Music in Television by Deaville James Andrew

Author:Deaville, James Andrew
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2011-03-14T16:00:00+00:00

Part II

Case Studies in

Television Music

Chapter 6

“Bad Wolf”

Leitmotif in Doctor Who (2005)

Robynn J. Stilwell

The years around the millennium’s turn were marked in popular culture by a surge in remaking, rethinking, reviving, and revisioning. Popular television shows of previous decades became films, such as The Addams Family (1991), The Brady Bunch (1995), Lost in Space (1998), Miami Vice (2006), and The A-Team (2010); The X-Files (1993–2002) even made a feature film between the fifth and sixth seasons (1998). Popular animated films became Broadway musicals, such as Beauty and the Beast (film 1991, stage 1994), and The Lion King (1994, 1997). Superheroes who had a long history in comics, television, and films experienced a renaissance. Superman returned, both on the small screen in The New Adventures of Lois and Clark (1993–1997) and Smallville (2001–2010) and at the movie theatre (Superman Returns, 2006). Batman was reimagined at least twice (by Tim Burton in 1989, Christopher Nolan in the 2005 version, and arguably Joel Schumacher in 1995’s Batman Forever, which was nominally part of Burton’s cinematic universe). Even a show with a relatively ignominious history could be reborn: 1978’s campy fantasy quest Battlestar Galactica was revisioned as a political allegory of religious/ethnic conflict, genocide, and displacement in 2003, first as a miniseries and then as a continuing serial (2004–2009). This last was part of a trend in American television also emerging from the ensemble dramas and nighttime soap operas of the 1980s: the growing serialization of series, which was a feature particularly represented in fantasy and science-fiction series with large-scale narrative arcs such as Babylon 5, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Lost.

The BBC’s classic science-fiction program Doctor Who experienced two revivals during this period. Originally a children’s television production, Doctor Who had become a popular British icon as well as attracting a cult fandom over its initial 1963–1989 run and afterwards. It was first brought back in 1996, in a relatively unsuccessful British and American co-produced television film in 1996.1 Far more successful, both critically and popularly, was the new television program of 2005 that has become the BBC’s current flagship show.2 Although ostensibly a continuation rather than a reboot or a revisioning, the new series nonetheless underwent significant transformation, showing influence from trends in both American and British television. Two of the most significant changes from the original series were in narrative structure and in music.

These changes—both in style and deployment—reinforce one another. Doctor Who had always featured elements both of the series (parallel, repeat-able) and the serial (continuous, unfolding),3 but the conception of the 2005 series (designated Series 1, or S1, by the production company)4 interwove story and music in a structure more complex than is usual for television, possibly in part because there was no initial expectation of a second series. The thirteen parts were conceived as a potentially closed cycle, a companion’s journey and a Doctor’s death and regeneration5—the death of a Doctor always contains the seeds of renewal in regeneration but is still always the death of a distinct personality and performance.

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