Best TV Theme Song

Thirty seconds you never skipped, back when skipping was not an option and the theme was how the week actually began.

The form is close to extinct now, which makes this bracket partly an archive. Streaming added a skip button and shows responded by shortening their titles to a logo and a sting. What went with it was a specific craft: a piece of music that had to establish tone, survive a hundred repetitions across a season, and be finished before anyone got impatient. Danny Elfman says he wrote The Simpsons theme in the car on the way home from the meeting. The Rembrandts wrote Friends as a jingle and ended up with a number one single they could not escape. Forty-nine themes are here, running from sitcom singalongs to a string quartet about dragons.

Voting exposes an odd split between the themes people admire and the themes people can actually hum. Several prestige-drama openings are better pieces of music than the sitcom entries and lose repeatedly to a song somebody has known since they were eleven years old.