Ostentatious Scoring: Bewitching the Complex TV Audience from The Sopranos to Wednesday

Sophisticated moments of music-led narration are increasingly central to the establishment of peak TV style and worldbuilding; such moments also perform other cultural, economic, and ideological functions. Ostentatious musical moments manipulate screen music conventions to present aesthetically rich and affecting narrative. Their innovations and continuities also compel our consideration of patterns of twenty-first century storytelling and consumption fed by the era of peak TV and the contemporary media landscape. This article seeks to theorize this definitive musical phenomenon of the peak TV era. It considers ostentatious moments in relation to work by TV and media theorists including Trisha Dunleavy and Jason Mittell, screen music and sound theorists including Rick Altman, Nicholas Cook, Annette Davison, Claudia Gorbman, and Amy Herzog, and analysis of examples from series including Friday Night Lights (2006–2011), Sense8 (2015–2018), Six Feet Under (2001–2005), The Last of Us (2023), The Leftovers (2014–2017), The Sopranos (1999–2007), The Wire (2002–2008), WandaVision (2021), and Wednesday (2023). It proposes a set of recurring audiovisual and musical features that combine to shape ostentatious musical moments on TV and in other musical multimedia, examines their implications for notions of screen music (in)audibility, and considers the trait’s wider cultural meanings from a range of critical perspectives.