Latest Posts

Column 4: Considering Pete and Pete

May 21, 2014

If you happened to catch last week’s Screened Plays, you’ll know that we discussed the importance of television theme songs and, in particular, how they should be viewed in the context of the audience they reach and the generation in which they existed. Theme songs are great windows to the soul of a television audience, but the thing is that most are pretty limited by their genre. That is to say, most television theme songs say a lot about an audience’s values and tastes, or the subject of the TV show itself… and that’s it. But there are some television show theme songs that transcend their show’s scope and somehow manage to be appropriate for whatever music style is current at the time. Enter: The Adventures of Pete and Pete. Often pointed to as 90s-Nickelodeon gold (and as the reigning 90s-nostalgia magnet), The Adventures of Pete and Pete captured the[...]

Column 3: Theme Songs

May 14, 2014

What do the following phrases have in common? “Just sit right back and you’ll hear a tale, a tale of a faithful trip…” “Here’s the story, of a lovely lady…” “Whatever happened to predictability, the milk man, the paper boy, evening TV…” Anyone who has ever turned on a television probably identified these as lyrics to extremely recognizable TV show theme songs. But you probably could’ve known the answer without ever having turned on a television—that’s how ingrained into popular culture these theme songs are. Two of the above theme songs are brought to you by the 1960s (Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch, respectively), the decade that ushered in the scripted sitcom and singlehandedly built the television industry. American families gave up radios in favor of television, and by the late 1950s, weekly sitcoms were being broadcast into homes all over the country. A family in California watched and[...]

Column 2: Let’s Talk About TURN

May 7, 2014

AMC has an impressive track record of successful television programming. Its standouts, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, quite often are referred to as the best shows in the history of television. Anyone who’s watched them knows this to be true. But for every Jaguar pitch and jaw-dropping desert shootout, there are a handful of mediocre moments happening on one of AMC’s lesser shows. TURN, AMC’s new colonial spy drama, is just slightly better than mediocre despite an obvious attempt to be great.  TURN’s mediocrity is surprising because it has all the makings of a successful show: a story with a good hook, unknown actors, attractive costuming and set design, purposeful music, and the list goes on. It’s as if the programming team at AMC looked at their successes and from them created a checklist of what every other show must have in order to be good. This line of thinking seems[...]

Column 1: Prologue

April 30, 2014

Sound and motion are inextricably linked. Think about it: every motion has a certain sound associated with it. Everyone knows what clapping hands sound like, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who can’t imitate a buzzing bee. Most sounds are universally recognized, and when they are, they become a shared human experience. In fact, sound is so fundamental to our lives that when it defies our expectations, it’s either unsettling, or inspires a frenzied look into why it’s different and what that means for us. This line of thinking is what will guide Screened Plays, buffaBLOG’s investigative coverage of the sounds that shape the kind of motion that’s become an integral part of our lives: motion pictures, and not just of the movie variety. Any moving image with notable sound is fair game, including but not limited to: movies, television, commercials, shorts, cartoons, and maybe (but probably not) your parody[...]