I've always really enjoyed the music in Dallas, for me it really added to the scene. Whether building up the intensity, drama or emotion, just wouldn't be the same without it. Can't say I'm clued up on the composers, but I've always appreciated and admired their work.
Absolutely love the jazzy piece which is known as "Sue Ellen's drunk theme" so funny, that's just my simplified opinion.
Music score -- like direction, scripting, acting, or cinematography -- is incredibly important to a film or TV series, because it helps establish mood and emotional subtext (I just enjoy saying that).
A lot of scores are dished out far too often as "sound filler" indiscriminately.
Which is a huge mistake, because the wrong score can totally undermine the project. As we've discussed before in other threads, the ominous, uncredited stock score (mostly by John Scott) in the first two-thirds of the 1980-1981 year (Season 4 per DVD count) and starts out the minute after JR's been shot -- used because of an industry composers' strike -- is weird but acceptably effective because there's a mystery afoot. Sure, it's repetitive and the cues are reused constantly, but it only becomes a problem after, IMO, "The Prodigal Mother" episode, which is the last place I think it works. (Some fans feel it's good through "The Executive Wife" a few installments later).
But the strike went on longer, and so that stock score for DALLAS eventually started to become a problem. It seemed to slow down the show, in the immediate wake of "Who Shot JR?" when the program had become iconic globally, yet the score was making it drag. Badly after a while, possibly damaging its momentum after Kristin skipped town.
I've analyzed that ever since, and the problem doesn't seem to be the plots that year -- all the storylines probably are what they needed to be at that point in DALLAS history. And their execution still seems competent enough.
So what's the problem?
I have to fall back on the extended use of that old John Scott stock score. And the very fact that the narrative pacing
appears to pick up near the end of the season, right when the strike ended and they abandoned that score and the regular composers returned to write fresh ones,
can't be a coincidence.
It can just make a huge difference. And I've certainly observed other TV series throughout the decades which were enhanced by the right inspired score, or undermined by the wrong score -- or by the use of the wrong set of stock cues lazily slapped down by the hack music editor unsupervised by apathetic producers.
And then there are shows where it's much worse than just a matter of "laziness" but a deliberate and misguided attempt to do something distinctive (that wound up sucking). When FALCON CREST hired a new show-runner for Season 6 & 7, they brought in a highly synthesized score (by Mark Snow) wall-to-wall, and it caused an icky tonal change (except for "Maggie's Theme" which kinda worked) causing the series to feel, well, more synthetic... Yes, the writing shifted under the new producer, in both good ways and bad, but the new computerized sound made the program feel less organic (always a mistake, especially for a program whose setting is in a vineyard, the family product, and all the dead bodies, buried underneath that vineyard). True, they briefly returned to an orchestral score for Season 8, but the show had already lost its way and, under the guidance of yet another new producer, they no longer knew how to go straight again after a spate of excessive campiness.
Then there's -- sigh -- DYNASTY. And as that show progressed and was becoming a hit, the producers asked their composers to write excessive scores (using twice the music as, say, DALLAS, per episode) which were mostly wood-windy (minus the oboe, which the series actually needed) to resemble old Golden Age movies from the late-1930s (which even Hollywood abandoned for something better by the '40s). And the effect was reductive, the show's increasing problems with muddled, circular plotting, purple prose dialogue, and a static acting policy forced onto the actors, made to seem all the more disoriented and unfocused by an endless series of endless scores which seemed to be telling its own story independent of the narrative.
So, yeah, music makes a huge difference. And it can sink a TV series.
