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Soundtrack Dissonance / Live-Action TV

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  • Played with in the Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. episode "Making Friends and Influencing People", which opens with Simmons getting ready for work, all set to a upbeat song. It at first seems to fit perfectly, complete with lyrics like "I'm a working girl you know"...then it's revealed that she's now working for HYDRA, and suddenly the upbeat music seems out of place. Although the title of the song — "God Help The Girl" — and the lyric "God help the girl she needs all the help she can get" fit pretty well, since Simmons is now working undercover in a very dangerous place.
  • The Amazing Race, season 21, leg 9 sees Abbie and Ryan eliminated after one of the most demoralizing humiliation congas in the series, then played off to a happy, jaunty tune from the street organs from the earlier Detour.
  • American Horror Story has been using this in some of the season 3 teasers, using Winter Song by Sara Bareilles and Ingrid Michaelson over imagery of a woman stuck with giant pins and sewing needles, among others.
  • Angel:
    • "Reprise" features Angel boarding what he's pretty sure is a literal elevator to Hell in the company of the walking corpse of his nemesis who is taunting him about how futile his struggle is...with typical schmaltzy elevator music Muzak chirping away in the background.
    • In "The Magic Bullet", The Beach Boys' cheerful song "Wouldn't It Be Nice" plays as everyone in LA is going around happily...because they have all been brainwashed by Jasmine.
  • Arrow: In "Dark Waters", the Ghosts ambush Oliver Queen's limo, crippling Felicity Smoak, to whom Oliver has just proposed marriage. The assassination attempt is set to Little Drummer Boy, with the Mood Dissonance enhanced by being intercut with the Big Bad who sent the assassins enjoying Christmas with his wife and daughter.
  • The Babylon 5 episode "And the Rock Cried Out, No Hiding Place" is one of the better-known examples of this, in which an upbeat gospel hymn of the same title is played over a scene of Refa, a particularly vicious Centauri war criminal, being hunted down and beaten to death by Narns. (Word of God cites Cabaret, listed in the Musical section for this trope, as an inspiration.)
    • For bonus points, said song also has Lyrical Dissonance, being an upbeat gospel hymn about sinners facing judgment at the rapture. A perfect, but ironic song for a war criminal's demise.
      • For more bonus points, the song's title is the same as the episode, and said war criminal is being hunted down in an underground cave, with the words "the Rock Cried Out No Hiding Place Down Here" being sung as it seemed Refa was about to escape when a group of Narn appeared from apparently nowhere (and the direction Refa had originally came from) to push him back to the lynching mob. No hiding place indeed.
      • And for even more bonus points, said upbeat hymn immediately followed a sermon about the evils of intolerance. Yet non-Christians will still burn in Hell...
    • "And we will all come together in a better place...a better place...than this"
  • The last episode of the third season of Being Human (UK) uses this to a particularly unnerving effect. The bloody corpse of a recently dead vampire victim rises up out of the gurney, and begins to sing about the inevitability of Mitchell's death and how Annie needs to return to purgatory while his ghost watches in horror....oh, and he sings it to the tune of Frere Jacques. Cause that totally wasn't creepy enough already.
    • In the second season, Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake Waltz" is used as Saul tries dragging a panicking Annie through the door to the afterlife.
    • Hal singing and dancing to "Puttin' on the Ritz" as he wakes up his newly created vampires, drenched in blood, in a roomful of people he just massacred.
  • An unintentional version occurs in Birds of Prey (2002). The climactic fight scene features "All The Things She Said" by t.A.T.u.. Because a pop song about lesbians just goes so well with an action-packed superhero fight...
  • Black Mirror:
    • "Playtest" uses Elvis Presley's "Mama Liked the Roses" for the credits music after a Downer Ending where the episode's protagonist dies pitifully from a malfunctioning device frying his brain, leaving him living out his deepest personal demons and screaming out for his mom. For an extra layer of bitter irony, the device malfunctioned because he left his phone on and his mom tried to call him.
