The B List: 10 Favorite TV Theme Songs

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9. Dr Who

If the X-Files theme song gives you the goose bumps, the theme song to Dr Who makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up. It’s creepy electronica and frigid sterility leaves you with a sense of uneasiness. It’s key to note here that in our wiki-findings, we actually discovered this tidbit: Doctor Who was the first television series in the world to have a theme entirely realized through electronic means. So basically it’s the primitive untz untz we love about it. If you want to fully geek out, read the whole radiophonic breakdown.

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8. Six Feet Under

Ok, if you really want dark and unsettling, the Six Feet Under intro is “deathly” creepy. The eerie stillness continuously broken apart by small, bright flashes of light is powerful enough to create it’s own imagery. Put beneath the vivid intro sequence and it’s a minor soundtrack before each episode.

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7. Monday Night Football

I’ll never hear this song and not want to get completely obliterated with my college buddies, doing halftime funnels and scrounging for change to pay the delivery guy. Calling your bookie and putting $20 on the over while that song is blaring in the background is better than sex. When Al Michaels and John Madden come on, it’s close to godliness. I dare you to play that video and not forward it to every degenerate gambler on your AIM buddy list.

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6. Miami Vice

Ah, the good old days of neon shirts, loafers and a fresh 8-Ball in your white blazer pocket. If the 70s were all funk, horns and drama, the Miami Vice theme song introduced middle America to the ’80s coke hangover Steve Rubell set in motion. And yeah, as good as the helicopter ride over the surf and the flamingos are in the intro montage, you know when you were 12 years old your favorite part was when that girl walks by with her bikini top bouncing like a bocce set. So if you want to relive the glory of puberty, you won’t have to wait too long…it’s at the :14 mark.

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5. Sanford and Son

In 1972, when Fred G. Sanford came into American homes, he didn’t just bring with him a junkyard and a string of pseudo-heart attacks, he also introduced us to one of the greatest funk themes of all time. It’s hard not to have this in your head all day after hearing it, so be warned. The horn blows are impeccable pop, dancing above a strong-armed bassline that chugs along. It rises and falls, but in the end, the outro is ultimately the best part of the whole song.

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4. The Sopranos

Come on, who doesn’t love this song? Sure the Alabama 3 song is always going to be tied to Tony Soprano, and it fit his torn mental state perfectly as he drove the Jersey Turnpike, but you could relate. You’ve put yourself behind that wheel more than you can count. Who didn’t want to be Tony Soprano? Unless you saw yourself more like a Christopher, and in that case, you got less power in the family, but you were banging Adriana. So you got that working for you.

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3. Dukes of Hazzard

One of the first 45s I ever bought as kid (for you iPod generation readers, those were little vinyl albums with no portability…unless you had one of those briefcase phonographs, which worked ok, but you had to put pennies on the record sometimes so it would play flat. No, I’m serious.) Aaaaanyway, one of my first musical purchases was this Waylon Jennings single. I’m sure I bought it ‘cause I desperately wanted to be a Duke boy, but there was also something about Waylon’s drawl and unassuming guitar work that really took me before I even knew what Country music was. It’s 25 years later and I still appreciate how great a song this really is.

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2. Taxi

About 5 years ago I was digesting as much of my father-in-laws’ jazz collection as I possibly could. Yet I kept gravitating to the trumpet, sax and guitar-driven stuff. I was fearful of moving into piano-led albums – I just didn’t know where to start. So he gave me a Bob James album from the mid-70s. Over the next year or so I immersed myself in James’ material. Some of it is certainly easy-listening fare, but shit, some of his albums are just amazing. It was somewhere in that year I came to find out he wrote Angela, which of course is the Taxi theme song, and probably his best known work. I’ve never driven a cab through the dank, New York City streets at night, alone, in a somber drizzle, dejected and pensive…but I imagine it feels exactly like the piano lines in Angela.

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1. Barney Miller

Besides being one of the greatest television series ever produced, one that more closely resembled a live stage performance than a typical TV drama, Barney Miller gave us the best theme song in the history of television. Any song that can begin with a slow rolling bass solo and immediately capture your undivided attention is a destined masterpiece. As the song progresses, the gritty, sultry guitar solo takes over, empowering the rhythm before driving straight into a cacophony of horns. This is more than a mere introduction to a half-hour sitcom. This is a stand-alone work of art that happened to precede an award-winning series.

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Did we miss any theme songs you think deserve to be on our list? Leave a comment below letting us know your faves…