From Catchy to Classic: 30 of the Most Memorable TV Theme Songs

From Catchy to Classic: 30 of the Most Memorable TV Theme Songs

A good theme song is recognizable. A great theme song actually enhances a series. They can often tell their own story, get stuck in your head, or even be a track you look forward to hearing more than watching the show. 

This list does not rank all opening credits from worst to best or best to worst. Instead, we’re following the timeline of most recent to oldest shows, including The White Lotus, Stranger Things, Veronica Mars, The Sopranos, Miami Vice,The Jeffersons and more.

Below, read, listen and prepare to start nodding your head to the most memorable TV theme songs in history.

Yes, the original ‘60s sitcom, The Addams Family, has one of the most iconic theme songs in television, but for this list, we are looking at how the hit Netflix show, Wednesday, modernized the beloved morbid family. Created by Tim Burton, the series plays a theme composed by Danny Elfman. Notably, Elfman is a long-time collaborator of Burton’s, having made scores for numerous Burton films, including The Nightmare Before Christmas, Edward Scissorhands and Beetlejuice, as well as countless other iconic movies and shows. 

While Wednesday doesn’t use the memorable theme song in the original series, it does give nods, like when Wednesday (Jenna Ortega) snaps her fingers. And Elfman’s score elevates the gothic feel. 

Welcome to the White Lotus. As viewers check in to each new episode of Mike White’s anthology show, they can hear its anxiety-inducing yet danceable score, created by composer Cristóbal Tapia de Veer. “Mike wanted me to do music that feels like something is about to explode or somebody’s about to die,” Veer told THR in 2022. “Because of the slow pace, it feels like there’s something happening behind those images, or like you’re watching a shadows show.”

Veer has won three Emmy awards for his work on the show’s theme. During season three, viewers heard a noticeably different version of its opening track. The change was to fit the new theme and setting of the third season, which took place in Thailand. 

However, Veer revealed he is not returning for season four. His reasoning is that he and White disagreed on the show’s score. “Maybe I was being unprofessional, and, for sure, Mike feels that I was always unprofessional to him because I didn’t give him what he wanted,” Veer said in April.  

HBO’s Jeremy Strong, Sarah Snook, Kieran Culkin and Brian Cox starrer features a score from Nicholas Britell. And fans online have been obsessed with the theme song since the series debuted in 2018. Its sound was inspired by Beethoven and Schubert, with hip-hop beats incorporated. In 2019, Britell won an Emmy for outstanding original main title theme music.

Due to the song’s popularity, the score has been used in memes online. “Honestly, when you’re writing music, the initial dream is just that people feel what you’re feeling, you know? But the way that this has taken on a life of its own with the memes, and like the Kermit the Frog meme! I mean, there’s all these amazing memes. It’s been really, an incredible thing,” Britell told THR in 2019. 

In HBO’s drama series — featuring a stacked cast with Nicole Kidman, Reese Witherspoon, Shailene Woodley, Laura Dern, Zoë Kravitz and more — the song “Cold Little Heart” by British singer-songwriter Michael Kiwanuka plays while the women are driving through Monterey, California, with shots of the beach and their children. The track was the first one off of Kiwanuka’s 2016 album Love and Hate. Its bluesy feel and lyrics fit well with the show’s theme, making it an unskippable intro.

For Netflix’s hugely popular horror and sci-fi series, Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the band Survive composed the score, which also plays during the end credits. With the show set in the ‘80s, the title sequence not only looks the part but also features a mysterious and synth-heavy melody that sounds like a score from horror legend John Carpenter’s catalog. In 2017, Stranger Things won an Emmy for outstanding original main title theme music.

AHS — short for American Horror Story — is known for its visually scary content, exploring different frightening stories every season. But it’s also memorable for its chilling theme song. Originally created by César Dávila-Irizarry in the ’90s, the theme was later composed by Charlie Clouser, known for his work with Nine Inch Nails and the Saw franchise. It was inspired by the opening credits of David Fincher’s 1995 film Se7en. The AHS theme has been remixed in the following seasons for a different sound that fits each season’s tone.

For a series about trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, it only makes sense that its theme would also be unsettling. Bear McCreary, who created the music for Outlander and Da Vinci’s Demons, composed the opening song in collaboration with Steven Kaplan and the Baltic House Orchestra. McCreary previously said that creating music for every episode of TWD begins with him and the show’s creator Frank Darabont brainstorming what story they’re trying to tell and how the music can add to that.

