeling—​I tried to address these two themes and to reflect these polarities in the music.” As for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the half-​hour comedy series (airing on PBS stations starting in 1974) used 30 seconds of John Philip Sousa’s march “The Liberty Bell,” composed in 1893, for its main title. It is now so associated with the Pythons’ anarchic comedy that hearing it invariably evokes laughter regardless of the performing context. Troupe member Terry Jones recalled in 2009 that it was one of three potential pieces to be played against Terry Gilliam’s amusing animated opening while production was underway in 1969. “When ‘Liberty Bell’ came up, we all said, ‘That’s it!’ None of us had heard it before, but we all thought it was great... I suppose because it’s quite jolly, but also a bit pompous. It’s ready to have the mickey taken out of it, to be defused.” Gilliam’s giant cartoon foot descending from above to rudely interrupt the march with a resounding splat proved to be the ideal introduction to the irreverent Pythons. “The Liberty Bell” continues to be played at American presidential inaugural ceremonies and, because of its association with Monty Python, may now be among Sousa’s best-​known works.

12 “This is the way”

Music for Cable and Streaming Services

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he commercial broadcast networks, and PBS, were “home” to most viewers until the 1990s. Fox joined the ranks of NBC, CBS, and ABC in 1986 and became a true competitor in the 1990s with the popular success of such shows as Married . . . with Children, The Simpsons, and The X-​Files. Movie studios Warner Bros. and Paramount launched the WB and UPN networks, respectively, in 1995; they merged to become the CW in 2006. Meanwhile, the cable universe had expanded, and its largest and most powerful channels (including premium outlets like HBO and Showtime, and basic cable networks like USA, FX, Lifetime, A&E, Sci-​Fi Channel, and others) were slowly developing their own original programming. Most of America had, by the advent of the twenty-​first century, been wired for cable, and a majority of Americans were cable subscribers. The widespread use of personal computers and the attendant rise of the internet as both a communication tool and an entertainment delivery system led to surprising new developments in the second decade of the twenty-​ first century: so-​ called streaming services (including Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Disney+​, and others) began supplying original programming for their subscribers too.

Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0013

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Curiously, producers working for the non-​broadcast entities seemed to pay more attention to the role and power of music. And as big-​screen filmmakers began to gravitate to television, finding greater artistic freedom than the medium once offered, they frequently engaged high-​ profile composers to help tell their stories. The earliest cable-​music classic was the theme for It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (1986–​1990, Showtime), the fourth-​wall-​breaking comedy starring the standup comedian (“This is the theme to Garry’s show /​the theme to Garry’s show /​Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song /​I’m almost halfway finished, how do you like it so far?”). Shandling’s co-​creator Alan Zweibel later recalled: “Together we wrote the quirky lyrics . . . in an elevator we got into on the sixth floor of a Los Angeles building. The song was complete by the time we reached the lobby.” With music by Joey Carbone (music director of the talent competition Star Search) and sung with tongue in cheek by Bill Lynch, it perfectly mocked theme-​song traditions and set the stage for Shandling’s skewering of sitcom tropes. The anthology series Tales from the Crypt (1989–​1996, HBO) involved expensive, high-​gloss adaptations of the grisly, often dark-​humored stories from the infamous EC comics of the 1950s. Movie producers Joel Silver, Robert Zemeckis, and Richard Donner were among the executive producers of this half-​hour series, which often featured top stars and directors (and, as on Amazing Stories, scores by the composers who usually worked for those directors). Upon hearing of the project, composer Danny Elfman sought out Silver and asked to write the theme. “Nobody loves monsters more than me,” Elfman explained, harking back to his childhood love of fantasy and horror and the morbid nature of some of the songs he wrote for his rock ’n’ roll band, Oingo Boingo. His intent was simply to write “something dark, creepy, and fun.” Elfman’s theme accompanied a virtuoso minute-​and-​a-​half of camerawork and special effects, as the viewer entered an old house, proceeded down torch-​lit stairways into a spooky dungeon where the ghoulish Cryptkeeper—​part skeleton, part rotting flesh—​resided, ready to introduce a new tale with bad, death-​related puns. With the sepulchral notes of an organ and the quaint sounds of a harpsichord, it began menacingly and built in intensity, yet its playful theme and amusing finale suggested a musical “wink,” reminding the viewer not to take all of this too seriously. The Tales from the Crypt theme was recorded by the Sinfonia of London during the recording of Elfman’s music for the big-​screen Batman. For HBO’s romantic comedy-​drama Sex and the City (1998–​2004)—​ starring Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, and Cynthia Nixon as single women in modern-​day Manhattan—​creator-​producer Darren Star wanted a theme that was “sexy, sophisticated, and told the audience that it was okay to laugh,” composer Douglas J. Cuomo

(b. 1958) recalled. Wandering through a New York record store, Cuomo found inspiration in the “space-​age bachelor pad” music of the 1950s and 1960s. He hired a small combo including saxophone and piano, and produced a lighthearted, Latin-​flavored theme that was immediately labeled “a home run” by the producers. Those Latin sounds, played by some of Manhattan’s best jazz musicians, infused the first season and a half of Sex and the City, which was all Cuomo actually scored. “Darren went back to HBO and asked for a bit more [money] so that we could have a live recording session every week,” Cuomo said. The theme became one of the cable channel’s most familiar themes, reprised not only in subsequent seasons but in the two big-​screen movies that eventually followed. Not every show was treated to original music, however. Larry David’s outrageous, largely improvised comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000–​, HBO) used a piece of library music written more than a quarter-​century earlier: Italian composer Luciano Michelini’s “Frolic,” originally penned for the 1974 film La Bellissima Estate but discovered by David in a California bank commercial. “There was something circus-​y about it,” David later said. “It tells the audience, ‘don’t take this seriously; this is funny.’ ” Michelini (b. 1945) called it “a cheerful march,” a happy tune featuring an unusual mix of tuba, mandolin, and banjo. “People really like it,” David added. “It just introduces the idea that you’re in for something pretty idiotic.” Crime and criminals continued to fascinate viewers, and cable offered a far wider storytelling latitude than that of network TV. So David Chase created The Sopranos (1999–​2007, HBO), about a New Jersey mobster (James Gandolfini), his wife (Edie Falco), protégé (Michael Imperioli), psychiatrist (Lorraine Bracco), and the various other mob bosses and underlings who surrounded him. The series became the first cable show to win the Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series (in 2004 and 2007), winning 19 additional Emmys during its six seasons. What was startling about The Sopranos was its complete lack of underscore. “We don’t have a composer,” producer Martin Bruestle explained midway through the series run. “David wanted music to exist where it naturally exists within the environment of the characters, not taking the dramatic beat of the scene and accentuating it with a piece of underscore.” Chase and Bruestle chose all the songs. An average of 10 master recordings per episode were licensed; as Bruestle said, “you’ll have a song that’s just supposed to be music from a radio on a kitchen counter, but if you can find a song that also accentuates something going on within the story or the dynamic in the scene, it can get very magical.” Opening each episode was “Woke Up This Morning,” a 1997 song (“you woke up this morning, got yourself a gun /​mama always said you’d be the chosen one . . .”) by British band Alabama 3.

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A different kind of drama, The Wire (2002–​2008, HBO) was a grim and gritty crime saga set in Baltimore, Maryland, its complex and interconnected worlds seen initially through the eyes of several characters, including a police detective (Dominic West) and a drug kingpin (Idris Elba). In this case, too, creator-​producer David Simon eschewed traditional underscore, although an original piece, “The Fall” by music supervisor Blake Leyh, was heard under the end titles. Leyh later won an Emmy for contributing to the sound mix on Simon’s later HBO series, the post-​ Katrina New Orleans drama Treme (2010–​2013). Simon saw The Wire as “the anti-​cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the [nonsense] police procedurals afflicting American television.” He also believed that “musical score, unless it is an earned moment, is a sign of weak storytelling. You are cueing your audience what to think and when to think it. . . . We are using music as ambient background rather than score. A way to consider this is to note that the perfect song is rarely playing at the perfect moment in real life.” Like Chase on The Sopranos, Simon chose the songs heard throughout The Wire. The series was unusual in that the same song—​Tom Waits’s 1987 “Way Down in the Hole”—​was used under the title sequence each season, yet always by a different artist (The Blind Boys of Alabama, Waits’s original, the Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, Steve Earle). The lighthearted mystery series Monk (2002–​2009, USA) won two Emmys in its first season: for Tony Shalhoub’s portrayal of the obsessive-​compulsive San Francisco detective, and for Jeff Beal’s infectious, jazzy guitar theme. Beal (b. 1963) was a top jazz trumpeter and classically trained composer who had written an acclaimed score for the film Pollock and would go on to prominence in both TV and documentary music. His theme was inspired by a Django Reinhardt piece in the temporary score for the pilot. “I was consciously trying to write what I would describe as an annoyingly memorable melody,” Beal said. “It’s like Monk in the sense that, when he fixates on something, his obsession becomes at the expense of everything else.” He went on to score more than 120 episodes of the series, including a haunting melody for Monk’s late wife Trudy. The producers replaced Beal’s theme in the second season with a new song by Randy Newman (“It’s a Jungle Out There”). “I liked the show,” Newman later said, “so I wrote a song befitting the character.” Newman’s amusing tune (“it’s a jungle out there /​disorder and confusion everywhere /​and no one seems to care”) received the Emmy the very next year, marking the only time in the history of the Emmys that two different themes for the same series have won. Newman won yet another Emmy for a second Monk song, “When I’m Gone,” written for the final episode in 2009. Dexter (2006–​2013, Showtime) relied on compelling music to heighten its offbeat premise: an analyst in the Miami-​Dade Police Department’s forensics lab (Michael C. Hall) is also a serial killer, murdering miscreants who

deserve to die but who have somehow eluded prosecution or imprisonment. English composer Rolfe Kent (b. 1963), who had done such quirky films as Legally Blonde and Sideways, recalled: “The pilot was beautiful and moody, with a sophistication that really appealed to me. [The producers] asked for it to have a Caribbean or Cuban quality to it, but also to be entertaining and light, with a slight twist, a hint of darkness.” Kent, who loves exotic instruments, played Turkish saz, the Andean charango, and ukelele himself in what he termed a “swung reggae” style. It was Emmy-​nominated in 2007. Adding to the intrigue was the atmospheric weekly underscore of Daniel Licht (1957–​2017), whose background in horror (Hellraiser IV, Thinner) gave him a head start in the “creepy” department, but whose ability to convey charm and the musical colors of south Florida—​via everything from acoustic guitars to Balinese gamelan, hammered dulcimer, and wordless vocals—​found a home in Dexter. As the seasons progressed, Licht added other unusual sounds (bones, knives, saws, scissors, duct tape, wine glasses, didgeridoo, Irish harp, and other instruments) to his palette for an even more appropriately macabre sound. Breaking Bad (2008–​2013, AMC) was a different kind of crime drama altogether. Bryan Cranston played high-​school chemistry teacher Walter White, who decides to start making serious money by manufacturing crystal methamphetamine, eventually becoming a powerful drug lord in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Created by former X-​Files writer Vince Gilligan, Breaking Bad eventually became one of the most critically acclaimed series in TV history, earning 16 Emmy awards (including Outstanding Drama Series in 2013 and 2014). Composer Dave Porter (b. 1972) made a single nod to the Southwestern locale: the use of dobro, a resonator guitar, in the series theme. “I didn’t want to pigeonhole it in New Mexico, because the show was much more universal than that. Walter is everyman—​at least, everyman at his breaking point.” The dramatic score was often textural, rarely utilizing recurring themes or recognizable musical instruments. “I wanted to do it in a non-​traditional, non-​orchestral way,” Porter explained, “because the show itself was so unexpected, so jarring, and there was clearly, from the very beginning, so much about Walter that wasn’t what it seemed.” Porter utilized his collection of vintage synthesizers and world-​music instruments, but often invited percussionists and other players into his studio to record musical ideas, to which he would then “apply whatever processing, or make digital or analog enhancements, that I could.” He did use Aztec-​inspired percussion sounds whenever the series crossed the border into Mexico; and used a five-​note riff played on a Japanese koto “every time Walter put on his black hat and became Heisenberg [White’s drug-​dealing alter ego].” Another instance of a show unlikely to be seen on a broadcast network was Six Feet Under (2001–​2005, HBO), created by American Beauty writer

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Alan Ball. The series was about a family funeral business, and every episode began with an unexpected death. Stories centered on the brothers (Peter Krause, Michael C. Hall) who operated the business, their mother and sister (Frances Conroy, Lauren Ambrose), their late father (Richard Jenkins), and others around them. The unusually thoughtful scripts dealt with mortality, grief, and, inevitably, how one lives one’s life in the face of all of this darkness (it was, Ball later said, “a show about America’s relationship with death”). Composer Thomas Newman (b. 1955), who scored American Beauty but who rarely worked in television (themes for Against the Law, 1990, and Boston Public, 2000, both on Fox), won an Emmy and two Grammy awards for his memorable theme, set against imagery connected with death, embalming, and burial (including dying flowers and a black crow pausing on a tombstone). Newman’s music came first: “I wanted to capture some of the show’s humor, wonder, and profundity,” he said, writing a piece for English horn, pizzicato strings, and the composer’s trademark unusual and hard-​to-​place musical sounds. Richard Marvin, who often played keyboards for Newman in the 1980s, scored all five seasons of Six Feet Under, trying (with just pianos and synthesizers) to be “meaningful and emotional but not in an overly melodramatic way.” Newman returned to high-​ profile cable drama with a compelling theme for Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom (2012–​2014, HBO), starring Jeff Daniels as a network news anchor. Fast-​moving piano and string figures—​ set against photos of such broadcast-​ journalism greats as Edward R. Murrow, Walter Cronkite, and Chet Huntley—​suggested the urgency of newsroom activity and hinted at the importance of this honorable (indeed, indispensable) profession. Newman might have won a second Emmy, but the theme was not entered for TV Academy consideration in its eligibility year. Mad Men (2007–​2015, AMC) was another acclaimed, serialized drama that relied heavily on songs, especially to set the time and place (New York in the 1960s). Jon Hamm starred as the creative director at a Madison Avenue advertising agency, and the series follows his personal and professional lives, along with those of his secretary (Elisabeth Moss) and his fellow ad men. It won 16 Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series for four consecutive seasons (2008–​2012), and was the first basic cable series to claim that honor. Its striking, 40-​second main-​title sequence—​featuring a silhouetted man falling down the side of a skyscraper adorned with iconic 1960s ad imagery, yet ending with that man comfortably seated, cigarette in hand—​was scored with “A Beautiful Mine,” a 2006 song from hip-​hop producer RJD2 whose strings-​and-​drums track proved an ideal complement to the visuals. (The string passage, music buffs eventually discovered, was sampled from Enoch Light’s 1959 recording of the standard “Autumn Leaves.”)

David Carbonara (b. 1957) composed a nostalgic score that was firmly rooted in the 1960s, with jazzy cocktail-​lounge numbers and bossa novas galore, always with “live musicians” (as opposed to sampled sounds, then commonplace in TV scoring) as requested by series creator-​producer Matthew Weiner. Carbonara, a former jazz trombonist, was inspired by the jazz greats of the era, including Duke Ellington, Gil Evans, and Oliver Nelson. He augmented a small jazz combo with strings and woodwinds for more dramatic moments. “I just wanted it to be timeless,” Carbonara explained. “Real strings and real woodwinds will stand up. There’s a lush sound I grew up listening to in the sixties. I played in big bands where the chords were thick. “Everything was so quiet in Mad Men, it was so difficult to come in [with music],” he added. “What I learned was, the time to enter is not the big moment when Don Draper realizes something—​it’s when the audience realizes it. That’s when to sneak in.” Carbonara contributed an average of three to six minutes per episode, as much as 13 minutes for season finales. In the opening sequence of House of Cards (2013–​2018, Netflix), shadows overtake familiar Washington, D.C., landmarks, and night falls over the nation’s capital. Traffic continues to rush through the streets, and an inverted American flag (a “signal of dire distress” as stated in the U.S. Flag Code) appears along with the series title. Based on the 1990 BBC miniseries, it was a contemporary political thriller about power-​hungry and vengeful Frank Underwood (Kevin Spacey), his ambitious wife Claire (Robin Wright), and their ruthless, conspiracy-​filled drive for the White House.

Jeff Beal conducting House of Cards.

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Composer Jeff Beal worked closely with pilot director David Fincher and writer-​producer Beau Willimon to create the sound of this disturbing narrative, starting with the theme. It was an especially long minute and 45 seconds, featuring an electric bass, distant trumpet, strings, piano, and percussion. Fincher asked for “a call to arms,” Beal said, and decided to create a theme that was anthemic yet “dark and twisted.” For the score, Beal created a piano-​based “puppet master” subtheme for Underwood, and a strange, angst-​filled love theme for Frank and Claire. Starting with the second season, Beal added an operatic voice (his wife, professional singer Joan Sapiro Beal), in keeping with the larger-​ than-​life, Shakespearean drama of the series. By the third season, Beal said, there were “big contrasts. Frank is president now, so we’re dealing in a wider arena internationally. A lot of times I’ll have music that’s fully orchestrated and string-​driven, and sometimes brutally simple music, like a solo piano.” Added producer Willimon: “We often whiplash from one emotional state to one that’s completely different in the same frame. Music helps us make those transitions, helps establish the pace, helps us uncover the emotional truths of our characters in ways that can amplify or add more facets. Jeff ’s not just tackling each scene as it comes, he’s looking at each episode as a totality, thinking about the emotional thrust of that episode; then he’s doing that on a larger scale, thinking about a trajectory of music for the entire season.” Beal operated like most composers in twenty-​first-​century TV and independent film: on a “package” basis that required him to compose, orchestrate, record, mix, and deliver all of the music for a single fee. He even recorded a 17-​to 26-​piece string section in his house, conducting his score to picture. “It is very unconventional,” he said, “but it’s way less stressful for me. Aside from the money that is saved, it’s also time. So many steps in production workflow are mitigated and streamlined.” Beal called it “a dream job,” underscoring complex political and personal agendas for which music provided “energy and subtext.” Already a three-​time Primetime Emmy winner, he won two more for his House of Cards music (for episodes in the third and fifth seasons) and four additional nominations (for episodes in the first, second, and sixth seasons, and for the theme). A very different sound greeted viewers of another political drama, The Americans (2013–​2018, FX), which starred Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys as undercover Soviet agents posing as an American couple during the waning days of the Cold War in the 1980s. Composer Nathan Barr (b. 1973), inspired by the musically advanced David Shire scores of the 1970s (notably The Conversation and The Taking of Pelham 1-​2-​3), created mystery and paranoia via piano, prepared piano, guitar, and cello, all of which he played himself. “There is a very open sound to the score, with the inner plucked strings of the piano, something that evokes Russia

without being overtly Russian.” The fast-​paced opening title theme (an Emmy nominee in the series’ first season) featured hammered dulcimer and piano. “We were careful not to go full ‘Red Army choir,’ ” Barr said. The use of period songs “defined the place and the time, and the score was about the emotional journey of the characters.” In 2003, cable’s Sci-​Fi Channel remade Battlestar Galactica as a four-​hour miniseries, reimagining the 1978 space opera with a new starship commander (Edward James Olmos), the highest-​ranking surviving government official (Mary McDonnell), a traitorous scientist (James Callis), a Cylon with human appearance (Tricia Helfer), and two hotshot pilots (Jamie Bamber, Katee Sackhoff). Richard Gibbs (b. 1955) scored it in an unexpected manner: “a zen approach,” Gibbs called it, eschewing the traditional symphonic form in favor of a minimalist, world-​music blend of ethnic instruments, synths, and some Western orchestra. Japanese taiko drums were an unusual choice for the battle scenes. “What seemed to work,” Gibbs said, “was the sense of the primitive without a specific location.” Gibbs’s assistant, Bear McCreary (b. 1979), who handled much of the percussion writing for the miniseries, became composer for the subsequent Galactica series (2005–​2009). Gibbs’s series theme used a vocal rendition of the Hindu “Gayatri Mantra,” one of many multicultural nods in seasons to come. The revised Galactica earned critical praise for its writing, dealing with political, military, and even religious issues in thoughtful and provocative ways. McCreary’s scores became a part of the producers’ overall vision. “This show needed to set itself apart from all other space operas, especially the old version of the show, so traditional orchestral writing was

Bear McCreary.

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out,” McCreary said. “The other idea was that the story is about a ragtag fleet of ships searching for Earth, and there are all these hints that our histories are somehow connected, that we are related, so what I wanted to do was use very ancient, earthly sounds. The percussive element is very aggressive, tribal, and primitive. The drums add a sense of urgency and desperation. The melodic instruments help tie their history with our own.” Season one featured vocals in Italian, Latin, and Gaelic. Season two included Uilleann pipes, duduk (the Armenian double-​reed woodwind instrument), electric guitar, electric violin, and even conventional string quartet. For season three, McCreary added such exotic stringed instruments as Chinese erhu and Middle Eastern tambur; wrote an original piano sonata; and arranged Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” for a startling season finale. The fourth and final season featured more ethnic sounds from the Indian bansuri flute, Japanese biwa and shamisen; and what McCreary called a “Diaspora Oratorio” with Latin lyrics as the warring factions finally find Earth. He even found occasion to reference Stu Phillips’s original Galactica theme, initially as the Colonial Anthem and in the series finale. The horror genre once again flourished on television, and composers found fresh ways to convey the sense of dread and terror via music. The title sequence of True Blood (2008–​2014, HBO) featured the Jace Everett song “Bad Things,” but composer Nathan Barr found offbeat sounds to accompany telepath Sookie (Anna Paquin) and her vampire friends, including the banjo-​like Turkish cumbus saz, the inner strings of a dismantled piano, and glass harmonica, in addition to the more traditional cello and guitar (playing, as on The Americans, virtually all the instruments himself). He also earned an Emmy nomination for his eerie, melancholy theme for the series Hemlock Grove (2013–​2015, Netflix). For the zombie-​apocalypse series The Walking Dead (2010–​2022, AMC), Bear McCreary found that different producers demanded different musical approaches as the seasons progressed. “It started off very minimal, very Bernard Herrmann–​influenced, a small string group with elements from the location [Georgia], a lot of bluegrass influences,” he said. Then, under a second producer, the score was “bigger, more dissonant, and there was more music.” Later, a new producer “was fascinated by color, particularly synthesizers, pulses, and screeching feedback.” But, he added, “there was no point at which the score radically changed. It gradually evolved, some due to narrative need, some due to the tastes of a new showrunner.” Penny Dreadful (2014–​2016, Showtime), with its Gothic horror elements, as apparent in its creepy opening titles (featuring bats, spiders, scorpions, and copious amounts of blood), was especially moody. Timothy Dalton, Eva Green, and Josh Harnett starred in this tale of nineteenth-​ century London that cleverly intertwined the stories of Dracula, Frankenstein, Dorian Gray, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

The music of Polish-​born composer Abel Korzeniowski (b. 1972) was a key element in this Grand Guignol mix, and the TV Academy honored him with three Emmy nominations in recognition (for his theme and scores in the first and second seasons). Korzeniowski defined his work as one of “dark beauty. It’s an exploration of different shades of what we consider beautiful and charming and alluring. It’s the sweetness of the poison.” A second-​season highlight was his “Melting Waltz,” a classic European-​ style dance whose later incarnation as a gramophone recording recalled Bob Cobert’s 1969 Dark Shadows tune, “Quentin’s Theme.” Written and orchestrated for 35-​piece orchestra, Korzeniowski’s Penny Dreadful was, as he put it, “a huge artistic adventure.” The most popular of all the cable fantasy shows turned out to be Game of Thrones (2011–​2019, HBO), a serialized adaptation of author George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Fire and Ice novels about warring clans in an ancient kingdom where dragons exist and magic is real. Audiences flocked to the series in greater numbers each season, and Game of Thrones ultimately eclipsed ER and Hill Street Blues for most prime-​time Emmys ever won by a drama (59, out of 164 nominations). German-​Iranian composer Ramin Djawadi (b. 1974) saw the pilot just six weeks before the series’ scheduled premiere and, he recalled, “I was so inspired that the theme just poured out of me. It came pretty quickly.” That piece—​set against an imaginative 3-​D rendering of a map of the fictional lands—​soon became one of the decade’s most familiar and beloved

  Ramin Djawadi.

