The Evolution of TV Themes

From the rattling charge of The Lone Ranger to the slick, warbling vocals of White Lotus, music for television has been beckoning us to the couch for the best part of a century.

In Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring, Jon Burlingame has charted the history of music for telly in the form of an elegiac sort of look back at the medium as streaming overtook network TV and the 2007 writers’ strike looked to have changed the medium forever. Now a new edition, released in the context of a new and bitterly long writers’ and actors’ strike, may serve as an elegy for the streaming age too.

Jon joins Andy from Los Angeles to fire up the cathode ray and listen to the music of the medium, with plenty of memorable tunes in the mix.