The 100 Greatest TV Theme Songs of All Time
We apologize in advance for all the TV theme songs we are about to lodge back into your heads. Or maybe we should preemptively accept your thanks?
Despite periodic attempts to contract or outright eliminate them, theme songs are a crucial part of the TV-watching experience. The best ones put you in the right mindset to watch each episode of your favorite, and can be just as entertaining in their own right as any great joke, monologue, or action sequence. So we’ve decided to pick the 100 best theme songs of all time — technically 101, since there are two as inextricably linked as peanut butter and jelly — and attempted to rank them in order of greatness.
How did we figure this out, beyond just arguing about it over Slack, Zoom, ham radio, etc?
First, we assembled a massive list of great songs from throughout the entire long history of TV. We then pared that down by looking for diversity in terms of style of music, style of show, and era. (Honestly, the entire 100 could have been made up of shows from the Seventies. Apologies to The White Shadow, What’s Happening??, and many more that did not make the final list.) Some were written expressly for that show, while others were pre-existing songs given new life through their association with a particular series.
Then we considered two main factors: 1)How great is it as a song? 2)How well does it prepare you for the show that follows, in terms of mood and/or an explanation of the premise? Sometimes, one factor weighed more heavily than the other, and many bitter fights were fought. (There are still hurt feelings regarding which of ABC’s T.G.I.F. family sitcoms got the nod and which ones didn’t.) Like any attempt to quantify art, there was ultimately a lot of gut feelings involved: On its own, Theme Song A is an objectively better piece of music than Theme Song B, but Theme Song B is a much more perfect match for its show.
This list — with many of the blurbs owing a debt to the wealth of theme song history in the book TV’s Greatest Hits by Jon Burlingame — is our attempt to explain why we chose these 100 over any or all of your favorites.
Enjoy, and get to humming.
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‘Sesame Street’
Image Credit: HBO He wasn’t a big yellow bird or a furry blue monster, but Joe Raposo was as integral to the success of the children’s educational institution Sesame Street as any Muppet. In addition to writing classic Sesame songs like “Bein’ Green,” “Sing,” and “C Is for Cookie” — that’s good enough for me — Raposo composed the jaunty, instantly recognizable theme song that helped lodge the show in the public consciousness. With lyrics by Raposo, Jon Stone, and Bruce Hart, “Can You Tell Me How to Get to Sesame Street?” conjures up images of smiling kids running down the sidewalk on a sunny day — headed, in the words of Don Draper, to a place where they know they are loved. —S.T.C.
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‘How to Make It in America’
Image Credit: HBO No one would ever attempt to claim that this comedy about two buddies trying to break into the fashion business — an unofficial attempt at an East Coast Entourage — is among the great HBO shows of all time. Yet a convincing argument could be made that its opening credits — a montage of distinctly New York faces and images of strivers and hustlers in action, cut against the addictive beat of Aloe Blacc’s “I Need a Dollar” — are among the greatest ever featured on a channel with a long history of iconic intro sequences. —A.S.
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‘The Love Boat’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images “The love boat! Soon we’ll be making another run!” sings adult-pop stalwart Jack Jones on this vintage slice of Seventies disco cheese. “Charlie Fox gave me this melody, said that it was a new series called The Love Boat, it was about a cruise ship,” lyricist Paul Williams, who wrote the song with composer Fox, told Songfacts in 2007. “We honestly didn’t think it was going to last six weeks. We thought, ‘Who’s going to watch a series about a cruise ship?’” Decades later, it’s still unclear how a comedy-drama about a cruise ship became an era-defining hit. But Fox and Williams’ hooky theme song that made “love exciting and new” had a lot to do with it. —M.R.
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“Orange Is the New Black”
Image Credit: JoJo Whilden/Netflix Regina Spektor first worked with showrunner Jenji Kohan when she covered the Weeds theme song, “Little Boxes,” during the second season of that show. And when Kohan started to think about a song for her Netflix prison show Orange Is the New Black a few years later, she turned again to Spektor. “She told me about the premise and some of the vignettes over lunch, some of the stories,” Spektor told Stereogum this year. “I instantly started to imagine things. … It just sounded so cool and unique, and to have a show with so many women of different ages and races.” After watching rough cuts of a few episodes, Spektor penned a song about the horror of facing endless time while packed tightly into a cage like an animal. “Think of all the roads,” she sings. “Think of all their crossings/Taking steps is easy/Standing still is hard.” —A.G.
