On Saturday, I suggested that the producers of US crime shows don’t watch any of the other shows. I’ve now decided to expand the hypothesis to include other genres, thus necessity a name change for the hypothesis, which will now be called “Buckley’s ‘All producers live in Islington’ hypothesis” (so-called because only people in Islington say things like “Of course, we don’t actually watch television. In fact, we don’t even own a television set. Ha, ha, ha!”).
I’m prompted to do this hypothesis-expansion because of Monday’s episode of Prison Break. During the last five minutes of the show, there was an extended montage overlaid with an instrumental version of Massive Attack’s Teardrop. “So what?” you ask yourselves. Well, the thing is Prison Break airs on the Fox network in the US, as does House MD, everyone’s favourite tale of grumpy doctors. And as I’ve droned on about ad nauseum, the theme tune to House in the US isn’t the same as it is in the UK (the UK’s theme is apparently called “Buddha Grass Soul(kpm 548)” and was composed for the show especially, because of licensing issues). The US theme to House is in fact Massive Attack’s Teardrop. Two Fox shows in more or less the same time slot, both using the same piece of music.
Ordinarily, I wouldn’t have mentioned this to avoid being too anal about it. But Variety picked up on it, too. When quizzed though, Fox replied, “The music supervisor for Prison Break didn’t know it was the theme song for House.” But as Variety’s Josef Adalian points out, surely one of the producers of Prison Break will have watched House at some point.
Except if my hypothesis is right, of course… Still, I feel I need more evidence before I can bump my hypothesis up to the status of theory. And ‘Law’ is going to be a long time coming, I suspect.
