The Musical Montage — 12 Great Music Moments in TV History

For the past twenty years, as television has entered its golden age, it has also strengthened its bond with music. If you’re a follower of both mediums, you have probably, at some point in the past two decades, looked up a song after seeing it used in an episode-ending montage that tore your heart out or tense climactic scene that had you clawing at your couch cushions.

Some shows do it better than others—medical shows like Scrubs and Grey’s Anatomy were notorious for doing this from the start; teen soaps like The O.C. and One Tree Hill practically reinvented the trend by promoting the popular indie bands of the 2000s; and then there are high concept shows like Breaking Bad and Stranger Things, which seem to have perfected the art of pairing the perfect song to set the mood.

These days, it’s practically expected for primetime dramas to perfect their relationship with the musical montage. Even though my heart isn’t into NBC’s The Blacklist anymore, that hasn’t stopped me from migrating to Spotify after the latest episode and bookmarking the new hit the show is promoting. All over the filming industries, music supervisors are hard at work finding the latest talent and playing liaison between the rights holders and the directors to bring us the most memorable moments of primetime drama.

But while the trend seems obligatory, that hasn’t stopped it from being effective. The ubiquity of music in television just means music supervisors have to try that much harder to leave their mark. Viewers tend to remember the shows that formed a symbiotic relationship between the artist and the story. The following list details my favorite musical montages of the past twenty years, and the songs that seared these moments into my memory.

Needless to say, there are spoilers for all. Also, we have created a Spotify playlist of all the songs here, except “I Will Wait For You” by Connie Francis which is not available on Spotify at the time of this printing.

“DLZ” by TV on the Radio

Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad had one of the most diverse and carefully constructed soundtracks I’ve ever heard. For dozens of the songs used in its 62-episode run, I can still picture every detail of the scene it is paired with. “DLZ” occurs at the end of season two episode, “Over,” when Walter White (Bryan Cranston) confronts a pair of inept would-be meth cooks at the local big box hardware store after he catches them buying supplies. Walking straight up to the pair in the parking lot, Walt looks the bigger of the two in the eye and chillingly declares, “Stay out of my territory,” an admonishment that is made all the more alarming by the fact that it works, and the two drug dealers back off.

In Breaking Bad’s long history of shocking and memorable moments, it’s easy to lose sight of this scene. It’s not the first time Walt breaks out of his shell and it’s certainly not the last, but it is a key moment in the evolution of Walter White to Heisenberg. Until this point in the series, Walt had done his best to convince himself he was still the man he’d always been, separating himself from the criminal element and letting others do the dirty work. But with five simple words and a moody, menacing soundtrack, Walt has jumped into the ring and established himself as a serious force to be reckoned with.

This wasn’t my first experience with the band TV on the Radio, but it helped them to become one of my favorite bands. The surprisingly apt lyrics of “DLZ” (“Never you mind, death professor”) make this one of the show’s best musical pairings and will forever entangle that song with that scene in my mind.

“No Children” by The Mountain Goats

Moral Orel

For those who’ve never heard of it, Moral Orel was a short-lived stop-motion animated show on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim lineup from 2005 to 2008. It resembled Davey and Goliath but lampooned organized religion and traditional family values at every turn. I had tuned out of the series in the first season, finding it not to my tastes, but accidentally caught the second episode of its final season, “Numb.” The episode explored the contentious relationship between Orel’s parents: Clay, an alcoholic, nihilist, and closeted homosexual, and Bloberta, whose loveless and passionless marriage has made her numb, detached, and unfeeling.

Bloberta spends the episode reaching out for male attention to the extent that she injures herself so she can feel something, but she is repeatedly shot down. When Clay returns home from a hunting trip at the end of the episode, husband and wife retire to their separate beds and just stare at the ceiling, united in their loneliness and mutual resentment. I was blown away by the impression this episode left on me and how perfectly the song lyrics—stark and bitter and crippling in their genuine spitefulness—fit the tone. I was dedicated to this show until the end of its exquisite, moody final season.

“I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers

How I Met Your Mother

In season 2 episode, “Arrivederci Fiero,” Marshall (Jason Segel) and his friends reminisce about his beloved, broken-down Fiero as its future lays in limbo at the mechanic’s. It was Marshall’s first car and each friend has a memory attached to it. In a flashback to a cross country road trip with Ted (Josh Radnor) during their college years, the song “I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles)” by The Proclaimers is playing repeatedly on the radio and Marshall explains that the cassette tape got stuck in the radio years ago and it’s the only song that he can play. When Ted reaches his breaking point with the song, Marshall assures him, “Don’t worry, it comes around again,” immediately followed by a scene with the two of them triumphantly singing along with gusto.

