There was a time when the TV theme song ruled. Probably at around the same time as the TV show when watched in real time ruled.

Tonight on Tonic (6 p.m.) Tim Tamashiro features some TV themes gone jazz, from those good old days. Actually no days pre-PVR were truly good in terms of ease of TV viewing, but they were definitely better days in terms of signature musical themes composed specifically for a particular show. (Although I would make a case for the creativity behind taking an existing piece of music and cleverly re-working it, as was the case with the theme used on Weeds, Malvina Reynolds Little Boxes, or on The Wire, Tom Waits' Down In The Hole.)

Tellingly the jazz versions of themes that Tim is playing are from shows like The Price Is Right, The Waltons, and The Flintstones -- old shows. Gone, it would seem, are the days when a TV theme song was part of the aural lingua franca. Or as Pop Vultures put it:

"Once upon a time, each television show had a memorable tune that would imprint itself on the collective pop culture psyche. I mean, who among us does not know every single word to The Brady Bunch song? Nowadays, we get digitized letters (Lost, Supernatural) or eight bars of instantly forgettable music (Grey’s Anatomy). Is that really the best they can do?"

Personally I wish I could forget the Brady Bunch theme, but that's neither here nor there.

Maybe it's the advent of the new television season, but suddenly there seems to be a general mourning for the loss of we-all-know-it-even-if-we-hate-it. A recent article in Billboard (Original TV Theme Songs A Dying Breed) says "Popular TV theme songs have slowly disappeared from the landscape, leaving a world of 'cold opens' -- plunging viewers straight into the action without an introductory tune."

A world of "cold opens," how sad.

But they go onto say that what has supplanted the "warm open" is the practice of licensing existing music -- as anyone who watches TV and follows the music industry knows it's commonplace for bands to promote their music as having been used on such and such a TV show. The reasons may be in part a new aesthetic -- the sound of something fresh each week -- but it's also based on an old reality, money. Apparently it costs less to license tracks.

As this piece also points out though, not all shows are eschewing the theme, and some themes are instantly recognizable if not lyric-based, like that eerie theme from Six Feet Under, by Thomas Newman.

Popwatch offers another reason other than cost cutting as a rationale for the Cold Open, by the way. "In the age of the remote and the DVR, shows don't want you to lose interest for even a few seconds at the beginning of the half hour, lest you change the channel, and theme songs are a big time-killer."

There's probably some truth to that -- although it doesn't explain why some of us love to watch the opening sequences to shows like The Wire or The Sopranos again and again. Or, for that matter, adore hearing both opening and closing to Coronation Street. There were great huzzahs in households across the nation when the closing Corrie music was restored with closing credits. Beats a Cold Close, any day.