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TV tunes, so much so that amateurs and professionals alike raced to post their cover versions on YouTube (a cello version exceeded 26 million views, a vocal version 15 million, a violin version 10 million, even one “sung” by a meowing Siamese cat topped 5 million). Producer-​writers David Benioff and D. B. Weiss felt that “a full-​on, heavy orchestral score didn’t feel appropriate for the dirtiness and grimness of the show’s world, but period instruments didn’t seem able to provide the weight and power we wanted.” Djawadi decided to focus on cello (“expressive, but dark”), tribal-​sounding drums and percussion (“it’s the drive of the show, very propelling”) and hammered dulcimer (a folk instrument that might evoke ancient times). All nine seasons of Game of Thrones music were recorded in the Czech Republic. While the main theme and variations were often heard during the first season, as the story became more complicated, and murders and betrayals mounted, Djawadi created numerous subsidiary themes (for House Stark and House Lannister, which fought for control of Westeros; for “mother of dragons” Daenerys Targaryen [Emilia Clarke]; and for other characters). “The story keeps evolving,” Djawadi said, “and the unpredictability of it pushes me in new directions with the music.” The tone varied from mystic to savage, tragic to powerful, as the shocking violence and battles for supremacy continued. Djawadi set author Martin’s poetry to music in the second season, so the song “The Rains of Castamere” became the Lannister anthem; its use triggered the infamous Red Wedding of the series’ third season. Later highlights included “Mhysa,” the choral finale of that third season, sung in Daenerys’s language of Valyrian; and “Light of the Seven,” a 10-​minute sequence featuring passacaglia-​style piano, organ, and boy soloists that climaxed in the destruction of the Great Sept of Baelor in the sixth season finale. Benioff and Weiss alerted Djawadi to major developments in advance, so that he could plant musical seeds that would pay off later. He hinted at the music of Daenerys and Jon Snow (Kit Harrington) early in the seventh season, but it wouldn’t flower in full until their love scene in that season finale. The eighth and final season featured “The Night King,” a nine-​minute, piano-​driven sequence that dramatized the seemingly inevitable victory of the army of the dead; and “A Song of Ice and Fire,” with both a 40-​voice mixed choir and 12-​voice children’s choir accompanying the 60-​piece orchestra in the final moments of the series. Djawadi was Emmy-​nominated for music in the fourth season and won twice, for the seventh and eighth seasons. He conducted his Game of Thrones music in a series of live concerts around the world beginning in 2017. “I feel like it really shaped my career, shaped me as an artist and as a composer in terms of defining my style,” he said near the end of the series. “I always try to imagine, what if we just turn the picture off? Will the music tell the story, tell us how to feel for these characters? There’s an

emotional connection to the story and the characters. Maybe that’s why it resonates.” He was nominated twice more for another HBO series, the futuristic Westworld (2016–​). The series expanded on Michael Crichton’s 1973 film about a theme park where visitors interact with androids in an Old West setting. “The player piano in the show was a big part, so we knew we wanted piano,” Djawadi recalled of his initial discussions. Skeleton hands appeared to play the tune in the opening titles, designed and animated to match the melody. Weekly scores featured piano, acoustic guitars, and (because so much of the backdrop was high-​tech) synthesizers. TV continued to revisit old series, including a seventh Star Trek series and a reboot of an Irwin Allen classic. Star Trek: Discovery (2017–​, Paramount+​) was set a decade prior to the events of the original 1966 series, its lead a human Starfleet officer (Sonequa Martin-​Green) who was raised by Spock’s father Sarek on Vulcan. Composer Jeff Russo (b. 1969), a former rock musician who won an Emmy for his eclectic music for Fargo (2014–​, FX), became the latest composer to tackle music for the Federation-​versus-​Klingon world invented by Gene Roddenberry. Russo recalled talking with the producers about the idea of Star Trek, “which is exploration and harmony and discord between people and species,” he says. “The overall theme is that we’re all one. What could I do to embody that in music?” He remembered the idea of “common tone” in music theory: “If every chord I played shared one single note, how could I fashion that and then write a melody on top of it? The idea

Jeff Russo.

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of a commonality in people and species, I wanted to apply to music.” (The common note turned out to be F.) He bookended his new music with Alexander Courage’s original Enterprise fanfare so that the theme would combine an air of mystery, a propulsive rhythm, and a hopeful feeling, while reminding viewers that this was still Star Trek. Discovery became the first of the live-​action Trek series to have a single composer writing every score. He had a 64-​piece orchestra for the pilot and found a new way to musically treat the warlike Klingons. “It’s not all gloom and doom and marching drums,” he said. Instead, he manipulated guttural vocal noises and added ethnic wind instruments for a unique sonic signature for the race. “We don’t need to play bad-​guy music,” he said. For the new Lost in Space (2018–​2021, Netflix), composer Christopher Lennertz (b. 1972) incorporated John Williams’s original theme into his own musical signature. The new series follows roughly the original outline (shipwrecked family facing hostile conditions on an uncharted planet) but without the campy theatrics that marred the original. The more serious tone appealed to Lennertz, no stranger to televised sci-​fi and fantasy. His music for Supernatural (2005–​2020, WB, CW) was appropriately strange; for Revolution (2012–​2014, NBC), post-​apocalyptic; and for Agent Carter (2015–​2016, ABC), a jazzy 1940s vibe. Lennertz’s own themes included a new series signature plus motifs for the Robinson family, the mysterious Dr. Smith, the robot who befriends young Will Robinson, and the Robinson children. He recorded with the Philharmonia Orchestra at London’s Abbey Road, although quieter cues, often featuring piano, synth, ethnic-​music soloists or vocals, were recorded separately in the U.S. “It’s unabashedly emotional, very testosterone-​driven when it needs to be, but very poignant when it comes to the kids and the family,” Lennertz said. Period series demanded even more of their composers, as the musical needs often extended to acknowledging the time and place. Writer-​producer David Milch’s profane Western Deadwood (2004–​ 2006, HBO)—​ set in Dakota Territory of 1876, with Ian McShane as a saloonkeeper and Timothy Olyphant as the sheriff—​opened with shots of a lone horse galloping through the woods, interspersed with random images of wagon wheels rolling through mud, men panning for gold, cards being turned, and whiskey being poured. David Schwartz (Northern Exposure) recalled finding that main title “so inspiring, I sat down with a Weissenborn guitar, which is like a Hawaiian lap slide guitar made out of koa with a hollow neck, and played. I started writing, that fiddle melody came out, and I just kept on following it. I wrote a middle part, with a harmonium and a duduk, and it just really worked.” Schwartz’s Deadwood theme was Emmy-​nominated in the series’ first season. Rome (2005–​2007, HBO) boasted a brilliantly animated title sequence that imagined the graffiti on Roman walls in the first century bc coming to life. And again, HBO offered a minute and 40 seconds to display the

names of the actors and creators, allowing composer Jeff Beal to set the stage with appropriately exotic sounds. HBO did not want the classic, big-​orchestra approach of a Miklós Rózsa (as in Quo Vadis or Ben-​Hur), Beal said. “We don’t know a lot about what their music might have sounded like, but we do know quite a bit from research and artifacts what instruments were used at that time. I also used a broader geographic region as a starting point. The Roman Empire was immense—​all of Europe, the Middle East, Egypt and North Africa—​so I assembled as many instruments as I could.” That battery of instruments (many of which Beal himself learned to play) included such stringed instruments as the Middle Eastern oud and rebab, wind instruments like the Armenian duduk and Turkish zurna, and percussion including the frame drum. “It was very much a gritty, violent, passionate, pre-​Christian society, so I wanted the rawness of those real instruments. You want to feel the dirt on the floor,” Beal said. Recorders, and the occasional strings and brass, were also heard, and Beal received three more Emmy nominations for his music (the theme and an episode score in each season). Showtime, too, attracted audiences to historical dramas rife with sex and violence: The Tudors (2007–​2010), starring Jonathan Rhys-​Meyers as English King Henry VIII, and The Borgias (2011–​2013), with Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander VI. Both earned Emmys for Canadian composer Trevor Morris (b. 1970) for main-​title theme music. “We didn’t know, at the time, that we were reinventing the costume drama,” Morris said of The Tudors, “making it sexy and modern and relevant. What I wanted to do was not be a musicologist, and say what fifteenth-​century England sounded like. I took the instruments that interested my ear—​dulcimer, hurdy-​gurdy, lyre, things of that time that spoke to me. With a base of those, I used the orchestra—​mostly strings, some French horns and some choir—​and it became a melting pot to try and tell the best story I could.” Morris brought a contemporary musical language while flavoring the work with period sounds. “I always brought a modern angle to all the period pieces,” he said. “The main title has a full-​on drum loop; it has no business being in that piece and yet it works somehow.” The musical highlight of the series was Jane Seymour’s theme in the third season and, because Morris knew her storyline would be both significant and poignant, he convinced the producers to underwrite an orchestra-​and-​choir session in Prague, the Czech Republic location of so many modern film and TV recordings. He struggled with her theme for months. “She needed a melody, and it needed to be expressed on a simple instrument or as a requiem, beautiful and sad and all of the things I thought Jane Seymour was. We actually recorded all of that before they started shooting,” he said. Morris set the opening of Neil Jordan’s The Borgias—​a series of images of blood-​spattered Renaissance-​era paintings—​to the sounds of

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a period-​appropriate lute and a choir intoning dramatic passages from the Latin Mass. In addition to his 2011 Emmy win for its theme, he was nominated for his scores for the final episodes of the second and third season. He was also Emmy-​nominated for another period production, the eight-​part Ken Follett miniseries The Pillars of the Earth (2010, Starz) set during twelfth-​century England, and reached even farther back to the eighth century to create a primitive, tribal-​drum backdrop for Vikings (2013–​2020, History). The sequel to Pillars was World Without End (2012, Starz), another eight-​part miniseries, set in fourteenth-​century England, and it won an Emmy for Canadian-​born composer Mychael Danna (b. 1958). He also won an Academy Award for his multicultural musical backdrop for Life of Pi (composed in the same year). He attempted to characterize the period with “an archaic quality,” he said, not dissimilar to the music he had earlier written with his brother Jeff Danna (b. 1964) for Camelot (2011, Starz), which had earned them an Emmy nomination. The Camelot score was especially impressive for its vast amounts of choral music, often in Latin. “We were trying to conjure the feeling of the Dark Ages, with its superstition and ignorance, and Christianity the light of the era,” Mychael Danna said. Conceding that the use of an orchestra was anachronistic, he pointed out that replicating the actual music of fifth-​century England “would have been very primitive and completely unhelpful for telling the story.” In a span of less than a year and a half, composer Bear McCreary became the musical architect of three more cable series, all of them period pieces and all distinguished by fascinating musical choices: Da Vinci’s Demons (2013–​2015, Starz), Black Sails (2014–​2017, Starz), and Outlander (2014–​, Starz). Da Vinci’s Demons took a fictionalized look at the young Renaissance genius (Tom Riley) and imagined him mixed him up with Italy’s powerful Medici family. McCreary’s concept was to employ early-​music instruments (viola da gamba, crumhorn, lute, Celtic harp, natural trumpet, hurdy-​ gurdy) but in a more modern framework, using orchestra, string quartet, and even synthesizers. His main theme was a musical palindrome (a melody that could be played forward or backward), suggestive of the artist’s famous “mirror writing.” The first half, he felt, was “heroic and strong, ideal for his moments of brilliance,” while the backward portion was “mysterious and enigmatic, better suited for his vulnerability and self-​doubt.” Introduced in the animated main-​title sequence by viola da gamba and lutes, this clever and memorable theme won McCreary a 2013 Emmy. McCreary’s theme for the Medicis drew on the modal music of the fifteenth century. Black Sails was an eighteenth-​century pirate saga but, rather than emulate the classic swashbuckling sound of the movies, McCreary decided to “create music that sounds improvised by an exhausted crew aboard a ship navigating choppy waters.” He began with two instruments he

played himself, accordion and hurdy-​gurdy, adding other “historically MUSIC FOR CABLE accurate sounds: string quartet, rhythm guitar trio, percussion duo, and AND STREAMING various historical solo instruments” including Latin American quena 415 flute, mandolin, dulcimer, and both bodhrán drums and bones for percussion. McCreary’s sea-​chanty theme, including raucous male vocal quartet (“a sound audibly raw, filthy and salty,” McCreary said), was Emmy-​ nominated in 2014. Outlander was the most audacious concept of the three: a World War II nurse (Caitriona Balfe) time-​travels back to eighteenth-​century Scotland, where she falls in with a band of rebel Highlanders, marrying one of them (Sam Heughan). For the title sequence, McCreary adapted an old Scottish folk tune, “The Skye Boat Song,” with lyrics by Robert Louis Stevenson and sung by McCreary’s wife Raya Yarbrough. Again, he began with folk instruments appropriate to the locale: “Fiddle, bagpipes, accordion, pennywhistle and bodhrán form the backbone of the score, supported by orchestral strings, haunting vocals, and larger percussion,” he explained. In the second season, the characters find themselves at Versailles and the court of King Louis XV so, McCreary said, “I spent the summer in a crash course studying French baroque music.” Harpsichord, baroque trumpets, timpani, and a larger string ensemble were added. McCreary earned another Emmy nomination for his first-​season Outlander music. Quality made-​ for-​ television films and high-​ profile miniseries shifted mostly to the cable services in the late 1990s and early 2000s. HBO’s first two great miniseries—​From the Earth to the Moon (1998) and Band of Brothers (2001)—​were executive produced by Tom Hanks, following up on landmark American moments that he had previously explored in the movies Apollo 13 and Saving Private Ryan. From the Earth to the Moon was a 12-​hour chronicle of the Apollo space program that took astronauts to the lunar surface in only a decade; Hanks directed the first hour and wrote four more, including the finale. Michael Kamen (1948–​2003), the American-​born, London-​based composer of Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, composed the heroic theme and scored three key episodes (the first, the last, and the Apollo 8 story, for which he was Emmy-​nominated). “Tom Hanks was wonderfully motivating,” the composer said. “I’m an inveterate astronomer since I was about five years old. I could really relate to the fantastic rush of energy that comes when you think of making that voyage.” The other episodes were scored by equally stellar feature-​film composers: James Newton Howard, Mark Isham, Marc Shaiman, Brad Fiedel, Mark Mancina, and Mason Daring. Band of Brothers was much more personal to Kamen. This time Steven Spielberg joined Hanks as an executive producer, and HBO reportedly spent $120 million to adapt Stephen E. Ambrose’s book about the soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division during World War II; critics hailed it as

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Michael Kamen.

one of the most realistic depictions of the realities of war ever seen on TV. This time, instead of just doing three episodes, Kamen told Hanks he “wanted to do them all.” “I wanted to write music for my father’s twin brother, who was killed in Germany about three weeks before the end of the war,” Kamen said, “a requiem for an uncle I had never met. The trauma of losing his brother Paul is something that my father lives with every day of his life. I wanted to make the music as meaningful as that.” The result was one of Kamen’s most heartfelt compositions, which one critic described as “music of heartbreaking melancholy . . . far from the brash martial triumphalism that one might expect from an American war story.” It was hard to find the brass and drumbeats in Kamen’s score; instead, the music reflected the emotions and experiences of the soldiers in Europe, from the terror of parachuting into Normandy on D-​Day to the discovery of the concentration camps. “This war was a real tragedy in the entire world and in our lives,” Kamen said. Blake Neely, who orchestrated for Kamen, remembered the composer insisting “he would not score the battle scenes because music would either deter attention from, lessen the tension of, or romanticize, the horrors of war. Rather, he wanted the score to ground the emotion of the soldiers’ personal story.” Added his daughter Zoe Kamen: “I think he felt that if he could express the true emotions that war brings with it, the loss

that people felt, in his own way he could contribute and make people remember why to avoid it.” The production won seven Emmys, including Outstanding Miniseries, and was nominated for 13 more—​but not, shockingly, for either Kamen’s theme or his scores, one of many black marks on the history of the Emmys for music. Nine years later, Neely returned to the war scene as one of a trio of composers for The Pacific (2010, HBO), a companion piece to Band of Brothers, set in the Pacific theater of World War II operations. Oscar winner Hans Zimmer (b. 1957) and Geoff Zanelli (b. 1974) collaborated. “We all wrote themes, and then Geoff and I split it up and scored the 10 episodes,” Neely recalled. “Hans would help produce the cues at the sessions and give advice during the spotting and writing process.” Neely conducted a 75-​piece orchestra in the score. As with Band of Brothers, the tone was one of dignity and reverence for those lost in battle. All three composers were Emmy-​nominated. Thomas Newman composed a powerful score for Angels in America (2003, HBO), the six-​hour adaptation of Tony Kushner’s Tony-​and Pulitzer Prize–​ winning play about homosexuality and AIDS in the Reagan era. Directed by Mike Nichols, the highly acclaimed miniseries won 11 Emmys including outstanding miniseries (as well as statues for direction, Kushner’s script, and for the acting of Meryl Streep, Al Pacino, Mary-​Louise Parker, and Jeffrey Wright).

  Thomas Newman.

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Newman said, at the time, that his music “wraps its arms around a broad array of human emotion, from despair to guarded optimism, and to give play to Mike Nichols’s spare irony and enduring humanism.” He spent seven months writing approximately 110 minutes of music based on half a dozen major themes. “Evocative,” “soaring and wistful,” “shimmering,” “remarkable,” and “extraordinary” were among the words used by critics in praising his work. Curiously, in his initial discussions with Nichols about what the music needed to accomplish, the director often referenced All About Eve, the classic film score Newman’s father Alfred had written over half a century earlier—​“in that All About Eve was this very pithy, smart, scathing reaction to the theater world, and yet the score was romantic. He thought there was value in that relationship, between music and idea, and I had to agree with him.” Newman discovered new musical challenges in Angels in America: writing “a Bach-​like piece for orchestra and choir for the first appearance of the angel,” and perhaps most startlingly, music for “an angel making love in midair to a man dying of AIDS as she bursts into flames and says ‘Amen.’ That was discussed at great length with Nichols: the sense of almost parody, to become Wagnerian as an approach to angelic erotic sex.” Newman’s stunning orchestral and choral work (recorded over five months with an orchestra of 79 and a choir of 46) was certainly among the most musically and dramatically impressive works ever created for the medium . . . and yet it wasn’t even nominated for an Emmy. The resulting scandal within the music branch (“that score was just amazing, I can’t believe it wasn’t nominated,” said a music nominee that year) pointed up serious flaws in the voting process, which officials sought to correct in subsequent years. Nichols, at least, cited “Tom Newman’s beautiful music” during his acceptance speech, and the applause that followed his mention indicated that many in the audience shared his view of the composer’s contribution. The Emmy snub, luckily, was countered by the Recording Academy, which nominated the Angels in America soundtrack album for a Grammy. In the science-​fiction realm, few projects were more eagerly awaited than Dune (2000, Sci-​Fi), which took six hours to explore Frank Herbert’s epic political, spiritual, and fantasy adventure that moviegoers generally think was botched by David Lynch in the 1984 film. New Zealand composer Graeme Revell (b. 1955), known for such film scores as The Crow and The Saint, found just the right sounds for the desert planet Arrakis, the narcotic spice Melange, the factions battling to control it, the planet’s giant sandworms, and the story’s hero Paul Atreides (Alec Newman). Director John Harrison wanted “a lot of different colors and different textures” and not a romantic Star Wars–​style score. “I was really focused on the spiritual aspects,” Revell explained. “We used some Armenian

instruments, plus others from across the Middle East. We also used a few from the southern republics of what used to be the USSR, places like Kazakhstan and so on. We had a singer from Lebanon . . . not trying to be too specifically ethnic, but we wanted to remind people that we were in a different environment.” He added electronic elements to the more traditional orchestra and often eerie choral passages. The result was strangely timeless and exotic. The score was recorded in Prague, as was the six-​hour sequel, Children of Dune (2003, Sci-​Fi). Composer Brian Tyler—​years before he would tackle such blockbuster films as Iron Man 3 and Avengers: Age of Ultron—​wrote a stirring march for House Atreides, played percussion and various ethnic instruments, supplied his own vocals, and even wrote a song, “Inama Nushif,” in the Fremen language invented by Herbert in the novels. Composer Laura Karpman toiled consistently in television from 1989, doing stellar work on such major projects as the six-​hour Sally Field miniseries A Woman of Independent Means (1995, NBC). Dividing her time between commercial projects and concert music (gaining wide notice for her Langston Hughes–​inspired multimedia Ask Your Mama), she eventually became the leading voice for women media composers, co-​founding the Alliance for Women Film Composers and becoming the first female music governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. For the science-​fiction series Odyssey 5 (2002, Showtime), Karpman composed “this low, poignant music . . . a sound that would be big but different,” with an unusual ensemble that included celli, French horns, wooden flute, duduk, prepared piano, and countertenor. She earned an Emmy nomination for her pilot score. But it was the 10-​part, Steven Spielberg–​produced miniseries Taken (2002, Sci-​Fi) that demonstrated her ability to powerfully combine the

Laura Karpman.

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tonal with the atonal. Taken (which starred a young Dakota Fanning) was a 20-​hour story about three families affected over five decades by the 1947 Roswell UFO incident. With a 40-​piece orchestra at her disposal, she searched for “a musical language that was neo-​[Charles] Ivesian. I began to think of ways to incorporate American folk music and classical music from the second half of the twentieth century,” she said. Its highlights might easily have formed a concert work programmed by a major American symphony orchestra, yet it fulfilled the miniseries’ dramatic needs and was, as producer Les Bohem said, “full of dreams and longing and a sense of beauty and of loss.” Ancient Camelot, as viewed from a feminist perspective, was the subject of the four-​hour The Mists of Avalon (2001, TNT), lushly and colorfully scored by Lee Holdridge, who had been down the ancient-​civilization route before (from The Beastmaster to Wizards and Warriors). The mini got good reviews and became one of the year’s biggest successes on cable. “They didn’t want the usual King Arthur score,” Holdridge recalled. “It is symphonic, but I mixed a little of that modal singing quality, and a bit of mythological feel” via various ethnic instruments from around the world: the bowed Indian esraj, Bolivian flutes, Celtic and Scottish pipes. And because director Uli Edel wanted a voice in the score, Holdridge discovered Hampshire-​born New Age artist Aeone, who added vocals she later described as “ranging from mystical etherea to emotional pagan keening” for an otherworldly feel. “I loved weaving a woman’s voice throughout the score,” Holdridge said. “It brings a personal quality, an intimacy. In a way, she’s like the inner voice of Morgaine (Julianna Margulies), and that to me captures what the film is about.” The Mists of Avalon was nominated as Outstanding Miniseries and Holdridge received a nomination for his score, recorded with a large orchestra in Munich. American history inspired some especially popular films for cable. Charles Bernstein (b. 1943), Juilliard-​ trained composer of the original A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), shifted easily to the small screen with scores for such miniseries as the Michael Mann–​produced six-​hour Drug Wars: The Camarena Story (1990, NBC), but really flourished in the freer cable environment with the Emmy-​nominated The Sea Wolf (1993, TNT) starring Charles Bronson, and two fact-​based Showtime films: Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble (2000) and Out of the Ashes (2003). Enslavement, about a British actress (Jane Seymour) who marries an American plantation owner (Keith Carradine), used Civil War–​era instruments, choir, and solo voice to suggest Kemble’s consciousness-​ raising regarding slavery; Bernstein received the film’s only Emmy nomination. Solo voice and choir also figured prominently in his dramatic score for Out of the Ashes, about the life of Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz doctor Gisella Perl (Christine Lahti).