After this episode aired, I made my friend a mix CD (because mix CDs were still a thing back then), composed entirely of this song over and over again, 21 times in a row. He claims it took him to the third iteration to catch on to what was happening. Some time later, we both pulled the prank on my sister (who introduced us to How I Met Your Mother) while the three of us were on a long road trip. Remarkably, it took 19 plays for her to realize it was on repeat. Clearly, the song really does ‘come back around.’ The joke resonated well with me, as “Arrivederci Fiero” remains my favorite episode of the long-running sitcom and I forever associate The Proclaimers with the show.

 

“Battle Flag” by Lo Fidelity Allstars

ER

I had never heard of this song prior to its appearance in ER’s sixth season episode “Be Still My Heart” in 2000, and it never became a radio hit in the U.S., but it makes this list because it is one of the most haunting and personally memorable song-to-scene moments in my lifetime of TV viewing. During Valentine’s Day festivities at Chicago’s County General Hospital, two doctors are stabbed—one of them fatally—by a paranoid schizophrenic patient while this song enthusiastically pumps over the intercom. The twist ending proved why ER was part of NBC’s Thursday night “Must See TV” lineup and was absolutely mind-blowing to my 13-year-old self—not just for the shocking, unexpected violence of it all, but because it happened to my favorite character.

What followed this episode was seven days of me scouring the internet’s geekier side for any clues about the fate of my beloved character and discovering an extremely low-quality leaked scene from the following episode, “All in the Family,” an episode I have since committed to memory. And thus, I was able to pinpoint the exact moment in TV history that a young Kara discovered what a ‘spoiler’ was and where I could find them, an obsession which has not left me nearly two decades later. My favorite character survived the attack, but it left him forever changed and altered the course of his characterization for his remaining 6+ years on the show. The song, meanwhile, will always be associated with the initial terror of that one scene.

“Heat of the Moment” by Asia

Supernatural and South Park

I know the purpose of this list is to show how a song can forever tie you to a specific TV show, but I just couldn’t decide which show used Asia’s hit song more effectively. South Park’s resident psychotic narcissist, Eric Cartman, has a storied history of singing tone-deaf renditions of popular songs. This time around, Cartman leads the Supreme Court in a stirring sing-a-long of “Heat of the Moment” to emotionally manipulate them into approving stem cell research, ostensibly to save his friend, Kenny (but really for selfish reasons). The irreverent scene is a clever send-up of an emotional movie trope; sure, a child bravely singing an inspirational song to a roomful of stoic adults could be very moving… but “Heat of the Moment”?

On Supernatural, the Asia hit was used in the third season episode, “Mystery Spot,” in which Sam (Jared Padalecki) is stuck in a time loop, reliving the same day over and over again, which always ends in Dean’s (Jensen Ackles) death. Every time the loop resets, Sam wakes up to “Heat of the Moment” on the radio and must endure another frustrating day of trying to convince his brother something is off. He experiences over a hundred loops until the whole ordeal is revealed to be an illusion by the Trickster (Richard Speight Jr.), in a failed attempt to teach Sam a lesson about his codependency with his brother.

“Take Me Home” by Phil Collins

Mr. Robot

Mr. Robot is not one of my favorite shows. In the long list of currently-airing TV shows I watch, it doesn’t even break into the top twenty. I’ve struggled with its lack of plot originality, unlikeable characters, and cheesy dialogue since the start, but I’ve stuck around because there are some things that Mr. Robot just excels at, and cinematography is one of those things. The USA Network original often utilizes unique framing techniques that effectively draw my attention to the screen, even when I’m not interested in what’s happening.

When the second season premiered, I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep watching. I was still fresh off the clichéd twist from the freshman season and just not feeling it, but I wanted to give the show a chance. In a seemingly random scene, a powerful businessman is bribed to bring a duffel bag with six million dollars in cash to a public park, ostensibly to exchange it with the mysterious hackers who are blackmailing him. When he reaches the drop spot, he looks uncertain and afraid; people go about their business in the park, completely oblivious to him as Phil Collins’ “Take Me Home” plays softly in the background. The businessman gets a phone call we cannot hear the other side of and receives baffling instructions. As the song swells and drowns out the white noise, the blackmailed man dutifully sets the bag of money on fire in the middle of the park.

I remember being completely drawn into this scene, despite having no idea what was happening. The song choice is perfect because it is so disarming. It also reluctantly roped me in for the entire season and beyond and sent me on a lengthy Phil Collins kick that has continued on to this day.

