Music for Prime Time

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.

Featuring themes and music from:

The Lone Ranger

Rawhide

The Twilight Zone (Bernard Herrmann)

The Twilight Zone (Marius Constant)

Peter Gunn

Hawaii Five-0

The Man from U.N.C.L.E

Mission, Impossible

Get Smart

The Jetsons

The Flintstones

Gilligan’s Island

All In The Family

Cheers

Hill Street Blues

The West Wing

Pride & Prejudice

Jeeves & Wooster

Deadwood

The Sopranos

Game of Thrones

Succession

White Lotus

The West Wing (closing credits)

The Music Show is made on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country

Technical production by Russell Stapleton on Gadigal Country