The 12-​hour Into the West (2005, TNT) intertwined the experiences of two families (one white, one Native American) throughout the 1800s on the American frontier; its cast included Keri Russell, Matthew Modine, Graham Greene, and Keith Carradine. For his massive, six-​hour score, Geoff Zanelli, who had assisted Hans Zimmer and fellow Media Ventures/​ Remote Control composers on many film scores, became the youngest composer ever to win the Emmy in the category of Music Composition for a Miniseries, Movie, or Special. “The score is a balancing act between the Western orchestra and the Native American drums and woodwinds,” Zanelli later reflected. “There are two major thematic elements that play, one for the Lakota and one for the settlers. Those two themes were designed to work together at times, and also to work against each other when I needed the tension.” Zanelli incorporated field recordings of Lakota musicians into his own music; added guitars, mandolin, and fiddle for folk colors; and mixed his soloists with an orchestra recorded overseas. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (2007, HBO) was an even more culturally sensitive project. Dee Brown’s 1970 book was a touchstone for Native Americans and for a generation just learning of the atrocities committed against tribes across the continent. Yves Simoneau’s film dramatized tragic nineteenth-​century events through the eyes of a highly educated, mixed-​race Sioux trying to improve conditions for his people, and culminates in the 1890 massacre in South Dakota. The film won six Emmys including Outstanding Made-​for-​Television Movie. Tennessee-​born composer George S. Clinton (b. 1947) was sensitive to the need for musical authenticity. He discovered John Two-​Hawks, an Arkansas flutist of Lakota Sioux lineage, and cast him as the primary soloist. “There were no Western woodwinds competing with the voice of

THE RISE OF THE MUSIC SUPERVISOR Songs, of course, have been a staple of variety shows since the start of TV. But their use in dramatic contexts is a more recent phenomenon. The landmark musical comedy That’s Life (1968–​1969, ABC) starring Robert Morse, and the radio-​station comedy WKRP in Cincinnati included many popular songs that required clearance by studio music departments. It was Miami Vice, however, that launched the trend of rock songs being threaded throughout a television narrative. Director Michael Mann’s use of Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight” in the two-​hour Vice pilot has become legendary, and his recruitment of pop stars Glenn Frey and Jackson Browne as soundtrack participants had no precedent in the

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medium. MTV debuted in 1981, music videos were all the rage, and the term “music supervision” was just coming into wide use when the series debuted in 1984. Gradually, popular songs began to be added to network series, not only as opening themes (Joe Cocker’s “With a Little Help from My Friends” for The Wonder Years, the Rolling Stones’ “Paint It Black” for Tour of Duty), but throughout the shows themselves. Northern Exposure featured a radio DJ, and his eclectic musical tastes gave that early 1990s series a quirky vibe. The legal drama Ally McBeal (1997–​2002, Fox) even featured its own alt-​rock balladeer in Vonda Shepard. Alexandra Patsavas pioneered music supervision at a high level with shows like The O.C. (2003–​2007, Fox), Grey’s Anatomy (2005–​ , ABC), Gossip Girl

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his flute,” Clinton explained. Two-​Hawks arrived in Los Angeles with “at least 20 flutes,” Clinton recalled. “He wanted to make sure that whatever instrument he played was spiritually right for that moment in the film.” Clinton had already recorded an L.A. orchestra (minus not only conventional woodwinds but also trumpets, to avoid any “here comes the cavalry” clichés) and male choir. Two-​Hawks recorded his many solos on a variety of different flutes, and after some scenes “was visibly shaken,” Clinton said, by scenes that resonated with him personally. The choir (and Two-​Hawks) sang phrases in the Lakota language, lending additional feeling and meaning. Clinton was Emmy-​nominated for his moving music for this story of a great American tragedy. John Debney, who won an Emmy for The Young Riders, returned to the TV Western with Hatfields & McCoys (2012, History Channel), co-​written with Tony Morales and set in late nineteenth-​ century Appalachian Mountains (with Kevin Costner as Hatfield and Bill Paxton as McCoy). “A little more bluegrass, a little more roots music,” Debney said, adding that much of the score was performed by “eight or nine musicians, lots of guitar, solo fiddle, and solo voice.” They were Emmy-​nominated, as were Debney and fellow multiple Emmy winner Bruce Broughton for their collaboration on the much larger-​scaled Texas Rising (2015, History), a 10-​hour miniseries based on the Texas Revolution of 1836 with Paxton as Gen. Sam Houston. “We divided it up along thematic lines,” Debney said, “I got a certain story arc and Bruce got an arc or two.” The score was “more orchestral, more traditional,” he added. Both composers were masters of this genre, and the result was among the finest Americana scores of its time. The America of a much later time, and concerns about “concentrations of power and money in smaller and smaller groups of people,” in the

(2007–​2012, CW), Mad Men (2007–​2015, AMC), and Scandal (2012–​2018, ABC). Explaining the job of a music supervisor, she said: “Everything musical falls under their umbrella, from helping with the theme song to creating a signature sound, making sure that any on-​camera singing is cleared for air, that the songs are seamless with the score, the costumes, the style of the show. We are part of that key creative team.” The job is not just creative (helping the showrunner to find the right song for the right moment), but also administrative (gaining permission from the artist, the music publisher, the record label, and all other rights holders). “All good ideas are worthless without being able to make sure that all the songs are cleared, vetted, and budgeted correctly,” Patsavas said. “That is at least 50 percent of our time.”

The key discussions between showrunner and music supervisor are often at the beginning of a series: “How is the audience to feel when they hear the music? Is it going to be songs they know? Or songs they don’t?” The O.C. demanded indie rock, “very youthful, very current,” she recalled. The O.C. helped propel Death Cab for Cutie (“A Movie Script Ending”) and Imogen Heap (“Hide and Seek”) to fame; Snow Patrol (“Chasing Cars”) and Tegan & Sara (“Where Does the Good Go”) saw sales skyrocket because of song placement on season-​finale episodes of Grey’s Anatomy. “The music supervisor’s job is to work with the creators of a project to identify what the goals are for music as a storytelling device, and then to bring in the resources and the talent to bring that concept—​within the time and budget constraints—​into reality,” said

words of composer Nicholas Britell (b. 1980), informed his music for Succession (2018–​, HBO), a black comedy-​drama about the dysfunctional Roy family which controls a New York-​based media conglomerate. The series won multiple Emmys, including Outstanding Drama Series, in its first two seasons, including one for Britell’s theme in 2019. “What is the music that the Roy family imagines for themselves?” he asked himself. Searching for “a sense of both gravitas and absurdity,” the composer found “there was something about the darkness of this late-​ classical era music, mixing that with these disproportionately large beats.” Britell’s piano-​ driven, classical-​ meets-​ hip-​ hop earworm caught the attention of watchers and listeners, bringing a Los Angeles Philharmonic audience to its feet when he later performed it live at Disney Concert Hall. The “stateliness” of 18th-​century minuets figured in the week-​to-​week scores, “almost like the music of their court, if you imagine that this a kind of old feudal world.”

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The Disney company’s twenty-​first-​century acquisition of such high-​ profile entertainment properties as Marvel and Lucasfilm meant that its streaming service, Disney+​, would become the television home of spinoffs from its big-​screen entertainments, notably the Star Wars films and the many Marvel Cinematic Universe films. The Mandalorian (2019–​) was an exciting outer-​space western starring a mysterious, helmeted bounty hunter (Pedro Pascal) who reluctantly becomes the guardian of a child (popularly known as “Baby Yoda”); in two eight-​episode arcs, they had multiple adventures and “Mando” eventually delivered the child to its rightful place with the Jedi Knights. Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson (b. 1984), an Oscar winner for Marvel’s Black Panther film (2018), composed the music for this television

Thomas Golubic, who earned praise for his music supervision on such series as Six Feet Under (with Gary Calamar), Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead. “As storytelling became more nuanced, the possibilities of using songcraft as a curatorial contributor to storytelling became more nuanced as well,” he said. “[Showrunners] are asking for you to do the most effective storytelling of the characters and find compelling ways of letting us know who they are. My feeling is that if you capture a truth, and you put real thought into it and make sure that it resonates with the creative people involved, the audience will feel it even if they don’t understand it intellectually.” Sia’s “Breathe Me” was not only used under the final six-​minute montage of Six Feet Under, the entire scene was written with that music in mind, creator Alan Ball later said.

For Breaking Bad, Golubic spent time in Albuquerque, absorbing the atmosphere and listening to the music of north-​central New Mexico. Six Feet Under needed anywhere from four to 10 songs per show, while Breaking Bad averaged just two or three. For The Walking Dead, he commissioned a series of original songs, especially in the series’ third and fourth seasons. “Having a deep knowledge of music does not make you a music supervisor,” veteran music supervisor P. J. Bloom pointed out. “The creative component is most often a minor part of the job and in some cases nonexistent.” Rather, the field demands expertise in production and music administration: an understanding of the technical aspects of filmmaking, the politics involving filmmakers and studios, the mechanics of music publishing and record labels, the ability to negotiate deals, and more.

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spinoff of the Star Wars franchise. He played a bass recorder for the lead character: “It’s a very original, distinctive, lonely sound that follows this gunslinger on his journey,” Göransson explained. To this, he added massive tribal drums, ugly metallic scrapings, airy synths, and a 70-​piece orchestra for a recognizably Star Wars ambiance. He also added cutting-​ edge electronic processing. “You take those organic drum sounds, percussion sounds, or flute sounds, and then make them sound different or modern using the tech,” he added. “Ludwig has one foot in traditional score and another foot in technology, creating sounds that feel very musical even though he’s using non-​ traditional methods and instruments,” executive producer Jon Favreau said. “Ludwig’s music has given The Mandalorian its own identity, apart from, yet related to, Star Wars. We were departing definitively from what has come before, yet we wanted it to feel like it was a continuation—​a dichotomy of goals. It took somebody with a strong musical vision like Ludwig to do it.” Göransson won two consecutive Emmy Awards for Mandalorian scores. The Marvel Universe had already spawned several TV series, notably Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on network TV and Daredevil, Jessica Jones, and others on Netflix, but WandaVision (2021, Disney+​) attracted a huge audience, critical raves, and music that garnered far more than the usual scant attention. The nine-​episode miniseries was a mystery with supernatural overtones about the odd suburban life of married ex-​Avengers Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) and Vision (Paul Bettany), which seems to unfold as a series of sitcom episodes, complete with laugh track. Disney engaged Oscar-​ winning songwriters Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-​Lopez (Frozen, Coco) to pen a series of opening theme songs that simulated the sitcom styles of the early 1960s (“A Newlywed

As producer Ryan Murphy’s music supervisor, he was involved before the first script for Glee (2009–​2015, Fox)—​the groundbreaking weekly musical comedy-​ drama about a high-​ school show choir—​was even written. “We spent eight months in pre-​production simply working out the music mechanism we would use to execute the scope and pace of the show.” Bloom, a six-​ time Guild of Music Supervisors nominee for his work on the series, defines music supervision “in its most robust form, as the development, oversight and execution of the overall music plan,” which can also include themes and scoring. And sometimes, he added, “this includes participating in the creative aspects of choosing songs, which is clearly the sexy part.”

Couple,” à la The Dick Van Dyke Show), late 1960s (“WandaVision!” à MUSIC FOR CABLE la Bewitched), 1970s (“We Got Something Cooking,” à la The Partridge AND STREAMING Family), 1980s (“Making It Up as We Go Along,” à la Family Ties), 425 and the early 2000s (“Let’s Keep It Going,” à la Malcolm in the Middle; “W-​V 2000,” à la The Office). They capped it with “Agatha All Along” (à la The Munsters), a “villain-​reveal” song, as Lopez put it, in which nosy neighbor Agnes is unmasked as the manipulative witch Agatha Harkness (Kathryn Hahn). “Agatha All Along” became an unexpected hit, reaching Number 1 on the iTunes soundtrack chart and Number 5 on its top-​100 singles chart; it won the 2021 Emmy for best song. The rich symphonic score by Christophe Beck was as memorable and effective as his Ant-​Man scores for the big screen, and fully justified his return to TV series work for the first time in two decades. It required a broad approach, from bouncy 1960s sitcom music to large-​scale orchestral drama, reflecting both light and dark sides of the grief-​stricken Wanda. Beck’s score was Emmy-​ nominated, too, but lost to The Queen’s Gambit (2020, Netflix), an equally thrilling, classically styled score by Carlos Rafael Rivera (b. 1970) for the well-​received coming-​of-​age drama about a young chess prodigy (Anya Taylor-​Joy). More than 70 years after its modest beginnings, television music, too, has come of age.

Afterword

I

n 1995, to conclude the original edition of this book, I wrote: Television has lost its innocence. The once-​adventurous new medium is now middle-​aged, cynical, and far less willing to take chances. Much of prime time is inane and banal. The television film, once home to serious examinations of relevant social issues, is reduced to retelling sordid true-​ crime tales ripped from the tabloids. The chase for an increasingly hard-​ won ratings point in an era of multiplying networks and cable services has caused a perhaps inevitable decline in standards virtually everywhere on the tube. Inexperienced producers and network executives are a part of the problem: people who think that music is some kind of necessary evil of post-​production, not an integral element in the creative process—​people who don’t understand that the right score can make the difference between a film that moves a viewer and one that simply tells a story. This is reflected in shrinking budgets for music that rarely allow for an acoustic ensemble, forcing many composers to fall back on electronic sounds and musical samples. Only a handful of shows still rely on orchestral scores, enabling a few composers to regularly surprise viewers with fresh approaches to scoring for television. Even more rare is the composer who manages to find innovative solutions working in the all-​synthesizer milieu. Music for Prime Time. Jon Burlingame, Oxford University Press. © 2023 Jon Burlingame. DOI: 10.1093/​oso/​9780190618308.003.0014

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(Left to right) TV composers Henry Mancini, Nelson Riddle, Jack Marshall, André Previn in 1961.

Apart from these exceptions to the general rule, most music for television these days sounds like it was made in someone’s garage. It often is. Little of the flavor, the bounce, the fun, the dynamic qualities that composers of taste and talent—​backed by studio executives and savvy network bosses who valued and appreciated music—​brought to TV in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s can be heard today. But all things in life are cyclical. Perhaps after an extended down period, the glory days of television will return, and with them the understanding that music is a vital element of the filmmaking process: the melodies and harmonies without which no audience can truly be touched. *** Since that time, I’ve been proven both right and wrong. The expansion of cable and the arrival of the streaming services have provided incredible new opportunities for composers to create themes and scores that would not have been possible in that earlier era: orchestras sometimes nearing 100 players; months to conceive and deliver powerful scores for expansive dramas; the arrival of wonderful new talent, especially women and people of color, long marginalized but now bringing fresh musical perspectives to the medium; budgets appropriate to the project, whether intimate or epic; and most of all, producers who appreciate the gift of music and offer their collaborators the creative freedom they need and desire.

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And yet, the proliferation of platforms and content has led to plunging fees and, on the part of some executives, a shocking level of disrespect for the time and effort required to give their shows the music they need to properly tell their stories. The growing numbers of young composers excited by this field has, unfortunately, meant (without any union to represent them or set minimum employment standards) reduced compensation for all. Back in the 1970s, Henry Mancini called one of his theme collections “Big Screen, Little Screen,” meaning movies and TV. Today, it’s no longer a “little screen,” with wall-​size screens occupying space in many homes and visual-​media buffs taking advantage of the availability of home-​ theater technology. And there are an ever-​increasing number of symphony concerts that are programming the more sophisticated work being done for television, from Lost and Game of Thrones to House of Cards and Downton Abbey. So, just as I imagined in 1995, there continues to be hope for the future of this endlessly fascinating realm of modern music. —​J.B., September 2021

Photo Credits pp.  2, 39, 91, 303: Phyllis Wilson. pp.  10, 12, 16, 21, 25, 30, 35, 55, 58, 64, 67, 70, 87, 105, 136, 148, 150, 165, 166, 169, 172, 183, 188, 190, 192, 201, 203, 204, 206, 216, 218, 227, 254, 268, 272, 279, 283, 292, 297, 309, 319, 328, 331, 337, 349, 352, 357, 370, 379, 381, 384, 387, 416: The Film Music Society (FMS). pp.  14, 139, 187: BMI Archives. pp.  19, 397: Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences. p.  23: Stephanie Blackburn. pp. 29, 98, 198: Hearst Newspaper collection, University of Southern California libraries. pp.  37, 119, 134, 178: from the author’s collection. p.  41: Detroit Public Library. p.  48: Mack David collection, USC Performing Arts Archives. pp.  49, 171, 285, 288: photo by Sheldon Secunda, R.A. Israel Collection. pp.  52, 96, 99, 101, 126, 129, 160, 184, 259, 270, 276: photo by George Fields, FMS collection. p.  61: photo by Andy Sackheim, BMI Archives. p.  74: Elliott Sears Management. p.  78: Nan Schwartz. p.  90: Susanna Moross Tarjan. p.  93: Dimitri Tiomkin collection, USC Performing Arts Archives. p.  107: Kate Markowitz. pp.  109, 341: FMS, Tony Thomas collection. p.  116: Steven C. Smith. p.  132: FMS, courtesy of Renata Pompelli. p.  142: Stu Phillips. pp.  146, 257, 339: Television Academy. pp.  154, 157, 405, 407: photo by Dan Goldwasser, ScoringSessions.com. pp.  162, 176: FMS, photo by Alexander Courage. p.  209: Stephen Cox collection. pp.  210, 427: Frank Marshall. p.  212: Laura Hagen. p.  223: Charles Fox. p.  231: FMS, photo by Spike Nannarello.

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p.  235: Stu Gardner. p.  241: NBC. p.  244: Jonathan Wolff. p.  247: Michael Skloff. p.  261: Theresa Eastman Schifrin. p.  273: FMS, photo by Dana Ross. pp.  281, 411: Rhapsody PR. p.  294: Anna North. p.  312: Hoyt Curtin. p.  317: Lee Mendelson Productions. p.  321: FMS, photo by Ted Soki. p.  344: Society of Composers & Lyricists. p.  347: Basil Poledouris, photo by Craig T. Mathew. p.  367: Francis Lai Collection, courtesy of Stephane Lerouge. p.  377: Jon Astley, courtesy of Jaz Wiseman. p.  389: Cool Music Ltd. p.  392: White Bear PR. p.  395: Alamy. p.  409: Ramin Djawadi, photo by Andrés Jiménez. p.  417: photo by Sally Stevens. p.  419: photo by Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum.

Bibliography and Sources The vast majority of this book is the product of personal interviews and primary research. Unfortunately, when it comes to music, many of the available books on television’s past are filled with factual inaccuracies, and what little published information exists (based mostly on screen credits) is often highly suspect. Whenever possible, screen credits were checked against studio music logs (in an earlier era, I was able to scrutinize these at Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros., 20th Century-​Fox, and MGM), cue sheets, Composers and Lyricists Guild of America records, the ASCAP and BMI databases, and/​or the composers themselves. All interviews were conducted by the author unless otherwise noted. A number of reliable books on television, music, and films were consulted: Arledge, Roone. Roone: A Memoir. New York: Harper, 2003. ASCAP Biographical Dictionary, 4th edition. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1980. Bang, Derrick. Crime and Spy Jazz on Screen: A History and Discography (two volumes: 1950–​1970; since 1971). Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2020. Bang, Derrick. Vince Guaraldi at the Piano. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012. Beck, Jerry, and Will Friedwald. Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. New York: Henry Holt, 1989. Bianculli, David. Dictionary of Teleliteracy. New York: Continuum, 1996. Bluem, A. William. Documentary in American Television. New York: Hastings House, 1965. Bond, Jeff. The Music of Star Trek. Los Angeles: Lone Eagle Press, 1999. Brooks, Tim, and Earle Marsh. The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows, 1946–​Present, 9th edition. New York: Ballantine Books, 2007. Brown, Les. Les Brown’s Encyclopedia of Television, 3rd edition. Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1992. Burlingame, Jon. For the Record: The Struggle and Ultimate Political Rise of American Recording Musicians within Their Labor Movement. Los Angeles: Recording Musicians Association, 1997. Burlingame, Jon. Sound and Vision: 60 Years of Motion Picture Soundtracks. New York: Billboard Books, 2000. Caps, John. Henry Mancini: Reinventing Film Music. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Copland, Aaron, and Vivian Perlis. Copland since 1943. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989. Cotter, Bill. The Wonderful World of Disney Television: A Complete History. New York: Hyperion, 1997.

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Daniels, George G., editor. As You Remember Them: The Men and the Music; Some Notes on the Music. New York: Time-​Life Records, 1972–​1973. Dawidziak, Mark. The Columbo Phile: A Casebook. New York: The Mysterious Press, 1989. Dickerson, Ian. The Saint on TV. Andover, UK: Hirst, 2011. Dunning, John. On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-​Time Radio. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Eaton, Rebecca. Making Masterpiece. New York: Penguin Books, 2013. Einstein, Daniel. Special Edition: A Guide to Network Television Documentary Series and Special News Reports, 1955–​1979. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Elmer Bernstein’s Film Music Notebook: A Complete Collection of the Quarterly Journal, 1974–​1978. Los Angeles: The Film Music Society, 2004. Erickson, Hal. Syndicated Television: The First Forty Years, 1947–​1987. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1989. Fager, Jeff. Fifty Years of “60 Minutes.” New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017. Fox, Charles. Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010. Gambaccini, Paul, Tim Rice, and Jonathan Rice. British Hit Singles, 8th edition. London: Guinness, 1991. Gelfand, Steve. Television Theme Recordings: An Illustrated Discography, 1951–​1994. Ann Arbor, MI: Popular Culture Ink, 1994. Gianakos, Larry James. Television Drama Series Programming: A Comprehensive Chronicle, 1947–​1959, 1959–​1975, 1975–​1980, 1980–​1982, 1982–​1984. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1980, 1978, 1981, 1983, 1987. Goldberg, Lee. Unsold Television Pilots, 1955–​1988. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1990. Goldmark, Daniel, and Yuval Taylor. The Cartoon Music Book. Chicago: A Cappella Books, 2002. Gottlieb, Jack. Working with Bernstein. Milwaukee, WI: Amadeus Press, 2010. Hagen, Earle. Memories of a Famous Composer Nobody Ever Heard of. Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2002. Halliwell, Leslie, with Philip Purser. Halliwell’s Television Companion, 2nd edition. London: Granada, 1982. Hardy, Phil, and Dave Laing. The Faber Companion to 20th-​Century Popular Music. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Harris, Steve. Film, Television, and Stage Music on Phonograph Records: A Discography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1988. Howey, Ann F., and Stephen R. Reimer. A Bibliography of Modern Arthuriana (1500–​2000). Cambridge, UK: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Johnson, Laurie. Noises in the Head. New Romney, UK: Bank House Books, 2003. Jones, Quincy. Q: The Autobiography of Quincy Jones. New York: Doubleday, 2001. Jones, Reginald M., Jr. The Mystery of the Masked Man’s Music. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1987. Kaplan, Mike, editor. Variety’s Directory of Major U.S. Show Business Awards. New York: R. R. Bowker, 1989. Larson, Randall D. Musique Fantastique. Sierra Madre, CA: Creature Features, 2012. Leonard, Geoff, Pete Walker, and Gareth Bramley. John Barry: The Man with the Midas Touch. Bristol, UK: Redcliffe Press, 2008.

