Last month, remarks by David Chase, creator of the HBO television drama The Sopranos, briefly caught fire online. He lamented the end of what has been called the “Second Golden Age of Television”—a development that he and his show are credited as being foundational—and said that for all the era’s paradigm-shifting success, it had been a transient “blip” in media history:
This is the 25th anniversary [of the series premiere of The Sopranos], so of course it’s a celebration. But perhaps we shouldn’t look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral [...] We’re going back to where I was. They’re going to have commercials... and I’ve already been told to dumb it down.[1]
Around the time I read this, my wife and I were concluding our binge-watching of the NBC series, Hannibal. The program is the quintessence of the “Second Golden Age of Television”: it is grim, phantastically violent, and sexually explicit to a degree that was unimaginable on network television as late as the 2000s. Like many shows under the aforementioned rubric, it treated difficult, even disturbing subjects with unprecedented (on television) candor, discarded clear-cut “good”/“evil” characterizations, and generally extirpated the medium’s platitudinous conceits and tropes. At least according to critical consensus.
Hannibal, like a few of the other “Second Golden Age” shows I have seen, at best trades one set of clichés for another. Predictable heroes and villains, for example, merely become predictable anti-heroes and anti-villains. The former are typically deeply flawed and odious; the latter sympathetic, their portrayals often aided by tragic “origin stories” which contrive justification, even exculpation for their essential baseness. Consider the titular protagonist of Hannibal (notwithstanding the excellent acting of Mads Mikkelsen): a serial murderer who dispatches his victims with a sanguinary ostentatiousness that is like Son of Sam meets Rip Taylor, by way of Francis Bacon, with a touch of Rube Goldberg; yet he is also an affable gentleman of preternatural refinement and erudition, whose bloodlust can be attributed to the traumatic loss of his sister in his youth. Throughout the series his multifarious talents are lavishly depicted—he has the culinary skills of a Michelin star chef, is a draftsman worthy of Albrecht Dürer, and a martial artist that would keep Jet Li huffing and puffing. In archetypally villainous fashion, Hannibal also loves classical music, to the extent that he plays the harpsichord for his own amusement and edification, and composes Baroque nostalgia throwbacks in his spare time.
This suggests that music would be an important component of Hannibal, yet it is in that aspect that it reveals a key deficiency that it shares with other “Second Golden Age” programs. Constantin Bakaleinikoff complained to a reporter in 1959 that “most of the Hollywood music writing is a business, writing to fill the gaps in a film.”[2] Brian Reitzell, the series composer, apparently misunderstood that remark as encouragement to write filler to pad over silences; his original music, mostly ambient-style white noise, used like a cheap sauce that smothers a bland dish. He also uses classical music throughout the series, which in its unimaginative application and selection—basically the genre’s top 10 “hits”—inadvertently piles cliché upon cliché; reaching its jaw-droppingly corny apogee in the Quentin Tarantino-transmogrified-through Looney Tunes climactic fight between Hannibal Lechter and Jack Crawford in the “Contorno” episode, choreographed to the diegetic use of a 78 RPM recording of the overture to La gazza ladra (which is emitted with digital clarity from a gramophone and without need of a side change).
Music struggles for equal treatment with the visual components of drama even in the best of times, as Wagner’s struggle for gesamtkunstwerk illustrates. Nevertheless, memorable symbioses of action and music have been achieved since. It is enough to recall the collaborations between Sergei Eisentein and Sergei Prokofiev, Federico Fellini and Nino Rota, David Lean and Maurice Jarre, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, to name a few. On television, such a partnership, like the one of actor-producer Sheldon Leonard, the creator spiritus of Desilu’s late years, and his house composer, Earle Hagen, is exceptionally rare.