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‘Bonanza’
Image Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Frankly, a list like this could be filled top to bottom with Westerns, given how many cowboy shows grab viewers with galloping tempos and energetic twang. But the Bonanza theme is one that lots of folks still enthusiastically hum — even if they’ve never spent a single minute watching the Cartwrights roam around the Ponderosa Ranch. Though this series is a mature drama about the changing cultural mores in 1860s Nevada, the credits music is downright rollicking, with its rapidly strummed guitars and pumping horns. It’s an invitation to frontier adventure, meant to get people’s hearts racing before anyone even draws a gun or throws a punch. —N.M.
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“Gilmore Girls”
Image Credit: © CW Network/Everett Collection Producer Lou Adler almost kept “Where You Lead” off Carole King’s 1971 classic Tapestry. “[It] didn’t really fit in quite as much with the other singer-songwriter-type things,” King’s daughter Louise Goffin later said. Fittingly, when Gilmore Girls creator Amy Sherman-Palladino requested King’s permission to use “Where You Lead” for her new show’s theme, King sang it with Louise, though she told her daughter, “Don’t get your hopes up. Pilots usually don’t go anywhere.” (King also revised the lyrics to make them less overtly subservient.) This pilot did take off — and King began appearing occasionally as a record-shop owner in Stars Hollow beginning in Season Two. —M.M.
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‘Living Single’
Image Credit: © Warner Bros/Everett Collection Queen Latifah’s theme song powered her beloved mid-Nineties sitcom about four friends living and loving in Brooklyn. Just as with her hits, like “Ladies First” and “U.N.I.T.Y.,” she switched between singing the chorus and rapping with aplomb, all atop a New Jill Swing groove. In addition to introducing the show’s characters, the opening sequence features longtime choreographer and future Rap City co-host Leslie “Big Lez” Segar in silhouette, busting fierce and athletic dance moves. —M.R.
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‘Law & Order’
Image Credit: Virginia Sherwood/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images Mike Post already had experience creating theme songs for Hill Street Blues and The Rockford Files when Dick Wolf tapped him to create an intro for his new police procedural. Using clarinet, guitar, and electric piano, Post managed to plunk out a theme that wouldn’t be just recognizable for generations of true-crime addicts — it would become the basis for the franchise’s countless iterations. But it’s Post’s other, midshow music that he’ll probably be best remembered for: the dun-dun that introduces scene-cards throughout the show. “I think of it as the stylized sound of a jail cell locking,” he said. Lucky for him, it’s considered a piece of music, not a sound effect, meaning he gets a royalty every time it plays. —E.G.P.
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‘SpongeBob SquarePants’
Image Credit: © Nickelodeon/Everett Collection When any millennial or zillenial hears “Are you ready kids?,” they’d also know to immediately respond “Aye, aye, captain!” The SpongeBob theme song has been covered by icons like Avril Lavigne and CeeLo Green, and this year even served as walk-up music for the Cleveland Guardians’ outfielder Oscar Gonzalez. Composed by Mark Harrison and Blaise Smith, with lyrics by late creator Stephen Hillenburg, this song is the perfect introduction to a world of high-pitched laughs, hijinks, and Krabby Patties, and it made sea shanties cool before “The Wellerman” took over TikTok. After 23 years, the song and show are still going strong. Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? In a certain sense, we all do. —T.K.
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‘Sex and the City’
Image Credit: HBO The opening credits are most famous for Carrie Bradshaw’s tutu, which Sarah Jessica Parker and costume designer Patricia Field had to fight to include as a sign of all the fashion choices that would follow. But the concept for the song itself — a “Latin, cocktail-themed vibe” — came straight from creator Darren Star. (Composer Douglas Cuomo said he found inspiration for it in the “Space-Age Bachelor Pad” section of the Virgin Megastore.) Though the song has become instantly recognizable, the scene itself seems almost disconnected from the reality of the show; shot in March 1998, a few months before the series premiered, it features Carrie getting splashed by a bus that bears her face — a fitting metaphor for the rest of the series, but with a character whom the star was still figuring out. “If we had shot it a year later, I would’ve understood exactly how she walks,” Parker told Entertainment Weekly. “But that was part of figuring it out that day.” —E.G.P.
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‘The Monkees’
Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images The songwriting duo of Tommy Boyce and Bobby Heart are responsible for many of the Monkees’ biggest hits, including “Last Train to Clarksville,” “(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone,” and “I Wanna Be Free.” They also wrote this zany theme song to the sitcom, inspired by the Dave Clark Five’s hit “Catch Me If You Can.” It introduced the tweens of 1966 to Davy, Peter, Micky, and Mike — but not all of those guys loved the song. “I was very interested in rock & roll music, music that was setting the tone and the tenor of the times, music that was a soundtrack to a generation,” said Michael Nesmith. “So that didn’t fit, and I was vocal about not liking it.” The public disagreed, and it remains one of their most famous tunes, despite the fact that they never bothered to play it live a single time across six decades of concerts. —A.G.