“Got a secret, can you keep it?” Those are the lyrics that start off the theme to the mystery series Pretty Little Liars. The song, titled “Secret” by the Pierces, plays while the four Liars (played by Lucy Hale, Ashley Benson, Troian Bellisario and Shay Mitchell) are shown around a casket and hold their fingers in front of their mouths for the iconic “shhh,” with Aria (Hale) specifically getting a close-up shot (with the well-known off-center “shhh”) to conclude. In the second half of season six, Sasha Pieterse’s Alison was added for the intro. 

Benson discovered the tune and showed it to her castmembers while they were shooting the pilot in Vancouver. 

“Randomly, I was on Spotify, and I was on a playlist, and somehow that song came into my shuffle,” Benson told The Hollywood Reporter in an interview tied to PLL’s 15th anniversary. “I was like, ‘That’s so weird.’ And I kind of just went past it, and then I put it on again, and I listened to the words. At the time, we were all reading the books. So I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is a crazy song. This is literally what the show’s about!’”

Halfway through shooting the pilot, Benson pitched the song to the show’s creator, Marlene King, as she was convinced that the track had to be the theme music and recalled telling King, “I just don’t see any other song being the song for the show.”

Following Laguna Beach (more on that later), MTV released its spinoff, The Hills, which centered around Lauren Conrad — “LC” for short — and her friends’ lives in Los Angeles. And for The Hills‘ opening number, another hit pop song was the right one for the job. Despite using a different song in the first episode, Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” plays in every other episode of the six-season-long show while viewers see cast members Heidi Montag, Spencer Pratt, Kristin Cavallari, Brody Jenner and Audrina Patridge. 

Nearly 20 years later, “Unwritten” became popular again as it played a big part in the 2023 rom-com, Anyone But You, led by Glen Powell and Sydney Sweeney. Their characters’ belt out the song several times — and in the end credits — in the film because it’s Ben’s (Powell) “serenity song” that helps him calm down. At the 2024 People’s Choice Awards, Powell and Sweeney sang the song with Bedingfield, along with the audience, while presenting the award for female country artist.

Created by Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant, the U.S. version of The Office features an instrumental upbeat theme song. While its piano-based melody is instantly identifiable among fans, it actually almost wasn’t the show’s signature tune. The sitcom planned to use ELO’s “Mr. Blue Sky,” but that song was used for the theme on NBC’s LAX, anothershow on the same network. So, the music in The Office’s opening credits, which was composed by Jay Ferguson, was recorded a week before the pilot aired, according to Office star Jenna Fischer.

Let the rain fall down. Inspired by The O.C., this mid-2000s reality series followed the lives of high school students — including Kristin Cavallari, Lauren Conrad and Stephen Colletti — living in Laguna Beach. The MTV series features Hilary Duff’s hit “Come Clean” as the theme song.

Even though Laguna Beach was a hit and led to a follow-up reality series (see: The Hills, above), in 2023, Duff explained why she “didn’t watch” the show. “In a moment in time when you could not record TV shows, I was on tour,” Duff admitted on a Watch What Happens Live appearance. “So, I missed a huge chunk of big things that people talk about that I didn’t get to experience. And then my song was the theme song, and I loved that because I lived at MTV for a while.”

The Kristen Bell-led mystery series kicks off each episode with The Dandy Warhols’ “We Used to Be Friends.” The song was the lead single from the group’s 2003 album Welcome to the Monkey House and the original version was used in the first two seasons, but for the third season, it was remixed. In season four, a cover version is performed by Chrissie Hynde. “We Used to Be Friends” has also been featured in other teen shows like The O.C. and Wonderfalls.

Josh Peck’s “Hug me brotha!” The Oprah obsession. Crazy Steve. These are all memorable storylines and characters from the obsessed over show and its beloved theme song. Eager to make it as a rock star, a young Drake Bell pushed to incorporate his own music into the Nickelodeon series, Drake & Josh, after the show’s producer, Dan Schneider, originally wanted to use a song by Lenny Kravitz. The song, “I Found A Way,” was co-written by Bell and his friend Michael Corcoran. Today, the song is often Bell’s closer at his concerts, which has his fans singing along to the chorus.

The WB/CW’s teen drama series played “I Don’t Want to Be” for its opening credits during the show’s first four seasons. The tune, originally sung by Gavin DeGraw, returned for season eight, but with different artists covering it each week. However, in the series finale, DeGraw makes an appearance to perform the hit song.

