The Webseries and the Lost Art of TV Theme Songs
The 1970s are often looked upon as the Golden Age of Television Sitcoms, and with good reason. From The Mary Tyler Moore Show to M*A*S*H to All in the Family, the decade not only contained more than its fair share of small screen laughs but the shows themselves offered social critique while laying the groundwork for the “quality television” boon of the 1980s. In addition to the entertaining antics of Mary Richards and Hawkeye Pierce, however, the television shows of yesteryear also contained catchy theme songs that resonated with viewers and became lodged in their memory banks as they made their way through life. With a few exceptions, the television theme song has fallen by the wayside in the Twenty First Century. Actor Daniel Dae Kim, for instance, remarked after being cast in the 2010 Hawaii Five-0 reboot that he was “just happy to be on a show that has a theme song” after co-starring for six years on the ABC drama Lost.
Pittsburgh actress Christine Laitta is someone who laments the loss of the once prominent opening musical sequence. In 2006 she conceived a live, cabaret-style sing-along production filled with the theme songs of such 1970s classics as Laverne and Shirley and The Jeffersons. The response was outstanding from an audience standpoint, and Laitta’s TV Tunes Sing-a-Long is still going strong years later. For Laitta, the reason is more than nostalgia but the fact that there is something missing from today’s television screen.
“We’re losing those fantastic sitcoms—and they were—like The Dick Van Dyke Show,” she told Pittsburgh Post Gazette theater critic Chris Lawson during a podcast interview in September 2009. “It’s a lost art to write a classic sitcom or, even more importantly, the theme songs which were these wonderful little thirty-second whole stories of the show.”
While television may have dropped the ball on this mini-musical art form, the webseries medium seems intent on filling the void. Although most episodes of a webseries run from five to ten minutes, an increasing number of quality productions have used thirty-second snippets of that limited span to resurrect the catchy theme song introduction of television’s past. The list includes a collection of webseries sitcoms that rival the output of 1970s television, such as Copy & Pastry, Fourplay in LA, Freckle and Bean, The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else and Saving Rent.
“We wanted something fun,” actress Alice Cutler explains in regards to the webseries Saving Rent. “There was never a clear intention to have a throwback to early sitcoms, but it ended up being very reminiscent of the sitcoms I grew up watching. Brian Elliot wrote the theme song. He started with the lyrics, which basically tell the story of Saving Rent, then added music to it.”
The fun little ditty that Brian Elliot composed for Saving Rent does indeed compliment the webseries in both style and substance. The narrative of the webseries centers on an advertising manager who loses his job and tries to hide it from his girlfriend by renting out rooms in their rather large house to a handful of strangers in order to make ends meet. As clips of the characters appear on the screen in a classic opening sequence style, the song plays in the background—“Let’s take in a few roommates, start saving rent!”
Fourplay in LA, meanwhile, features a series of small snippet-like episodes detailing the ups and downs of four female friends living in Los Angeles. According to director Rich Yau, the theme song was not specifically written for Fourplay but a composition from local indie band The Leftover Cuties called “A Game Called Life” that the cast felt captured the mood of the webseries. Yau uses the song effectively in the opening sequence, which features Partridge Family-style colored rectangular blocks moving across the screen while the four lead actresses dance and pose their way through the song in a way that both compliments the characters and highlights their close-knit friendship.
Although a large number of quality webseries have foregone the opening musical sequence due to time restraints, those that do have shrewdly added an additional marketing tool for webseries success. Just like themes for The Brady Bunch or Laverne & Shirley can easily get stuck in one’s head, the same holds true with the theme songs of various webseries. For a medium still struggling to find mainstream success, what better way to attract a loyal fanbase than with a catchy tune that resonates with viewers and can help spread the word in the most simplest of fashion?
Scott McCabe and Tory Stanton, the co-creators and stars of Copy & Pastry—a webseries about two friends looking for success in the catering business—discovered this fact by accident. “I’m not sure we set out from the start to fashion the catchiest possible theme song for Copy & Pastry, but it is something we’ve gotten a lot of feedback on, folks even singing the song back to us and the like,” they explain. “And I think as much as, if not more than, any one scene or joke or character we created, that’s what’s helped lodge the show in the minds of viewers. It’s made a pretty deep impression on us, in fact. In part because we kind of stumbled onto the song in a sort of happy accident.”
“Tory and I always used to do that little high hat intro to one another as a joke, which grew into a play on a sort of lounge act, with excessive warbling and nonsense lyrics,” McCabe continues. “Initially it had nothing to do with the idea of the show, though as that idea developed we started throwing Copy & Pastry into the bit. And it stayed something of a joke between ourselves until we literally couldn’t get it out of our heads. At that point it was simply too late to change it—we were stuck on it and it was, in many ways, inextricable from the show itself.”
Some of the best webseries are not only original in regards to their storylines and structure but are also able to conjure up memories of classic television shows of the past. The Real Girl's Guide to Everything Else, for instance, was created with a deliberate Sex in the City vibe in order to showcase an alternative vision of female companionship and features an opening sequence similar to the HBO comedy. Despite centering on two Los Angele-based wannabe actresses, meanwhile, Freckle and Bean conjures up memories of Laverne & Shirley and contains a catchy ditty of a theme song that details the premise of the webseries. Just as the creators of such shows are inevitably influenced by what came before them, the same holds true for their opening sequences as much as the actual writing.
“Saving Rent has a little bit of a Friends feel, so when we shot some footage for the opening credits we were going for the essence of that show,” Alice Cutler remarks in regards to her webseries.
“I’m very influenced by old sitcoms,” Rich Yau of Fourplay in LA adds. “I grew up on Growing Pains, Full House, Who’s the Boss?, Diff’rent Strokes. I liked how they established the characters, the setting, and the tone with a catchy tune.”
The number of shows cited by Copy & Pastry’s Scott McCabe and Tory Stanton is equally as long. “As for influences, there’s a pretty healthy list of shows we could offer,” the two readily admit. “The most signal for us, though, are probably Cheers, The Andy Griffith Show, Laverne & Shirley, Cops and The Brady Bunch. The rationale for each is slightly different, but all of them are simple and catchy and from shows we watched as kids that lodged themselves in our memories. Andy Griffith’s is probably our collective favorite; it’s so simple you can hear it once and be whistling it all day.”
Although the webseries medium is still relatively young, it has seen an influx of quality productions in recent years. Comedies along the likes of Copy & Pastry, Fourplay in LA, Freckle and Bean, The Real Girl’s Guide to Everything Else and Saving Rent are prime examples and their incorporation of catchy theme songs as introductions add to their status as direct descendents of the classic sitcoms that actress Christine Laitta spotlights in her TV Tunes Sing-a-Long showcase. Who knows—maybe someday audiences will gather in theaters to sing the themes of Copy & Pastry and Saving Rent in the same fashion that they do in Pittsburgh with The Brady Bunch.
Anthony Letizia (January 3, 2011)
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