Everybody Wants This: Gen Z is Watching for the Songs as the Sexy TV Soundtrack Returns
From Taylor Swift to the Beatles to Selena Gomez: ‘The Summer I Turned Pretty’ to ‘Nobody Wants This’ are turning curated playlists into chart-toppers
I cover where music & Hollywood meet. I interviewed the brains behind the KPop Demon Hunters blockbuster soundtrack and spoke to Billy Joel’s right-hand man about the Piano Man’s health. Reach me at rob@theankler.com
I can hear it now: a bouncy piano riff accented by a strumming acoustic guitar segues into meditative lyrics: “We’ve been on the run, driving in the sun, looking out for number one,” a voice cries out. “California, here we come, right back where we started from.”
If you’re of a certain age (as in, a millennial like myself), you might know that little ditty as Phantom Planet’s alternative hit “California.” It’s an anthem that served as the theme song for the moody Fox teen drama The O.C., the Josh Schwartz series set in the titular SoCal county that defined early-’00s teen culture and turned its cast, including Adam Brody, into stars.
Aside from the bright sun that shone over its picturesque beaches and posh mansions, the energy powering the show — about a boy from Chino (Ben McKenzie) who, through the magic of TV, gets adopted by an affluent O.C. family, led by patriarch Sandy Cohen (Peter Gallagher) and his wife, Kirsten (Kelly Rowan) — came from an inspired soundtrack featuring an array of indie tracks that were subsequently catapulted into the musical lexicon. With each episode kicking off with that aforementioned Phantom Planet earworm, The O.C. was a hotbed of notable placements. For example, who can forget Imogen Heap’s “Hide and Seek” (“Mmm, what’d you say?”) during its bloody second-season finale? It was a musical moment so memorable that Saturday Night Live eventually parodied the show’s use of the track in an early viral Digital Short. Under the supervision of Alexandra Patsavas, The O.C. became so synonymous with its use of music that six compilation albums were released (they dubbed them Mixes, alluding to the CD culture of the day), and all of them charted.
I was one of those impressionable teens who had a copy of an O.C. mix or two (or if the statute of limitations is up, I’ll admit my high school self ignorantly downloaded them on LimeWire). It was an era when culture-dominating shows from The Sopranos to Scrubs treated music as if it were another character. But as they say, everything old becomes new again, and the fine art of television soundtracks is once again back in the spotlight with Netflix’s Nobody Wants This and Amazon Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty.
“The data has always been there that Gen Z will watch a show because they like the music in it,” says Melyssa Hardwick, the music supervisor for the Amazon smash. She would know: The Summer I Turned Pretty occupied nine of the 10 slots on the Billboard Top TV Songs chart in September, the third consecutive month the show dominated the list.
So it’s no surprise that Hardwick has found others want to replicate her success. “I’ve been talking to executives at studios all the time who say, ‘We’re looking for our The Summer I Turned Pretty.’”
Everybody Wants This… Song
In the modern era, more than 20 years since Brody was nice Jewish boy Seth Cohen on The O.C., he’s now the hot rabbi, Noah Roklov, on the Netflix rom-com series Nobody Wants This. An Emmy nominee for best comedy series and a bona fide hit, at least according to the streamer’s internal metrics, Nobody Wants This was created by Erin Foster and focuses on the relationship between Noah and Joanne (played by Kristen Bell), an agnostic podcaster whose lack of faith complicates their long-term prospects. (Foster based the series on her own life.) Much like Brody’s teen hit, season 2 of Nobody Wants This (now streaming) comes with its own companion compilation album, featuring an array of indie and pop acts whose music propels the series.
“Like the rest of the world, we were fans of the show in season 1 and were wondering what we could do differently,” says Manish Raval, who, alongside Jonathan Leahy and Tom Wolfe, is behind Aperture Music. This is the outfit that has worked on the soundtracks for everything from Girls, Lena Dunham’s HBO lightning rod, to current comedy streamers Chad Powers, Platonic and Nobody Wants This. While the debut season of the latter series used recognizable tracks from artists like Dua Lipa, the Aperture team took a more bespoke approach for its sophomore season.
