With our usual Insider Tracker, Ethan Alter, taking a well-deserved vacation this week, we’re taking a break from Big Picture awards chatter for a musical interlude brought to you by the Emmys.
When it comes to the music categories, the Emmy Awards do their best impression of Grammys, honoring the scores, songs, and main themes that made the year’s best TV really sing.
This year, few musicians working in the medium faced a task quite like the composers behind two of this year’s high-concept buzzy breakouts. For Widow’s Bay, David Fleming needed to thread the same needle as the hybrid show’s scripts while crafting the score. Meanwhile, on Pluribus, Dave Porter accepted the challenge of conveying Vince Gilligan’s radically different alien-invasion story in the span of a 20-second main title.
Gold Derby spoke with both Daves this week about cracking the code. And then, further down, we take a look at the songs nominated for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics.
Widow’s Wail
One of this television season’s biggest sensations is a Cirque du Soleil-level balancing act of tone. Widow’s Bay is a horror-comedy that takes its scares seriously, but never too seriously as to drain them of their delight for genre fans. And the Television Academy recognized the achievement, awarding the debut season with 19 Emmy nominations.
That signature tone was set in the pilot script by creator Katie Dippold and expounded upon by the writers room and director-EP Hiro Murai. But what does a scarily funny and funnily scary show sound like?
That task of answering that question fell to Emmy-winning composer David Fleming, whose recent work has ranged tonally from the soaring, John Williams-inspired score for James Gunn’s Superman to TV’s The Last of Us and Mr. and Mrs. Smith.
When Fleming began working with Dippold and got a rundown of the series from its creator, his mind drifted back to a memory from his past. “I felt that so much of it connected to my early childhood, the way I felt reading collections of short stories by Stephen King,” Fleming tells Gold Derby.
That feeling led Fleming to a starting point for his work, and — luckily — aligned with Dippold’s primary request for the score: No “comedy” music. “My pitch was, ‘Let’s ignore horror for now,'” Fleming says. “‘We’ll get there, and let’s just focus on the town itself.’ I wanted the music to feel inextricable from that place. Obviously, there’s horrific things that happen, but the town is such a charming place that you want to revisit it.”
That leaping-off point led to a conversation between Fleming and Dippold about the creator’s favorite films, including Jaws. Steven Spielberg’s tale of a seaside town with a beleaguered, tourism-hungry mayor certainly had an iconic sound, but it was the non-“Duh dun” elements of Williams’ score — the parts that captured the feeling of Amity — that interested Fleming.
An early sonic concept that Fleming toyed with not just the character of the town Widow’s Bay, but also its history. Spinning out from the flashback starring Emmy nominees Betty Gilpin and Hamish Linklater, “Our History,” Fleming considered taking that sound of that episode’s colonial era and applying it to the entire series, but ultimately, he knew the score needed a “specific rhythm and tempo.”
“It wasn’t thinking so much about the literal music of a New England town at this time,” Fleming says. “It was asking in a more elemental way, ‘What is the sound of a place like this?’ I think about wind and creaking wood and close, tactile sounds. Voices echoing, wind, or fog horns.”
The resulting score captured that tangible essence of the town, while also being flexible enough to shift with each episode’s dip into different subgenres of horror. By the end, Fleming felt that he and all of the artists on Widow’s Bay had recreated that feeling of reading spooky short stories late into the night, but he wasn’t sure how a broader audience might react to it.
“It just feels very specific to the point where I was really hoping, but not positive that people would connect with it,” Fleming says. “It’s been weirdly affirming to see so many people latch on to it, and I don’t know that we all expected that. But it’s certainly been nice to be a part of.”
The Art of the Theme
For Pluribus, Vince Gilligan reassembled the Breaking Bad below-the-line band and told them to take big swings. The result: 18 Emmy nods. Three of those belong to Dave Porter (for his main title, score, and sound mixing), a long-coming breakthrough at the awards after years of snubs for his work on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
Porter took the “big swing” edict to heart, employing orchestration and vocal arrangements for the first time in his work with Gilligan, and nowhere did it pay off more than the show’s theme.
While he joined Breaking Bad late in the process, for Pluribus, Porter met with the writers early on to get a feel for the series. “From the very early conversations in that writers’ room, I knew the human voice was going to be a big part of the score,” Porter tells us. “I got to get into the episodes a little bit more to understand what we were doing.”
However, unlike the show’s extraterrestrial happiness virus, which takes hold nearly instantly, Porter’s theme took some toiling to perfect. “Probably four months, all told. It was a labor of love, for sure,” he says. “It’s a tricky thing, one of the hardest things to do for a composer in our business: that main title theme, especially in a show as complex as this one, to distill down to 20 seconds all of the things you want your audience to feel and know about the show when they sit down to watch it.”
After dozens of false starts — “some of them were gigantic, enormously powerful pieces” — Porter finally struck gold by stripping it down.
“It’s a very simple two-part vocal piece, very crucially sung by the same woman, the terrific Kenya Hathaway. So it’s the same voice giving us both perspectives: One is a little more stilted and robotic, almost, and rhythmic and full of motion; the other is just a beautiful melody. The two of them at times collide and rub against each other tonally, and at other times are very harmonious. And in a sense, that’s our show, right?”
TV Tunes
Before we head off, here’s a quick refresher on the contenders vying for the Emmys equivalent of Best Original Song. It’s a perfect weekend playlist for all you TV-heads.
“Rise Him Up” — The Boys
As Oh Father, Hamilton‘s Daveed Diggs sings the praises of Homelander as the one true lord and super savior.
“Mis Figuritas” — Hacks
Perhaps in a bit of manifestation on the part of Team Hacks, “Mis Figuritas” is the track that leads to Deborah Vance’s in-show Emmy nomination in the same category.
“Need Someone” — The Pitt
Grammy nominee Andrew Bird provided the music and lyrics for the capper to “12:00 P.M.” emotional conclusion.
“Christian Woman” — South Park
For its season-long riff on the American political right, South Park turned out a new Christmas song that’s sure to make the entire family feel pretty weird.
“The Devil You Know” — Spider-Noir
What’s a ’30s detective pastiche without a glamorous ballad? This one, provided by cast member Li Jun Li, strikes the right chord for the hardboiled superhero.
“The Dead Dance” — Wednesday
Truly a match made in hell, Lady Gaga co-wrote and performed that nominated track from Netflix’s gothic Addams Family spin-off, Wednesday.
