Nicholas Britell is the composer of the definitive TV theme tune of the 21st century. The New Yorker’s dizzyingly hypnotic title music to HBO’s splenetic family saga Succession has been described as sounding like “a smashed music box”. When Britell first played it to Jesse Armstrong, the showrunner of the hit TV series greeted it with the words: “Fuck, yeah!”
Yet there’s one thing that annoys softly spoken Britell: the “Skip intro” facility on streaming services, which was brought in five years ago and lets viewers bypass a show’s opening credits. “I am very against it,” says Britell. “TV theme music is incredibly important. It’s almost a show’s DNA identifier. It serves as an overture to bring you in and sets the tone. I think that formal entrée is crucial.”
Robust words from the man whose Emmy-winning, earwormy Succession work, with its gothic strings, cascading piano and skittering beats, is helping to revive TV theme tunes. Britell collaborates regularly with film-makers Barry Jenkins (writing the Oscar-nominated scores for both Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk) and Adam McKay (scoring The Big Short, Vice and Don’t Look Up). But it’s TV music that he’s been “obsessive about since I was a kid”. As well as Succession, he scored last year’s acclaimed Amazon adaptation of Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad. “Every show deserves its own sonic universe,” says Britell. “A soundscape that’s unique and special.”
So why was “Skip intro” invented? We can blame Netflix and data metrics. According to Cameron Johnson, Netflix’s director of product innovation, users were fast-forwarding through the first five minutes of an episode 15% of the time. This suggested that many viewers wanted to whiz past the title sequence. If you’re binge-watching, after all, intros can become repetitive. Johnson himself admits that he often tried to manually spool through the Game of Thrones titles, but got frustrated when he stopped short or went too far.
So, in early 2017, his team consumer-tested a range of names: “Jump past credits”, “Jump ahead”, “Skip credits”, “Skip intro” and simply “Skip”. Users had a clear favourite and “Skip intro” was born, with most rival streaming services following. Where does this leave theme tune composers? Have they grown to hate the little button that, according to Johnson, brings “a little moment of delight to audiences around the world”?
Murray Gold was Doctor Who’s musical director for more than a decade and is a longtime collaborator with writer Russell T Davies, scoring hit series including Queer As Folk and It’s a Sin. He’s none too keen on the button. “It really bugs me because, a lot of the time, people’s default setting is to skip past the titles,” says Gold. “When we watch the American Office at home, I won’t ever let my wife skip. The opening titles are so short and I just want to hear the music.”
Grammy-winner David Arnold scored five James Bond films but also has an illustrious TV CV, having composed the theme tunes for Little Britain, Sherlock, Dracula and Good Omens. He insists that they are a vital part of the viewing experience.
“Take The Sopranos,” says Arnold. “You’ve got that amazing Alabama 3 song Woke Up This Morning, which sets it up completely. I never fast-forward because I’m always happy to hear that tune. It’s the same with Succession. Great theme tunes make you feel anchored in the show’s world. That’s what I try to do with mine: welcome you and prepare you for what’s about to happen. It’s like having the lighting and the heating right in your house when you come home.”
Arnold believes intro-skippers are missing out. “A title sequence is as essential a part of the show as any other,” he says. “If you think it isn’t, you’re not watching in the way that you’re meant to. Information is being imparted. It’s like a kid snuggling down to read a book. On Listen With Mother, they’d always say, ‘Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin.’ That’s what a title sequence does – settles you down and guides you in. It gets you excited, your mind opens and you’re away. If you decide to skip that stage, the experience won’t be as satisfying.”
Canadian-British composer Carly Paradis is responsible for Line of Duty, Sick Note, The Pembrokeshire Murders and Sky’s new supernatural thriller The Rising. She has mixed feelings but concedes that skipping can be soul-destroying for composers.
“I’m guilty of using it myself, so I can’t complain too much,” she says. “But when you pour your heart, time, sweat and tears into a piece of music and get incredible musicians on it, it is a little heartbreaking. I’m glad I started out in the pre-skip era.”
However, it is not just “Skip intro” that is dealing a blow to TV theme tunes. Many dramas are doing away with theme music and title sequences altogether, instead deploying a “cold open” in a bid to seize viewers’ attention immediately. The likes of Peaky Blinders, Fleabag, Girls, I May Destroy You and Killing Eve plunge straight in, before a title card flashes up as a reminder of which show you’re watching. Even then, it’s often just a brief flash of a logo or bold typeface.
