The good news is that Sunday night’s episode of Westworld gave us our first extended peek at another park, one seemingly devoted to India during the British Raj period. Pith helmets, hookahs, white-and-beige ensembles, elephant rides, muskets, Bengal tigers tackling ladies off cliffs. Awesome. The bad news is that some of this reveal was accompanied by a sitar-driven version of the White Stripes’ “Seven Nation Army.” Seriously. As always, these violent delights have corny soundtracks.
It’s time to check in on the time-honored and increasingly frustrating phenomenon of prestige TV co-opting pop music, now that two of the most bombastic and frustrating current exemplars of the form, Westworld and The Handmaid’s Tale, are back for their second seasons and, shall we say, feeling themselves. What’s frustrating is that as we’re bombarded with more and more allegedly top-tier shows, they’re forced to bombard us with more and more bygone musical splendor, all clamoring for the right combination of sentimental nostalgia and modern internet-breaking audacity.
It’s an arms race we are all bound to lose. There is simply too much TV dredging up too much of the music we love in a usually vain quest to steal some of that love for itself. The results can be appalling, sometimes intentionally so. The Handmaid’s Tale season premiere kicked off with its most elaborate and brutal set piece yet, a mass hanging in a decrepit Fenway Park set to Kate Bush’s lush 1988 hyperballad “This Woman’s Work.” That the hanging itself turns out to be a fake out is cold comfort, given that we are treated to loving close-ups of weeping women, their heads slipping into nooses, their hands bound, their bodies shuddering, and one victim wetting herself just as Bush sings, “I should be crying but I just can’t let it show.” Keep it.
As always, this is a profoundly unpleasant viewing experience by design, another gala attraction in the show’s relentless carnival of misery. The question is whether dragging poor Kate Bush into it deepens the anguish, or merely cheapens it. “This Woman’s Work” is pantheon material, having famously first soundtracked the tear-jerking climax to John Hughes’s 1988 romantic comedy She’s Having a Baby, quietly one of the better montages of the montage-glutted ’80s.
Naturally, the song has since popped up, in some cheeky recontextualized form, in everything from Felicity to You’re the Worst to Love and Basketball to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. But each new placement can’t help but diminish the song’s impact, and the use of pop music in The Handmaid’s Tale in particular can be bitter and overly glib (think Leslie Gore’s “You Don’t Own Me” or Tom Petty’s “American Girl”), or simply distracting (think garage-rocker Jay Reatard’s “Waiting for Something” stepping all over one of the first season’s most anguished moments). The show’s Kate Bush stunt gets the job done — the job being to disgust you. But it’s also dangerously close to overkill in a way that threatens to viciously undercut the song itself.
Westworld, of course, spent most of its own first season luxuriating in somber saloon-piano renditions of Radiohead songs as a constant source of cheap heat, climaxing with an extra-melodramatic deployment of the reliably tormented “Exit Music (For a Film).” Season 2 is off to a rough start, between the White Stripes and the second episode’s use of Kanye West’s “Runaway” at what proved to be a hilariously inopportune moment. This was proof that pop songs — especially younger ones — have messy lives of their own, with their own fraught contexts that can shift very unpleasantly, and very quickly.
Surveying the rest of the staggeringly vast prestige-TV landscape, one solution to that problem is to use songs so old and venerated that uncomplicated audience goodwill is assured, though that usually assures audience boredom, too. Trust, FX’s new series recounting the 1973 abduction of John Paul Getty III, immediately raids the classic-rock jukebox, firing off the Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Argent’s relatively more obscure “Hold Your Head Up” in the first episode alone. The opening scene, in fact, literally depicts Getty-mansion pool-partiers singing along to The Dark Side of the Moon’s “Money.” This is all gratuitous by design, but it unfortunately succeeds in conveying lavish emptiness beyond the show’s wildest imagination. This guy’s face says it all.
Trust goes back to the Dark Side of the Moon well immediately, dropping “Eclipse” in its very next episode. The problem is that every track on that album was visually overexposed long ago, as fans of the FX surrealist-superhero jam Legion found out when it fired up the far too on-the-nose “Breathe” and “On the Run” in its first season last year. Legion also set a typically bonkers montage to the Who’s “Happy Jack” in its pilot. At least its taste in Rolling Stones songs is slightly more obscure, and its use of modern psychedelia (Tame Impala, Bon Iver) more adventurous. Like showrunner Noah Hawley’s other highfalutin FX franchise, Fargo, it casts its net wide and lets its weirdness run deep, as does the alluring and vicious new BBC espionage drama Killing Eve, which makes ’60s French pop sound even more menacing than it already sounded.
