Greatest opening and theme song in the history of Television

I was thinking the same thing earlier today.

In looking at it now, the words to the song, so perfect and fitting. The images synched to the music, concluding with the iconic hat toss. Mary smiling , whirling around, and tossing that cap, as if to say-here i am world. And then the freeze frame of Mary at her most beautiful, and that smile, the most perfect ever created.

I agree. It's probably the sweetest theme/opening of any show that ever existed. I love it.

American Horror Story Season 7: Donald Trump

I agree for the words but if you want to go with a theme that has no words I'd go with Hill Street Blues.

I don't know, some would argue that Gilligan's Island is the best TV Theme ever!
But then again I love the TV Theme to Three's Company!

Especially the first season's version -- the orchestration, the visuals by Reza Badiyi, the slightly different lyric.

I posted this on another thread, and I've referred before to the pronounced melancholy that existed in the world on the cusp of the '60s & '70s --- the '60s had felt like two different decades shoved into one (the reverse of the 2000s and the 2010s which feel like one decade stretched across two!) like one lengthy valley. The Beatles last #1 song came out in 1970, "Long and Winding Road" which also tapped into that deeply fatigued, heartbroken, bittersweet vibe which simply hung in the air at the time.

Much of what Hollywood does, then and now, tends to be too overproduced to really reflect in any organic way how the world "feels" at any given time, other than topicality and clothes. But the zeitgeist is usually lost.

But around 1970, there was this montage kinda thing going on that actually did capture what it felt like to be a person, alive and in the world, at that specific point in time...

The musical urban street montages of MIDNIGHT COWBOY, the wordless snow angels/ice skating scene from LOVE STORY, the first season opening theme and theme design from MARY TYLER MOORE, and the entire movie of HAROLD & MAUDE. Among many other examples from the same period.

If anyone too young to remember wants to know how things "felt" circa 1969/1970/1971, those are some of the most vivid go-to examples.

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Here's an article from today about the producers' choice of Sonny Curtis' song:



https://www.yahoo.com/music/how-mary-tyler-moores-theme-song-love-is-all-around-became-a-feminist-anthem-and-an-instant-tv-classic-230907737.html


Today, love is all around as the world mourns the death of legendary actress and feminist icon Mary Tyler Moore at age 80. And the soundtrack for this nothing day is “Love Is All Around,” the theme for Moore’s revolutionary, eponymous sitcom of the 1970s. The ebullient, 56-second opening song set the perfect plucky tone as the hard-working, hat-tossing career woman who could turn the world on with her smile, Ms. Mary Richards, made it on her own in the big city of Minneapolis. And it became one of the catchiest, most beloved themes in television history.


It turns out there’s a reason why “Love Is All Around” was such a success. It was penned and performed by a real rock ‘n’ roll veteran: Sonny Curtis, a member of Buddy Holly’s Crickets and the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, whose writing résumé also includes “I Fought the Law” and tunes for the Everly Brothers, Andy Williams, and Bobby Vee. (Side note: Urban legend has occasionally, incorrectly credited Paul Williams as the theme’s writer, a misunderstanding because a man named Pat Williams wrote music for the series.)

Incredibly, Curtis wrote “Love Is All Around” in just two hours; it was an instant classic, in the truest sense. But the song almost didn’t make it onto The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In 2014, Curtis told The Tennessean how the deal came together.

“I wrote it for the show. It all happened in one day, and I owe getting the deal to Doug Gilmore, a real good friend of mine who lives here in Nashville now,” Curtis said. “He was in L.A. working for the Williams Price Agency. They managed Mary Tyler Moore. He called me one day and said, ‘They’re going to do a sitcom with Mary Tyler Moore. Would you like a shot at the theme song?’ I said, ‘Why, sure.’ So during his lunch break, he dropped off a four-page format of what the show was about, and I called him back a couple of hours later and said, ‘Who do I sing this to?’”

Curtis told The Austin Chronicle in 2011 that Gilmore’s show synopsis didn’t give him much to go on, which makes this lightning-speed writing session all the more impressive. “It wasn’t a script, just a description. I’ve always thought that was kinda lucky, because they didn’t give me a lot of information,” he said. “It just said, ‘A girl from the Midwest moves to Minneapolis.’ She got jilted, I believe. ‘Gets a job at a newsroom, gets an apartment she has a hard time affording.’ You know, that kinda stuff.”

