Expository themes.

The other day I was listening to the Gilbert Gottfried podcast interview with Sid and Marty Krofft, the puppeteers who made all those outlandish Saturday morning kids' shows in the 1970s. After hearing about them and their work I felt a little bad about giving them such a hard time. But I'm comforted by the fact that if they even knew, they most assuredly wouldn't care.

It did put me in mind of the fact that at least three of their high-concept shows -- Land of the Lost, Lidsville, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and the Freudian nightmare that was H.R. Pufnstuf -- used their theme songs to set up the shows. Because if you just turned on Lidsville and you saw the kid who played Eddie Munster running around with people dressed like hats, you would wonder what in hell had been in that coffee this morning. But if you heard the opening theme, you'd know that the problem was not with you.

I think the expository theme song a good idea for a show, especially one that has an abnormal setup. A show like Friends or The Courtship of Eddie's Father or The Gilmore Girls or The Golden Girls can have a theme song that just sings about how we are pals and pals are we and whatnot and you really know all you have to know. You don't have to have someone explain to you why these people are friends. In the early seasons of The Brady Bunch, when a lot of the plot lines came from the blending of the two families, it was helpful to have a theme song to tell you that the females were one family and the males another and now they all have to live in a house with three bedrooms, except for Alice's bedroom, which is under the stairs, like Harry Potter's.

I'll Greg to block, Peter.

Theme songs like that are of the "How It Happened" variety, giving you a background in the show, so you know how these characters got into the situation in which we find them. Probably the most famous of these is Gilligan's Island, or possibly The Beverly Hillbillies -- in both cases, without the theme song you would be baffled by the goings-on because you'd be too busy wondering how these people got into this preposterous situation. Fresh Prince of Bel Air follows the Hillbillies line, of course. Dusty's Trail, which was just the Gilligan's Island characters on a wagon train, also had a theme song that explained the show, although it was a lot harder on Dusty (also played by Bob Denver) than the Gilligan theme was on Gilligan. Maybe that's why it lasted just one season. The Patty Duke Show also explained that Patty was going to be playing herself and her identical cousin with a phony accent, although it didn't put it quite that way.

Other themes of this variety include those for Diff'rent Strokes (although it's circumspect, and the brothers' mom's death is not mentioned), F-Troop (although mostly about how the captain was posted there), and Branded (a rare drama entry that explains why Chuck Connors is being hassled all over the place). One I didn't think of but my wife did: The Partridge Family, and that's just because of one verse only played on season 1:

Five of us and Mom working all day
We knew we could help her if our music would pay
Danny got Reuben to sell our song
And it really came together when Mom sang along

The rest of the theme is just about traveling and singing and happiness.

Other theme songs set the situation but don't explain how the people got into it. The Flintstones introduces the family, but it would be completely bizarre if you didn't have the cartoon showing you the "modern stone-age family" in action. George of the Jungle tells you who George and his friends are, and that he is clumsy, but not how George got in the jungle in the first place.

A little further from a proper setup are songs for The Jetsons, which only gives you the names of the characters, and Batman, which gives you... well, Batman.

The Odd Couple opener gives you the setup for the show in speech, not in music. The music has no words. In this regard, and its being set in Manhattan, it is completely identical to Law & Order.

Other shows had songs that just set up the mood without telling you anything much about who the protagonists are or what they want. They include:

Laverne and Shirley (25)
Cheers (28)
Moonlighting (23)
Secret Agent (3)
Friends (1)
The Greatest American Hero (2)
Welcome Back, Kotter (1)
The Monkees

And you know what's interesting? All of these theme songs were hits. The number is where it charted on Billboard -- except the theme from The Monkees, which was not a hit in America because it was not apparently released as a single in the US. That, children, is irony.

But most TV shows, like the radio shows before them, just used music to set the mood with no words at all -- everything from I Love Lucy to The Dick Van Dyke Show to Bones to Get Smart! to Hawaii Five-O to Miami Heat follows that template.

There being an Internet, and I being on it, I was sure that this ground had been covered before, and I figured some site like TV Tropes had listed all the show themes that explained the premise of their show. And I was right! That very site has an article called "Expository Theme Tune," and I wondered whether they included any I missed. Indeed, the Live-Action TV subpage has a few I should have known, including "How It Happened" classics like Charles in Charge, The Nanny, Green Acres, and Mystery Science Theater 3000, and situation-setters like Mister Ed and The Addams Family, among others.

What surprises me about this topic was not that so many shows had expository songs but that more high-concept shows didn't. Shows like Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie used animation to tell you what they were about; The Munsters used a simple domestic scene with the characters. ALF showed scenes of the family videotaped by their alien friend. Mork & Mindy also just had scenes from the pilot and expected you to get the idea. It seems natural that visual cues would be used in a visual medium, but there's a lot of fun to be had, especially in comedies, with theme songs that tell a story. And it helped with syndication in the old days, where people would be less likely to have come in on a show from the beginning.

Now, with binge-watching and episodes available online as well as plot summaries all over the Web, it's much less necessary to sum up the show at the top of every episode. But it's a shame. Wouldn't our pop culture have been poorer with no Gilligan's Island theme? I think so. And if not for The Flintstones, what would we sing on the bus?