TV shows with the best song choices: five different ways to get it right

Nostalgia can be comforting and incriminating

The second season opens with Frank Sinatra's “It Was a Very Good Year” over a montage of the show's world. The recording lends age, memory and a sense of established ritual to lives that include violence, compromise and dissatisfaction.

The effect is richer than irony alone. These people genuinely live inside family memories and inherited cultural images. The song allows that attachment to feel warm while the images prevent warmth from becoming an acquittal. A criminal is still capable of nostalgia. Nostalgia does not make him harmless.

At the end of “Cold Cuts,” Tony keeps bringing up Janice's absent son until her effort at self-control breaks. He then walks away to the Kinks' “I'm Not Like Everybody Else.” Heard alone, the recording could promise an exhilarating refusal to conform. After that dinner, it accompanies a man who has made another person miserable to protect his own idea of how people are allowed to change. The swagger remains enjoyable, which is what makes the placement sting.

This is the show's great advantage. It lets us enjoy the force of a recording without assuming the person it accompanies deserves the feeling. Tony's confidence and our pleasure in the sequence become uncomfortable neighbours.

The final diner scene makes listening itself suspenseful. Journey's “Don't Stop Believin'” begins as Tony's jukebox choice, part of an ordinary meal. The editing turns arrivals, glances and the door into possible signals. A familiar song promises continuation; the abrupt cut refuses the release we expect.

I do not think the musical choice independently proves one definitive account of Tony's fate. Its stronger achievement is to make the expectation of another moment palpable and then remove it. The unfinished listening experience becomes part of the ending.

A criticism of the show's reputation for music is that discussion can gravitate towards decoding every selection as a secret message. Sometimes a track establishes a mood or belongs to a character's taste. That can be enough. The best choices support several relationships at once—between the scene and Tony, between Tony and his self-image, and between the audience and its appetite for more of him.

Walt gets a soundtrack worthy of the man he imagines

TV on the Radio's “DLZ” accompanies the territory confrontation in “Over.” Walt has noticed another man's shopping and initially responds with the expertise of a teacher correcting a mistake. He then returns to assert ownership of the business.

The cue helps enlarge a parking-lot encounter into a moment of identity. Walt wants to be the man who can make someone else retreat. The music gives us access to that satisfaction. The question is whether we mistake access for approval.

Tommy James and the Shondells' “Crystal Blue Persuasion,” over the production-and-distribution montage in “Gliding Over All,” presents another form of seductive order. The operation seems efficient, expansive and almost effortless. The lightness of the recording sits beside the scale of what is being moved. A process that harms people has acquired the elegance of a successful enterprise.

That is a useful counterweight to treating every montage as uncomplicated celebration. The series often shows the pleasure of competence. It also keeps supplying the people and consequences that a smooth process would prefer to leave offscreen.

The finale's “Baby Blue” by Badfinger is more intimate. Walt's last encounter with the laboratory has the emotional shape of a farewell to something he has loved. The choice connects the product to the affection he has spent years claiming belonged solely to his family.

I find the ending effective because the preceding conversation with Skyler has made self-recognition possible. The song need not certify redemption. It can let a man die inside the attachment he has finally admitted.

There is a risk that the elegance of the farewell makes Walt's ending feel more generous than the endings given to people caught in his wake. That is a worthwhile objection, not a failure to understand the cue. The music is powerful partly because it grants a beauty we may not think he has earned.

Music supervision and original scoring also deserve separate credit. Thomas Golubić's song work and Dave Porter's score are different contributions. A playlist of licensed tracks cannot describe the entire sonic construction of the show, especially its use of silence and uneasy instrumental space.

The song understands how big the moment feels

Teen drama is often discussed as though heightened feeling were evidence against it. The O.C. frequently succeeds because its music accepts the characters' emotional scale while the images retain the social world causing it.

Alexandra Patsavas's music supervision, alongside creator Josh Schwartz, helps make songs part of that world rather than occasional decorations. Patsavas's account of the collaboration is a useful reminder that the choices arise from creative work, not a playlist materialising by itself.

Jeff Buckley's version of “Hallelujah” at the end of the first season accompanies separation and collapse rather than a simple romantic triumph. Ryan's departure and Seth's response have different causes, but the recording lets them occupy a shared emotional space. The adults' failures have become the young characters' immediate experience.

The second-season finale's use of Imogen Heap's “Hide and Seek” is harder to hear innocently after its life as a comic reference. That cultural afterlife can obscure the original construction. The exposed, processed vocal sounds both intimate and estranged; around the confrontation involving Ryan, Trey and Marissa, it makes the action feel separated from ordinary time.