The Mary Tyler Moore Show’s executive producer, James L. Brooks, was skeptical when he was first presented with the song, according to Curtis. “He was a little bit cold,” Curtis told The Tennessean. “He said, ‘We’re not near to the stage where we need a theme song yet, but I’ll listen to what you’ve got.’ We went into this big room that was empty, no furniture. He had a couple of iron-back chairs sent in, and I sat down and sang him the theme… There was a black telephone on the floor. He picked up the phone and had some people come in, and had some more people come in. I sang it about 10 times. He said, ‘OK, I need a cassette recording machine. I need to take this to Minneapolis with me this weekend.’ I had begun to feel pretty confident.”

Perhaps Curtis was feeling a little too confident at this point; he confessed to The Tennessean that when he found out Brooks wanted to get another vocalist to record the theme, he blurted out, “If you don’t let me sing it, you don’t get the song!” Brooks agreed to Curtis’s terms, though Curtis sheepishly told The Tennessean, “I don’t think I’d do that now.”

And so, it all worked out, and the song changed Curtis’s life almost as much as the show changed Moore’s. Curtis started his own publishing company with Gilmore and Crickets drummer Jerry Allison — “for some reason or another at that particular time, that was the summer of 1970, they hadn’t quite caught on that publishing was that big of a deal” — and published the song himself, raking in royalties for decades. He only just sold the copyright in 2013.

The song changed over the course of the sitcom’s seven seasons; in Season 1, the lyrics pertained to the naïve Mary’s post-breakup move to Minneapolis, opening with “How will you make it on your own?” and ending with the tentatively encouraging “You might just make it after all.” But by Season 2, Mary Richards was America’s thoroughly modern sweetheart, with a promising job at WJM-TV and her own groovy bachelorette pad, so those lines were fittingly replaced with the more optimistic (and now much more recognizable) “Who can turn the world on with her smile?” and “You’re gonna make it after all.”


Mary’s theme (the second version, of course) has since been covered by everyone from Sammy Davis Jr. (as a 1976 disco tune!), to future American Idol vocal coach Debra Byrd (who recorded a dance version for the 1995 Isaac Mizrahi documentary Unzipped), to Minneapolis grunge-rock legends Hüsker Dü (who recreated several scenes from The Mary Tyler Moore Show opening sequence for their lo-fi “Love Is All Around” music video, and wound up being an answer on Jeopardy!). The familiar bubbling keyboard line and chorus were also sampled on 1993’s Saturation by another trio of Midwestern alt-rockers, Urge Overkill.

But the best remake came along in 1996, courtesy of another feminist role model, the woman who could turn the world on with her sneer: Joan Jett. It’s no wonder that this grrrl-powered version was chosen as the updated theme for Moore’s 2000 TV movie with Valerie Harper, Mary and Rhoda.

“I grew up watching The Mary Tyler Moore Show. I was inspired that women were shown as being equal to men and it had an influence on me as I became a musician. The show was groundbreaking, important, and funny,” Jett said in a statement Wednesday, speaking for all of America as she added: “I will miss Mary Tyler Moore.”



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Hey lonnieanixt, as much as I enjoyed the theme song, I think I liked the opening even better. An MTM with a cat's meow instead of an MGM with a lion's roar is freakin' priceless. 



"It's nice to be nice... to the nice."
Frank Burns:

The opening theme, both instrumental, and words, proves that everything happens the way it is supposed to happen, the guy who wrote it did it in 2 hours, i mean where and how did that just pop into his head, and the words so fitting. That song was made by the heavens, there was a destiny there, a magnetic pull that brought all these supremely talented people together at just the right time with a show whose time had come. America in 1970 had grown just enough that sophisticated comedy could be sampled and enjoyed by a mass audience. A comedy without slapstick, a comedy that took chances, a comedy built around fragile characters, many women, with something to say, such a show would have been impossible just 5 years before, but now its time had come. Everything about the show was magic.
i don't know a thing about music, but the opening music, that-du-du-du-daah, those few quick notes, what feelings they invoke, they just jump start a thousand memories. and then the closing of the song, again pure instrumental, a crescendo, then a soft sound, like snow flakes falling, and bang it ends. Just genius.