Music Featured In The 2008 TV Season

In an article entitled “Five TV Shows To Enrich The Ears” Billboard magazine publicizes the musicians that will be shilling for, I mean featured in upcoming new shows for the 2008 television season.

Six Feet Under scribe Allan Ball’s True Blood is a Southern Gothic tale of vampires who no longer need suck blood to survive (rather they suck, um, synthetic blood). Music supervisor Gary Calamar plans to use “swampy and bluesy” music to add shading to the Louisian setting of the show. Backyards and Bullets concerns the travails of a picture perfect American town spiced with baroque intrigue. The pilot will serenade viewers with “classic-to-indie range” tunes such as Lynyrd Skynyrd. Eli Stone, starring Angelina’s first ex-husband Johnny Lee Miller, will play an unlikely prophet who receives divine messages through visions of pop stars singing their hits of yore. In the pilot? George Michael.

While I totally empathize with the connection a writer forges with the music whispering in their ears as they tap away on the laptop, I sometimes believe that relying too heavily on music to inform the emotional arc of the story is a sign of lazy writing and corporate whoredom. Allan Ball is especially guilty of this sin. Yes, as Calamar insinuates in the article, sometimes being offered a spot on television offers a platform the unsigned or underrepresented artists would be stupid to pass up. Sadly, an overly co-dependant relationship between song and script can send the viewer running in horror from the television. For example, the forthcoming Swingtown is described as being an exploration of 1970’s suburban sexual anomie (with jokes, of course) and also boasts the talents of Gary Calamar at the helm. The show will be peppered with tracks from Gary Wright, the Captain and Tenille (I had almost forgotten about them. Thanks a lot, Gary Calamer), and Rita Coolidge. A score by Liz Phair will play between the tunes. Lord, deliver us from the bad taste of music supervisors everywhere.