“So Far Away” by Dire Straits

Halt and Catch Fire

I nearly gave up on AMC’s tech drama several times over the first two seasons. The show was a slow burn all the way through but what really challenged me were the characters. I found four out of five main characters extremely unlikeable and, given my general lack of interest in the subject matter—the ‘Silicon Prairie’ of Texas in the eighties—there wasn’t much keeping me around. Yet I had a feeling I should stick with it. I don’t know why I stuck around for so long—maybe it was my love for the cast, maybe it was the really kickass title sequence—but that impulse paid off tenfold by the time the show had wrapped its fourth and final season.

By the time Halt and Catch Fire ended, every single character had gone through several transformations. Donna (Kerry Bishé), the only character I had previously sympathized with, had made so many mistakes and questionable decisions that she had come down from the pedestal I’d placed her on, but became an even more complex character. Joe (Lee Pace) had been taken down a few notches and his competitive façade had been lifted to reveal him as possibly the most fragile of them all. I never fully sympathized with Cameron (Mackenzie Davis), but she’d been through the ringer enough to understand her a little better and Bos (Toby Huss) had gone from jerk to lovable jerk in my esteem. The biggest surprise, however, was Gordon (Scoot McNairy), who I had found too petty and condescending to abide.

By the time the final season rolled around, Gordon seemed to be the one who had it together the most, even when he was bickering with his ex-wife, fumbling over parenting his teenaged daughters, and slowly dying of brain damage caused from a factory job he’d had in his younger years. All the signs were there and had been seeded for the entire series and still I was completely floored when Gordon’s death happened on-screen. The following episode, “Goodwill,” wasn’t about computers or business deals or shaping the future, it was about these five people and the remarkable bond they established that no one ever would have thought possible in season one. As Donna and Cameron and Joe gather to clean out Gordon’s house following his funeral, Donna puts on the Dire Straits’ “So Far Away” and you suddenly realize that Gordon had been the best friend that all three of these broken people had. The melancholy mood holds until the end of the series as you wonder whether they will be able to stick together when the center could not hold.

 

“Winter” by Joshua Radin

Scrubs

Music was such an essential part of Scrubs’ identity that cast and crew—including series creator, Bill Lawrence, and stars, Zach Braff and Christa Miller—frequently made contributions to the soundtrack. It’s a testament to how closely these people felt to their characters and the show that the music is one of the things people remember most about it. Another thing that made Scrubs stand out was their weaponized use of sadness that often broke up an otherwise whimsical tone.

Both of these qualities were utilized in the season three episode, “My Screw Up,” which saw the return of Brendan Fraser as Dr. Cox’s (John C. McGinley) brother-in-law, Ben, a fan favorite character who had been diagnosed with cancer the last time we saw him. This time around, Ben is in remission but has not seen a doctor—except, that is, when he follows them around the hospital acting silly all episode. When JD (Braff) makes a mistake that costs a patient’s life, Cox gets angry and holds a grudge for the rest of the episode but forgives JD in time to attend his son’s first birthday… or so we think.

As JD and Cox talk it out in the park to the tune of Joshua Radin’s “Winter,” we discover that they are not in fact attending a baby’s birthday party, but rather Ben’s funeral, as he is the patient that passed. His presence throughout most of the episode was a Sixth Sense-style hallucination of Cox’s, unable to deal with the unexpected death of his friend. This show brought me to the point of sudden, explosive tears so many times that it was a tough call between this song, The Fray’s “How to Save a Life” (“My Lunch”) and Citizen Cope’s “Sideways” (“My Jiggly Ball”), all of which left me ugly-crying on the couch and utterly astonished at how this silly little show could hit so hard.

 

“Carry on Wayward Son” by Kansas

Supernatural

By the time Supernatural premiered in 2005, creating an identity for your show through music was taking hold in network TV, but unlike other shows, which used modern hits to stoke their fanbase, Supernatural was all about the classics. The show had a strong soundtrack of 70s and 80s rock songs, or ‘the greatest hits of mullet rock,’ as Sam eloquently put it. It made sense, since so much of the show took place on the road, to have a decent road trip playlist to keep you awake on those long drives.

Though the trend started to taper off after the fifth season, those episodes gave us some great song-to-scene moments, but none left more of an impact than “Carry on Wayward Son.” The remarkable thing is that the Kansas hit wasn’t even utilized in the show itself, but instead played over the “Previously on…” sequence that kicked off every season finale to this very day. The two-minute sequences showed us every noteworthy scene, every fight, every demon, every struggle from the previous 22 episodes that led us to this point and it truly set the tone for the apocalyptic finales. The song is so perfectly paired to this show that it feels like they were always meant to go together, even though their inception was 30 years apart.

