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About Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring

Music composed for television had, until recently, never been taken seriously by scholars or critics. Catchy TV themes, often for popular weekly series, were fondly remembered but not considered much more culturally significant than commercial jingles. Yet noted composers like John Williams, Henry Mancini, and Jerry Goldsmith learned and/or honed their craft in television before going on to major success in feature films. Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. It is the product of thirty-five years of research and more than 450 interviews with composers, orchestrators, producers, editors, and musicians. Based on, but vastly expanded and revised from, an earlier book by the same author, this wide-ranging narrative not only tells the backstory of every great TV theme but also examines the many neglected and frequently underrated orchestral and jazz compositions for television dating back to the late 1940s. Covering every series genre (crime, comedy, drama, westerns, action-adventure, fantasy, and sci-fi), it also looks at music for animated series, news and documentary programming, TV-movies, and miniseries, and how music for television has evolved in the era of cable and streaming options. It is the most comprehensive history of television scoring ever published.