Levinson, Peter J. September in the Rain: The Life of Nelson Riddle. New York: Billboard Books, 2001. Maltin, Leonard. Leonard Maltin’s Classic Movie Guide, 2nd edition. New York: Plume, 2010. Mancini, Henry, with Gene Lees. Did They Mention the Music? Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1989. Marill, Alvin H. Movies Made for Television, 1964–​2004. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2005. McNeil, Alex. Total Television, 4th edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1996. Mival, Eric. Cutting Edge: My Life in Film and Television. Powys, UK: Quoit Media, 2016. Murray, Lyn. Musician: A Hollywood Journal. Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1987. Newsom, Iris, editor. Wonderful Inventions: Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1985. O’Flaherty, Terrence. Masterpiece Theatre. San Francisco: KQED Books, 1996. O’Neil, Thomas. The Emmys, 3rd edition. New York: Perigee, 2000. Phillips, Stu. Stu Who? Forty Years of Navigating the Minefields of the Music Business. Studio City, CA: Cisum Press, 2003. Riddle, Nelson. Arranged by Nelson Riddle. Secaucus, NJ: Warner Bros. Publications, 1985. Rodgers, Richard. Musical Stages. New York: Random House, 1975. Rodman, Ron. Tuning In: American Narrative Television Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Sadie, Stanley, editor. The Norton/​ Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music. New York: W. W. Norton, 1988. Sanjek, Russell, and David Sanjek. Pennies from Heaven: The American Popular Music Business in the Twentieth Century. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996. Scharf, Walter, with Michael Freedland. Composed and Conducted by Walter Scharf. London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1988. Schifrin, Lalo. Mission: Impossible: My Life in Music. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2008. Schow, David J. The Outer Limits Companion. Hollywood: GNP Crescendo, 1998. Sellers, Robert. Cult TV: The Golden Age of ITC. London: Plexus, 2006. Sepinwall, Alan, and Matt Zoller Seitz. TV (The Book). New York: Grand Central, 2016. Sheldon, Sidney. The Other Side of Me. New York: Warner Books, 2005. Sherk, Warren M. Film and Television Music: A Guide to Books, Articles, and Composer Interviews. Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2011. Skelton, Scott, and Jim Benson. Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-​hours Tour. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1999. Sloan, P. F., and S. E. Feinberg. What’s Exactly the Matter with Me? London: Jawbone Press, 2014. Smith, Steven C. A Heart at Fire’s Center: The Life and Music of Bernard Herrmann. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991. Thomas, Tony. Music for the Movies, 2nd edition. Los Angeles: Silman-​James Press, 1997.

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Thomson, Virgil. Virgil Thomson by Virgil Thomson. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966. Tietyen, David. The Musical World of Walt Disney. Milwaukee, WI: Hal Leonard, 1990. TV Guide 25 Year Index. Radnor, PA: Triangle Publications, 1979. Vahimagi, Tise. British Television, 2nd edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Whitburn, Joel. The Billboard Book of Top 40 Hits, 3rd edition. New York: Billboard Books, 1987. Whitburn, Joel. Top Pop Albums, 1955–​1996. Menomonee Falls, WI: Record Research Inc., 1996. Wissner, Reba. A Dimension of Sound: Music in The Twilight Zone. Hillsdale, NY: Pendragon Press, 2013. Woolery, George W. Animated TV Specials: The Complete Directory to the First 25 Years, 1962–​1987. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989. Woolley, Lynn, Robert W. Malsbary, Robert G. Strange Jr. Warner Bros. Television. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985. Zeffirelli, Franco. Franco Zeffirelli’s “Jesus.” San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. Sources That is, for all my work other than the books previously cited. Daily Variety and Weekly Variety are abbreviated as DV and WV. The New York Times and Los Angeles Times are abbreviated as NYT and LAT, respectively. Chapter 1: The Birth of TV Music The Lone Ranger: Interviews with Byron Chudnow 2/​23/​95, film-​music archivist Graham Newton 7/​10/​95, Reginald Jones 7/​16/​95. Petrillo and AFM issues: WV 8/​9/​50, 3/​21/​51, 6/​11/​52, 8/​12/​53. LAT 3/​25/​56. Gluskin and AFM: WV 5/​21/​56, LAT 5/​22/​56. Adventures of Superman: Interviews with David Chudnow 3/​21/​95, Herschel Burke Gilbert 7/​4/​92, DV 3/​20/​50. Gilbert’s detailed documentation of series episodes using Mutel music. David Schecter liner notes for Open Secret soundtrack, 2011. Superman sidebar: Leon Klatzkin obituary LAT 5/​18/​92; Billboard 11/​3/​56. San Francisco Symphony email 1/​ 15/​ 16 (confirming Klatzkin trumpet work). Castelnuovo-​Tedesco and Lange experts Jim Westby, Lance Bowling emails 1/​15/​16; Screen Composers Association files at Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences (AMPAS); Library of Congress email correspondence July 2021. Attempts to discredit Klatzkin, notably in a 1992 Starlog article, various internet TV-​theme sites, and an essay in the 2000 Superman soundtrack CD, were largely the work of ill-​informed amateur “historians” who made erroneous assumptions about production practices and could never prove that Klatzkin wasn’t responsible for the theme. Laszlo: Robert Raff interview 1/​9/​95. Glasser: interview 7/​30/​94, plus excerpts from his unpublished 1992 autobiography, I Did It! (used by permission). Kraushaar: interview 2/​20/​95 plus MGM music files at USC. Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Dave Kahn interview 8/​21/​93, Norman Lloyd interview 4/​13/​11. David Gordon library: interview with grandson Jeff Gordon

8/​27/​95. Review of Stanley Wilson papers, scores. Rose and Ziv: interviews with widow Betty Rose 12/​3/​91, Milton Lustig 1/​7/​95, Nicholas Carras 7/​25/​95. Capitol library: interviews with Jack Cookerly 4/​11/​95, Raff 1/​9/​95; William Loose CLGA file and obituaries. Danger: Tony Mottola interview 8/​11/​94 plus letter 8/​19/​94. Guitar folio published by George Paxton 1951. TV Guide 1/​22/​54. Dragnet: Time 3/​15/​54, Saturday Evening Post 9/​26/​53. Nathan Scott interview 2/​ 15/​94. Walter Schumann obituary, LAT 8/​22/​58. Theme lawsuit: WV 11/​25/​53; Universal correspondence to Loew’s 12/​11/​53; summary in Pro Musica Sana (publication of the Miklós Rózsa Society), no. 14, 1975, plus letter from Rózsa to editor John Fitzpatrick 7/​19/​75. Medic: Interviews with Victor Young’s niece Bobbie Fromberg 8/​18/​93 (including Medic music in her garage), Sidney Fine 9/​18/​93. Disney and “Davy Crockett”: George Bruns interviews 7/​23/​68 (by Richard Hubler) and 9/​5/​78 (interviewer unidentified) in the Disney archives. “Davy Crockett’s Songsmith” in Portland Oregonian 12/​4/​55. Interviews with Richard and Robert Sherman 5/​10/​93, Buddy Baker 2/​19/​93. William Lava Zorro scores at American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming; Zorro review NYT 10/​ 11/​57. Gerard Schurmann interview 6/​15/​19. Warner Bros. and ABC: Music files in Warner Bros. Archive at USC. Lubin: Byron Chudnow interview 2/​23/​95. Notes for Decca LPs “Music for Loretta,” “The World of Sight and Sound,” One Step Beyond. Selinsky: notes for Kraft Television Theatre LP. Studio One scores: NYT 5/​2/​54. CBS and Gluskin: Gluskin profiles in DV 12/​28/​36, Radio Guide 10/​27/​39, Radio Life 12/​7/​47, The 560 News, April 1952. Don B. Ray interview 6/​21/​94. Down Beat 4/​12/​62, DV 1/​8/​62. Jerry Goldsmith interviews 2/​27/​87, 5/​1/​92, 1/​16/​95. Goldsmith profile by Leonard Feather in International Musician, December 1970. Goldsmith profile by Derek Elley in Films & Filming, May 1979. Norman Felton interview 2/​4/​91. Chapter 2: Cop and Detective Shows Henry Mancini, Peter Gunn and Mr. Lucky: interviews with Mancini 1/​27/​87, 1/​27/​ 92. Hal Humphrey column, Los Angeles Mirror News 10/​27/​58; Newsweek 12/​29/​ 58. Alan Livingston interview 9/​14/​95. AP story in Phoenix, AZ, Republic 7/​5/​59. M Squad: TV Guide 6/​13/​59, Detroit Free Press 12/​7/​58. Universal music logs. Benny Carter interview 10/​ 15/​ 93. John Williams profile in International Musician, April 1969. Richard Diamond: Interviews with Frank DeVol 2/​8/​95, Pete Rugolo 12/​6/​91, Richard Shores 6/​28/​91. Rugolo profile, International Musician, March 1969. Staccato: Unreleased Elmer Bernstein–​John Cassavetes interview about music 8/​ 31/​59. Elmer Bernstein liner notes for “Movie and TV Themes” LP, 1962, and Staccato LP notes, 1960. Take Five review DV 3/​25/​58. Checkmate: Eric Ambler liner notes for LP, 1961. John Williams profile, International Musician, April 1969. Williams interview 4/​7/​92. The Untouchables: Jack Hunsaker interview 6/​28/​93; Cookerly interview. Mike Hammer: Kahn interview 8/​21/​93; Spillane liner notes, 1959 LP. Jazz Artists sidebar: Asphalt Jungle: MGM music logs; MGM music files at USC. Harry Lojewski interviews 2/​25/​92, 10/​11/​94. Aquanauts: Andre Previn

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

435

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

436

interview 1/​17/​02, TV Guide 6/​24/​61. Straightaway: WV 10/​4/​61, Billboard 10/​9/​61. Mr. Broadway: Brubeck liner notes from “Jazz Impressions of New York” LP, 1965. R. A. Israel interviews 8/​10/​94, 10/​21/​94. Oliver Nelson profile in International Musician, July 1968. DV 11/​19/​64. Warner Bros. detective series: music files and music in Warner Archives at USC; Mack David Collection at USC. Livingston radio interview, WTTP Boston, 3/​27/​83. Erma Levin interview 3/​2/​95. Excerpts from Max Steiner’s unpublished autobiography, Notes to You, in Steiner collection at Brigham Young University. Burke’s Law: Gilbert interview. Ironside: Quincy Jones interview 10/​4/​93. International Musician profile, June 1968. “Quincy Jones: The Man Behind the Music” by Louie Robinson, Ebony, June 1972. Marty Paich interview 4/​5/​95. Hawaii Five-​0: Morton Stevens interview 9/​25/​91; Leonard Freeman notes for 1969 LP. Detailed review of cue sheets in CBS/​Viacom archives. Interviews with Brian Tyler 7/​23/​10, Bruce Broughton 7/​26/​10, Annie Stevens 7/​26/​10. Arrest and Trial: Universal music logs; John Waxman interview 8/​15/​94. Quinn Martin series: interviews with John Elizalde 7/​19/​94, Pat Williams 7/​14/​92, Goldsmith 5/​1/​92. Mystery Movie series: interviews with Billy Goldenberg 7/​23/​94, David Shire 1/​ 31/​92, Dick DeBenedictis 9/​23/​17. The Mod Squad: Earle Hagen interview 3/​ 26/​92. S.W.A.T.: Barry DeVorzon interview 8/​4/​17. The Blue Knight: Palm Springs, CA, Desert Sun 5/​23/​75; George Kennedy 2011 memoir Trust Me, Applause Books. Charlie’s Angels: Interviews with Allyn Ferguson 6/​16/​93, Jack Elliott 1/​26/​95, Scott Smalley 10/​10/​92, Jack Smalley 6/​27/​10. Barney Miller: Chuck Berghofer interview 6/​27/​10. Baretta: interviews with Dave Grusin 11/​16/​92, Morgan Ames 6/​12/​95. Rockford Files, Magnum, P.I., Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, Murder One, Law & Order series: Mike Post interviews 10/​5/​89, 4/​5/​94, 4/​30/​09, 2/​2/​15, 10/​24/​17. Steven Bochco interview 4/​19/​94. NYT 8/​13/​17. Miami Vice: Jan Hammer interview 8/​10/​94, Rolling Stone 10/​24/​85, LAT 10/​27/​ 85, USA Today 11/​1/​85. Tim Truman interview 10/​3/​19. 21 Jump Street: Peter Bernstein liner notes for 2018 Varese Sarabande soundtrack. Remington Steele: Henry Mancini interview 1/​27/​92, Richard Lewis Warren interview (by Justin Boggan) excerpted in Film Score Monthly 8/​9/​19. Cagney and Lacey: Bill Conti interview 11/​21/​94, Ian Fraser (on Angela Morley) 1/​18/​09, Nan Schwartz 9/​23/​17, Dan Carlin (on Shirley Walker) 9/​28/​17. Murder, She Wrote: John Addison interview 7/​15/​93. Spenser: For Hire: Steve Dorff interview 10/​19/​95. Sledge Hammer: Alan Spencer interview 10/​16/​17. Moonlighting: interviews with Lee Holdridge 6/​12/​89, 9/​23/​94, Alf Clausen 3/​19/​93. CSI series: New Yost Post 7/​22/​04. Crossing Jordan: Wendy Melvoin, Lisa Coleman interview 4/​14/​06. Homicide: Lynn F. Kowal interview 9/​22/​17. Chapter 3: The Westerns Gunsmoke and the CBS music library: interviews with Don Ray 6/​21/​94, Lud Gluskin (by Steven Smith) 3/​11/​84, Herrmann collection and CBS music logs at UCLA. Have Gun—​Will Travel: Johnny Western interview 3/​7/​95.

The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp: interview with Kate Edelman 6/​7/​94. Ken Darby: 1974 biography in files at Margaret Herrick Library of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Hum Sweet Hum” in TV Guide 5/​3/​58. Warner Bros. westerns: Correspondence in music files in Warner Bros. Archives at USC. Erma Levin interview 3/​2/​95. Bert Shefter music collection at UCLA. Wagon Train: Logs in Universal music library. Jerome Moross interview (by John Caps) 8/​31/​79. Stanley Wilson: Down Beat 10/​1/​59, BMI: Many Worlds of Music, April 1970; obituary DV 7/​14/​70; Wilson profile in International Musician, August 1970. The Cue Sheet, Vol. 17 #2–​3, April 2001. Interviews with John Williams 7/​22/​ 99 and 3/​9/​12, Lalo Schifrin 3/​8/​12, Quincy Jones 3/​9/​12, Universal contractor Sandy DeCrescent 3/​9/​12, Dave Grusin 3/​10/​12. Eulogy by Lyn Murray, detailed credits from Wilson’s daughter Phyllis Paul. Rawhide: Dimitri Tiomkin collection at USC. “Eerie Blue Notes in TV Theme Songs” Detroit News, 4/​27/​59. Interviews with Frankie Laine 3/​8/​95, Russell Garcia 8/​30/​95. The Rifleman: Herschel Burke Gilbert interview 7/​4/​92. Black Saddle: interviews with Jerry Goldsmith 5/​1/​92, Arthur Morton 7/​13/​93. Bonanza: interviews with Jay Livingston and Ray Evans 7/​ 24/​ 92, Alan Livingston 9113/​95, David Dortort 6/​17/​92, Betty Rose 12/​3/​91. NBC publicity materials for Bonanza: The Return, October 1993. David Rose interviews DV 2/​7/​62, 12/​13/​74. Harry Sukman collection at Margaret Herrick Library; David Rose collection at USC. Riverboat and Shotgun Slade: Elmer Bernstein interview 12/​1/​94. Gerald Fried interviews 5/​7/​91 and 6/​10/​91. Shotgun Slade album notes by Stanley Wilson. The Tall Man and Juan Esquivel: “Viva Esquivel!” notes by Irwin Chusid for “Space Age Bachelor Pad Music” CD, 1994. Wichita Town: Hans J. Salter interview 8/​25/​93. Outlaws: letter from Hugo Friedhofer to film-​music critic Page Cook 11/​2/​75 in Friedhofer collection at Brigham Young University. Friedhofer oral history for AFI by Irene Kahn Atkins March–​April 1974. The Virginian: interviews with Sandy DeCrescent 11/​ 23/​ 93, Percy Faith’s daughter Marilyn Leonard 9/​30/​93; correspondence with Bill Halvorsen (the Percy Faith Society) November 1993. Pat Williams interview 7/​14/​92. The Men from Shiloh: Ennio Morricone interview 2/​8/​16, Jack Cole interview 4/​6/​ 19. The Rebel and The Wild Wild West: interviews with Richard Markowitz 2/​11/​ 92, Andrew Fenady 8/​28/​95, Herschel Burke Gilbert 7/​4/​92; CBS music logs at UCLA; Tiomkin papers at USC. DV 12/​8/​64, 7/​30/​65. The Big Valley: George Duning interview 7/​1/​92; Duning collection at USC. Branded: Dominic Frontiere interview 9/​1/​95. The Loner: Goldsmith interviews 5/​1/​92, 1/​16/​95; DV 7/​30/​65. Cimarron Strip: Bruce Broughton interview 8/​11/​ 92. Kung Fu: Alex Beaton interview 6/​7/​95. Bret Maverick: Ed Bruce profile in Boston Globe 2/​23/​82. The Young Riders: John Debney interview 8/​1/​17. Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman: interviews with Beth Sullivan 4/​22/​19, orchestrator Larry Rench 4/​25/​19. Walker Texas Ranger: Tirk Wilder story at www.drj​aymi​ssdi​ana.com. Adventures of Brisco County Jr.: Randy Edelman interview 2/​24/​02.

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Chapter 4: Fantasy and Science Fiction Twilight Zone: Interviews with Buck Houghton 9/​13/​93, Don B. Ray 6/​21/​94 and 3/​30/​95, Goldsmith 2/​27/​87 and 5/​1/​92, Fred Steiner 2/​6/​92 (plus Steiner lecture at Society for the Preservation of Film Music conference 10/​21/​94), music editor Bob Takagi 8/​27/​93. CBS music logs and Herrmann CBS music at UCLA. John Vonde liner notes for TZ score albums, 1983–​1985. Constant interviews in High Fidelity, April 1985, Philadelphia Daily News 6/​9/​97. Constant obituaries in Le Monde 5/​18/​04, www.filmm​usic​soci​ety.org 6/​11/​04. Thriller: interviews with Goldsmith 2/​ 27/​ 87, Pete Rugolo 12/​ 6/​ 91, Douglas Benton 8/​19/​93; letter from Caesar Giovannini 5/​29/​93. ‘Way Out: August 2017 consultation with acoustic ecologist Justin H. Brierley. Alfred Hitchcock Presents/​Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Norman Lloyd interview 4/​13/​ 11, John Williams interview 7/​12/​10. Music logs at MGM and Universal. The Outer Limits and The Invaders: Interviews with John Elizalde 7/​19/​94, copyist Roger Farris 1/​4/​95, Duane Tatro 3/​20/​92. Randall Larson interviews with Dominic Frontiere October 2003 and 7/​22/​06. Irwin Allen series: Hugo Friedhofer letters to Page Cook (in Friedhofer collection at Brigham Young University) 3/​22/​65 and 12/​30/​76. Interviews with John Williams 4/​7/​92, Paul Tanner 1/​13/​94, music editor Ken Wannberg 3/​10/​ 95, George Greeley 12/​16/​93, Herman Stein 7/​22/​95. Twentieth Century-​Fox music logs. Star Trek series: Interviews with Alexander Courage 7/​8/​93, Fred Steiner 2/​6/​ 92, Robert H. Justman 6/​6/​94 and 6/​29/​95, Jack Cookerly 4/​11/​95 and 8/​28/​ 95, Gerald Fried 5/​19/​95 and 3/​9/​16, Dennis McCarthy 12/​5/​94 and 3/​5/​16, Goldsmith 1/​16/​95, Jay Chattaway 3/​5/​16, Jeff Bond 3/​8/​16. Liner notes by Gene Roddenberry and Fred Steiner for two Varese Sarabande “Star Trek” LPs 1985–​1986. Paramount music logs. Night Gallery: Interviews with Billy Goldenberg 7/​23/​94, Gil Mellé 5/​14/​92. Jack Laird interview by Leonard Feather in International Musician, November 1972. Correspondence with author Scott Skelton, April to November 1994. Gil Mellé: Mellé interview 5/​14/​92, interviews with William Link 2/​15/​05, Jerrold Freedman 2/​16/​05, Denise Mellé 7/​27/​17. Obituary DV 11/​4/​04. David Greene ad in Hollywood Reporter 7/​11/​85. James Anthony Phillips essay in Little Shoppe of Horrors #38 May 2017. The Sixth Sense: David Shire interview 1/​31/​92, Universal music logs. Battlestar Galactica: Stu Phillips interview 8/​22/​95, liner notes in Intrada soundtracks 2011–​2012. Amazing Stories: John Williams interview 4/​7/​92. Twilight Zone 1985: Phil DeGuere press conference 6/​6/​85, Robert Drasnin interview 8/​25/​93. Beauty and the Beast: Lee Holdridge interviews 6/​ 12/​ 89 and 9/​ 23/​ 94. The Storyteller: Rachel Portman interview 3/​ 30/​ 20, Washington Post 10/​25/​87, notes in 2018 Varese Sarabande soundtrack. Twin Peaks: Angelo Badalamenti interviews 4/​27/​90 and 7/​22/​90. The X-​Files: Mark Snow interviews 9/​22/​95, 9/​ 25/​95, 7/​11/​96, 6/​10/​98. seaQuest DSV: John Debney interview 8/​1/​17. Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Christophe Beck interview 9/​30/​11. Lost: Michael Giacchino interviews 7/​22/​05, 3/​20/​08, 4/​6/​09, 9/​28/​10. Lost concert review 9/​23/​16, www.filmm​usic​soci​ety.org. Night Stalker 2005: interviews with Philip Glass 9/​29/​05, Frank Spotnitz 9/​29/​05. Once Upon a Time: Mark Isham interviews 11/​16/​11, 8/​19/​18. The Orville: Interviews with Seth MacFarlane 8/​