Outside of the “Previously on…” sequence, “Carry on Wayward Son” only came up once, in the show’s 200^th episode, “Fan Fiction.” Continuing their trend of topping the meta humor the show is known for, the boys head to Flint, Michigan, to fight ghosts plaguing a high school musical production of their own lives, based off the book series written by the prophet, Chuck.

“We Are Born When We Die” by Apollo Sunshine

Breaking Bad

The thing about this song is that it played over a seemingly unremarkable scene. The slow and contemplative tune swells and squeals as Walt is sitting by the pool spinning a pistol like it’s Spin-the-Bottle. “Why say goodbye? We were born again when we die, but we will never leave our lives.” Twice in a row, the gun stops spinning with the barrel pointed directly at Walt. He’s at one of his lowest points with his back against the wall; it seems very much like he’s contemplating killing himself to finally end it all, but he spins a third time and the barrel lands on a potted plant and the scene ends.

In the next episode—the final episode of season four—Walt famously defeats nemesis and kingpin, Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), but he was not able to do it alone. He needed Jesse’s (Aaron Paul) help, but the young man was only willing to get involved after it seemed that Gus had his girlfriend’s son poisoned. It is not until after the assassination happens that the viewer gets their first hint that Gus may not have been the culprit. The poison that nearly killed the boy was created from Lily of the Valley, the same plant in Walter White’s backyard. We had been shown repeatedly that Jesse had a weak spot for little kids and Walt, knowing this, exploited that weakness to further his agenda and get away with his crimes. The stunning a-ha moment that accompanies the reveal of the plant set the stage for the final season and gave viewers key insight on the person Walt had become. For many, this was the point of no return, where Walt had become unsympathetic enough that he was never able to bounce back.

“Mr. Roboto” by Styx (but really Jeffster)

Chuck

Josh Schwartz was killing it in the early 00’s; three of his shows, The O.C., Chuck, and Gossip Girl all proved he had this thumb on the pulse of the alternative music industry. He knew what young people were listening to and what they would like to hear more of and he put that music in all of his shows. Chuck had such a great soundtrack that fit the tone of the show that it was hard to narrow down memorable moments to just one, but I opted for Jeffster’s rendition of Styx’s “Mr. Roboto.”

Jeffster was the band made up of Chuck’s (Zachary Levi) loser co-workers, Jeff and Lester (Scott Krinsky and Vik Sahay). They made their debut early on in season two, singing Toto’s “Africa” but they triumphantly topped that when they were asked to perform at Ellie and Devon’s (Sarah Lancaster and Ryan McPartlin) wedding as a last-minute distraction so Chuck could deal with a Fulcrum fiasco. The impromptu performance was hilariously inappropriate (though ‘inappropriate’ describes pretty much everything Jeff and Lester did throughout the series), but I have to admit I was seriously impressed by Vik Sahay’s vocal range.

Jeffster seems to be a quirk of the series that was never planned from the start, but rather written in as a perk of casting gold. It was also one of the few times that Jeff and Lester enhanced the scenes they were in, instead of just presenting as annoying side characters. Whatever the impetus was for Jeffster, they remain one of the most memorable things about Chuck’s run, as the running joke continued throughout the series.

“I Will Wait for You” by Connie Francis

Futurama

It’s a guarantee that any Futurama fan will know exactly what you are talking about when you mention ‘the dog episode’ of the animated space comedy. In the fifth season of the cult hit from The Simpsons creator Matt Groening, Fry (Billy West) encounters a fossilized version of his dog, Seymour, in a museum exhibit of the 21^st century. When the professor admits he can clone Seymour and recreate him, even reviving his memories at the exact time of death, Fry is ecstatic but Bender (John DiMaggio), who until this point had considered himself Fry’s best friend, is not crazy about the idea. Bender spends the entire episode attempting to dissuade Fry to the point of sabotage but feels bad and takes it all back when he realizes the bond Fry feels towards his pet is similar to the affection Bender feels for Fry.

At the very moment Fry is about to get his dog back, he finds out Seymour lived to the ripe old age of 15, 11 years more than Fry had with him. He orders the professor to stop the cloning and makes the uncharacteristically adult decision to leave the past in the past. What follows is a montage set to Connie Francis’ rendition of “I Will Wait for You,” in which the viewer discovers that Seymour did live on for eleven years, all of which he spent waiting obediently on the sidewalk where he met Fry, hoping one day that his master will return.

Futurama had a lot of episodes with memorably poignant moments, but thanks to this song, nothing will ever hold a candle to Seymour’s swan song. The fact that I started crying writing this short description just thinking about the scene is why it stands above the rest of the songs on this list.