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‘The X-Files’
Image Credit: FOX Image Collection/Getty Images It flitters. It flutters. It whistles at you like some unidentified creature in a dark forest at night. It has the awesome Tool-like alternate title “Materia Primoris.” It’s “The X-Files Theme,” it’s by composer Mark Snow, and it was created literally by accident, when Snow’s elbow struck his keyboard and created the sound he’d been looking for. A perfect musical representation of the spooky, sexy adventures of FBI agents Mulder and Scully, it’s taken on a second life since its Nineties heyday (when a remixed version hit the charts worldwide), as a sonic synonym for conspiracy theories in countless memes. —S.T.C.
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‘The Golden Girls’
Image Credit: Herb Ball/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images It’s forever associated with Bea Arthur, Betty White, Estelle Getty, and Rue McClanahan’s Eighties sitcom classic, but “Thank You for Being a Friend” is actually a glorious hand-me-down. Originally a Top 40 hit for Andrew Gold, a soft-rock fixture who enlisted session gods Waddy Wachtel and Jeff Porcaro for the track, it wound up achieving even greater fame via NBC’s Saturday-night lineup and a cover version by Cynthia Fee. It’s such a perfect tribute to the rocky but loyal friendships of Miami’s fab four that you can’t help but want to be like this guy and thank the song itself for being a friend. —S.T.C.
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‘Dragnet’
Image Credit: Silver Screen Collection/Getty Images “Dunnn da dun dunn. Dunnn da dun dunn dunnnnnnn.” The story you are about to hear is true: This nine-note embodiment of the long arm of the law reaching out to grab you by your criminal neck was itself the subject of a legal dispute. Composer Walter Schumann allegedly lifted the leitmotif from a passage from Mikós Rózsa’s score for the 1946 noir The Killers, titled “Danger Ahead.” Whatever you call it, it sounds exactly like creator and star Jack Webb looks: hard-boiled, relentless, and triumphantly square. —S.T.C.
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‘Laverne & Shirley’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel’s first crack at penning a follow-up to their successful Happy Days theme required an important revision. Fox and Gimbel wrote an inspirational song about how blue-collar best friends Laverne and Shirley wished their dreams would come true, so they could live bigger lives than working in a brewery. But the Laverne & Shirley producers objected to the idea that their title characters would just sit around and hope for better things, which is how “wishing our dreams will come true” became the radio smash “Making Our Dreams Come True,” with vocals by Cindy Grecco. —A.S.
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‘Twin Peaks’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images From the moment it became an unexpected sensation in 1990, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks was like nothing television viewers had ever seen. For the love of Bob, when it returned for a third season in 2017, it was still like nothing television viewers had ever seen. The theme music followed suit. Composed by Lynch’s eternal musical collaborator Angelo Badalamenti, it’s a painfully dreamy instrumental that gently washes over you like the spray of the town’s waterfall. A vocal version with lyrics by Lynch and a performance by singer Julee Cruise, titled “Falling,” became a dream-pop classic, too — as beautiful and haunting as Laura Palmer’s smile. —S.T.C.
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‘The Dukes of Hazzard’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images The key name in the credits: “Waylon Jennings as the Balladeer.” The outlaw-country legend narrated each episode of The Dukes of Hazzard in his down-home Texas drawl. He also sang the theme song, explaining how the wild-ass Duke cousins were “just two good ol’ boys, never meanin’ no harm.” Jennings always enhanced the onscreen action with comments like “Roscoe and Enos couldn’t count a dozen eggs without takin’ off their shoes.” “Good Ol’ Boys” hit Number One on the country charts — and shoot, it also done turned into Jennings’ biggest dang Top 40 crossover ever. Yeee — and this narrative nuance cannot be emphasized enough — haaaw! —R.S.
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‘The Addams Family’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images It uses “ooky” in a lyric so that no one else would have to: Veteran TV-music writer Vic Mizzy’s original theme song explained the plot of ABC’s horror-comedy — premiering the same year, 1964, that CBS tried the same premise. (Shout out to The Munsters’ theme, a swinging cousin of The Flintstones, minus the exposition.) The Addams Family theme, helped along by co-star Ted Cassidy intoning some rhymes in character as Lurch (“Petite!”), proved so indestructible that it survived two different rewrites by early-Nineties pop-rappers, both tied to film remakes: MC Hammer’s “Addams Groove” and Tag Team’s “Addams Family (Whoomp!).” —M.M.
