To me, the background music in a TV show or movie is extremely important. I listen to and play a lot of music myself, though I'm pretty sure I'd be a terrible composer if I attempted to back dramatic scenes.
It's hard, and Mark Snow is brilliant at it.
One of the primary features of Snow's compositions is subtlety. The music is noticeable, but at the same time doesn't stand out, especially not more prominently than the action. At least most of the time.
There have been a couple of cases where the music was extremely jarring or glaring it was used to great effect. One was was in 'Blood'. The dissonant chords that played whenever a person saw a dangerous message on an electronic display were obvious and extremely present. They could possibly be considered heavy-handed, since the action on the screen was already tense enough, but I feel they added an element of contrast with the normally less obvious score.
The other that comes to mind is 'Død Kalm', which has several jarring piano chords that actually work well with the tension of the episode and help build anxiety. The episode takes place in such an extremely confined space and is a race against time, so inserting music that's essentially bigger than that space and fast paced sufficiently overwhelms the episode and makes it seem even more claustrophobic. In this case, it doesn't really make the music seem so over the top. I mean, the episode is set on a ship in the Arctic. It's a tiny space surrounded by vast nothingness. The music fills in that nothingness.
And this is definitely a strength of Mark Snow's work. He knows when to be subtle but can often aid in the storytelling by being un-subtle.
Because I don't think that music always needs to be subtle in drama. But if it's not, and it's paired with a mediocre story, it can be distracting. A composer should only go over the top if they feel the story is strong enough to stand on its own and can only be complemented by a very specific and solid score.
I think the music in episodes like 'Duane Barry' and 'Ascension' and 'One Breath' contained some of the best examples of this. They were such strongly written episodes that the music probably could have been Yakety Sax and still worked. Well, OK, maybe not. But still. The point is, those episodes involved subtle musical cues to augment the story, and maybe that made them more awesome, or maybe they would have been just as amazing with no music at all.
I'm actually not sure about that last part (well, or about Yakety Sax. Both seem like exaggerations that would fail pretty miserably in say, 'One Breath'). And I've only ever seen one episode of television with absolutely no music, and it's pretty spectacular for that reason (well, and a gazillion others. If you know what show and episode I'm talking about, you get it, and if you don't, I'd rather not spoil you) but for the most part, I really like the presence of background music. It usually helps to make scenes not sound so awkward, despite not being there in real life.
I have found the music, and specifically the delineation between subtlety and obtrusiveness, to be a problem in other shows, though - Fringe, in particular, and especially the final season. An otherwise touching moment in the show would be drowned out by a very emotionally heavy score. If the scene already conveys that, the tone of the music needs to underscore it, not duplicate it. And if you're going to compose something heavy-handed to accompany a scene, the rest of your work had better be more background, so you gain that contrast without letting the viewer think, "Oh, this again."
Buffy was also frequently guilty of overdoing it with the score, especially after Christophe Beck left. The music in the last three seasons (with the exception of Christophe Beck's return for the season 5 finale) is unnecessarily jarring much of the time.
And maybe The X-Files will move in that direction, too. Perhaps it's one of those things that, like the general decline in quality that seems to happen in a lot of hour long dramas that make it past 4 or 5 seasons, happens to TV shows after they've been on the air for a long time.
After all, I've only seen less than two full seasons, and I don't know if Mark Snow composes throughout the series or if he leaves at some point and they hire someone new, with different ideas about how to compose for television. Or maybe the show's settings change enough that the music needs to become bigger.
Either way, for right now, the music is pretty consistently awesome.
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