“Where Everybody Knows Your Name” may be easy to take, but it wasn’t so easy to actually make: The NBC brass roundly rejected Portnoy and Angelo’s first two attempts before the duo penned an all-new song to accompany what would become one of television’s most beloved series. Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart Angelo’s classic theme song goes down about as smoothly and soothingly as a large tumbler of rye, instantly setting up high levels of comfort and camaraderie before the show kicks into the wacky shenanigans of the mainstays at Boston’s best-known fictional bar. That’s more staying power than a popped collar. Hammer’s synth-heavy song is so enduring, in fact, that it held the distinction of being the last instrumental to reach Billboard’s summit for almost 30 years, until Baauer’s “Harlem Shake” succeeded it in 2013. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, it also won two Grammys (Best Instrumental Composition and Best Pop Instrumental Performance, naturally). Jan Hammer’s simply named “Miami Vice Theme” proved to be so popular, both critically and popularly, that it not only hit No.
Don’t deny the jam’s pedigree, however: It was penned by rival sitcom star Alan Thicke (who also wrote the theme for Diff’rent Strokes, which he also sang), along with Al Burton and Gloria Loring.
The Facts of Life’s theme music had troubles of its own - talk about taking the good and the bad - thanks to lyric changes, vocalist switches, and the eventual jettisoning of the entire enterprise (by the time the show ended its run in 1988, the original version of the song had been shoved into playing over the show’s end credits, before it was done away with altogether). Thomas for only her second television theme song (she previously lent her pipes to a pair of very special Six Million Dollar Man episodes). Still, season four does boast a Dusty Springfield–voiced version, as the soul songstress duetted with B.J.
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The ABC sitcom’s heartwarming theme song went through its own changes (sure, feel free to calling them “growing pains”) with nine different versions rolling out over the course of the series’ seven seasons (“As Long As We’ve Got Each Other” even got the spooky treatment, thanks to a Halloween episode that aired in 1990). The most popular take on the material arrived during The Cosby Show’s fourth season, when singer Bobby McFerrin put his own spin on the song, one that quite handily proves the inherent hummability of what seemed to be a purely instrumental outing. There’s no definitive version of “Kiss Me,” the initially horns-heavy theme that Bill Cosby himself helped compose with the series’ musical director, Stu Gardner, as seven different versions of the song were used during the show’s eight-season run (presumably to allow for the creation of different thematic dance sequences). “Believe It or Not” has popped in such shows as Seinfeld (George’s answering machine) and The Following (an apparent favorite of Joe’s cult members), and was memorably included during a zippy montage in The 40-Year-Old Virgin.
Cannell’s short-lived superhero-centric dramedy, but the song has continued to live on (quite improbably) in the annals of pop culture, thanks to a random assortment of other appearances. Joey Scarbury’s soft-rock jam may have reached the top of the charts in 1981 thanks to Stephen J.
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The song was so essential to the series that when three of the eponymous girls moved over to CBS’s ill-fated spinoff, The Golden Palace, the theme came along, too. When Cynthia Fee laid down her version for The Golden Girls, it instantly became part of the pop-culture lexicon - where it remains to this day for virtually anyone over the age of 30. 25 on Billboard’s Hot 100 listing in 1978) before it was rerecorded and repurposed to serve as the theme for the enduring NBC sitcom in 1985. Oh, show me that smile!Īndrew Gold’s “Thank You for Being a Friend” was already a hit (reaching No. ‘80s television might be nostalgia’s most fertile ground, yet its various theme songs (from the synth-loaded and sax-heavy to the genuinely charming and weirdly moving) endure as hard-to-kill earworms that are almost impossible to stop humming once they wiggle their way into your brain. The ‘00s may be home to a new Golden Age of television, but while we’re metaphorically knee-deep in non-sequiturs and cable-network antiheroes, we’re often missing one major upside to watching weekly series on the small screen: Classic theme songs.