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‘Miami Vice’
Image Credit: Randee St. Nicholas/NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images Three years after the launch of MTV, the music-video channel’s high-gloss aesthetics made it to prime-time network TV with Miami Vice, a fast-paced look at the drug trade in southern Florida. In addition to fighting crime, Miami Vice promoted music, too, spotlighting Phil Collins’ moody “In the Air Tonight” in its premiere episode and giving a boost to Glenn Frey’s post-Eagles solo career. Its pop power was so potent, it sent the show’s maximalist theme song, composed and produced by jazz-rocker Jan Hammer, to Number One. In its original and TV-time-compressed form, Hammer’s theme boils over with dramatic flourishes — drum-pad hits, slashes of synth, and a pealing guitar solo — while giving off a vibe that’s as pastel-colored cool as Crockett and Tubbs’ decade-defining outfits. —M.J.
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‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’
Image Credit: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images The seeds of this classic theme song lay in Sonny Curtis’ 1970 single “Love Is All Around.” The original has a dreamy, string-laden arrangement typical of MOR pop during the era, as well as decidedly non-feminist lines like, “All the men around adore you/That sexy look will do wonders for you.” However, the version eventually broadcast during the first season of The Mary Tyler Moore Show has a triumphantly orchestral sweep, a better fit for the iconic title character’s personal and professional growth. The song’s innumerable covers include a memorable 1985 version by Minneasta hardcore heroes Hüsker Dü, who even filmed a homespun video. Alas, they didn’t include Moore’s famous hat toss. —M.R.
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‘One Day at a Time’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images Both the original Seventies-Eighties version of this Norman Lear sitcom and its more recent reboot are about a stressed-out divorced mom who juggles work, parenting, and occasionally romance. But while the latter take adds Latin rhythms to the Gloria Estefan-sung opening theme — to reflect its family’s Cuban roots — the melody and lyrics remain the work of Jeff and Nancy Barry, whose song “This Is It” distills what the show’s really about. “This is life/ The one you get/So go and have a ball,” read the words, describing what it’s like to suffer one disappointment after another, yet still keep going, joyfully. —N.M.
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‘The Greatest American Hero’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images Stephen Geyer’s self-deprecating lyrics and Mike Post’s slow-building power-ballad composition are a good match for the show’s lighthearted superheroics. But the full recording of Joey Scarbury’s performance of it quickly outgrew the show that gave birth to it. “Believe It or Not” was a radio staple in the early Eighties, making it all the way up to No. Two on the Billboard Hot 100, and spent more than four months in the Top 40. And years later, George Costanza recorded his own version for his outgoing answering-machine message. —A.S.
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‘Good Times’
Image Credit: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images The Good Times theme song is joyously over the top. Folks of a certain age will fondly remember mimicking Jim Gilstrap, Blinky Williams, and an unnamed gospel choir’s wild vocal exuberance as the show aired each week, whether during its original run or its many years on syndication channels like TV One. Even now, the chorus — “Goood times … aaaahhh … yeahhhmmm!” — may be ringing in your head. Ironically, the lyrics of this hallmark of Seventies Black culture were written by two white Broadway veterans, Alan and Marilyn Bergman, with music composed by David Grusin. Given those origins, oft-disputed lyric “hangin’ in and jivin’” might not pass muster today. —M.R.
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‘Hill Street Blues’
Image Credit: Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Written by Mike Post, the Mozart of TV theme songs — he counts The A-Team, The Rockford Files, The Greatest American Hero, Blossom, and the Law & Order franchise among his many indelible contributions — “Hill Street Blues” soundtracked a show that brought a new sophistication to the police-procedural drama and laid the early groundwork for several subsequent TV renaissances. Its wistful piano melody was similarly nuanced (compare and contrast with Dragnet!), befitting its status as the sound of the smartest dramatic programming on the tube at the time. Small wonder it hit the Billboard Top 10. —S.T.C.
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‘Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt’
Image Credit: Eric Liebowitz/Netflix If this song got in your head right before you went into underground captivity for 15 years, it would probably still be there when you finally got out. Written by Jeff Richmond, this earworm starts off Tina Fey and Robert Carlock’s comedy series about Kimmy Schmidt (Ellie Kemper) navigating life in New York City after being held captive by a doomsday cult. It parodies viral autotuned news clips, specifically “The Bed Intruder Song” by the Gregory Brothers, who also produced this tune. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Richmond said he, Fey and Carlock wanted the theme song “to live as an anthem – a song of empowerment and humor,” which is the perfect embodiment of what Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is all about.–T.K.
