Photo Illustration by Erin O’Flynn/The Daily Beast/Showtime
Admit it: The spooky breaths, feral cheers, raspy whispers, and garbled yells that comprise the score of Showtime’s smash hit Yellowjackets have gotten under your skin. It’s possibly the only music on TV that doesn’t sound like music at all.
Though Theodore Shapiro composed the score for the pilot, he was unavailable once the series was greenlit. Enter Craig Wedren and Anna Waronker, who admired Shapiro’s work—but also called it “a perfectly set table that [we] wanted to tip over.” To their immense delight, the nastier their vision became, the more the producers loved it. As a result, this intense tale of teenagers surviving the impossible and their adult counterparts navigating the trauma they carry with them still is all backed by thumping percussion, deep breaths, and that killer (pun unintended) Farfisa organ.
The Daily Beast’s Obsessed recently sat down with Waronker and Wedren to discuss the show’s “rock opera”-like theme song, the embarrassing technical glitch that actually became a godsend, and if working on Yellowjackets has made their children finally think they’re cool.