California, here we come! This Fox series was a heavily music-driven show and helped bring bands like Death Cab for Cutie, The Killers, Modest Mouse and Rooney to a wider audience. Its most recognizable song is, of course, its theme song “California,” by rock band PhantomPlanet.The track was co-written by former band member and actor, Jason Schwartzman (Rushmore, Moonrise Kingdom,Mountainhead) and Alex Greenwald (Unicorn Store, Donnie Darko), who is also the lead vocalist. And to create the chorus, they referenced Al Jolson’s song, “California, Here I Come” from the ‘20s and changed the lyrics from “California, here I come, right back where I started from” to “California, here we come / Right back where we started from.” After The O.C. became the phenomenon it was, the estates of Jolson’s co-writers sued and received shared songwriting credits. 

Schwartz recalled the song being popular on local L.A. radio stations at the time, and when he played it for studio executives, they loved it. The O.C. star Adam Brody (aka Seth Cohen) praised the song in the 2023 book, Welcome to The O.C.: The Oral History. “That Phantom Planet song is so good. When it plays with the road montage, the show works already. You’re sold once the note comes in,” he said. “You haven’t even been to Orange County. You’ve only been in Chino and stolen a car and been to jail [describing Ben McKenzie’s character, Ryan Atwood]. Now you’re driving out of Chino, and that song comes in, and it’s already magic. That song does so much.”

Before Henry Cavill and David Corenswet, Tom Welling played Clark Kent in Smallville, which explored Kent’s teenage years before he became Superman. While “Save Me” by rock band Remy Zero wasn’t in the pilot, it became a consistent opening credits theme in the series, featuring catchy lyrics like “Somebody save me.” The band also performed the song in the season one finale.

The mother-daughter-led series, a classic rewatch every fall and winter, has its opening credits play to the song “Where You Lead.” Written by Carole King, the original song is featured on her 1971 album Tapestry, but for the show, it was re-recorded with her daughter, Louise Goffin, to emphasize the show’s mother-daughter theme.

Despite audiences loving the track, it was not featured in the opening credits in the 2016 four-episode revival, Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life. Instead, the song plays at the end credits of the “Fall” episode. 

Amy Sherman-Palladino revealed the reason why she chose not to include it in the opening credits. “​​We were really trying to tell a different kind of story about these three women and where they were when their lives got turned upside down. I think because of that and because there were no commercial breaks and because you’re not writing to act breaks, you’re really writing sort of in movie form, it’s harder to break away from that and put a main title sequence in there without it feeling like you’re just doing the old series again,” she told E! News in 2016. “It really was just a stylistic thing and dramatically, wanting to come up cold on certain things.”

For the Emmy-winning drama series about Mob boss Tony Soprano balancing his crimes and personal life, creator David Chase found the theme song, “Woke Up This Morning.” Chase discovered it when he heard it on the radio while driving on the New Jersey Turnpike. He felt its lyrics “Woke up this morning, got yourself a gun / Mamma always said you’d be the chosen one” matched the relationship between Tony and his mom. The show used a remixed version of the song by British band Alabama 3, which plays in the opening credits while Tony is driving from New York City to his home in New Jersey.

“In the Street,” written by Big Star’s Chris Bell and Alex Chilton from the 1972 album, 1 Record, plays over the opening credits of the Fox show about a group of friends living in the suburbs of Wisconsin. In season one, a cover of the tune is sung by Todd Griffin (while the cast sings along, too). But in the second season and onward, the band Cheap Trick recorded a new version that includes an added line: “We’re all alright!” And the OG singable lyrics, “Hangin’ out…down the street. The same old thing…we did last week,” make for a free and easy feel when listening. 

Whether you’re watching reruns of this decade-long NBC sitcom with your friends (no pun intended), someone else, or alone, it’s hard to stop yourself from singing along to this classic. The show’s famous upbeat theme song, “I’ll Be There for You” is performed by pop rock duo the Rembrandts and written by David Crane, Marta Kauffman and Allee Willis. It reportedly made the Rembrandts $5 million in royalties as of 2022. 

But despite its popularity, that doesn’t mean it was beloved among its castmembers. Jennifer Aniston told the BBC in 2016 that “No one was really a big fan of that theme song,” when referring to her co-stars. 

David Schwimmer told the Making A Scene podcast in April that he used to not have the “great response to [the song] for a period of time” because it was always played and associated with him when he was doing talk show appearances. However, his opinion changed after his child discovered the show at nine years-old and heard him laughing at it.

This sci-fi/drama series’ haunting instrumental theme was composed by the late Mark Snow. The mysterious, whistling sounds on the track mesh seamlessly with the show’s message. Snow’s wife, Glynn, even contributed to the whistling effects. The song, titled “Materia Primoris,” is featured on the album, The Truth and the Light: Music from the X-Files.

