Spurred by the use of Badfinger’s “Baby Blue” in the Breaking Bad finale, Ben Greenman explores the increasingly sophisticated use of pop music in TV shows:
Pop music has been a valuable part of film for years, but television, as a result of smaller budgets and the repetitious nature of a series mentality, tended to make its own music—theme songs, composed scores. Sometimes that music has been memorable (“Hawaii Five-O,” “Sesame Street”), but it has tended to take the form of brand reinforcement rather than editorial content or commentary, and those series that made music part of their charter (“Miami Vice,” “Gilmore Girls”) did so overtly. …
[B]oth “The Sopranos” and “Mad Men” imagined a relationship between their characters and the music onscreen. Tony Soprano and his crew hung out at their nightclub, listening to music constantly; one of his lieutenants was played by one of the most famous musicians ever to take a television acting job, the Bruce Springsteen stalwart and garage-rock historian Steve Van Zandt. And “Mad Men” planned its song placements meticulously, illustrating how changes in pop tastes were mirroring, or outrunning, changes in the characters. The show famously paid a quarter-million dollars for the rights to the Beatles’ “Tomorrow Never Knows” [heard above] — and then squandered the song, arguably, by dashing it against Don Draper’s impenetrable aloofness.
The Dish 