From ‘Only Murders in the Building’ to ‘The Dropout’: How Composers Approach Crime Series

variety.com:

Jon Burlingame editorCrime stories have been a TV staple dating back to the beginnings of the medium. And composers continue to find fresh ways to dramatize murder, mayhem, investigations and convictions, as demonstrated by series from the past year like “Only Murders in the Building,” “The Thing About Pam,” “The Dropout” and “Gaslit.”Siddhartha Khosla (“This Is Us”) came up with one of the year’s catchiest themes for “Only Murders in the Building,” the Hulu comedy-mystery starring Steve Martin, Martin Short and Selena Gomez as amateur sleuths out to solve a murder in their Manhattan apartment building.“I read the script and I heard something that felt quirky and mysterious and dramatic and emotional,” Khosla says. “It harkened back to a ’60s-ish, Donovan-like thing, and I started singing this melody over that chord change.” But when producers asked Khosla to “make it more New York,” he began thinking about musicians in the subway and added a drummer playing on “paint buckets from Home Depot.”For the weekly scores, Khosla employed a 40-piece orchestra including bassoon, without (at first) realizing that a bassoonist would not only be a character later in the season but in fact play a pivotal role in the story.

Episode 7, told without dialogue from a deaf person’s perspective, turned out to be his biggest challenge: “The score had to drive the emotional and dramatic beats of the entire episode,” Khosla says.For NBC’s “The Thing About Pam,” with Renee Zellweger as a real-life housewife suspected of murdering her best friend, composers Sonya Belousova and Giona Ostinelli (“The Witcher”) looked for offbeat sounds.“Pam tromps through town like she’s larger than life,” explains Belousova.