    • In "Metalhead", a car radio playing the song "Golden Brown" is used to lure a terrifying killer robot into a trap.
  • Black Sheep Squadron's opening theme uses a quote from "The Whiffenpoof Song" sung by an off-key male chorus at a fraction of the usual tempo.
  • Boardwalk Empire seems to employ this mostly during the assassination montages, most notably in the montage that ends the first episode, with a lovely Enrico Caruso aria playing as men are blown to bits. Soundtrack Dissonance also appears at the end of almost every episode, as the credits run over a (usually upbeat) piece of popular 1920s music, while most episodes tend to end on a downer or bittersweet note.
  • One episode of Bones features a mini-van exploding, set to Lou Reed's "Perfect Day". Then again, it is a Lou Reed song, so maybe it's not as dissonant as it seems.
  • Breaking Bad:
    • In "Half Measures", The Association's bouncy sunshine pop song "Windy" plays over a montage of Wendy the hooker's sad daily routine.
    • Later in the Season 5 episode "Gliding Over All", during the scene where the men connected to Gus' drug empire are brutally murdered in prison, "Pick Yourself Up", by Nat King Cole is played.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • In "Listening to Fear", Buffy is washing dishes, crying her eyes out in the dark while the radio plays cheery Latin dance music, she having turned on the radio to drown out the sound of her mother raving upstairs.
    • Not to mention the end of "Conversations with Dead People". A devastated Willow and Dawn, the death of Jonathan, and Spike beginning to kill again, all set to the whimsical, beautiful "Blue" by Angie Hart.
    • Not to mention the hard rock credit song, clashing with the tone of more than several episodes (e.g. "Body", which otherwise used no music at all).
    • And the haunting vocal music that plays over the slo-mo carnage and Mirror Buffy getting her neck snapped by the Master at the end of "The Wish".
    • And the music playing while the building collapses around Spike and Buffy having passionate sex in "Smashed".
    • A Played for Laughs version is the dramatic music playing during Xander and Harmony's slo-mo slap-fight in "The Initiative".
  • The pilot for Bunheads ends with Michelle and Fanny learning of Hubble's death — as Jim Croce's "You Don't Mess around With Jim" plays in the background.
  • Castle:
    • The show often opens an episode with shots of the scene of the crime set to some sort of music, and it splits about 50/50 between this trope and extremely appropriate pieces. In either case, it's often accompanied by a Diegetic Switch as the background music is shown to be a headset, radio, or other object at the crime scene.
    • The theme of the show is played over the end credits: the perky whistling usually fits the mood since the episodes tend to end on a happy note. Sometimes that's not the case and it feels really inappropriate.
  • In the UK, Channel Five's evening news programme on 9/11 ended with slow-motion footage of the Twin Towers attacks accompanied by Samuel Barber's "Adagio for Strings", more familiar as the theme to Platoon. You could kind of see what they were trying to do but still...May have also been a case of poor timing.
  • Chuck had one of its Buy More characters get murdered for no reason by one of the bad guys from the current Spy arc. It's bad enough that it's really the first time anyone from the Buy More crew had come to any kind of actual harm and all previous instances were Played for Laughs. They played "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips when it happened. Hold on, for one more day, things will go your way. As said character get shot in the eye by a silenced pistol from point blank range, followed by a close up of his broken glasses, a bullet hole in the middle, splattered with blood. Also, in the Christmas Episode, "Silent Night" was played over a tense confrontation in which Sarah killed a Fulcrum agent in cold blood.
    • Jeffster! performances can double both as this and Awesome Music. Seriously, you have a gunfight scored to "Mr. Roboto", Ellie giving birth to "Push It", and the final confrontation with Quinn in the series finale backed up by "Take On Me".