Hagen began his career as a trombonist and bandleader, who in his spare time studied privately with Ernst Toch.[3] He took his career first from the night club to the silver screen, then with studio budgets for film music shrinking in the early 1950s, to television. In 1953, freshly assigned to work on The Danny Thomas Show, Hagen met Leonard, who was to have a decisive impact on his career:[4]
“Sheldon was unique,” Hagen said. “The first time I met him, he said, ‘Do you know your business?’ and I said, ‘Yeah, I do.’ He said, ‘Good, you’ll never hear from me.’ In seventeen years, he never ran a picture with me, he never went to a dubbing or a recording, and he never second-guessed me. It was like Camelot. The implication was that he hired the best people he could get and then stayed out of their way.” [...] Leonard broke with the then-standard television practice of tracking shows [i.e. using library and pre-existing music]. “Every episode of every show that Sheldon Leonard ever did was scored [i.e. had original incidental music],” Hagen said, recalling a memorable Leonard quip that the practice of tracking music originally intended for another show would be like “wearing somebody else’s underwear.”[5]
Aloof though their collaboration appeared to be on the surface, its basis on mutual trust ensured a distinctive visual-musical unity to Sheldon’s productions that were unmatched by few other television programs of the time. Their achievement is all the more remarkable when one considers that Hagen juggled composer duties for Leonard’s other programs,[6] successfully managing to impart a distinct musical identity to each. I Spy was perhaps the most successful and certainly the most varied fruit of their professional relationship, earning Hagen preeminence in his field,[7] as well as his only Emmy in 1968. Leonard often brought Hagen along to locations around the world where the show was filmed; the latter collected as many recordings of local music as he could find, in order to adapt them into the program’s score.[8] However, it is arguably on The Andy Griffith Show where this team made their most indelible impression, at least with me. Rather than merely plugging up holes, Hagen’s music is narrator, inner monologue, Greek chorus, sometimes all three within the same episode. His means are economic: cues are almost always brief, scored for a small ensemble, with counterpoint used very sparingly, and never more than two parts at a time. A classic example of what makes the Hagen/Leonard association special occurs at the very start of season 2’s “The Pickle Story.” As Aunt Bea works in her kitchen, a cue for winds and accordion—lasting all of ten seconds—is heard; virtually a micro-overture that conveys to the viewer the episode’s central theme: the yearning for humble attainments that may be risible to some, but can mean everything to others. The cumulative artistry displayed, visually and aurally, lead one to question whether television has truly improved in the decades since. At least with music, this is debatable.
Television programs prior to the 1970s, particularly “rural” ones like The Andy Griffith Show, before the emergence of socially conscious sitcoms and dramas that are the predecessors of their “Second Golden Age” counterparts, are typically derided for their perceived unsophistication. Like film, television is a medium that depends not only on the efforts and creativity of a large crew of people, but also on their ability to subordinate their personal interests for the sake of a common goal, not least which is to make a profit. In this respect, “Second Golden Age” programs are no different and are, perhaps, worse. When Howard Beale yells at the camera in one of the dramatic nodal points of the film Network, he could have just as well been referring to the state of television programming today, with its “prestige” programs that purport to flatter their viewers’ intellectual egos while stooping ever lower to grab that dollar. “Television is not the truth—television’s a goddamn amusement park,” he admonishes his audience. “We’re in the boredom-killing business… But, man, you're never gonna get any truth from us.”
Notes
[1]: Pidd, Helen (January 14, 2024). “Era of complex and ambitious TV is over, says Sopranos creator”. The Guardian. URL: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/jan/14/the-sopranos-creator-david-chase-quality-tv-era-over.
[2]: Bakaleinikoff, Constantin; Klein, Doris (April 2, 1959). “Dr. Bakaleinikoff: Famed Composer Likes Amateurs”. Valley Times. Page 17.
[3]: Babcock, Bruce (October 28, 2009). “Memoirs of a Famous Composer”. Society of Composers and Lyricists. URL: https://thescl.com/articles/memoirs-of-a-famous-composer/.
[4]: Burlingame, Jon (2023). Music for Prime Time: A History of American Television Themes and Scoring. Oxford University Press. ISBN: 978-0-19-016830-8. Page 212.
[5]: Burlingame 2023, p. 213.
[6]: Burlingame 2023, p. 214.
[7]: Musel, Robert (August 14, 1965). “Television World: Television Developing Elite Composers’ Corps”. San Bernardino Daily Sun. United Press International. Page A-10.
[8]: Burlingame 2023, pp. 256–257.
[9]: Eskridge, Sara K. (2018). Rube Tube: CBS and Rural Comedy in the Sixties (1st paperback ed.). Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press. ISBN: 9780826222626. (In addition to compiling contemporaneous invective against these programs, the author adds her own.)