9 TV Theme Songs That Outlived Their Shows

Gary Portnoy and Judy Hart-Angelo took four tries to land this one. Their earlier attempts got politely rejected before they hit on that lonesome piano intro and the line you can probably still sing: “Sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.” It aired for the first time in the fall of 1982 and never really left.

What makes it endure isn’t the melody so much as the promise. In under a minute it sells you on a place that takes you in on your worst day, no questions asked. Portnoy sang all the harmony parts himself, layering his own voice to fake a whole crowd. Somehow that only makes it warmer.

Here’s a fact that surprises people: this never hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. It peaked at No. 17. But on the Billboard airplay chart it sat at the top for eight straight weeks in 1995, because radio simply could not stop playing it — and neither could anyone with a television.

The Rembrandts, a duo who’d been chugging along for years, suddenly had the biggest song of their lives handed to them by a sitcom. The full-length version came about almost by accident, after a radio DJ looped the short TV theme to make his own extended cut. The four claps still make people do the thing with their hands.

The gentle, aching instrumental that opened M*A*S*H each week began life as a song with lyrics, written for the 1970 film. Director Robert Altman wanted something deliberately dumb for a scene and couldn’t manage it himself — so he handed the job to his teenage son, Mike, who was all of fourteen.

Composer Johnny Mandel set the boy’s words to that famous, melancholy melody. Here’s the kicker that Mike Altman has told for years: because the song kept earning royalties long after the movie, he reportedly made far more money from those lyrics than his father ever made directing the film. Not bad for a school assignment nobody assigned.

Morton Stevens wrote it, but it was the surf-rock band The Ventures who turned it into a genuine hit. Their cover charged up the charts in 1969 and peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100 — an instrumental TV theme muscling in alongside the pop singles of the day.

That galloping drum-and-brass opening is pure adrenaline, and it has never gone out of style. Marching bands still blast it in stadiums; you’ve heard it at a game and known exactly what it was without being told. Book ’em.

Actress Ja’Net DuBois co-wrote the theme and sang it herself, backed by a jubilant gospel choir. She reportedly wrote it as a promise to her own mother — a song about finally getting your piece of the pie, that deluxe apartment in the sky — and you can hear that personal joy in every note.

The show ran a full decade, from 1975 to 1985, but the song has outlasted it by miles. It’s become shorthand for anybody’s big break, quoted in ads and speeches and everyday conversation. The phrase itself has quietly entered the language.

Unlike most themes on this list, this one was already a hit song years before it ever met a TV show. Andrew Gold wrote and recorded it in 1978, and it climbed to No. 25 on the Billboard Hot 100 in its own right.

When The Golden Girls came calling in 1985, a shortened cover by Cynthia Fee became the version the whole country now hears in its head. For a lot of us, the song and the show are welded together — but Gold’s original was out there charting long before Blanche, Dorothy, Rose, and Sophia ever sat down at that kitchen table.

Mike Post and Pete Carpenter’s instrumental is one of the great examples of a theme escaping its show entirely. Released as a single in 1975, it became a Top 10 hit — reaching No. 10 on the Billboard Hot 100 — and won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Arrangement.

Listen closely and you’ll hear a bluesy harmonica, a dobro, and one of the early pop appearances of a synthesizer. It sounds exactly like a rumpled private eye living in a trailer by the beach — which is to say, it sounds like James Garner. Post went on to write half the TV themes you remember, but this was the one that made him a chart act, too.

Creator David Chase was driving down a New Jersey freeway when this brooding, blues-soaked track by the British band Alabama 3 came on the radio. He decided on the spot it was the sound of Tony Soprano rolling home from the Lincoln Tunnel, and used it over the opening credits from the 1999 premiere onward.

The song had been an obscurity before that — the band reportedly agreed to let HBO use it for a modest fee, then watched it earn them a small fortune in royalties as the show became a phenomenon. Every week it set the mood before a word was spoken. Now you can’t hear it without seeing that cigar and that toll plaza.

Jan Hammer’s sleek, synthesizer-driven theme did something no TV theme has done since: it went all the way to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, topping the chart in November 1985. It remains the last instrumental to reach the very top of that chart, a record that has stood for four decades.

It captured the whole show in ninety seconds — the pastel suits, the speedboats, the neon reflected in the water. Hammer built it almost entirely out of synths and drum machines, and it still sounds like 1985 in the best possible way. A TV theme, sitting at the top of the pop charts, above every band in the country. That may never happen again.