New TV theme songs are not as memorable as old "Friends"

There was a time, I think, when theme songs were almost as important as the shows they introduced. They were fully formed tunes, many of them catchy and original and comforting. “Friends” had one of the best, a sweet song with a chorus that begins, “I’ll be there for you.”

As I wrote in my “Pop Psychology” column this week, two of our old “Friends” have come back into our lives recently – Matt LeBlanc in Showtime’s “Episodes” and Matthew Perry in ABC’s “Mr. Sunshine.” Neither of them brought particularly good theme songs with them, though.

Poets of darkness

In a quiet residential neighborhood in Encino, there is a room where five young men convene to make deafening amounts of noise. This room is on the second story of Sean Sykes’ home, at the end of a wing, as if the architect knew that someday the rest of the family would need some peace and quiet in the rest of the house.

The air smells vaguely of dust and marijuana smoke, and a banner for a 1994 Thin Lizzy concert hangs on the wall. In this room, Sykes and the rest of the extreme metal band Statius gather for practices, joined sometimes by Sykes’ Irish wolfhound mix, Hayden.