“We pitched using the same approach as Girls once that show gained traction, which was going out and trying to get as many original, unreleased songs by artists who fit the series and assemble the soundtrack like that, as opposed to going on Spotify and plugging in your general hits,” Raval says. While working alongside The Core Entertainment CEO and co-founder, Simon Tikhman, and as a result of the goodwill for the show and a partnership with Interscope Records, the team landed an impressive array of unreleased tracks from household names like Selena Gomez and Kacey Musgraves, as well as buzzy artists ranging from Role Model to the rising Australian duo Royel Otis. “We were looking for fans of the show and luckily there were many artists, labels, publishers and managers who had tracks that hadn’t seen the light of day,” says Raval.
The Aperture team was reluctant to give specific briefs to artists’ teams, so as not to be overt or sonically clichéd in their choices. “As opposed to searching for songs for specific moments in the show, we gave them a very broad logline,” Raval explains. “It was about finding songs within the feeling of the show. We will find a place for them.”
From there, he and Leahy plugged the entire season into Pro Tools and test-drove the tracks over specific scenes. “It was all about finding the right spot,” says Leahy. “Did a song fit in a scene in episode two? Or a different one in episode six? All of the songs were auditioned in various episodes until they found their home.”
Nobody Wants This was also unafraid of genre, featuring sounds from the twang of Chris Stapleton to the booming R&B of Teddy Swims. Their timing seemed blessed by a rabbi, as they included names like Role Model and used his unreleased track, “Saddle Again,” long before his breakout hit, “Sally, When the Wine Runs Out,” went mainstream.
“That’s one of the challenges of music supervision,” says Leahy. “You’re working on something months and months before it sees the light of day, and trying to time things so that you have the right songs appearing in a series at the right time so it feels really contemporary for everyone.”
Songs of Summer
In the annals of music supervision lore, the blockbuster success of Amazon Prime Video’s The Summer I Turned Pretty turned heads as a project with needle drops that generated as much viral chatter as its love triangle storyline.
“Music is such a big part of the emotion of that show,” says Raval as an observer. “It’s in the DNA and not an afterthought, and it’s not every project where you can do that.”
Created by Jenny Han and based on her book of the same name, the hit series follows a teenage girl, Belly (Lola Yung), who finds herself embroiled in a love triangle. The show’s emphasis on music came straight from Han, who worked with MelyssaHardwick to set the teen soap’s sonic landscape, which ranges from modern pop stars (most notably Taylor Swift, like her “Taylor’s version” of “Back to December”) to iconic tracks by Fleetwood Mac and even the Beatles.
According to Hardwick, the creative team emphasized needle drops and big musical moments from day one. “We’re very intentional about and thoughtful about the way that we use music and showcase it, as opposed to anything being a throwaway use,” Hardwick says, noting that for the recent third and final season, she had to fill 150 slots for songs. “The idea for the soundtrack was songs of the summer throughout the years, whether the music the character of Susannah (Rachel Blanchard) used to listen to in college, or what the lead characters like Belly listen to. Obviously, since Jenny’s a writer, the lyrics are paramount. At the end of the day, she’s picking and signing off on every single song that goes on the show, which I’ve honestly never seen a showrunner do,” marvels Hardwick. “She’s so considerate and thoughtful about choosing what songs to feature.”
There was also a drive to introduce songs that younger audiences may not be familiar with. Hardwick cites the Beatles specifically, with the show licensing the Fab Four’s Abbey Road cut “Oh! Darling.”
“When we used Sublime, some people were like, ‘Who is this band covering Lana Del Rey?’” she says, noting younger audiences are more familiar with Del Rey’s cover of the band’s 1994 track “Doin’ Time” than the original itself. The amount of significant needle drops from big names caused even casual industry observers and the show’s rabid fanbase to take notice.