24/​17, Bruce Broughton 8/​2/​17, Joel McNeely 8/​23/​17, John Debney 5/​11/​18, 5/​1/​19. Chapter 5: Drama Route 66 and Naked City: interviews with Herbert Leonard 5/​7/​93, Christopher Riddle 3/​10/​92, Billy May 9/​7/​93. Jonathan Schwartz’s liner notes for “Round Midnight” CDs, 1986; profile in International Musician, June 1973. The Fugitive and Run for Your Life: interviews with Pete Rugolo 12/​6/​91 and 4/​13/​ 95, John Elizalde 7/​19/​94, Roy Huggins 2/​10/​93. Dr. Kildare: Jerry Goldsmith interviews 5/​1/​92 and 1/​16/​95; MGM music logs. Ben Casey and Breaking Point: David Raksin interview 11/​13/​91. Marcus Welby, M.D.: Leonard Rosenman interview 4/​21/​92; “Could Dr. Welby Practice Without Music?” TV Guide 5/​19/​73. Medical Center: Lalo Schifrin interview 2/​ 9/​87. St. Elsewhere: Dave Grusin interview 1/​16/​92, J. A. C. Redford interview 7/​9/​16. ER: James Newton Howard interview 12/​5/​95. Chicago Hope: Mark Isham interview 7/​17/​18. Perry Mason: Fred Steiner interviews 2/​ 6/​ 92 and 4/​ 16/​ 95. The Defenders: Rosenman interview 4/​21/​92, LAT 6/​6/​76. East Side/​ West Side: Kenyon Hopkins profile in International Musician, September 1971; R. A. Israel interview 8/​10/​94. L.A. Law: interviews with Mike Post 4/​5/​94, Steven Bochco 4/​19/​94. Shannon’s Deal: interviews with Wynton Marsalis 5/​23/​89, Stan Rogow 1/​11/​90. Combat!: Rosenman interviews 4/​21/​92 and 1/​17/​95. 12 O’Clock High and Rat Patrol: interviews with John Elizalde 7/​19/​94, Dominic Frontiere 9/​1/​95, Alex North collection at Margaret Herrick Library. M*A*S*H: Johnny Mandel interviews 10/​10/​94, 10/​26/​13 China Beach: John Rubinstein interview in Music from the Movies, Winter 1994–​1995. General Electric Theater: interviews with Elmer Bernstein 4/​ 14/​ 92, Morton Stevens 9/​25/​91. Alcoa Premiere, Kraft Suspense Theatre: John Williams interview 4/​7/​92. Chrysler Theater: interviews with Dick Berg 9/​7/​94, Lalo Schifrin 10/​18/​91. The Adams Chronicles: John Morris obituary DV 1/​26/​18. Name of the Game: interviews with Dave Grusin 1/​16/​92, Billy Goldenberg 7/​23/​94; Grusin profile in International Musician, March 1971. The Waltons: interviews with Goldsmith 2/​27/​87 and 5/​1/​92, Alexander Courage 7/​8/​93, Earl Hamner Jr. 10/​28/​93. Peyton Place and Bus Stop: Arthur Morton interview 7/​13/​93; Hugo Friedhofer letter to Page Cook 3/​22/​65 (in Friedhofer collection at Brigham Young University). The Survivors: Universal music logs. Beacon Hill: Marvin Hamlisch interview 10/​31/​09. Dallas and Knots Landing: interviews with Jerrold Immel 4/​ 21/​ 95, Bruce Broughton 8/​11/​92. Dynasty and Falcon Crest: Bill Conti interview 11/​21/​ 94. Lou Grant: Pat Williams interviews 3/​11/​91 and 6/​15/​95. thirtysomething: interviews with W. G. Snuffy Walden 6/​8/​94, Stewart Levin 8/​30/​95. The West Wing and Friday Night Lights: Walden interview 9/​5/​17. Northern Exposure: David Schwartz interview 10/​20/​17. Desperate Housewives: interviews with Steve Jablonsky 5/​1/​12, Marc Cherry 5/​2/​12. Revenge: Fil Eisler interview 5/​5/​ 14. The Good Wife: David Buckley interviews 5/​7/​14, 9/​1/​21. Umbrella themes: NBC Mystery Movie: Mancini interview 1/​27/​92, keyboardist Clare Fischer 3/​8/​95; Mancini interview by Don Freeman, Palm Springs, CA,

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Desert Sun 5/​23/​75; music sketch at Library of Congress. The Men: Isaac Hayes interview 10/​26/​05. ABC Saturday Mystery: Mike Post interview 10/​24/​ 17. CBS Thursday Night Movie: Mort Stevens scores/​recordings in CBS collection at UCLA. ABC Movie of the Week: Harry Marks comments at www. tvpa​rty.com; Burt Bacharach interview 11/​30/​16. Hallmark Hall of Fame: Saul Bass collection at Margaret Herrick Library, Jeff Alexander collection at UCLA, email correspondence with Hallmark, Mark McKenzie interviews 10/​ 9–​12/​17. Chapter 6: Comedy I Love Lucy: Eliot Daniel interview 12/​17/​92. The Honeymooners: WV 11/​2/​55. Car 54, Where Are You?: John Strauss interview 7/​16/​95. The Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction: interviews with Paul Henning 5/​24/​93, Jerry Scoggins 7/​11/​ 94. Perry Botkin 1963 radio interview, courtesy Nik Ranieri. Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch: interviews with Sherwood Schwartz 2/​27/​ 92, George Wyle 7/​17/​95, Frank DeVol 2/​20/​92 and 9/​9/​95. DeVol profile in TV Guide 3/​9/​63. CBS and Paramount music logs; Schwartz collection at USC. My Three Sons: DeVol interview 2/​20/​92. The Addams Family, Green Acres: Vic Mizzy interview 10/​29/​91. “The Addams Family: The Man behind the Music” by Randall Larson, Cinefantastique December 1991. The Munsters, Karen: Frank Marshall interview 5/​21/​15, Bob Bain interview from 2004 at Robert Farnon Society website. Mister Ed: Jay Livingston and Ray Evans interview 7/​24/​92. The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and other Sheldon Leonard series: Earle Hagen interview 3/​26/​92; Hagen profile in International Musician, May 1970. The Patty Duke Show: Sid Ramin interviews 2/​17/​94 and 7/​28/​95. Hogan’s Heroes: Jerry Fielding profile in International Musician, November 1969. Fielding papers at Brigham Young University. Bewitched, Gidget, Here Come the Brides: interviews with Jack Keller 3/​11/​95, Warren Barker 6/​19/​95. I Dream of Jeannie: LAT 2/​7/​81, 2/​22/​81. The Monkees: retrospective in The Television Chronicles, No. 2, 1995. My Mother the Car: Paul Hampton interview 5/​2/​16. The Flying Nun: Dominic Frontiere interview 9/​1/​95. Mr. Roberts, Courtship of Eddie’s Father, Chico and the Man, Welcome Back Kotter: interviews with James Komack 8/​28/​95, John Sebastian 9/​3/​95. Love, American Style, Happy Days, Laverne & Shirley, Love Boat: Charles Fox interview 12/​21/​92. Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart Show, other MTM comedies: interviews with Sonny Curtis 9/​17/​95, Pat Williams 7/​14/​92, James L. Brooks 3/​21/​92, Allan Burns 6/​16/​95. Curtis profile in Entertainment Weekly 4/​12/​91. Days and Nights of Molly Dodd: Jay Tarses interview 4/​1/​91. WKRP in Cincinnati: Jim Ellis interview 10/​5/​17. Taxi: Bob James interview 9/​4/​17. All in the Family: Charles Strouse interview 8/​ 11/​ 92. Maude, Good Times, Brooklyn Bridge: interviews with Alan and Marilyn Bergman 3/​4/​92, Dave Grusin 1/​16/​92. The Jeffersons, One Day at a Time: Jeff Barry interview 9/​18/​ 17. Three’s Company: ASMAC oral history with Ray Charles 7/​15/​09, interview with Julia Rinker 5/​5/​16. Sanford and Son, The Bill Cosby Show: Quincy Jones interview 10/​4/​93, Down Beat 11/​27/​69.

The Cosby Show: Stu Gardner interview 9/​21/​17. A Different World: Dawnn Lewis interview 9/​29/​17. Murphy Brown, Growing Pains: Steve Dorff interview 10/​ 19/​95. Diff’rent Strokes, Facts of Life: Gloria Loring interview 10/​2/​17. Family Ties: Tom Scott interview 8/​3/​17. Who’s the Boss?: Robert Kraft interview 9/​8/​ 17. Full House, other Friday night ABC series: Bennett Salvay interview 9/​23/​ 17. Golden Girls: Megan Garber piece in The Atlantic 9/​14/​15. Cheers: Judy Hart Angelo interviews 10/​ 15/​ 92, 10/​ 21/​ 92. Roseanne, Home Improvement: interviews with Dan Foliart 7/​31/​95, Howard Pearl 8/​29/​95. Torkelsons, Boy Meets World: Michael Jacobs interview 11/​12/​17. Anything But Love: J. D. Souther interview 8/​26/​19. Seinfeld, Will & Grace: Jonathan Wolff interviews 7/​25/​95, 6/​22/​21. Mad About You: Don Was interview 3/​8/​00. The Nanny: Ann Hampton Callaway interview at www.today.com 4/​2/​21. Frasier: Bruce Miller interview 9/​7/​95. Friends: interviews with Michael Skloff 7/​20/​95, Allee Willis 7/​20/​95; DV 7/​1/​20. Fresh Prince of Bel-​Air: Andy Borowitz interview at artofthetitle.com 9/​27/​16; Jeff Townes interview at www.ew.com 3/​30/​17; QD III interview at genius.com 11/​ 15/​16; Quincy Jones interview at time.com 9/​10/​15. Girlfriends: Kurt Farquhar interview 10/​9/​17. Two and a Half Men: Grant Geissman interview 11/​6/​17. Arrested Development: David Schwartz interview 9/​20/​17. Modern Family: Gabriel Mann interview 10/​13/​17. 30 Rock: Jeff Richmond interview 4/​5/​11. Big Bang Theory: Ed Robertson interview at songfacts.com 5/​20/​16. Shorter themes: Ted Harbert, Warren Littlefield, David Poltrack, David E. Kelley, James Garner quotes from my transcripts of the summer 1994 network press tours; New York Daily News 7/​21/​94. Chapter 7: Action-​Adventure The Man from U.N.C.L.E.: interviews with Norman Felton 7/​ 23/​ 74, Jerry Goldsmith 2/​27/​87 and 5/​1/​92, Gerald Fried 7/​22/​74; MGM music logs; my notes for Volumes 1–​3 of soundtracks, 2002–​2004 . I Spy: Earle Hagen interview 3/​26/​92. Mission: Impossible, Mannix: interviews with Lalo Schifrin 2/​9/​87, 10/​18/​91, Robert H. Justman 6/​6/​94, Jack Hunsaker 6/​28/​93; Bruce Geller liner notes to Mission: Impossible LP, 1967; Schifrin profile in International Musician, May 1968; Paramount music logs. Secret Agent: Steve Barri interview 9/​ 20/​ 93. CBS in-​ house documentation. Original acetate recording discovered in CBS music library 1991. Get Smart: Irving Szathmary, via publicist’s letter to LA Times columnist (in USC Hal Humphrey collection) 1/​11/​66; Leonard Stern interview 7/​1/​08. It Takes a Thief: Universal music logs. Dukes of Hazzard: Gy Waldron interview 2/​23/​ 16. The Fall Guy: Glen Larson interview for TV Academy 2/​5/​09. MacGyver: Randy Edelman interview 5/​18/​19. The Equalizer: Stewart Copeland interview 9/​1/​96. Batman: interviews with Neal Hefti 3/​ 25/​ 92, Christopher Riddle 3/​ 10/​ 92; “Batmusic” by Bob Garcia in Cinefantastique, February 1994. The Green Hornet: Billy May interview 9/​7/​93. Wonder Woman: Charles Fox interview 12/​ 21/​92. The Incredible Hulk: Joe Harnell interview 5/​3/​94. The Flash: interviews with Danny Elfman 8/​12/​93, Shirley Walker 10/​7/​92. Lois & Clark: Jay Gruska interview 9/​18/​17.

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Heroes: Allan Arkush notes in 2009 soundtrack. Flash, Supergirl, Arrow: Blake Neely interview 3/​ 24/​ 17. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: Bear McCreary interview 8/​11/​17. Lassie: Nathan Scott interview 2/​15/​94. Flipper, Daktari: MGM music logs; Shelly Manne profile in International Musician, November 1970; Leonard Kaufman liner notes for “Daktari” LP 1968. Scarecrow and Mrs. King: Arthur B. Rubinstein interview 6/​2/​94. The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles: interviews with George Lucas 2/​13/​92, Laurence Rosenthal 11/​30/​93, 12/​1/​93. Alias: Michael Giacchino interview 11/​15/​04. 24: Sean Callery interview 7/​0/​06. Chapter 8: Documentaries, News, and Information Programming Victory at Sea: “Robert Russell Bennett: A Sound for All Seasons” by Richard Hanser in Television Quarterly, Winter 1981–​1982. Liner notes by Hanser for soundtrack album, Vol. 2, 1958, and by Bennett for Vol. 3, 1959. “Man Behind the Tune” in Newsweek 7/​20/​53; reviews in Time 11/​10/​52, The New Yorker 4/​4/​53. Project XX: Notes for “The Coming of Christ” LP 1961; “He Is Risen” feature in TV Guide 4/​14/​62. Wide Wide World: David Broekman essay in Film and TV Music, Summer 1957; John S. Wilson liner notes for soundtrack LP 1956. Air Power: “TV Music by Contemporary Composers” in Etude, November 1956. Twentieth Century: NYT 4/​12/​59. Winston Churchill, The Valiant Years: Daniel Melnick interview 8/​9/​94; liner notes for 1961 soundtrack LP. Wolper documentaries: interviews with David L. Wolper 2/​ 6/​ 92, Elmer Bernstein 4/​14/​92, Lalo Schifrin 10/​18/​91. Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: Newsweek 8/​14/​67, Life 9/​29/​67, TV Guide 3/​2/​68. World War I: Morton Gould interview 6/​23/​92; liner notes for 1965 LP; White Plains, NY, Journal-​News 10/​26/​64. Africa: Anna North interview 9/​4/​93; liner notes for 1967 LP by Jerry Bredouw; Alex North profile by Christopher Palmer in Film Music Notebook. Michelangelo: The Last Giant: Laurence Rosenthal interview 12/​1/​93. National Geographic and Jacques Cousteau specials: interviews with Elmer Bernstein (by producer Gail Willumsen) 5/​10/​94, Walter Scharf 10/​14,16/​ 91, Schifrin 10/​18/​91, Jay Chattaway 6/​14/​95, John Scott 4/​30/​95. TV Guide 3/​2/​68. Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness: Jack Urbont interview 8/​20/​21. The Living Edens: Laura Karpman interview 2007 at www.bsospi​rit.com. BBC nature documentaries: George Fenton interview by Daniel Schweiger for filmmusicinstitute.com 1/​11/​16. In Search Of: Michael Lewis interview 9/​17/​18, Leonard Nimoy liner notes for 1977 LP. oceanQuest: LAT 5/​30/​85, liner notes for “Oceanscape” LP 1986. NBC News and sports themes: interviews with Ray Ellis 5/​1/​95, Henry Mancini 1/​27/​92, John Williams 4/​7/​92, 6/​11/​92, 1/​5/​02, 9/​6/​06; Joel Beckerman 9/​6/​17. ABC Olympics music: Miami Herald 8/​4/​84, Detroit Free Press 2/​11/​84. CBS News themes: interviews with George Schweitzer 9/​6/​18, John Trivers 9/​4/​18, Neal Fox 9/​6/​18, James Horner 9/​6/​06; also Wall Street Journal 9/​5/​06. ABC News music: R. A. Israel 8/​10/​94, Bill Conti 11/​21/​94. PBS documentaries: Mason Daring 9/​7/​18, Lynn Novick 9/​8/​18, Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross 5/​ 14/​ 18; The Civil War LAT 11/​ 24/​ 90, jayandmolly.com. Entertainment Tonight: interviews with Michael Mark 9/​26/​18, Andy Muson 8/​

18/​21, Andy Friendly 8/​26/​21; Mancini score at Library of Congress. Cosmos: Alan Silvestri 5/​8/​14. Reality television: Interviews with Russ Landau 5/​14/​09, David Vanacore 8/​23/​21. Chapter 9: Cartoons in Prime Time Hanna-​Barbera cartoons: interviews with Hoyt Curtin 3/​22/​93, Ted Nichols 3/​ 19/​16, cartoon-​music producer Earl Kress 8/​3/​95. Kress liner notes for “Hanna-​ Barbera Classics” and “The Flintstones: Modem Stone-​Age Melodies” CDs 1994–​95. Curtin interview from spring 1999 at classicjq.com. AFM musicians’ records for Hanna-​Barbera 1960–​1965. The Bugs Bunny Show: music correspondence in Warner Bros. Archives at USC. Rocky & Bullwinkle: interviews with Fred Steiner 2/​6/​92, Frank Comstock 6/​13/​ 95. Peanuts specials: Lee Mendelson interview 10/​30/​89; Ralph Gleason notes for “Jazz Impressions of a Boy Named Charlie Brown” LP, 1964. Rankin-​Bass specials: Maury Laws interview 8/​28/​91, obituary DV 4/​19/​21; Greg Erhbar interview in “Music of Maury Laws” chapter of Cartoon Music Book. The Simpsons: interviews with Matt Groening 6/​23/​92, Danny Elfman 8/​12/​93, Alf Clausen 3/​19/​93. DV 8/​30/​17, 8/​5/​19. Batman and other DC animated series: interviews with Shirley Walker 10/​14/​99, Dynamic Music Partners 6/​19/​ 09; Daniel Schweiger interview with Bruce Timm in 2008 soundtrack album. Family Guy and American Dad: interviews with Seth MacFarlane 5/​10/​10, Ron Jones 3/​15/​10; Walter Murphy from 2016 soundtrack album liner notes. Chapter 10: Made-​for-​TV Movies and Miniseries Vanity Fair: R. A. Israel interview 8/​10/​94. The Power and the Glory: Laurence Rosenthal interview 11/​30/​93. The Hanged Man: Benny Carter interview 10/​ 15/​93. Companions in Nightmare: Norman Lloyd interviews 6/​18/​86, 4/​3/​11. Heidi, Jane Eyre: John Williams interview 4/​7/​92. Brian’s Song: Michel Legrand interview 9/​25/​93, Buzz Kulik comments in “As You Remember Them”; Los Angeles Herald-​Examiner 11/​7/​71. The Glass Menagerie, Love Among the Ruins, The Corn Is Green, Eleanor and Franklin: John Barry interviews 7/​29/​88, 8/​21/​90, 3/​22/​93. QB VII: Jerry Goldsmith interview 1/​16/​95 plus his liner notes for 1974 LP; TV Guide 4/​27/​74. Holocaust: Morton Gould interview 6/​23/​92, Time 4/​17/​78 and 5/​ 1/​78. The Winds of War, War and Remembrance: Bob Cobert interview 8/​10/​88; Randall Larson interview in CinemaScore, No. 11–​12, Fall 1983. The Red Pony: Goldsmith interview 5/​1/​92. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman: Fred Karlin interview 5/​7/​92. Roots: interviews with Quincy Jones 10/​4/​93, Stan Margulies 1/​14/​92 (J. B.) and 1994 (D. L. Fuller), Gerald Fried 5/​7/​91. Down Beat 10/​23/​75, notes and lyrics from soundtrack 1977, LAT 2/​27/​77. The Mystic Warrior: Fried interview 5/​7/​91; ABC press releases 1/​18/​84, 5/​7/​84; Newsweek 5/​21/​84. Centennial: John Addison interview 7/​15/​93, letter 7/​7/​95; Addison interview by David Kraft in Soundtrack! December 1981. East of Eden: interview with Lee Holdridge 9/​23/​94. Blue and the Gray, 0 Pioneers!: Bruce Broughton interviews 10/​30/​91, 8/​11/​92. North and South: Bill Conti interview 11/​21/​94. Amerika, Lonesome Dove: interviews with Basil Poledouris 8/​12/​92 (plus lecture at Film Music Society conference 3/​19/​94), Scott Smalley 10/​10/​92. CinemaScore, No. 15, Winter 1986–​Summer 1987; DV 2/​18/​87, 2/​3/​89.

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Moses, Marco Polo: Ennio Morricone interviews 3/​17/​94 (J. B.) and 4/​12/​94 (by Gary Crowdus); WV 4/​12/​82. Moses liner notes in 1992 CD; Marco Polo analysis in CinemaScore, No. 10, Fall 1982. Jesus of Nazareth: Maurice Jarre interview 7/​ 21/​ 93; interview by Martyn Crosthwaite, RTS Music Gazette, August 1977. Shogun: Jarre interview 7/​21/​ 93; NBC press release, June 1980. Masada: Goldsmith interviews 2/​27/​87, 5/​1/​92; NYT 4/​5/​81, Newsweek 4/​6/​ 81. A.D.: Lalo Schifrin interview 10/​18/​91. The Adventures of Don Quixote, Casanova: Michel Legrand interviews 2/​ 10/​ 87, 9/​ 25/​ 93. Peter the Great: Laurence Rosenthal interview 11/​30/​93; Rosenthal liner notes for 1986 soundtrack LP. Les Miserables, Camille: Allyn Ferguson interview 6/​16/​93. Duel: Billy Goldenberg interview 7/​23/​94. Rich Man, Poor Man: Anna North interview 9/​4/​93, North notes for 1976 soundtrack LP. Captains and the Kings: Elmer Bernstein interview 4/​14/​92. Contract on Cherry Street: David Newman interview 11/​10/​17. The Moneychangers, The Thorn Birds: Henry Mancini interviews 1/​27/​87, 1/​27/​ 92; interviews by John Caps 8/​18/​76 and 10/​15/​76; by Ron Miller in San Jose Mercury News 3/​20/​83; ABC press release 3/​17/​83. The Sex Symbol, Berlin Affair, Sins: Francis Lai interview in French by Stephane Lerouge 5/​4/​15; English translation by Martin Davies. Sybil: interviews with Leonard Rosenman 4/​21/​92, Alan and Marilyn Bergman 3/​4/​92. The Stand: W. G. Snuffy Walden interview 6/​8/​94; Stephen King letter to TV Academy 5/​26/​94. Sherlock Holmes in New York, Poor Little Rich Girl, The Attic: Richard Rodney Bennett interviews by John Caps 5/​12/​76, 10/​18/​ 05. Fantasy scores: Trevor Jones interview 5/​2/​02, Anne Dudley 7/​21/​15. American composers in TV: King Lear, WV 10/​21/​53. World of Nick Adams: interviews with A. E. Hotchner 10/​22/​02, Michael Boriskin 10/​22/​02; TV Guide 11/​9/​57, DV 11/​11/​57. CBS Playhouse: NYT 8/​28/​66. CBS On the Air: Frank DeWald notes for 2018 Naxos recording. The Day After: David Raksin interview 11/​30/​89. Chapter 11: British Shows Aired in America Adventures of Robin Hood: Michael Sigman interview 8/​15/​17, Carl Sigman obit NYT 9/​30/​00. Sir Lancelot: Alan Lomax obit NYT 7/​20/​02. Danger Man, The Saint, Department S: Edwin Astley interview by Vanessa Bergman and Michael Richardson, Action TV #12, Autumn 2005. Andrew Pixley notes in Danger Man and Saint CD sets by Network, 2008, 2010. Emails with Leslie Charteris biographer Ian Dickerson 8/​29/​17. Jon Astley interview on Australian “Danger Man” DVD 2008; Pete Townshend on Astley’s Way documentary, BBC-​2, 12/​7/​01. John Scott interview 4/​30/​95. The Champions, Strange Report, The Protectors: Andrew Pixley notes for the Network-​issued soundtrack CDs. The Zoo Gang: research by Paul McCartney historian Adrian Sinclair 8/​20/​17. Espionage: details from Malcolm Arnold catalog of works by Alan Poulton; Dimitri Kennaway emails on his stepfather Benjamin Frankel’s episodes 10/​28/​17. The Avengers: “The Man with the Baton: Laurie Johnson” by Dave Rogers in Stay Tuned to the Avengers, Vol. 2 #2, 1992.

