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I just watched an episode of BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, the current Kristin Kreuk series on The CW, and then I happened to play my audio rip of THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN episode "The Bionic Woman" Parts 1 and 2. And I realized I couldn't recall a note of music from B&B.
WTF happened to music scores in one-hour drama? The SMDM ep was from 1975, and it is drenched in story-enhancing, melodic goodness. Oliver Nelson's score set the whole atmosphere, and his theme for Jaime got you liking the character before Lindsay Wagner so much as blinked. Her job was half done for her! You literally get your money's worth from the score alone.
As for BEAUTY AND THE BEAST, the actors are good enough, the plot was serviceable, the HD cinematography was fine (except for a weird avoidance of close-ups; the good-looking Kristin Kreuk got, I think, only one in the whole hour-- not enough), and overall it's a decent show. But where's the music?
Are they so desperately afraid of seeming corny that melody has been outlawed? They're stupid! The show could be so much better if they used melodic music cues to paint the characters.
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You don't even have to go all that far back to find good, solid, memorable orchestral TV scores. As recently as Bear McCreary's Human Target, actually (I'm not up on a lot of more recent TV because I'm tired of my shows being cancelled). But the landscape really did change in the late 80's. Guys like Lance Rubin and Kevin Kiner come to mind has having provided synth scores that, while imaginative, sounded very cheap. The second season of SeaQuest gradually moved from huge, full orchestral scores to some really awful sounding synth work by Russ Landau. But the first season, damn, that was Emmy winning stuff.
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Posted: |
Jun 21, 2013 - 11:24 AM
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By: |
mastadge
(Member)
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You don't even have to go all that far back to find good, solid, memorable orchestral TV scores. As recently as Bear McCreary's Human Target, actually (I'm not up on a lot of more recent TV because I'm tired of my shows being cancelled). But the landscape really did change in the late 80's. Guys like Lance Rubin and Kevin Kiner come to mind has having provided synth scores that, while imaginative, sounded very cheap. The second season of SeaQuest gradually moved from huge, full orchestral scores to some really awful sounding synth work by Russ Landau. But the first season, damn, that was Emmy winning stuff.
There are still memorable TV scores. McCreary continues doing his thing with good results. Dominik Scherrer and Murray Gold turn in consistently good stuff. I don't think it's much of a surprise that the many many formulaic dramas often have pretty boring, formulaic scores, and I would also guess that back when you might find Harnell or Goldsmith or whomever doing great music for selected shows, you also had no shortage of shows with unremarkable music as well.
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