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‘Succession’
Image Credit: Macall B. Polay/HBO Undergirding a classical piano piece with a grim, murky hip-hop beat, the music for Succession nicely drives home the notion of a ruling class that has descended into gangster decadence, of ambition and entitlement collapsing into chaos and nihilism. “Things are always kind of off-kilter in themselves,” composer Nicholas Britel has said of the music, “like the family in the show,” As Succession has progressed, that score has evolved, constantly shifting in emotional texture and tone until it feels like another character in the story — one of the few sympathetic ones, in fact. —J.D.
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‘Star Trek’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images “Space … the final frontier …” Like William Shatner’s iconic monologue, this minute of woosh and hum (composed by Alexander Courage and titled “Where No Man Has Gone Before”) points to the stars. Often mistaken for that most retrofuturist instrument, the theremin, the wordless melody line is sung in much of Season One by soprano Loulie Jean Norman, with flute and organ mixed in for an otherworldly feel. While various Star Trek movies and shows have their own themes, composers often use the original fanfare, as nothing else sounds quite like high adventure on strange new worlds. —J.G.
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‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Show’
Image Credit: © Showtime/Everett Collection Garry Shandling’s Showtime series It’s Garry Shandling’s Show broke ground in meta-comedy during the Eighties, with Shandling often looking past the camera and addressing the audience to riff on on-set happenings. The happy-go-lucky theme song is similarly self-referential, with session musician Bill Lynch at one point crooning, “I’m almost halfway finished/How do you like it so far?” and warning the audience before he launches into some good-natured whistling. According to Judd Apatow’s 2019 Shandling tome, It’s Garry Shandling’s Book, the comedian and co-creator Alan Zweibel conceived and wrote the song while on a lengthy elevator ride, trading lines and finishing things up just in time to reach their floor. In comedy, after all, timing is everything. —M.J.
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‘Peter Gunn’
Image Credit: TV Guide/Everett Collection A theme song so ingrained into popular culture, you know it even if you’ve never heard of the show it introduced. It’s one of the earliest collaborations between director Blake Edwards and composer Henry Mancini — it later led to Mancini’s Pink Panther theme, which also grew beyond its original usage. Mancini’s relentless, sinister blend of rock, jazz, and blues now represents an entire era of hard-boiled-sleuthing entertainment, and would be used ironically decades later in comedies like The Blues Brothers and Sixteen Candles. It was even mashed up with “Every Breath You Take” for a memorable Sopranos sequence making fun of the FBI agents trying to catch Tony Soprano. —A.S.
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‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
Image Credit: John P. Johnson/HBO The moment you hear that womp-womp-womp, you know Larry David has done something equal parts horrendous and hilarious. That’s the musical promise of “Frolic,” an obscure piece of film music by Italian composer Luciano Michelini that David overheard in a bank commercial and hand-selected to be the incongruously cheery theme for his cringe-comedy masterpiece. (It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia would take a similar approach.) It’s since taken on a life of its own on the internet, used to soundtrack a million memes and videos in which somebody, somewhere, really screws the pooch. —S.T.C.
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‘All in the Family’
Image Credit: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images Norman Lear’s sitcom about the 1970s culture wars had the perfect intro: Edith and Archie Bunker sitting at the piano in their working-class Queens living room, singing “Those Were the Days.” It’s full of nostalgia for the pre-WWII days, before those damn hippies ruined everything: They salute Glenn Miller, Herbert Hoover, and the vintage LaSalle car. But it also reveals the warmth between Jean Stapleton’s Edith and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie. “Those Were the Days” felt like an authentic oldie, but it was written for the show by the Broadway team of Charles Strouse and Lee Adams, who did the musical Bye Bye Birdie. (Strouse later wrote Annie, which had a very different take on Herbert Hoover.) It’s one of the most parody-friendly TV themes ever; The Simpsons updated it for the Seventies (“Boy, the way the Bee Gees played/Movies John Travolta made”) and the Nineties (“Gee, our modem dialed up great”). Bonus applause for the equally evocative closing theme, “Remembering You,” by O’Connor and jazz pianist Roger Kellaway. —R.S.
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‘The Sopranos’
Image Credit: Anthony Neste/Getty Images By far the best example of how the right credit sequence can combine with the right song to be something special. On its own, Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” is a pretty cliched, irritating example of turn of the century trip-hop. Yet somehow, when it’s accompanying Tony Soprano’s long, unglamorous drive from the Lincoln Tunnel to his suburban Jersey home, it is impossible to imagine a tune that is more ominous, more absorbing, or more suited to the task of getting the viewer into the proper mindset to watch the most transformational TV series of our time. —A.S.