  • The British comedy anthology series The Comic Strip Presents had an episode called "Mr. Jolly Lives Next Door". The eponymous and misnamed Mr. Jolly was a hit man who would invite his victims to his flat and then play upbeat Tom Jones records very loudly — to drown out the sound of their screams.
  • Community does this, mostly for laughs:
    • "Spanish 101": Aimee Mann's "Wise Up" plays over Jeff and Pierce's bizarre Spanish class presentation, complete with Mexican dancing, fairies waving flags, a blackface minstrel show (which angers the only two black people in the class), robots shooting each other, using one of the women in the class in a piece about a pair of boat-rowing kidnappers, and a Silly String fight.
    • "Epidemiology": The group tries to survive the Zombie Apocalypse with ABBA's Greatest Hits blasting over the school's PA system.
  • Coronation Street:
    • Richard Hillman locks the Platts in his car as he attempts to drive it into a canal to kill them. All the while, the cheery pop tune of "You & Me Song" by The Wannadies is played on repeat on the stereo.
    • The upbeat rock anthem "Whatever" by Oasis plays as incidental music while Tracy Barlow murders her boyfriend Charlie Stubbs by repeatedly bashing him over the head with a statuette. Needless to say, it makes the whole scene even more haunting, especially with the relevancy of the lyrics.
  • Cop Rock “Baby Merchant” is a rather upbeat song about a man who is kidnapping children and committing illegal adoptions.
  • Criminal Minds loves this trope:
    • One episode begins with a mother leaving her small child in a high chair to answer the door. She doesn't come back, and the day passes as the child grows increasingly distressed. Finally, the camera pans to show her dead in the next room. The whole sequence is set to "Shambala" by Three Dog Night.
    • One episode features an entire family being murdered to an Enya song, though admittedly it's "Boadicea", which is probably as creepy as she gets.
    • Invoked by the Piano Man in the episode "Unknown Subject". He was a serial rapist who came back to rape his previous victims again. He broke into their homes and played love ballads while raping them. Songs include "Total Eclipse of the Heart" and "You're The Inspiration".
    • The ending of the season finisher for Season 4, "To Hell..."/"...And Back" plays a very soft, childlike theme, almost a lullaby, over the end of the episode; in fact, except for a voiceover once Aaron Hotchner starts his summation, it's literally the only sound. It includes the death of both UnSubs, one by a vengeful family member and the other who probably didn't pose a threat, and then starts Hotch's very downbeat summation of the episode where he reflects on the huge damage done to everyone, from the ninety-three people who died, to the victims who survived and their families, townspeople who thought monsters weren't real until they found out they lived with one, to the psychological damage the job does to his team. The episode ends with Hotch getting shot by a recurring villain.
  • One episode of CSI opened with a character cooking, with the background music being the funny novelty song "Everybody Eats When They Come to My House". What he's actually doing is force-feeding a cut-up credit card to an identity thief before killing him. Also, Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick as he puts some totally normal ingredients in there first.
  • In March 2014, The Daily Show started a meme called "McConnelling", where viewers could dub a web ad for Kentucky senator Mitch McConnell with any song they wanted.
  • Dead Set features a scene where Davina McCall is chased by a zombie, attacked, has her throat bitten out, and is then left to die alone gasping for air...all to the light-pop stylings of Mika with "Grace Kelly".
  • Each episode of Death in Paradise starts with the discovery of a gruesome death...Immediately followed by the jaunty, upbeat opening theme.
  • Played for Laughs in an episode of Detroiters, where a legendary Motown singer laments how a pair of ad executives used his somber, soulful Civil Rights Movement anthem in a commercial for a water park.
  • Dexter often includes all manner of cheery background music while the eponymous Serial Killer is slicing up one of his victims. Depending on how much we're led to sympathize with Dexter's usually-monstrous victims, it might even be a subversion, as we're happy to see them go.
