But it also reveals the warmth between Jean Stapleton’s Edith and Carroll O’Connor’s Archie. 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. Image Credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images “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. (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. But the concept for the song itself - a “Latin, cocktail-themed vibe” - came straight from creator Darren Star. 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. 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. 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. (There are still hurt feelings regarding which of ABC’s T.G.I.F. 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. 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. (Honestly, the entire 100 could have been made up of shows from the Seventies. We then pared that down by looking for diversity in terms of style of music, style of show, and era. How did we figure this out, beyond just arguing about it over Slack, Zoom, ham radio, etc?įirst, we assembled a massive list of great songs from throughout the entire long history of TV. 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. 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. Or maybe we should preemptively accept your thanks?ĭespite periodic attempts to contract or outright eliminate them, theme songs are a crucial part of the TV-watching experience. We apologize in advance for all the TV theme songs we are about to lodge back into your heads.
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