The HBO Musical Effect: Musical Innovation and Transformation in the Era of Peak TV

HBO had a transformative impact on TV production of scripted serial drama, starting in the late 1990s. Notwithstanding their self-valorization in the tag line “It’s not TV. It’s HBO”, their serial dramas, which crystallized around their second major scripted drama, The Sopranos (1999–2007), set a new aesthetic standard, inspiring other networks such as Showtime, Starz, ABC, AMC, and FX to create their own shows in the same vein. This was described by Dean DeFino as “The HBO effect” in his book of the same name, and was instrumental in the emergence of what Jason Mittell has conceptualized as complex TV. This essay explores HBO’s development of distinctive approaches to the use of music in television drama from The Sopranos onwards, looking at music both in a show’s paratexts (opening titles and end credits), and within episodes. The influence of HBO’s approach to music on other original-content producers is examined, drawing on shows such as Dexter, Weeds, and Mad Men that sought both to emulate and to build on the successes of HBO’s Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire. I also consider the impact of the move from broadcast to streaming as one of the principal ways that TV drama is watched, and the way that HBO’s innovations provided the basis for strategies in the development of new approaches, in particular to both television drama’s paratexts and episode scoring, that invite close listening and continued engagement by the audioviewer.