My Top Five: PBS Theme Songs

Theme songs can sell a premise, introduce a program and set the mood for what you’re about to watch. If you’ve been a viewer of television for any measure of time, you no doubt have themes that you remember, maybe even some you can sing along to and know all the words. In fact, while some TV themes have words, some do not. Some are created specifically for the show and some are pre-extisting tunes borrowed to give the series a brand.

As such, I started to think about my favorite PBS themes. For this exercise, I stuck to non-kids programming and only shows broadcast across the PBS network. That means, no acquisitions from across the pond or other public broadcasting entities (unless they were distributed nationally by PBS in some manner). I also decided to limit my choices to long-running shows rather than limited series (so no “Ashokan Farewell” from Ken Burns’ THE CIVIL WAR, for example), stay away from kids shows (since I’ve covered that elsewhere) and eschew shows within a show on anthology series (sorry, JEEVES AND WOOSTER). So what did that leave? Decades of PBS programming that gave me plenty of good ideas.