Will Smith, under his stage name The Fresh Prince opens the sitcom by rapping lyrics “Now this is a story all about how. My life got flipped turned upside down” in the track, “Yo Home to Bel-Air,” which explains his journey from living in Philadelphia (“where I spent most of my days”), where he was getting in trouble and then has to move in with his aunt and uncle who live in the rich neighborhood of Bel-Air in Los Angeles. Smith also wrote the song, which DJ Jazzy Jeff produced. Initially, the series’ composer and executive producer, Quincy Jones, created a different version, but Smith and Jeff reworked it into the version played in the show.

The sitcom, which follows an unconventional family living in San Francisco, opens its credits with “Everywhere You Look” playing. The memorable tune, with its optimistic vibe, was written for the show by Jesse Frederick and Bennett Salvay and sung by Frederick. Its family-centered lyrics like, “Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, There’s a heart (There’s a heart), a hand to hold onto / Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, There’s a place, of Somebody who needs you” and “When you’re lost out there and you’re all alone. A light is waiting to carry you home” emphasize the show’s message of having support and love from a family even in challenging times. 

In 2015, the stars of Full House, including Bob Saget, John Stamos, Lori Loughlin, Candace Cameron Bure, Jodie Sweetin and Andrea Barber, teamed up with Frederick and the series creator, Jeff Franklin, to perform “Everywhere You Look” for Franklin’s birthday. 

Carly Rae Jepsen covered the theme for the opening credits of the reboot Fuller House, which premiered in 2016 and ran for five seasons.

The NBC sitcom, which ran from 1985 to 1992 and featured four best friends (played by Betty White, Bea Arthur, Estelle Getty and Rue McClanahan) features the joyful song “Thank You for Being a Friend.” It was written by Andrew Gold and released as a single in 1978. But the timeless track wasn’t the producers’ first choice. They originally wanted Bette Midler’s 1972 song “Friends,” but the rights were too expensive. So, they repurposed Gold’s song with Cynthia Fee singing the tune.

Composed by Jan Hammer, Miami Vice’s instrumental score is known for its synthesizer-heavy sounds. But its upbeat tempo is what gives off an exciting feel and matches the tone of the detectives who fight crime in southern Florida in the ‘80s. In 1986, the song won him two Grammy Awards, one for best instrumental composition and another for best pop instrumental performance. The song also topped the Billboard Hot 100 chart.

The NBC show, which debuted in 1982 and takes place in a neighborhood bar of the same name, has the beloved theme “Where Everybody Knows Your Name.” Written and performed by Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo, the song was originally supposed to be for the musical Preppies. However, after producers discovered it and made some rewrites, it became the version used in the show. Not only is it catchy, but it also sums up the show’s story, which is about tuning out the outside world and finding peace and camaraderie in a place — where everybody knows your name!

The track “Movin’ on Up,” which was written and sung by Ja’Net DuBois, plays during the opening credits of the CBS sitcom that aired from 1975-85. The series follows a couple, George and Louise Jefferson, who move from Queens to a grand apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, a journey that’s highlighted in the lyrics to the theme song. The inspiration for the track stems from DuBois’ promise to her mother that she would become successful. 

The iconic ABC series used its theme song to tell the story of how its blended family came together. Sherwood Schwartz, who created the show, wrote the lyrics, while Frank De Vol composed the music. The Peppermint Trolley Company sang it for the first season. And Paul Parrish, John Beland and Lois Fletcher re-recorded it for the following seasons.

Hearing the opening lyrics to the Scooby-Doo theme song, “Scooby-Dooby-Doo, where are you? We got some work to do now” is a nostalgic experience. And the first time viewers saw Scooby-Doo and the rest of his Scooby gang — consisting of Fred, Daphne, Velma and Shaggy — trying to solve murders onscreen was in the animated series, which first aired on CBS in 1969. David Mook and Ben Raleigh wrote the song, with Larry Marks singing it for the first season, while George A. Robertson, Jr. did for the second. Covers and altered versions have been used in spinoffs and remakes since.

The CBS series, which blended genres including science fiction, drama and horror, is known for its twists and narrations from creator Rod Serling. However, it’s hard to think about the series without remembering the eerie sounds of its theme song. The five-season series, which ran from 1959 to 1964, had its first season’s theme composed by Bernard Herrmann, while Marius Constant created the theme for the remaining four seasons. The version Constant created is most recognizable for the distinctive electric guitar part, which Howard Roberts performs. Listening to it feels like spooky season, no matter what time of year it actually is.