Establishing the Musical Epic in Peak TV: Stranger Things (2016–) and Tales From the Loop (2020)

Peak television has arguably peaked. With episode costs for worldwide phenomena such as Game of Thrones, Westworld, and Chernobyl running into the millions of dollars, we have truly arrived at the age of the big screen on the small screen. These productions generally have expansive, cinematic scores to match their impressive (and expensive) visuals. However, not all quality television conforms to these stereotypes. In recent years, the popular Stranger Things series (Netflix) and lesser-known Tales From the Loop (Amazon Prime Video) have provided audiences with narratives of magnitude and visuals of grandeur confined to the episodic restrictions of television. What sets these series aside is their use of music. Stranger Things relies on the use of music for verisimilitude—namely 1980s pre-existing popular songs and the sounds of melodic synth-heavy nostalgia—whilst Tales From the Loop employs the familiar sound of Philip Glass’ piano and string-driven minimalism, in collaboration with Paul Leonard-Morgan. This chapter seeks to explore peak television with non-epic scores. The visuals, set design, and production values conform to peak television norms and expectations, but the music heard is more intimate, less foregrounded, and—arguably—less “peaked”. By tracking televisual norms outside of the peak television category, this chapter will examine the points of inspiration for both these scores, elucidating on whether they are in fact more inspired by predecessors of the big screen rather than the small. Are the sounds of Stranger Things more John Carpenter than Ramin Djawadi; is the score from Tales From The Loop a slimmed down version of Koyaanisqatsi or The Truman Show? By asking these questions and examining the place of these series in the televisual and cinematic world, we will come to understand to what extent the musical scores of television shows define—either to critics or audiences—that they are epic or otherwise, and to ascertain the importance of distinctiveness in peak TV Scoring.