The 6 Most Manipulative Ways TV Shows Use Famous Music
Sometimes, TV shows make me feel things, and that makes me feel angry. The rational part of me knows I should be reserving my reactions for real stuff that matters, but then they go and pull at my emotions using the most underhanded of tactics.
Today, let’s look at one particularly devious tool from the TV writer’s toolbox. First, they’ll play some pop song as a joke. The scene is not serious, and our only reaction to that song is laughter. But later, they’ll play that very same song again over a serious moment. Your brain makes a connection between the two moments, and it short-circuits.
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The serious rendition of the song may come years after the initial joke. The result is devastating, and everyone involved with placing the song in the show should go straight to jail.
Modern Family
The first episode of Modern Family ends with Mitch telling his family that he and Cam were thinking of adopting a baby. His dad mistakes this for Mitch saying that he and Cam broke up and says that’s for the best, since Cam’s a drama queen. “My boyfriend is not that dramatic,” says Mitch. Then, Cam brings their new baby into the room, while playing “The Circle of Life” from The Lion King and posing in a programmed spotlight.
“Just turn it off,” says frustrated Mitch, and Cam does. Even if the following scene of the family greeting the baby warms your heart, the part where the song played was just there as a punchline.
Ten years later, Hailey, who was a child back in the pilot, gives birth to twins. After the nurses briefly take the babies away, Mitch and Cam bring them back into the room. The two guys both now worked on a presentation in which “The Circle of Life” plays, with help from their now-tween daughter. And this time, no one says to turn it off, and everyone cries.
This was, of course, the last scene of the finale. Then the show got renewed for another season, and everyone came back for 18 more episodes, in which nothing happened.
New Girl
The third episode of New Girl sends the gang to a wedding. Jess says she’s looking forward to doing the Chicken Dance. “No chicken dance!” Nick tells her because he’s no fun.
At the wedding, he crosses paths with an ex, and things don’t go great for him. So, he goes up to Jess and asks her get up. He does the Chicken Dance, and she follows suit. This is ridiculous because the song playing isn’t the Chicken Dance at all but Phil Collins’ “A Groovy Kind of Love.”
That scene actually sounds better if you haven’t been watching the show up to that point. If you have been watching, especially if you’ve been bingeing, you’ll notice that all three of the first three episodes end with the guys embarrassing themselves in public for the sake of relating to adorkable new girl Jess. “Is that the only trick the show has?” you’ll wonder.
Fortunately, they would come up with more tricks, and the show would improve a lot as the years went by. Inevitably, Nick and Jess fall in love (you could have guessed that would happen even from those disappointing first episodes), and they end up marrying in the final season. Everything goes wrong at the wedding (again, this all sounds predictable, but it comes down to execution), and when they finally do walk down the aisle, in a hospital of all places, the roped-in deejay bangs out “A Groovy Kind of Love.”
It’s unclear whether the characters themselves consider this a reference to that earlier wedding. It would be a bit odd for them to deliberately evoke an evening when Nick was hung up on another woman. But to us, the song just marks this as a relationship that has been building for many years.
That’s assuming you do the song’s earlier appearance, of course. That may be easier if you binged the show, which is both the best and worst way to experience television.
Glee
The kids of the glee club first pop up for us by showing up to an audition, five minutes into the pilot. A few of the performances run quite long, as these are the characters we’ll follow closest. Others are quick and last just long enough for you to laugh at the wacky cast the show is introducing. “Wow, a stuttering Asian goth girl singing Katy Perry,” they prompt us to say. “This show’s going to be nuts!”
Years . This class of kids graduates and is replaced by another and then a third. Right at the end of the series, the writers said to themselves, “How do we wrap this up, given that no one really cares about anything that’s been happening to these latest characters?” They solved this by ending with an episode called “2009,” flashing back to the very start of the series and having the actors now replay the events of the pilot from new perspectives. The actors were now six years older than they were back then, and one of the most significant actors had died, but they pulled it off.