Doctor Who, Man in a Suitcase, The Prisoner: liner notes by Geoff Leonard and Pete Walker in Doctor Who and Other Classic Ron Grainer Themes CD, 1994. Delia Derbyshire interview from Dr. Who Magazine, #199, May 1993. Mark Ayres notes from Doctor Who: The 50th Anniversary Collection CD, Silva Screen 2013, and Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, BBC 2005. The Persuaders!: interviews with John Barry 3/​22/​93, John Leach 10/​19/​08. Pinewood studios dubbing logs; emails with ITC archivist Jaz Wiseman 1/​15–​ 25/​21. Upstairs, Downstairs: Alexander Faris interview from 2006 on series DVD; obituaries in The Guardian 10/​13/​15, The Independent 10/​1/​15. I, Claudius: NYT 11/​23/​12. The Jewel in the Crown: George Fenton interview by David Stoner in CinemaScore, No. 15, 1987. Jeeves and Wooster, Poldark: Anne Dudley interview 7/​21/​15. Sherlock: Michael Price interview 8/​8/​14. Downton Abbey: John Lunn interviews 1/​30/​13, 1/​8/​16. Sherlock Holmes series: Christopher Gunning’s obituary for Patrick Gowers in London Guardian 1/​28/​15; Steven Smith email 9/​8/​17. Inspector Morse: Barrington Pheloung interview by Daniel Mangodt in Soundtrack, No. 52, 1994. Poirot: Christopher Gunning liner notes in 2013 soundtrack. Brideshead Revisited: Geoffrey Burgon interview, London Guardian & Observer 10/​24/​81; interview in From Silents to Satellite, No. 2, 1990. Pride & Prejudice: Carl Davis interview in “Making of Pride & Prejudice” book in 1995 DVD package. Monty Python’s Flying Circus: Terry Jones interview in London Telegraph 7/​17/​09. PBS themes: Masterpiece Theatre: Christopher Sarson reminiscence in 25-​year celebration book. Mystery!: Normand Roger emails 8/​31/​17, 9/​4/​17. Great Performances: David Horn interview 5/​18/​09, John Williams interview (by Horn, for PBS) 2/​10/​09. Chapter 12: Music for Cable and Streaming Services It’s Garry Shandling’s Show: Zweibel memoir, DV 3/​29/​16; Bill Lynch profile Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-​World 5/​4/​07. Tales From the Crypt: Danny Elfman interview 8/​12/​93. Sex and the City: Douglas Cuomo interview 7/​ 12/​18, Entertainment Weekly 4/​5/​17. Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David comments at Museum of Television & Radio seminar 3/​5/​02. Theme story at vulture.com 10/​11/​17. The Sopranos: Martin Bruestle interview 5/​7/​02. The Wire: David Simon interview in The Believer, August 2007, and Q&A 8/​16/​06 at www.bor​derl​ine-​prod​ ucti​ons.com. Monk: interviews with Jeff Beal 7/​28/​03, Randy Newman 5/​ 30/​17. Dexter: interviews with Rolfe Kent 5/​24/​12, 11/​6/​17; Daniel Licht (by David Mermelstein) DV 10/​2/​10. Licht obituary DV 8/​3/​17. Breaking Bad: Dave Porter interview 6/​27/​14. Six Feet Under, Newsroom: interviews with Thomas Newman 7/​18/​13, Rick Marvin 7/​16/​18. AP story in Washington Post 4/​14/​02. Mad Men: David Carbonara interviews 3/​20/​10, 7/​2/​18. House of Cards: Jeff Beal interviews 5/​7/​14, 1/​19/​15, 5/​10/​16; Beau Willimon 1/​22/​15. The Americans: Nathan Barr interview 6/​28/​18. Battlestar Galactica: Richard Gibbs notes in BG soundtrack album; Bear McCreary interview 5/​17/​08.

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

445

BIBLIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES

446

True Blood: Nathan Barr interview 6/​28/​18. The Walking Dead: Bear McCreary interview 5/​10/​16. Penny Dreadful: Abel Korzeniowski interview 8/​1/​16. Game of Thrones, Westworld: Ramin Djawadi interviews 3/​4/​13, 5/​6/​16, 7/​25/​17, 3/​8/​19, 6/​28/​19. Benioff & Weiss comments from first Game of Thrones soundtrack 2011. Star Trek: Discovery: Jeff Russo interview 9/​8/​17. Lost in Space: Christopher Lennertz interview 3/​28/​18. Deadwood: David Schwartz interview 9/​20/​17. Rome: Jeff Beal on “Soundcheck” WNYC radio 1/​10/​07; Jeff Beal interview (by Dan Goldwasser) soundtrack.net 7/​22/​06. Tudors, Borgias: Trevor Morris interview 10/​17/​11. World Without End, Camelot: Mychael Danna interview 10/​13/​17. DaVinci’s Demons, Black Sails, Outlander: Bear McCreary interviews 5/​17/​14, 5/​10/​16; McCreary blog entries at his website 4/​13/​13, 8/​9/​14; McCreary notes in Black Sails soundtrack. From the Earth to the Moon, Band of Brothers: interviews with Michael Kamen 5/​8/​98, 5/​7/​02; Blake Neely 9/​10/​17, Zoe Kamen 7/​12/​18. The Pacific: Blake Neely interview 10/​27/​17. Angels in America: Thomas Newman interview 6/​22/​04; Nonesuch press release 12/​2/​03; Emmy debacle, DV 8/​19/​04, www.filmm​usic​soci​ety.org 9/​24/​04. Dune, Children of Dune: liner notes in soundtrack albums 2000, 2003. Odyssey 5, Taken: Laura Karpman interviews 10/​19/​01, 9/​22/​04. Mists of Avalon: Lee Holdridge interview 5/​6/​02. Into the West: Geoff Zanelli website; also notes in soundtrack album. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: George S. Clinton interview 12/​18/​17. Hatfields & McCoys, Texas Rising; John Debney interview for TV Academy & Film Music Foundation 8/​1/​17. Succession: Nicholas Britell interview 5/​10/​19, DV 8/​23/​19. Mandalorian: Ludwig Göransson interviews 10/​21/​19, 10/​22/​20, Jon Favreau interview 11/​1/​19. WandaVision: Robert Lopez, Kristin Anderson-​ Lopez interviews 1/​19/​21, 8/​4/​21; Christophe Beck interview 1/​23/​21. Music supervision: interviews with Alexandra Patsavas 7/​10/​18, Thomas Golubic 7/​26/​19, P. J. Bloom 8/​7/​18.

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. A Team, The, 71 ABC Mystery Movie (ABC Saturday Mystery) 183–​84 ABC News music, 305 ABC Stage ’67, 63 ABC Sunday Night Movie, 184 A.D., 354–​55 Abraham, 355–​56 Abrams, J.J. 153–​54, 280 Adam-​12, 316 Adams, Lee, 230–​31 Adams Chronicles, The, 182 Adamson, Harold, 87–​88, 198 Addams Family, The, 207–​8, 210 Addison, John, 79, 341–​42 Adventurer, The, 385 Adventures of Brisco County Jr. 114 Adventures of Don Quixote, The, 356 Adventures of Jim Bowie, The, 88 Adventures of Robin Hood, The, 374–​75 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The, 393 Adventures of Sir Lancelot, The, 375 Adventures of Superman, 7, 8–​10, 267–​68 Africa, 293–​95 Against the Law, 404 Agatha Christie’s Poirot, 394 Agent Carter, 275, 412 Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. 275 Air Power, 287–​88, 292 Akinola, Segun, 382

Alaskans, The, 89 Alch, Alan, 110 Alcoa Premiere, 92–​93, 177–​78 Alexander, Jeff, 185, 261 Alexander the Great, 174 ALF, 82 Alfred Hitchcock Hour, The, 94, 124–​25, 126–​27 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955) 12–​13, 46, 124 Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1985) 145 Alias, 153, 280 Alice, 140 All in the Family, 230–​31 All Is Forgiven, 238–​39 Allen, Irwin, 128–​31 Almeida, Laurindo, 35, 90 Altman, Robert, 175, 178–​79 Amahl and the Night Visitors, 185 Amazing Stories, 121, 144, 304, 400 American Dad! 323–​24 American Collection, The, 396 Americans, The (1961) 103–​4 Americans, The (2013) 406–​7 Amerika, 345–​46 Ames, Morgan, 68–​69 Anastasia: The Mystery of Anna, 357–​58 Anderson-​Lopez, Kristen, 424–​25 Andy Griffith Show, The, 63, 213, 214 Angel, 198 Angels in America, 417–​18 Angelo, Judy Hart, 240–​41

Index

448

Angie, 223, 225 Annie Oakley, 8 Antheil, George, 288–​89 Antonini, Alfredo, 287, 288–​89, 293, 358 Anything But Love, 243 Apprentice, The, 309 Aquanauts, The, 46–​47 Arnaud, Leo, 58, 302–​3 Arnold, David, 391 Arnold, Malcolm, 326, 378 Arrest and Trial, 57–​58, 94 Arrested Development, 250–​51 Arrow, 274–​75 Asphalt Jungle, The, 45–​46, 47 Assignment: Vienna, 182–​83, 265 Astley, Edwin, 262, 263–​64, 374–​ 78, 383 Atom Ant, 314 Attic, The: The Hiding of Anne Frank, 371 Auric, Georges, 289, 295 Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, The, 336–​37 Autry, Gene, 84 Avengers, The, 378–​80 Awakening Land, The, 337 Ayres, Mark, 381 B.L. Stryker, 183–​84 Baa Baa Black Sheep, 71 Babcock, Bruce, 79 Baby M, 225 Babylon 5, 151–​52 Bacharach, Burt, 184–​85 Bachelor Father, 44, 92–​93, 205 Badalamenti, Angelo, 147–​49 Bain, Bob, 210 Baker, Buddy, 24, 25 Banacek, 61 Band of Brothers, 415–​17 Banyon, 60 Barbera, Joseph, 311–​14 Baretta, 68–​69 Barker, Warren, 217–​18 Barnaby Jones, 59–​60, 78 Barney Miller, 68 Baron, The, 378

Barr, Nathan, 406–​7, 408 Barri, Steve, 65, 262–​64 Barry, Jeff, 232, 238 Barry, John, 295, 329–​30, 383–​85 Basie, Count, 39–​40, 45 Bass, Saul, 181–​82, 185 Batman, 267–​70 Batman: The Animated Series, 322–​23 Batman: The Brave and the Bold, 323 Batman Beyond, 323 Battlestar Galactica (1978) 141–​43 Battlestar Galactica (2003, 2005) 407–​8 Baxter, Les, 276 Bay City Blues, 172–​73 Beach Boys, The, 211 Beacon Hill, 187 Beal, Jeff, 402, 405–06, 412–​13 Beaton, Alex, 112–​13 Beauty and the Beast, 145–​47 Beck, Christophe, 153, 425 Becker, 246 Bellis, Richard, 369 Ben Casey, 163–​65, 296 Benjamin Franklin, 362 Bennett, Richard Rodney, 370–​71 Bennett, Robert Russell, 282–​86 Benoit, David, 173, 318–​19 Benson, 221 Benton, Douglas, 95, 122 Berg, Dick, 179–​81 Bergman, Alan and Marilyn, 53, 231–​33, 362, 369 Berlin Affair, 367–​68 Bernstein, Charles, 420 Bernstein, Elmer, 43–​44, 64, 94, 100–​2, 110, 111, 176–​77, 290–​91, 295–​96, 298, 321, 363–​64 Bernstein, Leonard, 356, 359 Bernstein, Peter, 76 Bessie, 147 Best Place to Be, The, 365 Best Sellers, 363–​64 Bettis, John, 237–​38 Betts, Harry, 184–​85 Betty Hutton Show, The, 62 Between Friends, 304 Beverly Hillbillies, The, 13, 200–​2, 265 Bewitched, 217–​18

Bianculli, David, 248 Big Bang Theory, The, 252 Big Brother, 309 Big Town, 9, 11 Big Valley, The, 109–​10 Bill Cosby Show, The, 234–​35 Bill Dana Show, The, 263 Binder, Maurice, 42, 378 Bionic Woman, The, 144, 271 Black, Don, 330 Black Saddle, 97 Black Sails, 414–​15 Blackburn, Tom, 22–​23 Blake, Howard, 380 Bleak House (1985) 396 Bleak House (2006) 391 Blue and the Gray, The, 343 Blue Knight, The (1973) 65–​66, 330 Blue Knight, The (1975) 66 Blue Planet, The, 299–​300 Bob Newhart Show, The, 191, 228 Bochco, Steven, 72, 73, 171–​73 Bold Ones, The, 163, 181 Bonanza, 97–​100, 210 Boots and Saddles, 86 Borgias, The, 413–​14 Bosom Buddies, 241–​42 Boston Public, 404 Botkin, Perry, 200–​1 Botkin, Perry, Jr. 64–​65, 184, 201 Bourbon Street Beat, 46–​50 Bourne Identity, The, 357–​58 Boy Meets World, 242–​43 Boyce, Tommy, 219 Bracken’s World, 100 Brady Brides, The, 206–​7 Brady Bunch, The, 41–​42, 205, 206–​7 Brady Bunch Hour, The, 206–​7 Bradys, The, 206–​7 Branded, 110–​11 Brant, Henry, 294 Breaking Bad, 403 Breaking Point, 165 Bret Maverick, 113 Brian’s Song, 328–​29, 356 Brideshead Revisited, 395–​96 Bridget Loves Bernie, 217 Bring ‘Em Back Alive, 277–​78

Britell, Nicholas, 422–​23 Broadside, 215–​16 Brodkin, Herbert, 31, 170, 333, 378 Brody, Martin, 305–​6 Broekman, David, 286–​87 Broken Arrow, 8 Bronco, 89 Bronk, 299 Brooklyn Bridge, 233 Brooks, Jack, 89 Brotherhood of the Bell, The, 364 Broughton, Bruce, 56, 112, 144, 157, 188–​89, 322, 343–​44, 422 Brown, Dennis C, 250 Brubeck, Dave, 43–​44, 47–​50, 215, 318–​19 Bruce, Ed, 113 Bruestle, Martin, 401 Bruns, George, 22–​24 Brynner, Yul, 16–​17 Buccaneers, The, 375 Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, 141, 143 Buckley, David, 196 Buckskin, 92 Buffalo Bill, 229 Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 152–​53 Bugs Bunny Show, The, 314–​15 Bullwinkle Show, The, 315–​16 Burgon, Geoffrey, 394–​96 Burke’s Law, 51–​52 Burns, Allan, 226, 227 Burton, Al, 238 Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 421–​22 Bus Stop, 186 Buttolph, David, 26–​27, 50–​51, 89, 90, 105–​6 CBS Evening News, 304–​5 CBS Late Movie, 184 CBS Playhouse, 63, 358–​59 CBS Reports, 303–​4 CBS Thursday Night Movies (also Friday Night Movies) 184 CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, 82 CSI: Cyber, 82 CSI: Miami, 82

Index

449

Index

450

CSI: New York, 82 Cacavas, John, 61–​62 Cade’s County, 364–​65 Cagney & Lacey, 77–​78, 186 Cahn, Sammy, 213, 218, 244–​45, 326 Cain’s Hundred, 59 Californians, The, 88 Callander, Peter, 385 Callaway, Ann Hampton, 245 Callery, Sean, 280–​81 Calm at Sunset, 372 Camelot, 414 Camille, 66–​67, 360 Camp Runamuck, 218 Cannell, Stephen J. 70–​71 Cannon, 60 Canterville Ghost, The, 372 Cape, The, 274 Capitol Critters, 322 Captain Midnight, 8 Captain Nice, 209 Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons, 386 Captains and the Kings, 363–​64 Captains Courageous, 361 Car 54, Where Are You? 199–​200 Carbonara, David, 405 Carbone, Joey, 400 Caribe, 60 Carlin, Daniel, Jr. 78–​79 Carlton, Larry, 238–​39 Carmichael, Ralph, 220 Carol for Another Christmas, 38–​39 Caroline in the City, 244 Carpenter, Pete, 70–​72 Carter, Benny, 40–​41, 53–​54, 91, 93, 139, 180, 183, 264, 326 Carter, Kristopher, 322–​23 Cary, Tristram, 382 Casablanca, 26–​27 Casanova, 356–​57 Case of the Dangerous Robin, The, 14 Case-​Book of Sherlock Holmes, The, 393 Cash, Johnny, 107 Cassie & Co. 57 Castle, 250 Centennial, 79, 341–​42 Central Park West, 75–​76

Challengers, The, 163 Champions, The, 385 Charles, Ray, 233 Charlie Brown specials, 316–​19 Charlie’s Angels, 66–​68 Charteris, Leslie, 375–​76 Chattaway, Jay, 136, 137–​38, 297 Checkmate, 44–​45, 92–​93 Cheers, 240–​41 Cherry, Marc, 195 Cheyenne, 26–​27, 49, 84, 88 Chicago Hope, 168–​69, 249 Chicago Teddy Bears, The, 217 Chico and the Man, 220–​21, 222 Chihara, Paul, 176 Children of Dune, 419 China Beach, 175–​76, 273 China Smith, 8 CHiPs, 308 Christine Cromwell, 183–​84 Christy, 186 Chrysler Theatre (Bob Presents the Chrysler Theatre) 41, 94, 179–​81 Chudnow, Byron, 6, 7, 27 Chudnow, David, 7, 8, 27 Cimarron City, 92 Cimarron Strip, 9, 111–​12, 351 Cisco Kid, The, 9–11, 84 Civil War, The, 306 Clausen, Alf, 81–​82, 320–​21 Cleopatra, 372 Climax, 29–​31 Clinton, George S. 421–​22 Coates, Eric, 386, 387 Cobert, Robert (Bob) 124, 139, 333–​35 Cohen, Harvey, 322, 323 Colbys, The, 191 Colcord, Ray, 242–​43 Cold Night’s Death, A, 140–​41, 142 Cole, Jack, 106 Coleman, Lisa, 82–​83, 274 Colombier, Michel, 186–​87 Colombo, Alberto, 6 Colt .45, 88 Columbo, 60–​61, 138–​39, 142, 181–​82, 183–​84

Combat! 173–​74 Companions in Nightmare, 326 Comstock, Frank, 316 Conagher, 167–​68 Conflict, 26–​27, 49, 89 Conlan, Joseph, 65 Constant, Marius, 118–​19, 144–​45 Conti, Bill, 77, 189–​91, 305, 344–​45, 355–​56 Contract on Cherry Street, 364 Cookerly, Jack, 15, 46 Cool Million, 163 Cop Rock, 72–​73 Copland, Aaron, 66–​67, 90, 101, 293, 303–​4, 356, 357–​59 Copeland, Stewart, 267 Cops, 308 Corigliano, John, 397 Corn Is Green, The, 330 Coronet Blue, 278 Corsican Brothers, The, 361 Cosby, Bill, 234–​36, 256 Cosby Show, The, 235–​37 Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 308 Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, 308–​10 Count of Monte Cristo, The, 360 Courage, Alexander, 128–​29, 132–​34, 136, 137, 167, 185–​86, 332, 411–​12 Courtship of Eddie’s Father, The, 220–​21 Cousteau /​Amazon, 298 Cousteau Odyssey, 298 Cousteau’s Rediscovery of the World, 298–​99 Cowboys, The, 99–​100 Crash Landing: The Rescue of Flight 232, 225 Creston, Paul, 288–​89 Crime Photographer, 18 Critic, The, 321 Crossing Jordan, 82–​83 Crusader Rabbit, 315 Cuomo, Douglas J. 400–​1 Curb Your Enthusiasm, 401 Curtin, Hoyt S., 311–​14 Curtis, Sonny, 226–​27

D.A., The, 316 D.A.’s Man, The, 316 D-​Day, 291 Dain Curse, The, 373 Daktari, 276–​77 Dallas, 76–​77, 187–​89 Dan August, 58–​59 Danger, 16–​18 Danger Man (1961) 375 Danger Man (Secret Agent, 1965) 262–​ 64, 376–​77 Daniel, Eliot, 197–​98 Daniel Boone, 88 Dankworth, Johnny, 379 Danna, Jeff, 414 Danna, Mychael, 414 Danny Thomas Show, The (Make Room for Daddy) 63, 212–​13 Darby, Ken, 87–​88 Daring, Mason, 305–​6, 415 Dark Shadows, 333–​34, 409 David, Mack, 26, 47–​50, 89, 314–​15 David Copperfield, 326 DaVinci’s Demons, 414 Davis, Carl, 396–​98 Davis, Don, 146–​47, 151 Davis, Sammy, Jr. 54, 69, 177 Davich, Martin, 168 Davy Crockett, 22–​23 Day After, The, 359 Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, The, 228 Dead Like Me, 267 Deadwood, 412 DeBenedictis, Dick, 62 December Bride, 198 DeCrescent, Sandy, 94 Debney, John, 113–​14, 151, 157–​58, 422 Defenders, The, 170 Delerue, Georges, 144, 298, 371 Deliberate Stranger, The, 141–​42 Dello Joio, Norman, 287–​88, 292, 295, 325–​26 Delphi Bureau, The, 182–​83 Dennis O’Keefe Show, The, 9 Dennis the Menace, 14–​15 Department S, 378 Deputy, The, 102, 210

Index

451

Index

452

Derbyshire, Delia, 380–​82 Designing Women, 245–​46 Desilu Playhouse, 15 Desperate Housewives, 195 Detectives, The, 51, 96 Devlin Connection, The, 78 DeVol, Frank, 41–​42, 205–​7, 212 DeVorzon, Barry, 64–​65 Dexter, 402–​3 Diagnosis Murder, 62, 79 Diana, 216–​17 Dick Powell Show, The, 43, 96 Dick Van Dyke Show, The, 63, 213, 214 Different World, A, 236–​37 Diff’rent Strokes, 238 Dilbert, 322 Dinotopia, 372 DiPasquale, James, 372 Disney, Walt, 22–​26 Disney’s Wonderful World, 22 Disneyland, 22 Djawadi, Ramin, 409–​11 Dockstader, Tod, 123–​24 Dolan, Robert Emmett, 289–​90 Dr. Kildare, 109, 163–​64 Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, 114 Doctor Who, 380–​82 Dollmaker, The, 176 Donna Reed Show, The, 14–​15 Doogie Howser, M.D. 72–​73 Dooley, Jim, 156 Dorff, Steve, 80, 237–​38 Doris Day Show, The, 212 Double Life of Henry Phyfe, The, 209 Double Rush, 244–​45 Doublecrossed, 369 Downton Abbey, 391–​92 Dracula, 334 Dragnet, 11, 18–​21, 248 Dragon, Carmen, 164 Drasnin, Robert, 109, 144–​45, 255, 260 Dream On, 246 Dream West, 337 Drug Wars: The Camarena Story, 420 Dubois, Ja’net, 232 Duchess of Duke Street, The, 387 Dudley, Anne, 372, 389–​90