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‘The Simpsons’
Image Credit: FOX The first meeting between Simpsons creator Matt Groening and composer Danny Elfman began on an awkward note. In his days as a rock critic for the Los Angeles Reader, Groening had panned Elfman’s band, Oingo Boingo. “When we had our first meeting,” Groening recalled, “he said, ‘So you’re the one.’ But he forgave me, because I also went on to make fun of rock critics a lot in my cartoon scripts.” Elfman, riding high on the success of his Batman score, wanted to do “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.” That would not be the case for the orchestral chaos of his Simpsons theme, which has endured for more than 30 years, and has proven versatile enough to expand and contract depending on how long the opening credits are meant to run from one episode to the next. —A.S.
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‘The Muppet Show’
Image Credit: © The Jim Henson Company/Everett Collection Let’s say you’re producing a variety show, staffed entirely by dogs and bears and frogs and pigs and long-nosed blue weirdos of an unspecified nature. Let’s say you want to craft a “Hey, the show must go on” anthem befitting the facts (and fur and feathers) on the ground. The result would most likely be pretty much exactly what Muppet maestro Jim Henson and co-writer Sam Pottle came up with: a brassy, bouncy ode to the Muppets’ ramshackle DIY ethos, in which even the show’s resident hecklers, Statler and Waldorf, eventually got a verse of their own. Gonzo, blow your horn! —S.T.C.
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‘The Rockford Files’
Image Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images Jim Rockford was the private eye who lived in a trailer and always got his ass kicked — but as played by James Garner, he had the cockiest grin on TV. (Dope sideburns, too.) The Rockford Files theme captured Rockford’s sly bravado as well as his hard-luck blues. It was a Top 10 hit in 1975 for composer Mike Post (who has so many bangers on this list) and partner Pete Carpenter. That lonesome harmonica solo was played by Tommy Morgan, who also honked the licking stick on the Sanford and Son theme, not to mention the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations.” The theme song always kicked off with a message on Jim Rockford’s answering machine — for most Seventies viewers, it was the first time they ever heard of one. —R.S.
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‘Mission: Impossible’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images When this spy series debuted in 1966, it arrived during the heyday of Bond-mania, when stylish stories about supercool secret agents were all the rage. Lalo Schifirin’s explosive theme song gave the show its own cinematic flair. It’s like a mini movie in and of itself, with its sizzling opening sting, pounding bongo beat, and trilling flutes. The song set a new standard for how action-adventures should sound, influencing themes for Ironside, S.W.A.T., and more — as well as providing a hook to the scores for the blockbuster M:I movies. —N.M.
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‘The Wire’
Image Credit: HBO Throughout its five seasons, The Wire featured a different interpretation of Tom Waits’ song “Way Down in the Hole,” including the original version, from his 1987 album, Franks Wild Years. Series creator David Simon told Entertainment Weekly that he initially planned on Waits’ “Get Behind the Mule,” but it didn’t quite fit. “I went back and looked for similar things that were suggestive of the ubiquitous drudgery and pain of whatever you’re engaged in,” he said. Indeed, the lyrics about keeping “the devil way down in the hole” are both universal and specifically relevant to The Wire’s portrayal of Baltimore residents resisting and falling into deadly temptations. Meanwhile, its guttural blues-rock sound hints at historic civic injustices that the series explores with brilliant insight. —M.R.
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‘Cheers’
Image Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images It’s a little bit like no one told “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” that it’s the opening theme for one of the funniest TV shows of all time. Performed by Gary Portnoy, who co-wrote it with Judy Hart Angelo, the song opens with a somber melody and lyrics that acknowledge the difficulties of modern life, before launching into a rousing chorus about the simple beauty of going someplace where you’re recognized and acknowledged for who you are. Like the show’s dark wooden fixtures and golden lighting, it helped make Cheers feel like your Thursday-night home away from home. —S.T.C.
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‘Hawaii Five-O’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images The barreling drums and crisp brass of Morton Stevens’ theme for the sunny police procedural Hawaii Five-O announce a show with two purposes: fighting crime and showcasing the Aloha State’s natural beauty. Surf rock’s faster songs already had a natural propulsion, thanks to its ferociously played guitars; the CBS Orchestra’s pomp only added to the track’s explosiveness, particularly on its indelible riff. Covered by many, including the surf-rock titans the Ventures, and paid homage by many more, including the Aussie proto-punks Radio Birdman and Hawaii’s own Don Ho, the Hawaii Five-O theme’s legacy has even outlasted the show’s 21st-century reboot. —M.J.