The melodrama is the point under dispute. The confrontation has pushed the characters past the capacity to talk themselves out of danger; the exposed vocal makes that break feel intimate rather than merely spectacular. I think the intensity belongs to their experience. The objection is still substantial: music this forceful can give a sudden plot turn a coherence the preceding writing has not fully earned. The placement works for me because Marissa's intervention follows a relationship already damaged by violence, rather than importing a catastrophe into an otherwise untouched romance.

The limitation is that such strong musical feeling can encourage a series to reach for another catastrophe when a quieter development would do. Once the song is capable of making a scene enormous, escalation becomes tempting.

What keeps the best placements worthwhile is sincerity. They do not ask the audience to regard emotional exposure as embarrassing. Nor do they require the characters to possess perfect taste before their feelings count. The songs provide a language for people who often cannot explain themselves without making the situation worse.

The soundtrack belongs to Tommy's legend

The first episode introduces Tommy Shelby on horseback through industrial Birmingham with Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' “Red Right Hand.” The modern recording does not try to pass as period atmosphere. It tells us how to encounter the man: as a figure of threat, attraction and almost folkloric control.

That choice establishes the series' musical method. The historical setting is not meant to confine the audience to a museum's distance. Modern guitars, voices and rhythms bring aggression and sexual confidence into immediate range.

The benefit is dramatic compression. A ride through a street can establish a public identity before dialogue explains it. The city appears to react to Tommy, while the soundtrack supplies the scale at which he wants to be imagined.

Changing the voice can also disturb a familiar image. PJ Harvey's second-series version of “Red Right Hand” strips the song into a more exposed, eerie performance. The identity remains recognisable while its apparent confidence becomes less secure. BBC America's account of the theme's different versions confirms that Harvey's recording was made part of the series. The arrangement gives a returning song another attitude instead of merely asking us to enjoy the same entrance again.

The danger follows directly. Music can make the gangster's self-mythology so pleasurable that people harmed by his pursuit of power lose weight beside the image. A slow-motion entrance is not neutral when the story also asks us to understand damage.

I find the soundtrack strongest when the glamour meets resistance: when exhaustion, grief or another person's refusal interrupts Tommy's apparent command. Then the distance between the legend and the man becomes audible. The song offers a shape his life cannot hold for long.

It is weaker when another emphatic cue merely repeats that the Shelbys are formidable. The series has established that point; volume and recognisability cannot substitute for a new development.

The anachronism itself is not the problem. Historical drama always selects a language through which present viewers enter another time. The real test is whether the musical language opens the characters up or keeps polishing their silhouette. Peaky Blinders does both, sometimes within the same passage.

Sometimes the character needs the scene to become a song

The first-season finale's “All for Us,” performed by Labrinth and Zendaya, does more than accompany Rue. The sequence becomes a staged musical expression of her relapse and emotional dislocation. Choir, choreography and performance move us away from an ordinary account of what an observer would see.

That shift can be read as excessive. I find it justified because the series has already made Rue's narration and subjective experience part of its form. The finale gives those methods a bodily scale. She is carried, surrounded and swallowed by an expression of feeling she cannot manage privately.

The collaboration matters. This is a song, including Zendaya's vocal performance, rather than an instrumental cue that should simply be folded into a generic claim about Labrinth's score. Music supervisor Jen Malone described the preparation of the vocals, choir and band, making clear how deliberately the sequence was assembled.

The second season's school-play material tests a different relationship between performance and ownership. The use of Bonnie Tyler's “Holding Out for a Hero” in the stylised locker-room number makes public an interpretation that Nate cannot control. The song's theatrical force is part of the humiliation, not a neutral celebration of athletic masculinity.

The number also makes Lexi's authorship harder to celebrate innocently. She has found a spectacular form for something the school recognises, but recognition is being obtained through public exposure. Nate's humiliation and the audience's delight are part of the same construction. The sequence is inventive and cruel at once. Its pleasure is stronger criticism when we notice that Lexi can exercise power through a performance, too.

I prefer Euphoria's music when it gives a specific feeling a form that dialogue cannot. I become less persuaded when a succession of arresting tracks makes every transition feel equally momentous. If everything receives the force of revelation, the revelations begin to compete rather than accumulate.

At its best, the show understands that a song can be a temporary self: a more confident, devastated or extravagant version of a person than ordinary life permits. The writing still has to take responsibility for the person after the track ends.