Theme songs for TV shows are supposed to give you a general overview of what the show is about. They’re often catchy, jingle-adjacent, designed to stick in your head so you think, “Oh right, what could the Tanner family be up to this week? I should tune in to find out.” Even if it doesn’t have lyrics, sometimes the theme tune just kicks ass (hello, Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Sometimes the theme songs become as iconic as the shows; lookin’ at you, The Golden Girls. But what about the shows where the theme just doesn’t match up to what the show is about? We’ve rounded up a few examples where, in our professional opinions, the theme song doesn’t match what the show is about.
Unsolved Mysteries
Kicking things off with a classic. Does this theme song have to go so fucking hard? It terrified me as a child. Honestly, it still scares me a little as a fully grown (and then some) adult! The sliding tones designed to make the hair on your arms, neck, and ass stand up straight to attention because they almost sound like screams; the plaintive, repetitive piano notes repeating to drive you slowly insane. This would be a better fit as the background to A24’s next pseudo-horror film take on Kafka featuring Dolph Lundgren being turned into a depressed-yet-jacked gigantic beetle or whatever.
I understand they wanted to be creepy and off-putting. A lot of the crimes that are mentioned are scary, including a lot of unsolved murders (it says it right on the tin). But there were also episodes chronicling alien abductions, ghosts and other paranormal activity, and presumably people who just up and vanished into new lives, back when it was much easier to do such a thing. Plus, there were updates where people were found, or killers were caught. So did the theme have to be this intense for every single episode?
Apparently, a lot of people have been terrified by this theme song since it premiered, which does make me feel better. I did a little Googling, a la Jinx searching for information about “The Gremlin Rag.” Lo and behold, the LA Times did an interview with the co-writer of the theme song back in 2020 when the reboot/continuation of Unsolved Mysteries premiered on Netflix. Guess what? Those bastards wanted to terrify you, and they don’t give a shit if you or your kids were scared by their craftsmanship and usage of “the devil’s interval,” aka, The Tritone, which Gwendolyn Nix covered here at Dirge. But those composers, they did this shit on purpose. Honestly? Respect.
Murder, She Wrote
Murder, She Wrote is a classic TV show. I’m sure a lot of you reading this have fond memories of watching this at grandma’s house. Hell, the other day my husband and I were leaving my MIL’s assisted living facility and I heard this theme blasting out of someone’s room and I was so excited. “Babe, they’re watching Murder, She Wrote in there!” We paused for a minute, just in time for the jaunty tuba to kick in. Bliss. If the world as we know it is still around in 50 years (doubtful, but we can dream) then that’s going to be my future: Catatonic in front of a screen, watching Jessica Fletcher’s increasingly fucked-up exploits as at least one person around her is murdered once a week or so.
Anyway, my point is, the theme song is so sweet, upbeat, and fun, it should not be the theme to a television show about a 60-something woman solving murders that happen everywhere she goes. Seriously. Everywhere she goes, someone is murdered, and nobody seems to care. Very rarely a character will make mention of it, but more often than not, people only reference her ability to solve a crime/write a bestselling crime book. While a tuba and full orchestral string section make sweet musical love over footage of Jessica Fletcher riding her bicycle along idyllic Maine coastline, what they’re not showing is the trail of bloody corpses in this woman’s wake.
Also, she has a million nieces, nephews, and cousins, and very briefly (two episodes in total) we have Angela Lansbury playing the famous British actress cousin of Jessica Fletcher, while she’s also playing Jessica Fletcher. They are bad episodes. Ditto random episodes where Jessica is narrating someone else being the star and having weird adventures/murders occur to the people they love instead.
Otherwise, this show is gold, and everyone from the 1980s and 1990s appeared in it except for most of The Golden Girls, though Rue McClanahan is in an episode. See also: Ethan Embry, Jenny Lewis, Bryan Cranston, Courteney Cox, Joaquin Phoenix, George Clooney, Megan Mullally, and Jessica Walter in several episodes, to name just some of the actors who appeared on the show.
Midsomer Murders
Midsomer Murders is a long-running British television series that I’ve been binge watching in my current bout of “I need something on in the background that I can half pay attention to while I do daily activities.” It’s perfect because it’s, one, old-school British crime procedural, and two, truly, incredibly fucked up.
For instance: The first episode’s twist, spoiler alert, is that the murderer is the sweet young woman (played by Emily Mortimer) who’s getting married to a much older gentleman and she’s been killing people because she’s secretly been fucking her brother and they’ve been doing that for years because they’re in love. And they kill themselves via shotgun instead of facing judgment for their numerous crimes! No need to ease into all the weird shit that happens in the idyllic British countryside, I guess.
Most episodes have some kind of kinky weird sex plot, usually with older, stately British actors: Olivia Colman is in an episode; half of the minor cast of Game of Thrones appear in episodes; Orlando Bloom; Henry Cavill; the hot Outlander guy; a million Taskmaster contestants. So why the fuck does the theme song sound like it could be the theme tune to Space Invaders, including a theremin?!
This is the theme song to a kitschy-yet-dramatic 1970s space show. This theme is for ALF if that show had been a serious drama about the dire consequences of interstellar travel on alien life forms instead of Gordon Shumway1 cracking wise and constantly trying to eat the cat (not a euphemism). This theme is not for a show where nearly every episode’s twist involves an affair/a secret love child/incest/boring ol’ fraud/some combination thereof. Midsomer Murders has been on the air since 1998, and the theme song and title card have not changed since it premiered.2 I suppose once you theremin, you can’t theremout.
The Crown
“Wait a second, Nicole,” you’re likely saying now. “I thought we had a whole murder/spooky/scary theme going on here with these shows. What’s The Crown doing on this list?” Well, I’d argue that there’s almost nothing scarier than the history of the British monarchy/empire, which contains a lot of backstabbing, sociopaths, and death of all kinds. Therefore, it fits well within our theme.
The tune starts gently, softly, one could even say demurely, while it slowly starts to ramp up in intensity, with more and more instruments joining in, until it’s a full-on creepy-yet-beautiful symphonic force. Admittedly, it is a gorgeous piece of music, and it was written by Hans Zimmer, so that absolutely tracks. In addition, it’s accompanied in the show (though not on Youtube) with an extremely GoT-style creation of a crown being made: All swift, flowing shots of metal flying into shots of other pieces of metal that are weirdly sprouting and growing to form the aforementioned crown.
I could argue that it’s both too intense for the show while also being the exact right theme to highlight the life of such a long-reigning queen. I just remember hearing it for the first time and being completely taken aback by how intense it became, and how it felt more in-line with a fantasy series about married cousins vying to take over the wo…. Nevermind.
Have I missed any? Probably; there’s a million seasons of approximately five million shows between all the streaming platforms and regular TV stations (yes, they do still exist). Let us know what shows we missed and should watch/talk about in the future!
- I’m not even fucking with you: That’s ALF’s actual name. Man, cocaine in the 1980s just hit different. ↩︎
- Technically, they have *slightly* altered the theme and title card for a few of the episodes over the course of more than 20 series, but by and large, it hasn’t changed. ↩︎
