The Five Most Insufferable Sitcom Theme Songs Ever
Great sitcom theme songs come in all shapes and sizes, but the best among them share two traits. First, they put you in the right mood for the show, and second, they’re catchy — but not so catchy that it becomes annoying. The Cheers theme, for example, is absolute perfection. “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” is memorable without being too much of an earworm, and it’s just the right vibe; the song makes you want to pull up a stool next to Norm and Cliff as Coach pours you a cold one.
On the flip side, there are plenty of other theme songs that have you scrambling for the remote to hit that “Skip Intro” option as quickly as possible. Here are the five absolute worst that are so annoying they leave you wanting to skip the entire season and go back in time to when you didn’t even know the show existed.
My Mother the Car
Most of the songs on this list are annoying the first time you hear them. But the theme for My Mother the Car — a show about a man whose mother has been reincarnated as a 1928 Porter — is arguably funny the first go-around. Like Gilligan’s Island and The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, My Mother the Car has one of those theme songs that just explains what the show is about, and its premise is so ridiculous that a song describing it offers a good chuckle. After that, though? Let’s just say that the show’s cheery, clap-along theme certainly would have driven audiences mad had the series lasted beyond one season.
The Nanny
The Nanny also kicks off with a theme song explaining what the series is all about. The problem is, The Nanny is a show about a woman who is simply employed as a nanny — a premise most people could probably gather from the title. They didn’t need a tedious, fast-talking scat theme song detailing the history of how she got the gig in the first place.
It’s About Time
The 1966 sitcom It’s About Time features yet another premise-explanation song — but one that attempts to explain a lot more than that, too. It’s About Time follows two astronauts who go back in time to the days of cavemen. That’s really all you need to know, but the theme song goes into painstaking sing-songy detail about the time periods they flew past on their way there: “Past the fighting Minute Men. Past an armored knight. Past a Roman warrior.” And once the astronauts arrive, in case you weren’t paying attention, the song offers even more unnecessary details: “It’s about two astronauts. It’s about their fate. It’s about a woman, and her prehistoric mate.”
If that weren’t bad enough, halfway through the show’s first and only season, failing ratings pressured creator Sherwood Schwartz to retool the show, so he essentially reversed the premise: The stranded astronauts fix their ship and return to the present along with two cave people. From then on, the show follows out-of-place neanderthals. In accordance with the new set-up, Schwartz kept the insufferable theme song, but rewrote the lyrics to reflect the new version. Unsurprisingly, this version of the show — and theme song — is equally awful.
The Big Bang Theory
The theme song for The Big Bang Theory is exactly what this annoying show deserved. If you remember the Barenaked Ladies and their nasally, overcrowded story songs, then you wouldn’t be surprised by the song the band wrote and performed for the Big Bang Theory theme. In just 20 seconds, they explain the history of the universe in the exact same way that made everyone love them in 1998 and hate them by 1999.
Three’s Company
Don’t @ me. The issue here is that as soon as you hear “Come and knock on our door…,” the song has already earwormed itself into your brain. If you’re quick enough to turn it off right away, you may be in the clear. But if you let it linger, you’re not only screwed that day, but for many days and weeks afterward. Even when enough time has gone by that you can’t remember the plot of a single episode, the earworm will resurrect itself, seemingly out of nowhere, like the world’s most annoying zombie.
