The 5 Best TV Themes of All Time

Prove me wrong

Just to start a fight, here’s a list of the five best TV themes ever. All other answers are wrong and unacceptable. Nonetheless, feel free to suggest them in the comments — but don’t come up with something I love but forgot to include, because that’d be annoying.

Succession

Nicholas Britell

Something that baffled me about this show was how many people told me they couldn’t watch it because “None of the characters were likable”. I was, like: “Seriously? Then you probably shouldn’t meet most of my friends”.

A faultless cast from top to bottom, dialogue that was smart and sharp and complex without falling into the Sorkin trap (much though I love his work) of sounding a little too elegant for feasible human discourse, and written and structured with genuine genius. When the behavior was awful it was because it was so credible — otherwise it wouldn’t have made you feel so awkward. The whole thing kicking off each episode with the jagged, unsettlingly syncopated brilliance of the theme, perfectly evoking the characters’ megalomaniacal pomp and paranoia. Spot-on visuals, too.

Friends

The Rembrants

I mean, come on. Iconic, innit. And pretty definitely the best sit-com ever made.

Dr Who

Ron Grainer and Delia Derbyshire

I have a confession to make. I’m not actually a huge fan of Dr Who.

Okay, put down the pitchforks. TO BE CLEAR, that doesn’t mean I don’t like it, before I get canceled by hoards of outraged fans — our family very happily watched whichever season/s the fabulous David Tennant was the Doctor in, and got some way through Matt Smith’s reign before the child lost interest. It simply hasn’t been a big thing in my life and so I don’t regard it with quite the awed reverence that seems the norm. We moved back to the UK when I was eight, after years in the US, South Africa and Australia, and at that point my father decreed that the household would not have a television (I spent the long years after that doing annoyingly wholesome things like reading and learning the piano and listening to Radio 4 plays instead) and so it simply wasn’t in my cultural landscape at the age when most people of my generation caught the bug. And, clever though much of Who is — and celebrated though it should be for keeping interesting genre ideas in front of over half a century of children — it’s often just seemed, a little... well, look, we don’t all have to like all the same things, do we.

All that aside, the theme is a banger. Spooky and weird and driving and deeply engrained in the psyche of every British person, even those who had odd fathers like mine. This is the original 1963 version, composed by Ron Grainer and realized by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

If you don’t know about Delia Derbyshire she’s absolutely worth a Google and listen: she was out there forging groundbreaking (and often deeply strange) electronic music a long time ahead of Brian Eno and others of his ilk (there was a period when I listened to his Music for Airports a lot), and I’ll be amazed if John Carpenter isn’t a fan.

Two examples: Nightwalker —

And: Pot au Feu —

Brideshead Revisited

Geoffrey Burgon

This was, in curious fact, the show that broke my childhood home’s lack of television.

I’d finally got a TV into the house, a tiny little black and white, purely because I needed it as a monitor for that pioneering home computer, the ZX81. Yes I am that fucking old. Fuck off. Despite a television suddenly being right there, in my bedroom, I didn’t watch anything: I was perfectly happy listening to the radio and reading books, like the early settlers. But somehow — at least this is my recollection the adults got wind of just how popular Brideshead Revisited was (and dad had greatly enjoyed the novel back in the day) and so the family wound up watching the show on my little TV. After which, gradually, the floodgates opened. If floodgates can open gradually. Probably not. That’s a shit metaphor, sorry. I’ll report myself to the Writing Police.

Several years later I remembered the theme (though not where I’d heard it, which made things difficult) and tried to track it down. My guess was it was probably Haydn. There was no Internet — there were barely computers, still — and so I had to do it hit and miss, buying up cheap CDs in the hope it might be on there. Then eventually I somehow discovered it had been written by Geoffrey Burgeon for Brideshead.

If you look up “wistful nostalgic melancholy” in the dictionary, there’s a link to this, and the atmosphere of that show is still seared into my mind forty years later.

To be fair, though, my guess at Haydn was pretty on the money. And the upside of the long search for this theme is I wound up with a lot of his music, which I like.

The Leftovers

Max Richter

I’ve wanged on about Richter before, so go read that if you haven’t heard of him. The Leftovers was a criminally under-rated show (which admittedly slightly lost its way in the final season), lifted by the keening beauty of Richter’s music — though they actually changed the opening music for both the second and the third and final season.

The theme was developed in different ways throughout the show…

To end this piece, the song The Leftovers used for the titles of Season 2 — Iris DeMent’s Let The Mystery Be — is pretty wonderful too: and a very good mantra for how to deal with the eternal questions of life.

So — what did I miss? What’s on your list?