Duel, 361–​62 Duel of Hearts, 380 Duffy’s Tavern, 8 Dukes of Hazzard, The, 265 Duncan, Robert, 250 Dundee and the Culhane, 100 Dune, 418–​19 Duning, George, 109–​10, 111–​12, 135–​36, 161 Dynasty, 189–​91 ER, 168 EZ Streets, 168–​69 Early Edition, 194 East of Eden, 342–​43 East Side /​West Side, 170–​71 Eddie Capra Mysteries, The, 79 Edelman, Randy, 114, 266–​67 Edward and Mrs. Simpson, 388 Edwards, Blake, 33–​34, 38 87th Precinct, 54, 93 Eischied, 61–​62 Eisler, Fil, 196 Eleanor and Franklin, 330, 341 Eleanor and Franklin: The White House Years, 330 Elementary, 281 Eleventh Hour, The, 164 Elfman, Danny, 80, 195, 272–​73, 319–​20, 322, 400 Elizabeth Taylor in London, 295 Elizalde, John, 58–​60, 126–​27, 162–​63 Ellington, Duke, 45–​46 Elliott, Jack, 66–​68 Ellis, Jim, 228–​29 Ellis, Ray, 184, 301 Ellis Island, 342 Elms, Albert, 374–​75, 382, 383 Eloise at Christmastime, 343–​44 Eloise at the Plaza, 343–​44 Emergency! 65–​66 Empire, 196 Empty Nest, 239–​40 Emrys-​Roberts, Kenyon, 387–​88 Endless Game, The, 390–​91 Enslavement: The True Story of Fanny Kemble, 420

Entertainment Tonight, 307–​8 Equalizer, The, 267 Escape From Sobibor, 371 Espionage, 378 Esquivel, Juan, 92, 102 Ethan Allen, 86 Evans, Dale, 84 Evans, Ray, 97–​98, 99, 211–​12 Evening at Pops, 396 Evening Primrose, 63 Evening Shade, 226–​27 Everwood, 274 Extreme Close-​Up, 304 F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 333 F Troop, 219 FBI, The, 57–​58, 109, 128 F.D.R. 293 FM, 228 Facts of Life, The, 238 Fain, Sammy, 89 Faith, Percy, 104–​6, 295 Falcon Crest, 190 Fall Guy, The, 266 Fallen Angel, 372 Fame, 300–​1 Family, 176 Family Affair, 206 Family Guy, 323–​24 Family Matters, 239 Family Ties, 238 Family Upside Down, A, 365 Fantasy Island, 278 Far Pavilions, The, 396–​97 Fargo, 411 Faris, Alexander, 387 Farmer’s Daughter, The, 219 Farnon, Robert, 383 Farquhar, Kurt, 249 Fatal Vision, 141–​42 Father Dowling Mysteries, 62, 79 Father Murphy, 100 Fear No Evil, 138 Febre, Louis, 274 Feliciano, José, 220–​21, 222 Felicity, 194 Felton, Norman, 30–​31, 164, 253–​54, 259

Fenton, George, 299–​300, 388 Ferguson, Allyn, 66–​68, 360–​61 Ferguson, Maynard, 47 Fernwood 2-​Night, 207 Festival of Family Classics, 323 Feuer, Cy, 6 Fiedel, Brad, 415 Fielding, Jerry, 62, 136, 140, 144, 215–​17, 260, 289, 373 Final Cut, The, 390 Fine, Sidney, 21–​22, 105–​6 Fireball XL-​5 385–​86 First Olympics, The: Athens 1896, 343–​44 Fischer, Clare, 181–​82 Fish Police, 322 Flash, The (1990) 272–​73 Flash, The (2014) 274–​75 Flatt and Scruggs, 200–​2, 265 Flickers, 388 Flintstones, The, 311–​13, 320 Flipper, 276 Flying Nun, The, 220 Foliart, Dan, 241–​42 Forsyte Saga, The (1969) 386 Forsyte Saga, The (2002) 396 48 Hours, 305 Foster, Norman, 23–​24 Four Feathers, The, 360 Four-​in-​One, 62–​63, 181 Fox, Charles, 223–​25, 271 Fox, Neal, 304 Foyle’s War, 390 Fraggle Rock, 147 Franke, Christopher, 151–​52 Frankel, Benjamin, 378 Frankenstein: The True Story, 140–​41 Fraser, Ian, 77 Frasier, 245–​46, 248–​49 Frederick, Jesse, 239 Freebairn-​Smith, Ian, 71 Freedman, Jerrold, 142 Freeman, Ernie, 264 French Chef, The, 182 Fresh Prince of Bel-​Air, The, 248–​49 Friday Night Lights, 194 Fried, Gerald, 101–​2, 135, 205, 255–​56, 260, 295, 339–​41

Index

453

Index

454

Friedhofer, Hugo, 79, 94, 102, 103–​4, 128–​29, 186, 257, 258 Friends, 246–​48 Friends and Lovers, 191, 228 From the Earth to the Moon, 415 Frontiere, Dominic, 58, 110–​11, 125–​28, 174–​75, 220 Frontline, 305–​6 Frosty the Snowman, 322 Frozen Planet, 299–​300 Fugitive, The, 162–​63 Full House, 239 Funicello, Annette, 24 Fury, 10 Gale Storm Show, The, 9 Game of Thrones, 409–​11 Garcia, Russell, 94 Gardner, Stu, 235–​37, 249 Garner, James, 249 Garriguenc, René, 85 Garrison’s Guerillas, 174 Gauguin in Tahiti: The Search for Paradise, 295 Geissman, Grant, 249–​50 Geller, Bruce, 258–​62 Gene Autry Show, The, 84 General Electric Theater, 29–​30, 33, 44, 92, 94, 176–​77 George Washington, 357–​58 Get Christie Love! 67 Get Smart, 263–​64 Geyer, Stephen, 71, 225 Ghost in Monte Carlo, A, 380 Ghost Story, 140 Ghost Whisperer, 151 Giacchino, Michael, 153–​55, 280 Gibbs, Richard, 320, 407 Gideon Oliver, 183–​84 Gideon’s Crossing, 168 Gidget, 68, 218 Gilbert, Herschel Burke, 7–​8, 51–​52, 95–​96, 108 Gilkyson, Terry, 25–​26 Gillespie, Dizzy, 181 Gilligan’s Island, 102, 202–​5 Gimbel, Norman, 224–​25, 271 Giovannini, Caesar, 123

Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The, 255, 377 Girlfriends, 249 Glass, Paul, 139 Glass, Philip, 155 Glass Menagerie, The, 329 Glasser, Albert, 9–​11 Gleason, Jackie, 199, 252 Glory & Honor, 343–​44 Gluskin, Lud, 7, 9, 28–​29, 85, 87, 94, 116, 118–​20, 169, 263 Gold, Andrew, 239–​40 Gold, Ernest, 40, 90 Gold, Murray, 382 Golden Girls, The, 239–​40 Goldenberg, Billy, 60–​62, 63, 138–​39, 140, 181, 183–​84, 264–​65, 297, 361–​62 Goldsmith, Jerry, 29–​32, 59–​60, 91, 93, 97, 111, 118–​19, 121–​23, 129, 136, 137, 140, 144, 163, 164, 170, 177, 184–​86, 254–​55, 259, 321, 332, 335–​36, 353–​54, 364 Goldstein, William, 300–​1 Golson, Benny, 53–​54, 93, 264–​65 Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. 214 Good Fight, The, 196 Good Guys, The, 216–​17 Good Morning America, 305 Good Times, 232 Good Wife, The, 196 Göransson, Ludwig, 423–​24 Gordon, David M. 13, 46, 89 Gould, Morton, 292–​93, 333 Gounod, Charles, 12–​13, 124, 145 Governor and J.J., The, 216–​17 Gowers, Patrick, 393 Grainer, Ron, 380–​83, 388 Grateful Dead, The, 144–​45 Grau, Gil, 160–​61 Gray, Barry, 385–​86 Great Adventure, The, 181–​82 Great Expectations, 351 Great Performances, 394–​96, 397 Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century, The, 306 Greatest American Hero, The, 71 Greeley, George, 130

Green, Johnny, 15, 42–​43, 94 Green Hornet, The, 269–​70 Greenfield, Howard, 217–​18 Green Acres, 13, 207, 208–​9 Groening, Matt, 319–​20 Gross, Charles, 373 Growing Pains, 80, 237–​38 Grusin, Dave, 58–​59, 60, 68–​69, 91, 94, 167–​68, 181, 183–​84, 231–​32, 255, 264–​65, 318–​19 Gruska, Jay, 273–​74 Guaraldi, Vince, 316–​19 Gulliver’s Travels, 371–​72 Gunning, Christopher, 393, 394 Guns of Will Sonnett, The, 104 Gunslinger, 94 Gunsmoke, 9, 30, 84–​85, 91, 111, 120, 163, 188 Hadjidakis, Manos, 298 Hagen, Earle, 63–​64, 79, 104, 212–​14, 256–​58 Haggard, Merle, 265 Hajos, Karl, 6 Hallmark Hall of Fame, 185, 372–​73, 396 Halloran, Jack, 49, 89 Hamlisch, Marvin, 187, 232–​33, 305 Hammer, Jan, 69, 73–​76 Hampton, Paul, 219–​20 Hanged Man, The, 326 Hanna, William, 311–​14 Hanser, Richard, 282–​84 Happy Days, 223, 224–​25 Harbert, Ted, 248–​49 Harnell, Joe 144, 271–72 Harry O, 61 Hart, Bobby, 219 Hart to Hart, 149–​50 Hatch, Tony, 385 Hatch, Wilbur, 132, 198 Hatfields & McCoys, 422 Have Gun –​Will Travel, 85, 86–​87, 91, 120 Haven, 373 Hawaii Five-​0, 28–​29, 54–​57 Hawaiian Eye, 46–​51 Hayes, Isaac, 182–​83

Hayes, Jack, 101, 105–​6, 335 Hazard, Richard, 260 Hazard of Hearts, A, 380 Hazel, 218 He and She, 217 Hec Ramsey, 182 Hefti, Neal, 268–​70 Heidi, 326–​27 Heindorf, Michael, 50 Heindorf, Ray, 88–​89, 110 Helms, Jim, 112–​13 Hemlock Grove, 408 Henning, Paul, 200–​2 Her Secret Life, 371 Herbstritt, Larry, 80 Hercules: the Legendary Journeys, 152 Here Come the Brides, 218 Here Comes Peter Cottontail, 322 Here’s Lucy, 198 Heroes, 274 Herrmann, Bernard, 12–​13, 19, 28–​29, 85–​86, 94, 103–​4, 106, 112, 116–​18, 119–​20, 124–​25, 129, 130, 163, 179, 180, 181, 321, 326, 327, 408 Hey Landlord! 52 High Chaparral, The, 99–​100 Highway Patrol, 14 Highway to Heaven, 100 Hiken, Nat, 199–​200 Hill Street Blues, 72, 73, 171–​72 Hirt, Al, 270 Hobbit, The, 322 Hogan Family, The, 223, 225 Hogan’s Heroes, 216–​17 Holdridge, Lee, 80–​81, 145–​47, 297, 342–​43, 420 Hollywood, 396–​97 Hollywood and the Stars, 290–​91 Hollywood: The Fabulous Era, 290–​91 Hollywood: The Great Stars, 290–​91 Hollywood: The Golden Years, 290–​91 Holocaust, 332–​33 Home Improvement, 242 Homecoming: A Christmas Story, The, 184–​85 Homeland, 281 Homicide: Life on the Street, 83

Index

455

Index

456

Hondo, 109 Honey West, 51–​52 Honeymooners, The, 199 Hopalong Cassidy, 12 Hopkins, Kenyon, 170–​71 Horan, Edward, 375 Horner, James, 144, 304–​5, 322 Hot L Baltimore, 233 Hotchner, A.E. 357–​58 Hotel De Paree, 94 House of Cards (1991) 390 House of Cards (2013) 405–​6 Hovhaness, Alan, 289 How the West Was Won, 111, 188 Howard, James Newton, 168, 415 Huckleberry Hound, 311–​12 Hunsaker, Jack, 46, 259–​60 Hunter, 71 Huntley-​Brinkley Report, The, 301 Huxley, Craig, 189 I, Claudius, 388 I Dream of Jeannie, 219 I Love Lucy, 197–​98 I Married Joan, 199, 202 I Spy, 63, 214, 235, 256–​58 I Will Fight No More Forever, 339 I’ll Fly Away, 192, 193 I’m Dickens, He’s Fenster, 207, 263 Immel, Jerrold, 111, 188–​89 Immortal, The, 128 In Search Of… 300 In the Best Interest of the Children, 372 In the Heat of the Night, 78 Incredible Hulk, The, 271 Independence, 167–​68 Inspector Morse, 393–​94 Into the West, 421 Invaders, The, 127–​28 Invisible Man, The, 364–​65 Iron Horse, 127 Ironside, 41, 52–​54, 93, 106 Isham, Mark, 156–57, 168–​69, 415 Israel, Robert A. 48–​49, 170–​71, 305 It, 369 It Takes a Thief, 60, 68, 93, 94, 183, 264–​65 It’s About Time, 205, 252

It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, 400 Ivanhoe, 66–​67, 360 Jablonsky, Steve, 195 Jack and Mike, 78 Jackson, Calvin, 46 Jackson, Joe, 76 Jackson, Howard, 50 Jake and the Fatman, 62 James, Bob, 229–​30 Jane Eyre, 327–​28 Jane Wyman Theater, 27 Jarre, Maurice, 111–​12, 186–​87, 351–​53, 355–​56, 397 Jeeves and Wooster, 389–​90 Jeffersons, The, 232 Jennie: Lady Randolph Churchill, 394 Jennings, Waylon, 265 Jericho, 259 Jesus, 355–​56 Jesus of Nazareth, 350–​52 Jetsons, The, 311–​12, 313, 320 Jewel in the Crown, The, 388 Jigsaw, 182–​83 Joe 90 386 Joey Bishop Show, The, 213 Johnny Belinda, 223 Johnson, Laurie, 379–​80 Jones, Quincy, 52–​54, 91, 93, 233–​35, 248–​49, 337–​39, 340 Jones, Ron, 136, 323–​24 Jones, Stan, 26 Jones, Terry, 398 Jones, Trevor, 371–​72 Jonny Quest, 311–​12, 313–​14 Josephine Baker Story, The, 371 Josephs, Wilfred, 383, 387–88 Josie and the Pussycats, 311–​12 Judas, 355–​56 Justice League, 323 Justman, Robert H. 134, 135–​36, 259–​60 Kahn, Dave, 12–​13, 46 Kalehoff, Edd, 305 Kambon, Camara, 249 Kamen, Michael, 144, 149–​50, 321, 415–​17

Kane, Artie, 271 Kaper, Bronislau, 57–​58, 94, 164 Kaplan, Sol, 135 Karen, 211 Karlin, Fred, 336–​37 Karpman, Laura, 299, 419–​20 Kay, Hershy, 289–​90 Kay, Ulysses, 289 Kellaway, Roger, 230–​31 Keller, Jack, 217–​18 Kelley, David E. 249 Kennedys of Massachusetts, The, 140 Kent, Rolfe, 402–​3 Kenton, Stan, 221 Kentucky Jones, 207 Khan! 56 Killers, The, 325–​26 King, 362 King, Carole, 173 King Kong, 323 Kings Row, 26–​27 Klatzkin, Leon, 8–​10, 94, 111, 261 Klondike, 207 Knight Rider, 141, 266 Knots Landing, 189 Kojak, 61–​62, 183–​84 Kolchak: The Night Stalker, 139–​40 Komack, James, 220–​23 Korzeniowski, Abel, 409 Koury, Rex, 84 Kowal, Lynn F. 83 Kraft, Robert, 238–​39 Kraft Suspense Theatre, 94, 178–​79 Kraft Television Theatre, 27–​28, 115 Kraushaar, Raoul, 11–​12, 211, 275 Kremlin, The, 295 Kubik, Gail, 289 Kung Fu, 112–​13 L.A. Law, 171–​73 Lady and the Highwayman, The, 380 Lai, Francis, 366–​68 Laine, Frankie, 91–​93, 94, 374 Lancer, 91, 104 Land of the Giants, 131 Landau, Russ, 151, 308–​9 Laramie, 102, 103 Larson, Glen A. 62–​63, 82, 141–​43, 266

Lassie, 11–​12, 275–​76 Last Ride of the Dalton Gang, The, 334 Laszlo, Alexander, 9 Lava, William, 6, 24, 26–​27, 219, 275 Laverne & Shirley, 77, 223, 225 Law and Harry McGraw, The, 109 Law & Order, 73 Law & Order: Criminal Intent, 73 Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, 73 Law & Order: Trial by Jury, 73 Laws, Maury, 322–​23 Leach, John, 384 Lear, Norman, 230–​34 Leave It to Beaver, 13 Lee, Sydney, 277 Leg Work, 65 Legend of the Seeker, 152 Legends of Tomorrow, 274–​75 Legrand, Michel, 328–​29, 356–​57, 368 Lennertz, Christopher, 275, 412 Leonard, Herbert B. 160–​62 Leonard, Sheldon, 212–​14, 256–​57 Les Miserables, 66–​67, 360 Letter to Loretta, 27 Levin, Erma, 50 Levin, Stewart, 192–​93 Levinsky, Walt, 304 Lewis, Dawnn, 236–​37 Lewis, John, 139 Lewis, W. Michael, 300 Leyh, Blake, 402 Licht, Daniel, 403 Lieutenant, The, 185 Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, The, 84, 87–​88, 198 Life With Luigi, 120 Light’s Diamond Jubilee, 22 Lineup, The, 59 Link, William, 138–​39, 142 Little Dorrit, 391 Little House on the Prairie, 100 Little People, The, 216–​17 Littlefield, Warren, 249 Living Edens, The, 299 Livingston, Jay, 97–​98, 99, 211–​12 Livingston, Jerry, 26, 47–​50, 89, 314–​15 Llewellyn, Ray, 14

Index

457

Index

458

Lloyd, Norman, 124, 125, 326 Lobo, 94 LoDuca, Joseph, 152 Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, 273–​74 Lojewski, Harry, 45–​46 Lomax, Alan, 375 Lone Ranger, The, 5–​6, 84 Loner, The, 111 Lonesome Dove, 346–​48 Longest Hundred Miles, The, 326 Look at Monaco, A, 295 Loose, William G. 14–​15, 46 Lopez, Robert, 424–​25 Loretta Young Show, The, 27 Loring, Gloria, 238 Lorne Greene’s New Wilderness, 299 Lost, 153–​55 Lost in Space (1965) 129–​31 Lost in Space (2018) 412 Lou Grant, 78–​79, 191–​92, 228 Louvre, The, 295 Love, American Style, 223, 224, 225 Love Among the Ruins, 329–​30 Love Boat, The, 223, 225 Lubin, Harry, 27, 127 Lucas, George, 278–​79 Lucy Show, The, 198 Luening, Otto, 123–​24 Lunn, John, 391–​92 Lustig, Milton, 14 Lux Video Theatre, 28 M Squad, 39–​41, 44, 45, 80, 92, 93 M*A*S*H, 175 MacFarlane, Seth, 157–​58, 308–​10, 323–​24 MacGyver, 136–​37, 266–​67 Mack, Richard, 199 Mad About You, 245 Mad Men, 404–​5 Madigan, 62 Magician, The, 191 Magilla Gorilla, 311–​12 Magnum, P.I., 71, 77 Major Adams, Trailmaster, 89–​90, 92 Making of the President 1960, The, 291

Making of the President 1964, The, 166–​67, 291 Man Called Sloane, A, 265 Man From U.N.C.L.E., The, 54, 102, 253–​56, 259, 296, 375, 377 Man in a Suitcase, 382 Man in the Iron Mask, The, 360 Man of the World, 38–​39 Man with a Camera, 8 Mancina, Mark, 415 Mancini, Henry, 33–​40, 66, 76–​77, 181–​82, 301, 307–​8, 364–​67, 428 Mandalorian, The, 423–​24 Mandel, Johnny, 60, 144, 175–76 Manhunter, The, 128 Mann, Barry, 217, 219 Mann, Gabriel, 250–​51 Mann, Michael, 73–​75 Manne, Shelly, 35, 45, 210, 276–​77, 329 Mannix, 261–​62 Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The, 199 Marco Polo, 349–​50 Marcus-​Nelson Murders, The, 61 Marcus Welby, M.D. 165–​66 Margolin, Arnold, 224 Margulies, Stan, 337, 338–​39, 340 Mark, Michael, 307–​8 Markham, 92 Markowitz, Richard, 106–​9, 260 Marks, Johnny, 322 Married… With Children, 244–​ 45, 399 Marsalis, Wynton, 173, 306, 318–​19 Marshall, Jack, 102, 210–1, 427 Martin, George, 374, 384–​85 Martin, Quinn, 45–​46, 58–​60, 162–​63 Martin, Skip, 46 Marvel Super Heroes, 299 Marvin, Richard, 404 Mary Tyler Moore Show, The, 191, 226–​28 Masada, 353–​54 Massey, Curt, 201–​2 Master of the Game, 361 Masterpiece Theatre (also Masterpiece Classics, Masterpiece) 386–​93, 394, 396

Matlock, 62, 79 Maude, 68, 231 Maverick, 88–​89 May, Billy, 63–​64, 161–​62, 269–​70 Maya, 103 McHale’s Navy, 215–​16 McHugh, Jimmy, 43 McCarthy, Dennis, 136–​38, 145, 266–​67 McCartney, Paul and Linda, 385 McCloud, 62–​63, 93, 181–​82 McCreary, Bear, 275, 407–​8, 414–​15 McCuistion, Michael, 322–​23 McEntire, Reba, 265 McKenzie, Mark, 185 McMillan and Wife, 62, 181–​82 McNeely, Joel, 157–​58, 279, 323 McRitchie, Greig, 67 Medic, 20–​22 Medical Center, 165, 166–​67 Meet the Press, 301–​2 Mellé, Gil, 138–​42, 143 Melnick, Daniel, 289–​90 Melrose Place, 75–​76 Melvin Purvis: G-​Man, 334 Melvoin, Wendy, 82–​83, 274 Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes, The, 393 Men, The, 182–​83 Men From Shiloh, The, 106 Men Into Space, 14 Mendelson, Lee, 316–​19 Menotti, Gian-​Carlo, 19, 185 Merlin, 371–​72 Miami Vice, 69, 73–​76, 266 Michelangelo: The Last Giant, 295 Michelini, Luciano, 401 Mickey Mouse Club, The, 22, 25 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1958) 46 Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer (1984) 63 Milhaud, Darius, 289 Millennium, 151 Miller, Bruce, 245–​46 Minstrel Man, 337 Minucci, Ulpio, 295 Mission: Impossible, 166–​67, 258–​61, 262

Mr. Adams and Eve, 100 Mr. Belvedere, 241 Mr. Broadway, 47–​50, 215 Mister Ed, 13, 211 Mr. Horn, 373 Mr. Lucky, 38–​39 Mr. Novak, 124 Mister Roberts, 221 Mists of Avalon, The, 420 Mizzy, Vic, 207–​9, 211 Mockridge, Cyril J. 90, 102, 111–​12, 186 Mod Squad, The, 63–​64 Modern Family, 251 Moesha, 249 Moloney, Paddy, 297 Moment of Fear, 207 Monday Night Football, 223 Moneychangers, The, 364–​65 Monk, 402 Monkees, The, 141, 219 Monroes, The, 100 Montenegro, Hugo, 218–​19 Monty Python’s Flying Circus, 398 Moonlighting, 80–​82 Morales, Tony, 422 Moraweck, Lucien, 85 Mork & Mindy, 201 Morley, Angela, 77 Moross, Jerome, 89–​91 Morricone, Ennio, 106, 348–​50, 355–​56, 390–​91 Morris, John, 182, 372 Morris, Trevor, 413–​14 Morton, Arthur, 97, 167, 185–​87 Moser, James, 20–​21 Moses: The Lawgiver, 348–​49 Mosher, Bob, 211 Mottola, Tony, 16–​18 Mouret, Jean-​Joseph, 396 Movie of the Week, 184–​85 Movin’ On, 265 Mullendore, Joseph, 7, 51–​52, 96, 110 Munrow, David, 386–​87 Munsters, The, 209–​10 Muppet Show, The, 147 Murder One, 73 Murder, She Wrote, 79–​80, 109