In between vintage charm and current favorites you have the ’80s period pieces. The second season of Netflix’s Stranger Things at least broadened its Ready Player One–style fetishism to encompass Kenny Rogers and Metallica, while FX’s The Americans has been around long enough to develop an intimate and rewarding relationship with Peter Gabriel. If it’s classic ’90s jams you seek, the Billions hive will gladly tell you that the Showtime high-finance drama used Counting Crows’ “Round Here” to spectacular effect as the bookend to a recent third-season episode, further elucidating “the crumbling difference between wrong and right.” And FX’s grim The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story planted its feet in both decades earlier this year, depicting a string of lurid mid-’90s murders and including an American Psycho–style scene of the killer nearly duct-taping a potential victim to death while dancing to the 1984 Philip Bailey–Phil Collins classic “Easy Lover.” Maybe keep that, too.
By some consensus, Atlanta has the best soundtrack on TV, as proved by the breadth of the recent episode “North of the Border” alone: Kodak Black playing in the car, “Laffy Taffy” playing in the frat house as a pack of naked recruits dances on command, and TLC playing behind the scenes. HBO’s Insecure, which has its own intimate relationship with Frank Ocean, might have the sonic palette that best translates to its own official playlist, with SZA as the show’s truth North Star. These shows prove that the pop-on-TV translation isn’t hopeless, and that startling new innovations are still possible. But it’s highly unlikely at this point that a new prestige player is going to manage anything as extravagant as Mad Men dropping a quarter million to finally get the Beatles in the game, or the Sopranos turning “Don’t Stop Believin’” into a bewildering final punch line. Everyone is chasing the next prestige-viral sensation, but TV’s best musical moments have a tendency to be much smaller and stranger.
From the Golden Era, that means Chris from The Wire identifying an out-of-town drug dealer — and shooting him in the head — because the poor guy doesn’t recognize Young Leek’s Baltimore anthem “Jiggle It.” Likewise, the most memorable soundtrack moments of the past six months work either because the song isn’t conventional pop, or the framing isn’t typical montage fluff, or both. The weirdest thing I’ve seen on TV in 2018 is Taylor Kitsch, as cult leader David Koresh, leading a bar band through an alarmingly spirited “My Sharona” in the pilot to the otherwise very grim Paramount series Waco. The single best song choice, context notwithstanding, is the Netflix rom-com series Lovesick sneaking the lush Todd Terje–Bryan Ferry hyperballad “Johnny and Mary” into its third season. For pure ballsiness, the season finale of Frankie Shaw’s lewd and vulnerable Showtime comedy SMILF was unbeatable, hijacking aspects of Woody Allen’s Manhattan, from the title font to the triumphant rendition of “Rhapsody in Blue,” to tell a queasy story about childhood molestation. And FX’s fellow off-kilter single-mom series Better Things wrapped its second season in November with a dance sequence to Christina and the Queens’ “Tilted” that doesn’t make much sense even in context, which is a huge part of its charm.
It’s not that The Handmaid’s Tale or even Westworld are hopeless in this realm, just that their tendency to take huge swings inevitably hampers their ability to take good ones. The last two episodes of Handmaid’s have flaunted the show’s ambitions in less garish and perplexing ways, setting the construction of an impromptu shrine in the Boston Globe’s abandoned printing plant to Grouper’s eerily soothing “I’m Clean Now.” The most recent episode, veering off in another direction altogether, features a somber flashback in which an ultimately doomed mother and daughter sing Gwen Stefani’s “Hollaback Girl” to each other while driving in a convertible. Seriously.
This is ridiculous, of course, and arguably as acidly ironic and glib as any of the show’s previously polarizing choices. But it’s just unexpected enough to constitute an improvement, an attempt to disarm rather than bludgeon you, a bet that risking your mocking derision is preferable to triggering your outright, eye-rolling scorn. It’s proof that despite prestige TV’s tireless efforts to the contrary, we haven’t yet heard it all, and haven’t yet exhausted all the ways we might hear it.
