Home » Entertainment » Why can’t you watch ‘Moonlight’ or ‘The Wonder Years’? Blame it on the music

Why can’t you watch ‘Moonlight’ or ‘The Wonder Years’? Blame it on the music

When Bruce Willis announced his withdrawal due to neurological problems, many of us remember Moonlight. The series in which the actor starred with Cybill Shepherd between 1985 and 1989 she was responsible for her rise to fame, she continues to be an example of how to break the laws of television fiction, she is an unappealable model of cool eighties… and it is not available on any streaming platform. Why?

As explained Glenn Gordon Caron, show creator, Moonlight is not available due to a most prosaic reason: the rights to the songs on its soundtrack. “When we did Moonlight, TV series didn’t used to use pop music: only we did and Corruption in Miami”, he comments.

“So when they negotiated the rights to the music, nobody expected something like VOD,” continues Caron. “To stream the series, the owner of the series, which is Disney, has to renegotiate deals for all the music, and they’ve been holding out for six or seven years.”

In this way, intellectual property is the stumbling block that prevents us from enjoying the fights between David (Willis) y Maddie (Shepherd), as well as gems like that chapter presented by Orson Welles or the answers in verse of the Miss Topisto. If this only hurt Moonlight, It would be serious in itself, but other classic series are also affected by this state of affairs.

One of the most illustrious affected has been Those wonderful years. The Adventures of Kevin Arnold (Fred Savage) during their adolescence in the 1960s they benefited from an exceptional soundtrack… and it is that same soundtrack, full of songs from Bob Dylan, The Doors, Van Morrison and other great ones, the one that keeps the series out of VOD, since the original contracts only covered the television broadcast and not its editions in other formats.

Although the show reached the domestic format in 2014 with this repertoire intact (including the version of The Beatles in charge of Joe Cocker which made its opening credits unforgettable), is still absent from platforms due to its cost. Because, although at the time securing some themes for the series cost a small fortune, the passage of time has skyrocketed that amount astronomically.

To give us an idea, using the Beatles’ performance in the Ed Sullivan show cost $75,000 to Those wonderful years in the late 1980s. In 2012, Lionsgate had to shell out $250,000 (nearly four times that amount) for a ‘Fab Four’ song (Tomorrow Never Knows) will sound in a chapter of Mad Men.

In the same list of shows considered classics of the format, but away (forever?) from our screens, there are also Doctor in Alaska Y Murphy Brown, among other. Some other shows, like Freaks and Geeks, the territories in which they can be exhibited are limited for this very reason.

To make matters worse, the payment of rights is not only mandatory when the original recordings are used: in some cases, it is enough for a character in the series to hum a song or quote its lyrics so that pulling the wallet becomes essential.

One of the most egregious cases of this phenomenon is that of Chicago Hope, a hospital drama starring Mandy Patinkin (The engaged princess). Although the series did not use famous songs in its soundtrack, Patinkin’s character had a habit of singing songs from Broadway musicals while operating on his patients. And, since the rights to these pieces are very expensive, it is very unlikely that we will ever see it in a streaming catalog.

In general, the fact that a series is considered ‘cult’ instead of a massive success makes its managers reluctant to pay music rights. Sometimes, in the event that their potential audience is large enough to make the revival profitable, a rather dirty trick is resorted to: altering the soundtrack, eliminating the most expensive songs and replacing them with less expensive ones.

This latest trend has affected titles such as X Files, Supernatural (which had to remove from its episodes the themes of groups like the Creedence Clearwater Revival, for example) and, above all, Dawson grows up. fans of James Van Der Beek Y Michelle Williams they had to wait until 2021 to hear the I Don’t Want To Wait from Paula Cole playing in the credit titles.

Felicity, the series of Matt Reeves Y J. J. Abrams, also had to jump through this hoop for a rather sad reason: being a low-budget show, the only way to hit the college adventures of Keri Russell a sound background at the height of its setting nineties was to rent the rights to the songs for a period of five years.

Although it seems hard to believe, given how Hollywood works, the creators of the series also have (sometimes) a candle at this funeral. Without going further, Paul Feig resisted tooth and nail to give up the soundtrack of Freaks and Geeks: scenes like the one where Jason Segel massacre the Spirit of the Radio from Rush with their questionable drumming skills they would have been ruined had they employed this ruse.

Given the overabundance of VOD content that reaches us week after week, this scenario can go unnoticed. But it is very sad, and not only because the ‘GenX’ and millennials on duty are deprived of some of our favorite shows. On television, a medium that seems condemned to live in a perpetual present, having the option of reviewing the classics of the format and learning from them seems to be an increasingly pressing need.

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