Part of the episode includes extended sections showing the kids auditioning again. They do the same songs as before, but this time, it’s not a joke.
Well, they do repeat the joke where the teacher’s taken aback by the performance’s sexuality, but the singing is no longer a joke. Also, the episode ends with the same performance of “Don’t Stop Believing” that closed the pilot, we don't even need to detail how manipulative that part is.
Paradise
For our most recent example of these song callbacks, let’s look at Hulu’s Paradise.
In the second episode, a couple of kids are looking through old tapes, and they put on Starship’s “We Built This City.” They wrinkle their faces and toss it away because it’s a silly song and not to their tastes.
At the end of the episode, the song plays again. It plays against a solemn montage related to people literally having built a city. Only, it’s not the Starship version this time. It’s a slow, soulful cover of the song.
Unlike all the other examples we’re listing on this page, I’d have to say this one does not succeed at what it’s trying to do. Firstly because roughly five minutes separate the two appearances of the song, which is not long enough. But even if we fix that (by at least shifting the kids listening to the song to the first third of the episode), we’re still left with a slow, soulful cover, and people tend to roll their eyes at those now. Movie trailers ran that style into the ground.
A skilled editor might have instead been able to end the episode with Starship’s own version of the song. Yes, even though the end of the episode is supposed to be sad. The irony of the silly song playing can make the moment feel all the more serious. Let’s look at a show that did manage that, within a single episode:
The Leftovers
During one of the later episodes in The Leftovers, we come upon a couple scientists in an enormous vacant building. Rather than doing science stuff, they are playing a piano. They are playing “Take On Me” by A-Ha. It’s a surreal sight, which can only be explained by the fact that these scientists are European.
A little later in the episode, “Take On Me” returns, but this time, it is being played on a French horn. This is even sillier than the piano, and it plays over multiple successive scenes.
At the end of the episode, we watch some very intense events. These are set to serious opera music. But then, during the final shots and transitioning us into the credits, “Take On Me” returns. It’s not a cover this time. It’s the upbeat, bubbly A-Ha version that we all know, playing as the backdrop to tragedy.
I’m being vague when describing this episode because this comes from what's possibly the best season of television, and if you haven’t seen it already, I don’t want to needlessly spoil any of it. Still, if you do watch the above video that shows all three of those scenes, you likely still won’t have the faintest idea what is going on.
The Affair
The series finale for The Affair opens with the characters practicing a flash mob. This is set to the song “The Whole of the Moon,” and the practice session goes poorly,
Later, during a wedding, they stage that flash mob, and the song plays again. This time, it goes perfectly. Suspiciously perfectly, actually (we’ll have more about this in a moment), with even characters who did not participate in the failed practice session dancing flawlessly.
The episode continues, and once again, I’m going to avoid getting too explicit in describing a good show that you haven’t watched. But it all ends with one character recalling that wedding and dancing, now alone. “The Whole of the Moon” plays again, this time in its entirety. But here’s where the long-term nature of the musical callback kicks in. This version of the song is sung by Fiona Apple, who has been singing the show’s theme song for the past six years. And yes, this is a soulful cover, but it’s not the clichéd style of slow covers I mocked earlier. You’re not going to be hearing this song in the background of any video game trailers.
If these scenes all sound very cheesy, even by television standards, there’s one more thing you need to know. The show leaves ambiguous how much of what you see in these scenes is actually happening.
The gimmick of The Affair is that it uses an unreliable narrator. You’re always seeing a character’s point-of-view, or their memories, and the truth may be something different. Initially, this came in the form of each episode giving two characters’ contradictory versions of the same events, but later, the show shifted to simply showing one character’s version of each and leaving you to guess how accurate it is.
This is a great way to take in any story. Does some dialogue ring false? It’s because you’re hearing someone’s distorted view of how the conversation really went. Do we see people act unrealistically? In reality, they did not. And do you feel something? Well, let’s just say you’re sharing in the exaggerated emotions displayed by the perspective character. That’s allowed, just this once.
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