“Big theme tunes definitely went out of fashion for a while in the 2010s,” says Gold. “The trend was to go straight to picture. You tend to find cold opens in shows that want to emphasise their closeness to reality – either vérité-style dramas or things that are almost too important to have something as artificial as a piece of music to introduce them.” Arnold has another example. “With shows like Better Call Saul, you have a little signature twang sound at the start. It’s barely a theme tune, more of a punchline. It starts something, then it gets choked, and that says something about the character. It does the same job, just in a different way.”
Still, after a spell in the doldrums, “proper” theme tunes seem to be slowly making a comeback – partly because of the success of Succession. “Nick Britell brought back that old-fashioned musical approach and everyone responded positively,” says Arnold. “It’s such a brilliant piece, conceptually and musically. It has its roots in classical but it’s got hip-hop beats and some ugly distorted stuff. People will always respond to a good tune.”
Gold also detects a change. “Streamers seem to be bringing theme tunes back a bit,” he says. “I think it’s because they don’t need to keep you on the channel like a terrestrial network does. When we’re in a world of drama, and especially entertainment, you really want to bring the cast on with an old-fashioned song, don’t you? There’s definitely a taste for it again. It goes in cycles.”
Gold points out that, whatever else is going on, the sheer volume of programmes in today’s TV landscape means more work for composers. “We’re now producing content at a gigantic rate,” he says. “There’s never been this much drama. Although the delivery method is changing, streamers are keeping to a high artistic standard because that’s what gets eyeballs. Producers expect high-quality, interesting music and are reaching out to young up-and-coming composers. That’s encouraging.”
Unsurprisingly, the squeezing of closing credits vexes composers too, with follow-on episodes being flagged and counted down almost immediately. “I’m very against being pulled away from the end credits,” says Britell. “End credits give you a moment of reverie to sit and think back on what you’ve just seen.”
Gold agrees: “Streamers tend to serve up the next episode five seconds into the end credits. You never get to hear the closing music in full. I’d rather the default setting wasn’t to interrupt the credits. Besides – everyone wants to see their name.”
Netflix says the “Skip intro” button is now pressed 136m times a day, saving users worldwide a cumulative 130 years or so of viewing time. While this sounds like a good thing, in the bid to save precious seconds, are we losing part of the fabric of our pop culture? To save the TV theme tune, should we resist hitting that button?
“We end up getting the world we deserve,” says Gold, while Arnold compares it to CDs replacing vinyl: “Albums were assembled carefully, with songs designed to be listened to in a certain order. As soon as CDs turned up, people would just skip to their favourite songs. I’m not sure ‘Skip intro’ delivers the experience the makers were hoping for. You’re editing it to your own tastes. Why not let us mute a character we don’t like as well? If you give people the tools to do that sort of thing, we shouldn’t be surprised when they use them.”
Arnold has just finished working on a drama for the BBC and Netflix. Called Inside Man, the show is written by Steven Moffatt and stars David Tennant. “It’s a dark, twisted, logic-defying, cerebral conundrum of a show,” says Arnold. “And the music reflects that. Next, I start work on the second series of Good Omens.” Presumably both theme tunes are too good to be skipped? He laughs and says: “Let’s hope so.”
Unskippable: our composers’ favourites
Murray Gold
“Ramin Djawadi’s themes for Westworld and Game of Thrones are both fantastic. Toast of London puts me in a happy mood. Sex and the City is underrated too – musically complicated yet so witty and minimal. I always want to hear every second of The Simpsons. And with The Royle Family, the pathos of the music completes the journey of each episode. You need the closure of those final resolving chords.”
Carly Paradis
“The X-Files theme by Mark Snow influenced how I approached tension and suspense in Line of Duty. Great ones from when I was a kid include Miami Vice, The A-Team, Murder She Wrote, Knight Rider and The Twilight Zone. More recent favourites are Stranger Things, Succession, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders.”
David Arnold
“I grew up in the 60s and 70s when every TV theme tune was a classic: Dad’s Army, Are You Being Served?, The Protectors, Van Der Valk, The Sweeney, Z Cars, This Is Your Life, even Crossroads. You can whistle all of them. More recently, I loved Succession and Devs. That’s an incredible piece of work.”