Index

459

Index

460

Murder With Mirrors, 370–​71 Murphy, Walter, 323–​24 Murphy Brown, 237, 248–​49 Murray, Lyn, 105–​6, 124, 177, 199, 264–​65 Murray, Mitch, 385 Music, Lorenzo and Henrietta, 228 Muson, Andrew, 307–​8 Mussolini: The Untold Story, 357–​58 Mutel music service, 7, 8–​9, 27, 89 My Favorite Martian, 130 My Friend Irma, 120 My Hero, 9 My Little Margie, 9 My Mother the Car, 219–​20 My Sister Sam, 237–​38 My So-​Called Life, 194 My Sweet Charlie, 138–​39 My Three Sons, 41–​42, 205–​6 Myers, Liz, 304 Mystery! 393–​94, 397 Mystic Warrior, The, 340–​41 NBC Mystery Movie (Sunday, Wednesday) 60, 181–​82 NBC Nightly News, 301–​2 NYPD Blue, 72, 73 Naked City, 161–​162 Name of the Game, The, 60, 68, 93, 94, 140, 181, 183–​84 Nancy Walker Show, The, 232 Nanny, The, 245 National Geographic Specials, 124, 295–​97 Navy Log, 120 Neely, Blake, 274–​75, 416–​17 Nelson, Oliver, 48–​50, 53–​54, 91, 93, 139, 143–​44, 264–​65 Nerf Herder, 153 Nero Wolfe, 79 New Avengers, The, 380 New Bill Cosby Show, The, 235 New Breed, The, 125 Newborn, Ira, 80 Newell, Norman, 375 Newman, David, 364 Newman, Lionel, 129, 131, 143, 199, 227, 270, 326

Newman, Randy, 72–​73, 402 Newman, Thomas, 404, 417–​18 Newsroom, The, 404 Nicholl, Don, 233 Nichols, Ted, 314 Night Court, 68 Night Gallery, 93, 138–​39, 142, 181 Night Stalker (2005) 155–​56 Night Stalker, The (1972) 139, 334 Night Strangler, The, 139 Nilsson, Harry, 220–​21 90 Bristol Court, 211 North, Alex, 175, 293–​95, 362–​63 North and South, 344–​45 Northern Exposure, 194–​95 Northwest Passage, 11–​12 Nostromo, 390–​91 Nova, 306 Novick, Lynn, 306–​7 Nurse Jackie, 82–​83 O Pioneers! 343–​44 oceanQuest, 300–​1 Odyssey 5, 419 Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, 149–​50 Olvis, William, 114 Olympics music, 302–​3 Omartian, Michael, 65 Omnibus, 356, 359 On the Air, 359 Once and Again, 194 Once Upon a Dead Man, 62 Once Upon a Time, 156–​57 One Day at a Time, 232 One Step Beyond, 27, 127 Open All Night, 229 Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries, 385 Orville, The, 157–​58 Others, The, 152 Our Miss Brooks, 198 Our Town, 244–​45 Our World, 371 Out of the Ashes, 420 Outcasts, The, 219 Outer Limits, The, 125–​28 Outlander, 414, 415 Outlaws, 102, 103–​4

Outsider, The, 163 Overland Trail, 13 Pacific, The, 417 Paich, David, 54 Paich, Marty, 53–54 Parker, Jim, 390 Parker, John, 60, 111 Parkers, The, 249 Pasqua, Alan, 304 Patty Duke Show, The, 214–​15 Peake, Don, 266 Peanuts specials, 316–​19 Pearl, Howard, 241–​42 Penny Dreadful, 408–​9 Perfect Strangers, 239 Perilous Voyage, 138–​39 Perkins, Frank, 50, 221 Perry Mason, 120, 169–​70 Persuaders!, The, 383–​85 Peter Gunn, 33–​39, 42, 43, 76, 375 Peter the Great, 358–​60 Petrillo, James C. 6, 33 Petticoat Junction, 201, 202 Peyton Place, 186–​87 Pheloung, Barrington, 393–​94 Phenom, 368 Phil Silvers Show, The, 199–​200 Philip Marlowe, 108 Phillips, Stu, 82, 141–​43, 219, 266, 408 Phinnessee, Darryl, 246 Pillars of the Earth, The, 413–​14 Pirate Master, 308–​9 Planet Earth, 299–​300 Planet of the Apes, 140 Playhouse 90, 29–​32, 115, 120, 293, 325 Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, 185 Point, The, 221 Poldark (1977) 387–​88 Poldark (2015) 390 Poledouris, Basil, 145, 345–​48 Police Squad! 80 Police Story, 59–​60, 67, 109 Police Woman, 57 Poltrack, David, 249 Poor Little Rich Girl: The Barbara Hutton Story, 371 Porter, Dave, 403

Portia Faces Life, 18 Portman, Rachel, 147 Portnoy, Gary, 240–​41 Post, Mike, 69–​73, 171–​73, 183–​84, 215, 309 Powell, Edward B. 127 Power and the Glory, The, 325–​26 Powers That Be, The, 232 Practice, The, 153 Prescription: Murder, 60 Previn, André, 46–​47, 160, 394, 427 Price, Michael, 391 Price, The, 277–​78 Pride & Prejudice, 396–​98 Prime Suspect, 394 Prince, Robert, 139, 183–​84 Prisoner, The, 382–​83 Private Eye, 76 Profiles in Courage, 181–​82 Project XX, 284–​86 Protectors, The, 385 Pruitts of Southampton, The, 209 Psychiatrist, The, 138–​39, 142, 181 Punky Brewster, 241 Pursuit, 364 Pushing Daisies, 156 QB VII, 331–​32 QD III, 248–​49 Quantum Leap, 72–​73 Queen of the Stardust Ballroom, 362 Queen’s Gambit, The, 425 Queenie, 371 Questor Tapes, The, 140 Quick Draw McGraw, 311–​12 Quincy, M.E. 82, 141 Rabinowitz, Harry, 393 Race for Space, The, 290–​91 Racket Squad, 8 Raff, Robert, 9, 15–​16 Rage of Angels, 362 Raid on Entebbe, 140 Raksin, David, 90, 164–​65, 167, 321, 359 Ramar of the Jungle, 8 Ramin, Ron, 186 Ramin, Sid, 186, 214–​15

Index

461

Index

462

Rango, 94 Rankin-​Bass specials, 322–​23 Ransom for a Dead Man, 60–​61 Raposo, Joe, 233 Rat Patrol, The, 127, 174–​75 Rawhide, 9, 85, 91–​94, 104, 108 Ray, Don B. 28–​29, 56, 118 Ray Bolger Show, The, 212 Real McCoys, The, 15, 199 Reba, 265 Rebecca, 394 Rebel, The, 106–​8 Red Pony, The, 335–​36 Redford, J.A.C. 167–​68 Reiche, Gottfried, 303–​4 Reilly, Ace of Spies, 393 Reiser, Paul, 245 Remington Steele, 76–​77 René, Henri, 89 Renegade, 309 Reporter, The, 171 Restless Gun, The, 13 Return of Sherlock Holmes, The, 393 Return of the Gunfighter, 326 Return of the King, The, 322 Return to Oz, 323 Revell, Graeme, 418–​19 Revenge, 196 Revolution, 412 Reznor, Trent, 306–​7 Rich Man, Poor Man, 362–​63 Richard Boone Show, The, 38–​39, 181, 207 Richard Diamond, Private Detective, 41–​43, 122, 162 Richie Brockelman, Private Eye, 71 Richmond, Jeff, 252 Riddle, Nelson, 45–​46, 60, 65–​66, 159–​ 62, 181–​82, 269, 277, 374 Rifleman, The, 7, 95–​96 Rinder, Laurin, 300 Rinker, Julia, 233 Ripley’s Believe It or Not, 308 Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The, 291 Ritenour, Lee, 173 Ritmanis, Lolita, 322–​23 Rivera, Carlos Rafael, 425

Rivers, Johnny, 262–​64 Riverboat, 94, 97, 100–​2, 103–​4 Road Home, The, 167–​68 Roaring Twenties, The, 46–​51 Robert Montgomery Presents, 7 Robertson, Ed, 252 Rockford Files, The, 69–​71, 106, 249 Rocky and His Friends, 315, 316 Rocky Jones, Space Ranger, 9 Roddenberry, Gene, 131–​35, 136 Rodgers, Richard, 181–​82, 282–​84, 289–​90 Roemheld, Heinz, 90 Roger, Normand, 397 Rogers, Shorty, 63–​64, 76 Rogues, The, 161–​62 Rome, 412–​13 Rona, Jeff, 83 Rookies, The, 64, 67 Roots, 101–​2, 337–​40 Roots: The Next Generations, 340 Rose, David, 14, 98–​100, 160 Roseanne, 241–​42 Rosenman, Leonard, 105–​6, 120, 140, 165–​66, 170, 173–​74, 368–​69 Rosenthal, Laurence, 278–​79, 295, 357–​60 Ross, Atticus, 306–​7 Ross, William, 304 Rossini, Gioacchino, 5 Route 66, 65–​66, 159–​62, 269 Roy Rogers Show, The, 84 Rózsa, Miklós, 20 Rubinstein, Arthur B. 277–​78 Rubinstein, John, 176 Ruby, Harry, 15, 199 Rudolph the Red-​Nosed Reindeer, 322–​23 Ruff and Reddy, 311 Rugolo, Pete, 42–​43, 122, 162–​63 Run, Buddy, Run, 216–​17 Run for Your Life, 162, 163 Russell, Bob, 61, 89 Russo, Jeff, 411–​12 Ryan’s Four, 266–​67 S.W.A.T. 64–​65, 222–​23 Safan, Craig, 145, 373

Saga of Western Man, 295 Saint, The, 375–​76 St. Elsewhere, 167–​68, 194–​95 Salinger, Conrad, 90, 177 Salter, Hans J. 102–​3, 105–​6, 326 Salvay, Bennett, 239 Samson and Delilah, 355–​56 San Francisco International Airport, 181 Sandburg’s Lincoln, 124 Sanford and Son, 233–​34 Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town, 322 Sarge, 63 Satins and Spurs, 97 Saturday Night at the Movies, 184 Saunders, Merl, 145 Sauter, Eddie, 139, 289–​90 Sawtell, Paul, 49–​51, 88–​89, 128–​29 Scarecrow and Mrs. King, 277–​78 Scarecrow of Romney Marsh, The, 25–​26 Scarlet Letter, The, 182 Scarlett, 372 Scharf, Walter, 255, 260, 296–​98 Schifrin, Lalo, 91, 93, 110, 140, 166–​ 67, 180–​81, 255, 258–​62, 291, 296, 326, 354–​55 Schrager, Rudy, 7, 94, 96 Schumann, Walter, 18–​20 Schurmann, Gerard, 25–​26 Schwartz, David, 195, 250–​51, 412 Schwartz, Nan, 77–​78 Schwartz, Sherwood, 202–​7 Scoggins, Jerry, 200 Scooby-​Doo, Where Are You! 311–​12 Scott, John, 298–​99, 377 Scott, Nathan, 18–​20, 276 Scott, Tom, 69, 173, 191, 238, 262 Sea Hunt, 14 Sea Wolf, The, 420 seaQuest DSV, 151 Sebastian, John, 220–​21, 222–​23 Secret Agent, 262–​64, 376–​77 Secret Squirrel, 314 See How They Run, 326 Seely, John, 14 Seinfeld, 243–​44, 249 Selinsky, Wladimir, 27–​28

Seltzer, Dov, 348–​49 Senator, The, 181 Sendrey, Al, 101 Serling, Rod, 15, 27–​28, 31, 111, 115–​ 17, 138, 144–​45, 179–​80, 297 Seven Lively Arts, The, 357 77 Sunset Strip, 46–​51 Sex and the City, 400–​1 Sex Symbol, The, 366–​67 Shaiman, Marc, 415 Shandling, Garry, 400 Shannon’s Deal, 173 Shefter, Bert, 49–​51, 88–​89 Sheldon, Ernie, 218 Shell Seekers, The, 372 Sherlock, 391 Sherlock Holmes in New York, 370 Sherman, Richard M. 24 Sherman, Robert B. 24 Shire, David, 62–​63, 93–​94, 105–​ 6, 139–​40 Shirley Temple’s Storybook, 186, 207 Shogun, 352–​53 Shores, Richard, 43, 111–​12, 170, 255, 264 Shostakovich, Dmitri, 393 Shotgun Slade, 102 Shragge, Lawrence, 373 Shuken, Leo, 101, 105–​6 Shulman, Max, 199 Sigman, Carl, 374–​75 Silk Stalkings, 72–​73, 309 Silvestri, Alan, 308–​10 Simon, Carly, 368 Simon & Simon, 65 Simpson, Dudley, 382 Simpsons, The, 319–​21, 399 Singer & Sons, 242 Sins, 368 Sister, Sister, 249 Six Feet Under, 403–​4 Six Million Dollar Man, The, 106, 141, 143–​44 Six Wives of Henry VIII, The, 386–​87 Sixth Sense, The, 139–​40 60 Minutes, 305 Skloff, Michael, 246–​48 Sky King, 8

Index

463

Index

464

Slattery’s People, 296 Sledge Hammer! 80 Sloan, P.F. 262–​64 Smalley, Jack, 67 Smalley, Scott, 67 Smallville, 274 Smile Jenny, You’re Dead, 61 Smiley’s People, 393 Smith, Paul J. 105–​6 Smith, Steven, 393 Smith, Will, 248–​49 Smurfs, The, 311–​12 Snow Goose, The, 396 Snow, Mark, 149–​51, 262, 274 Soap, 221 Something About Amelia, 149–​50 Son of the Morning Star, 373 Sophia Loren in Rome, 295 Sopranos, The, 401 Sousa, John Philip, 398 South Central, 249 Souther, J.D. 243 Space: Above and Beyond, 152 Space Ghost, 314 Space: 1999, 386 Spelling, Aaron, 64–​65, 66, 189, 262 Spencer, Alan, 80 Spencer, Herbert W. 63, 212, 213–​14 Spenser: For Hire, 80, 237 Spielberg, Steven, 95, 138, 144, 151, 183–​84, 361–​62, 415 Sports Night, 193–​94 Springfield, Dusty, 143 Staccato, 43–​44, 94, 101 Stand, The, 369–​70 Star Trek, 102, 131–​36 Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, 137–​38 Star Trek: Discovery, 411–​12 Star Trek: Enterprise, 137, 138 Star Trek: The Next Generation, 136–​38 Star Trek: Voyager, 137–​38 Starsky and Hutch, 67, 262 Stein, Herman, 131 Steiner, Fred, 84, 94, 120–​21, 135, 145, 169–​70, 316 Steiner, Max, 26–​27, 51, 88–​89, 105–​6 Step By Step, 239 Steve Canyon, 20

Stevens, Leith, 120, 128–​29 Stevens, Morton, 54–​57, 84, 111, 112, 123, 145, 177, 184, 255, 354 Still, William Grant, 85 Stingray, 385, 386 Stoney Burke, 125 Stordahl, Axel, 215–​16 Storefront Lawyers, The, 56 Story of Jacob and Joseph, The, 355 Storyteller, The, 147 Straightaway, 47 Strange Report, 385 Strauss, John, 199–​200 Street Hawk, 266 Streets of San Francisco, The, 59, 191, 228 Strouse, Charles, 230–​31 Studio One, 28 Studio One in Hollywood, 29–​31, 164 Succession, 422–​23 Sugarfoot, 88–​89 Sukman, Harry, 99–​100, 164 Sunday Morning, 303–​4 Sunday Night Football, 303 Supercar, 385–​86 Supercops, The, 299 Supergirl, 274–​75 Superman: The Animated Series, 323 Supernatural, 412 Surfside 6, 46–​50 Survivor, 308–​9 Survivors, The, 186–​87 Suspense, 16 Suspicion, 13 Switch, 141 Sword of Gideon, 371 Sybil, 368–​69 Szathmary, Irving, 263–​64 Szysznyk, 226–​27 T.H.E. Cat, 262 Take Five, 43 Taken, 419–​20 Tale of Two Cities, A, 361 Tales From the Crypt, 400 Tales of the Unexpected, 383 Tales of Wells Fargo, 44, 88, 89, 92 Tall Man, The, 102

Tangerine Dream, 151–​52, 266 Tanner, Paul, 130 Tarses, Jay, 228, 229 Tarzan, 277 Tatro, Duane, 128 Tattingers, 167–​68 Taxi, 229–​30 Taylor, Herb, 7 10th Kingdom, The, 372 Tesh, John, 308 Texan, The, 14 Texas Rising, 422 That Girl, 63, 214 Theodorakis, Mikis, 355 Thicke, Alan, 238 Thin Man, The, 11–​12, 42–​43, 122 30 Rock, 251–​52 thirtysomething, 192–​93 Thompson, Bob, 51 Thomson, Virgil, 356–​57, 359 Thorn Birds, The, 365–​66 Those Whiting Girls, 198 Three’s Company, 233 Thriller, 54, 93, 95, 121–​23, 126–​27 Thunderbirds, 386 Tightrope, 109–​10 Timberg, Sammy, 8 Time Tunnel, The, 131 Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, 394–​95 Tiny Toon Adventures, 322–​23, 343–​44 Tiomkin, Dimitri, 91–​94, 108, 111 Tipton, George Aliceson, 221, 239–​40 To Play the King, 390 To Rome With Love, 212 To Serve Them All My Days, 387–​88 Today, 301–​2 Toma, 70, 163 Tony Randall Show, The, 191, 228 Top Cat, 311–​12, 313 Topper, 8 Torchwood, 382 Torkelsons, The, 242–​43 Towers, Micheal, 65 Townes, Jeffrey, 248–​49 Townshend, Pete, 82, 378 Tracey Ullman Show, The, 319 Traffic, 83 Trials of Life, The, 299–​300

Trials of O’Brien, The, 215 Trials of Rosie O’Neill, The, 173, 186 Trinity, 168 Trivers, John, 304 Troost, Ernest, 372 True Blood, 408 Truman, Tim, 75–​76 Tudors, The, 413 Tunick, Jonathan, 167–​68 12 O’Clock High, 127, 174–​75 Twentieth Century, The, 289, 292 24, 280–​81 21 Beacon Street, 13 21 Jump Street, 76 Twilight Zone, The (1959) 15, 30, 115–​ 19, 126–​27, 138, 163 Twilight Zone, The (1985) 144–​45 Twin Peaks, 147–​49 Two and a Half Men, 249–​50 227, 242 Tycoon, The, 276 Tyler, Brian, 56–​57, 419 UFO, 386 U.S. Steel Hour, 28 Under the Influence, 78 Ungar, Jay, 306 Unsub, 72–​73 Untouchables, The, 45–​46, 65–​66, 269 Uprising, 353 Upstairs, Downstairs, 387 Urbont, Jacques, 260, 299 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 123–​24 V, 271 Van Cleave, Nathan, 121 Van Heusen, Jimmy, 213, 218, 244–​45 Vanacore, David, 309 Vangelis, 308 Vanity Fair, 325–​26 Vars, Henry, 276 Victory at Entebbe, 225 Victory at Sea, 282–​85 Vietnam War, The, 306–​7 Vikings, 413–​14 Virginian, The, 57, 68, 93, 103, 104–​6, 111, 181 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, 128–​29

Index

465

Index

466

Wackiest Ship in the Army, The, 218 Wacky Races, 314 Wadsworth, Derek, 386 Wagon Train, 33, 44, 89–​91, 92–​93, 103, 104, 105–​6, 111 Waits, Tom, 402 Walden, W.G. Snuffy, 192–​94, 369–​70 Walker, Shirley, 78–​79, 152, 273, 322–​23 Walker, Texas Ranger, 114 Walking Dead, The, 408 Walt Disney, 22 Walt Disney Presents, 22 Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, 22, 24–​26 Waltons, The, 184–​86 Walz, Ron, 304 WandaVision, 424–​25 Wanted: Dead or Alive, 96 War, The, 306 War and Remembrance, 333–​35 War of Children, A, 373 Warbeck, Stephen, 394 Warm Springs, 343–​44 Warner Bros. Presents, 26 Warren, Harry, 87–​88 Warren, Richard Lewis, 76–​77 Was, Don, 245 Washington, Grover, Jr. 57 Washington, Ned, 91–​92, 94 Waterfront, 9 Waxman, Franz, 57–​58, 94, 105–​6, 111, 120, 179, 186, 289, 326 ‘Way Out, 123–​24, 138 Webb, Jack, 18–​20, 51 Webb, Roy, 90 Webster, Paul Francis, 88–​89, 94, 108 Weil, Cynthia, 217, 219 Welcome Back, Kotter, 220–​21, 222–​23 Wellingtons, The, 24, 204 Wells, Robert, 214–​15 Wells, Tom, 228–​29 Wendy and Me, 109–​10 West 57th, 305 West Wing, The, 193–​94 Western, Johnny, 86–​87 Westworld, 411 When Love Is Not Enough: The Lois Wilson Story, 373

Whispering Smith, 111–​12 Who’s the Boss? 238–​39 Wichita Town, 102–​3 Wide Wide World, 286–​87 Wide World of Sports, 223 Wild Wild West, The, 106–​7, 108–​9 Wilder, Tirk, 114 Will & Grace, 244 Williams, John (Johnny) 40, 44–​45, 91–​93, 95, 129–​31, 144, 177–​80, 205, 273–​74, 278, 301–​2, 303, 321, 325–​28, 396, 397, 412 Williams, Patrick, 59, 93, 106, 191–​92, 227–​28, 265, 355–​56 Williams, Paul, 225 Willimon, Beau, 406 Willis, Allee, 246–​47 Willy, 198 Wilson, Hugh, 228–​29 Wilson, Stanley, 13, 39–​41, 60, 63, 89–​90, 91–​95, 102, 104–​6, 122, 123, 125, 138, 143–​44, 176–​79, 181, 184, 264 Wind in the Willows, The, 322 Winds of War, The, 333–​35 Wings, 245–​46, 248–​49 Winston Churchill: The Valiant Years, 289–​90 Winston, George, 318–​19 Wire, The, 402 Wiseguy, 72–​73 Wizards and Warriors, 145–​46 WKRP in Cincinnati, 228–​29 Wolff, Jonathan, 243–​45 Wolper, David S. 290–​91, 295–​96, 337, 339, 340, 344, 365 Woman Called Golda, A, 329 Woman of Independent Means, A, 419 Women of Valor, 371 Wonder Woman (The New Adventures of Wonder Woman) 270–​71 Wonder Years, The, 192, 193 Wonderful World of Disney, The, 22 Woodbury, Al, 101 Word, The, 363 World at War, The, 396 World Premiere, 184

World War I, 291–​93 World War III, 140–​42 World Without End, 414 Wyle, George, 203–​4

Young Maverick, 113 Young Riders, The, 113–​14 Young, Christopher, 145 Young, Victor, 19, 21–​22

X-​Files, The, 149–​51, 399 Xena: Warrior Princess, 152

Zane Grey Theatre, 27, 96 Zanelli, Geoff, 417, 421 Zeffirelli, Franco, 350–​52 Zimmer, Hans, 321, 417 Zoo Gang, The, 385 Zorro, 23–​24 Zweibel, Alan, 400

Yogi Bear, 311–​12 You Bet Your Life, 62 Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, The, 278–​79

Index

467