While Hardwick won’t give hard numbers on the show’s budget, she does say, “I may be the first music supervisor in history who made their own budget and then went and music supervised the third season.”
She admits that’s not the norm. “Over the years, I’ve had to fight tooth and nail to save music budgets because that’s the last thing to go on, and when you’re on set and start pulling money from everywhere — I always call it the sprinkles on the cake, and sometimes people are like ‘Let’s bake the cake, but we might not need the sprinkles.’”
Again, Hardwick emphasizes that the attention to the budget also comes down from Han. “Some people only want indie artists, and you budget accordingly, but Jenny had the artists she wanted to use and everybody was aligned. Like, ‘we’re giving Jenny the money to get these songs!’”
The Taylor Effect
Without a doubt, the artist who has ruled over three seasons of Summer, along with the rest of culture, has been Swift. In the recent third season, some episodes used multiple cuts from her expansive discography, including the finale, which included “Dress” and “Out of the Woods.”
“To this day, I can’t believe she’s given us as many songs as she has. It’s really surreal,” says Hardwick of utilizing music’s behemoth. Again, the penchant to use Swift came from Han. “She’s a Swiftie. If you look at any of her interviews, she even talks about how she wrote the books (the series is based on) to (Swift’s sophomore album) Fearless, so she’s always been interwoven with her process.”
Initially, Han tried to use songs from Swift for her previous project, Netflix’s To All The Boys I've Loved Before, but according to Hardwick, “it wasn’t feasible” at the time. “But one day we had a call and Jenny was like, ‘I really, I really want Taylor (for Summer), I really wanna give something special to the fans. But at the time in 2020 and 2021, Taylor wasn’t licensing a lot of her songs. But it was so important to Jenny, and for me it was like, ‘What gift do you give to the person who gives to everyone else?’ So I said, ‘We’re gonna get her a Taylor Swift song! I will do everything I can humanly possible to get her Taylor.’”
A plan was hatched, and Hardwick had Han send a handwritten letter to Swift. “Afterwards, I had a conversation with Taylor’s team, and she said ‘Yes’ before she had even seen the show.”
It was a stamp of approval from the superstar. “I feel like she really bet on us in a lot of ways, and bet on Jenny, too. It ended up becoming an incredible partnership.” In all, Hardwick licensed 12 songs, some even unreleased, before utilizing a 13th, a number chosen by design considering the numeral is also a lucky one for Swift.
“Someone in an interview asked her if she was Team Jeremiah or Team Conrad,” Hardwick says, referencing the dueling love interests for Belly. “Taylor said, ‘I’m Team Summer I Turned Pretty because they use my music in such a thoughtful way.’ That’s the biggest compliment you can give both a music supervisor and showrunner.”
For the new season, Hardwick spent a year and a half on the music and says things went down to the wire when it came to Swift’s placements, with the team finishing final edits the week the announcement came out that the star regained control of her music catalog. “I lost a lot of sleep, because we didn’t know which versions we were going to get,” she recalls. “But we ended up with the original music because she got her songs back.”
Soundtracks Gone Viral
Music supervisors like Raval and Hardwick know full well the impact a placement can have on a song’s place in culture. After the Wheetus track “Teenage Dirtbag” was featured in a pivotal scene during the first season of Summer (chosen because Han used to sing karaoke to it), it became a viral sensation, with celebrities including Madonna sharing photos from their teen years set to the tune. Meanwhile, Dua Lipa’s 2020 dance jam “Levitating” was thrust back into prominence after a memorable scene during the first season of Nobody.
The effect can also affect names that aren’t Swift and Lipa. Cassandra Coleman, a 29-year-old singer-songwriter signed to Warner Records, landed a much-lauded placement on the Nobody Wants This soundtrack with her track “Bite My Tongue” after advocating from her manager Evan Winiker. “There are so many talented artists who could have taken this slot, so I don’t take it lightly that it was given to me,” Coleman says. “This placement has been my first taste of having a larger audience hear the art I’m making.”
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