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‘Game of Thrones’
Image Credit: HBO It took some time before Game of Thrones became the blockbuster hit of the 2010s, but composer Ramin Djawadi’s iconic theme music made it sound like the biggest thing on television right from the jump. A three-quarter-time swirl of magic and mystery, it perfectly mirrored both the show’s sweeping scope and the clockwork imagery of the title sequence. The song became so firmly identified with GoT’s genre-redefining flavor fantasy that when the time came to select the theme for the prequel series, House of the Dragon, HBO simply used it again. Hey, if it ain’t broke, don’t shout dracarys at it. —S.T.C.
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‘Too Many Cooks’
Look, we were half-tempted to put this right at the top of the list. And it’s not just that once you hear “Too Many Cooks” it will take years of intensive psychotherapy to get it out of your head. It’s also that writer Casper Kelly (co-creator of Adult Swim’s Your Pretty Face Is Going to Hell) hangs two irresistible questions on that earworm: (1) What if a TV show consisted entirely of its own theme song? (2)What if that theme song was somehow every theme song, from every genre? So what begins in familiar family-sitcom territory soon becomes a workplace comedy, a gritty cop drama, science fiction, a Saturday-morning cartoon, a slasher movie, and, inevitably, a cooking show. And it just. Keeps. Going. Adult Swim originally aired it at 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, yet the short film instantly went viral, because how could something this insane, but also this catchy, not? —A.S.
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‘The O.C.’
Image Credit: © Warner Bros/Everett Collection O.C. creator Josh Schwartz was so determined to fill his teen soap with his favorite indie-rock music that the soundtrack for the first half-dozen episodes is just made up of songs he had on his iPod. Most successful among those is his use of this soaring Phantom Planet ballad. Originally meant to just accompany a montage of the show’s main character arriving in Newport Beach for the first time, it struck such a chord with everyone who saw the pilot that it became the theme song, as well as a crossover radio hit. And it ushered in an era when The O.C., and the shows that followed it, like Grey’s Anatomy, made indie rock a familiar piece of TV’s sonic landscape. And the show wound up making “California” so popular that the estates of Joseph Meyer and B.G. De Sylva sued for a shared songwriting credit and cut of the rights, since Phantom Planet frontman Alex Greenwald and drummer Jason Schwartzman had incorporated a few of the lyrics to Meyer and De Sylva’s Al Jolson hit “California, Here I Come.” —A.S.
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‘Friends’
Image Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images The oversize suits. The awkward dancing. The half-singing-along. The claps. Does anything say “Nineties white people” more than the opening of Friends? This poppy Rembrandts song — modeled off R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” — set the tone for the ultra-caffeinated antics of the Central Perk sextet, reminding the viewers the group did truly care about one another, even if they hate Ross for being smart. —E.G.P.
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‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’
Image Credit: Chris Cuffaio/NBCU Photo BankNBCUniversal/Getty Images Thanks to decades in syndication since its original early-Nineties run, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince’s theme song to the classic sitcom The Fresh Prince of Bel Air is one of a few old-school rap songs that every generation knows the words to. The Philadelphia duo’s track has a strong resemblance to their breakthrough 1988 hit, “Parents Just Don’t Understand,” as the Fresh Prince cheerfully and humorously breaks down his journey from a city playground “where I spend most of days” to his throne in a rich Los Angeles enclave. Check the original song “Yo Home to Bel Air,” which has extra squeaky-clean rhymes that didn’t air on TV. —M.R.
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‘The Twilight Zone’
Image Credit: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images Bernard Herrmann’s screeching strings from Psycho. John Williams’ menacing Oh, no, here it comes theme from Jaws. John Carpenter’s eerie, insistent Halloween hook. These sounds are instantly synonymous with horror, and Maurice Constant’s Twilight Zone theme stands right alongside them. Starting with the show’s second season (replacing the original theme by Herrmann), Constant’s music sounded like a blaring siren, warning you that something terrible is about to befall the legion of legendary actors who populated creator Rod Serling’s macabre morality plays. To this day, it’s the go-to tune to nervously hum to yourself when something really weird has happened and you feel like you’ve entered … —S.T.C.
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‘Mister Rogers‘ Neighborhood’
Image Credit: Fotos International/Getty Images Fred Rogers did not have a fabulous singing voice. But that’s the whole point of every Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood song, in particular the Rogers-penned “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” So much of the series is about encouraging small children to believe in themselves and go with confidence out into the world. And what better way to convey this idea, episode after episode, season after season, decade after decade, than to welcome viewers in with the sound of Rogers warbling this familiar tune with warmth and complete self-assurance? He’s implicitly telling his young audience that it’s OK to do things you enjoy doing, even if you’re not going to be perfect at them, and he does it while the lyrics are encouraging them to sit a while and bask in his exceedingly kind and gentle presence. Many of the other kids-show themes on this list are more interesting and ambitious musically, but none understand the assignment better than “Won’t You Be My Neighbor?” —A.S.
