TV shows get out of tunes

About a decade ago, after Ted Harbert had been accused (wrongly, he says) of killing the television theme song, he put together a tape he called “Ted’s All-Time Favorite Theme Songs.” He still has a few copies left, with the full-length tracks of such classic themes as “Taxi,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “Mission: Impossible.”

Harbert hasn’t updated the cassette in the last 10 years. He hasn’t had to.

“Theme songs are not a top priority for people” in television, says Harbert, the former president of NBC Studios and chairman of ABC Entertainment. It was during his tenure at ABC that he issued his infamous “No more theme songs” memo. But Harbert says he intended only to get rid of bad theme songs.

Of course, not all shows have given up on themes. And Tuesday night, in fact, one of the classic (or most annoying) theme songs in TV history was heard again in prime time when “The Real Gilligan’s Island” made its two-hour debut on TBS.

That song, which served to introduce the cast (“With Gilligan, the skipper too, the millionaire and his wife”) and outline the premise of the original “Gilligan’s Island” back in the mid-1960s, is being updated for the new reality show by Grammy-nominated recording artists Bowling for Soup.

Despite such attempts at revival, the theme song is dying. Once a siren’s call that heralded the beginning of a show and drew people to the TV set from all over the house, the theme song is fast going the way of Harbert’s cassette tapes.

Network executives point to several causes of death: There are more commercials per half hour of TV, leaving less time for programs. The first thing to go is often the theme song. It’s costly to hire a good composer to write a song and pay the residuals due with each airing. Viewers have shorter attention spans and won’t sit through theme songs. And they can seem unsophisticated in this era of savvy audiences.

But the loss is significant. Anyone who has clapped along to the “Friends” theme or sat through a middle school music class rendition of “The Greatest American Hero” song can feel it. Good TV shows are made better by good theme songs and remembered more fondly for them. Think of “Cheers” with its “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” Or “The Golden Girls” and “Thank You for Being a Friend.” Or the jazzy themes of “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law.”

“The best of them really did capture the essence of the show,” says Gary Portnoy, who co-wrote and sang the “Cheers” theme (which can be heard on his website, www.garyportnoy.com). “It was a constant, and it was a familiar friend. I think it’s sadly missing nowadays.”

Portnoy was a full-time theme song writer for much of the ‘80s, writing the title music for “Mr. Belvedere” and “Punky Brewster,” among others. Part of the reason he stopped is that the time allotted to the songs kept shrinking.

“They went from asking for 60 seconds to 40 seconds to 20 seconds, and then ‘Seinfeld’ came along and it was bada-bip, bada-bip,” he says. “Nowadays, I truly believe they are looking to get the TV theme over with so they can sell more advertising. As an art form -- if you want to say it ever was one -- I think it has all but disappeared.”

Ted Frank, senior vice president for current programming at NBC, traces the decline of the theme song to 1990, when “Wings” debuted in the time slot following “Cheers” on Thursday nights. The “Wings” theme sequence had beautiful shots of a plane flying over water to Nantucket, Mass., set to classical music.

But NBC executives were concerned that “Wings” wasn’t holding a large enough share of “Cheers”’ lead-in audience. So the network asked the “Wings” producers to ditch the theme song and go straight into the action of the show.

“Remarkably, it made a real difference in the ratings,” Frank said. “You could see ‘Wings’ began to hold the audience better. So it was a much more seamless entry into the show, and that seemed to work, and that became a model for us in working with comedies that were coming on.”

Now, he says, the network doesn’t have a specific policy on theme songs. Some shows have one. Some don’t. It depends on the tone of the show and how the producers choose to use their time.