Netflix doesn’t release viewership information, but it’s still clear that Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a hit. Tina Fey and fellow 30 Rock alum Robert Carlock’s new series is a throwback to the gimmick sitcom era of Bewitched and Gilligan’s Island, but it maintains 30 Rock‘s model of densely packed laugh lines that reward multiple viewings. Still, the element that will continue to invade viewers’ brains long after the binge is over—the one that’s already spread like wildfire over social media and will soon be humming around offices all over the country—is the infectious theme song.
It’s not even a theme song the first time you hear it. The bit first pops up a couple of minutes into the first episode, in which four female doomsday cult members are rescued from the bunker where they’ve been held captive for 15 years. The rescue transitions into a montage of local news reports, during one of which a neighbor’s account of the proceedings morph into an auto-tuned, Songify the News-style homage to Antoine Dodson’s “Bed Intruder” video and Charles Ramsay’s interview after the Ariel Castro kidnapping story broke in Cleveland—complete with with quotables like “It’s a miracle,” and “females are strong as hell!”
But Fey, her husband-slash-series composer Jeff Richmond, and Carlock didn’t just create the sequence—they optimized it, hiring The Gregory Brothers, the minds behind Songify the News, to turn the introductory news piece into an earworm. And in the process, they crafted something that perfectly underscored the show’s throughline. “I think [they] all had in mind this idea that in the opening of the show the characters would go viral and experience that phenomenon,” says guitarist and vocalist Andrew Gregory.
Fey, Carlock, and the rest of the crew completed filming on Kimmy Schmidt last year when it was still slated as a midseason replacement for NBC, and assembled a version of the Walter Bankston interview without music. It’s a funny scene in its own right, but it’s also clearly a blueprint for something yet to come. In retrospect it’s hard to listen to Britt’s inflections without hearing the musicality in it, and Fey and Carlock’s edit heightens that impression. “[They] had such strong ideas about what this piece was that they were already serving us up this great thing that we could just add musical elements to in order to achieve peak catchiness,” Andrew says.
And the turnkey solution was appreciated. “Seventy percent of our job is scouring websites like the Huffington Post and The Drudge Report, which is really a fate I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy,” says Evan Gregory, who plays keyboard and sings. “So to be directly sent such an amazing fake news report was shocking.” Praise goes to Mike Britt as well, who Andrew describes as having “both an amazing sonic quality somewhere in between Joe Cocker and James Brown, and also the really powerful emotional delivery. That totally translates into the song and makes the listener get into it.”
There are actually four versions of the Kimmy Schmidt title song out in the world: the viral news video from that first episode; the theme song used in the subsequent 12 episodes which adds a key change, an extended version that lives online at the Gregory Brothers’ YouTube Channel with some extra jokes and footage (there’s even a brief clip of in-universe Broadway “classic” Daddy’s Boy for those looking carefully), and a cover version by the Gregorys themselves. “We’ve done this on a number of occasions for other works of fiction—The Cleveland Show and a couple of other shows,” says Evan. “But it’s just never been so central to the plot.”
The result is a theme song that sticks in viewers’ brains, makes them laugh, and whips in a hint of theme—the fortitude Kimmy shows in adapting to a world she doesn’t recognize anymore. It’s an impressive feat. But according to Evan, it didn’t feel like that much effort when working in conjunction with 30 Rock composer Richmond. “[Him] telling you to do something is like being Bugs Bunny playing basketball with Michael Jordan in Space Jam,” he says. “If Michael Jordan is throwing you an alley-oop, really all you have to do is jump off Yosemite Sam’s mustache and dunk it.”
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