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‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’
Image Credit: ©CW Network/Everett Collection Every episode of this delightful musical-comedy-drama hybrid featured at least two note-perfect song pastiches in a wide variety of styles, from the songwriting team of Rachel Bloom (also the show’s star and co-creator), Adam Schlesinger (a.k.a. the chief songwriter of Fountains of Wayne and the man responsible for “That Thing You Do!”), and Jack Dolgen. The trio brought that chameleonic quality to the theme song as well, which morphed each season to fit a new style and a new phase of the series. Season One’s theme (written just by Bloom and Dolgen) is an expository Broadway-style tune explaining the show’s premise even as it makes fun of the more problematic superficial aspects of it. (“The situation’s a lot more nuanced than that!”) Season Two goes classic Hollywood musical with a Busby Berkeley-ish number, where Bloom’s Rebecca Bunch insists that being in love relieves her of responsibility for her actions. By Season Three, Rebecca is genuinely struggling with mental illness, so the new theme — where Bloom channels, among others, Carrie Underwood and Eminem — confronts that idea more darkly. And as Rebecca starts to get her act together, the final season opens with a TGIF-sitcom parody, with a frequently changing punchline, called “Meet Rebecca!” The story wrapped up perfectly by the end of that season, but it’s hard not to wonder what other theme songs the trio might have crafted before Schlesinger’s tragic death early in the Covid pandemic. —A.S.
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‘Sanford and Son’
Image Credit: NBCU Photo Bank/NBCUniversal/Getty Images After his father’s death, Quincy Jones threw himself into as much work as he could get, from producing records for Aretha Franklin and Donny Hathaway to continuing his steady diet of TV and movie scores. One of those assignments was a tune for a sitcom about a junk-shop owner and his son in Watts, based on the British sitcom Steptoe and Son. Since he was juggling so many other deadlines, Jones wrote the theme for Sanford and Son (officially known as “The Streetbeater”) in 20 minutes. Then, with the show’s setting in mind, he and his crack studio crew — including keyboardist George Duke, sax players Phil Woods and Ernie Watts, and harmonica player Tommy Morgan — cut a track as scrappy, funky, and lowrider gritty as Fred Sanford’s junk shop. Morgan’s bass harmonica in particular was meant to conjure the throaty rasp of the show’s star, notoriously raunchy comic Redd Foxx. “I just wrote what he looked like,” Jones said. “It sounds just like him, doesn’t it? It was just like Foxx.” —D.B.
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TIE: ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Gilligan’s Island’
Image Credit: ABC Photo Archives/Disney General Entertainment Content/Getty Images; CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images A tie between the two all-time great expository themes, with lyrics by creator Sherwood Schwartz. As Schwartz said, “Confused people don’t laugh.” So “The Brady Bunch” and “The Ballad of Gilligan’s Isle” are the platonic ideal of what a theme song should be: catchy tunes that introduce the characters and tell you everything you need to know before watching. A lovely lady, a man named Brady, three girls, three boys — any questions? Seven castaways on an island — we good? That’s the principle behind all of the great premise-explaining cheat-sheet TV themes, from The Beverly Hillbillies and The Odd Couple to Charlie’s Angels and The Six Million Dollar Man. True, Schwartz ducked the question of why Ginger and the Howells packed 98 episodes’ worth of couture for a three-hour tour. But “Stairway to Gilligan’s Island” became a 1978 novelty classic; Robert Plant called it his favorite Led Zeppelin cover version. Both of these TV themes epitomize the lost art of here’s-the-story opening credits. —R.S.
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‘The Jeffersons’
Image Credit: CBS/Getty Images Of course the greatest TV theme song of them all would come from the greatest decade by far for TV theme songs. “Movin’ On Up,” co-written by Jeff Barry and Good Times co-star Ja’net DuBois, and belted out with passion and glory by DuBois, does everything you want from a theme song. It tells you what the show is about: Its lyrics touch on the specific move that George and Louise Jefferson have made from a working-class Queens neighborhood to a deluxe apartment in the sky of Manhattan, but also on broader ideas of Black striving and the American dream. It sets the exact mood for the episode that follows, with its raucous tone cueing up the bickering between George, Weezie, Florence, and their neighbors. And most important of all, the song is so exciting — a rat-a-tat gospel number designed to get viewers out of their seats like they’re leaping up from a church pew — that it becomes as much an enticement to tune in as the show itself. Admit it: You’re chair-dancing a little just thinking about it, aren’t you? —A.S.