Jon Burlingame editorScience fiction has been the springboard for musical flights of fancy as long as TV and movies have been around.
And this year there have been multiple examples of composers rising to the occasion for ambitious multi-part television series, .“Severance” is a rare TV project for Theodore Shapiro, a composer better known for his features (“The Devil Wears Prada”).
Ben Stiller, who directed six of the nine episodes, relies on Shapiro for his film scores (“Tropic Thunder,” “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”) and sought him out for this psychological thriller about a mysterious corporation whose workers undergo a medical procedure that ensures their work lives and home lives remain completely separate. “As soon as I started reading scripts, I started writing themes,” Shapiro reports.
One of his early musical ideas interested Stiller, and that turned into the “Severance” theme. “With that, this score really became rooted in one chord progression and a melodic idea on top of it.“It plays (as) mystery,” Shapiro explains. “There’s a fundamental mystery at the core of this show. [Each episode] peels back layers, essentially getting at the question, what is happening here at Lumon Industries?
Read more on variety.com