  • Doctor Who:
    • Sometimes caused by the theme music in the "pure historicals" of the early 60s — terrifying, screeching, then ultra-modern electronic music fits when the Doctor is going to fight the Daleks or the Zarbi, but not so much when he's pretending to be a gendarme in revolutionary France or getting mixed up in the politics of the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre.
    • Sickly electronic music (written by Dudley Simpson and produced by Delia Derbyshire) is a major feature of the crapsaccharine holiday-camp culture in "The Macra Terror".
    • "The Ice Warriors" is a story about environmental scientists battling against cryogenically-frozen aliens, and opens with an atonal One-Woman Wail.
    • "The Silurians" uses a staccato Leitmotif for the Silurians based around the crumhorn, a medieval instrument and the precursor to the modern oboe. The composer's rationale was that it was a "less evolved" instrument, much like the Silurians were from a less-evolved Earth. Unfortunately (and as noted by the producers and directors in the DVD special features) the bright, honky sound sounds almost exactly like a kazoo to the untrained ear.
    • "Death to the Daleks" accompanies the most feared beings in the universe with comical saxophone trio music.
    • Even when we know all is far from well at the Psychic Circus (aka "The Greatest Show in the Galaxy"), the entrance to the tent still has cheerful music playing.
    • The Russell T. Davies era of Doctor Who really loves this one. Sometimes it works really well. Other times it doesn't.
      • It started in "The End of the World". Rose in trouble, the Doctor in trouble, the villain getting their way, and the soundtrack was Britney Spears' "Toxic".
      • "The Christmas Invasion" features a spinning Christmas tree of death rampaging through the Tylers' home trying to kill them all...while playing Jingle Bells.
      • A character begins to play "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" in "Rise of the Cybermen" — while in the background, we hear the tortured screams of people being turned into Cybermen.
      • "The Impossible Planet" has a hauntingly beautiful violin piece played over a scene of demonic possession and murder.
      • "The Runaway Bride": "Love Don't Roam" is a happy, upbeat, peppy orchestral pop song about being separated from your loved one forever.
      • "The Family of Blood": The boys killing the scarecrows is set to "To Be A Pilgrim". This is particularly poignant because the episode is set in 1913, a year before World War I.
      • In "The Sound of Drums", an army of six billion Toclafane fly down to Earth under orders to murder one-tenth of the world's population, and "Voodoo Child" pounds in the background — here come the drums, here come the drums... The third part of the finale confirmed that the Master had brought along his own soundtrack to the apocalypse, when he regaled his fortress of slaves and the decimated Earth with "Track 3", a Scissor Sisters song called "I Can't Decide", which is indeed track 3 off their album Tah-Dah. The actual lyrics fit the Master quite well, but the fact that it's a rather catchy tune that the Master dances to (badly) creates the dissonance.
    • The climax of "The Pandorica Opens", where the Doctor is being forced into the Pandorica by every alien he's ever fought, Amy is shot by an Auton who was in the form of Rory as a Roman soldier, and River Song is trapped in an exploding TARDIS, is set to music that sounds like something from a freaking Don Bluth movie ("The Life And Death Of Amy Pond" by Murray Gold).
    • The Daleks: The Early Years VHS used the film inserts from "The Daleks' Master Plan" episode 1, but apparently did not have the audio yet, so they used the British Go-Gos' novelty song "I'm Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek". Over the death of a Second Great and Bountiful Human Empire security agent by Dalek neutralizer.
    • The episode of Doctor Who Confidential that announced the Eleventh Doctor's casting showed a montage of the Doctor kissing his companions. It was accompanied by another Scissor Sisters track, "Kiss You Off" — a breakup song.
  • An episode of Elementary starts with a woman being gunned down and the culprit trashing their getaway car afterwards, set to "Build Me Up Buttercup" by The Foundations.
  • ER's season nine episode, "A Thousand Cranes" features this trope when Jing-Mei and Luka find three of Doc Magoo's regular staffers shot and locked in the freezer while The Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations" is being played in the diner.
  • Averted several times in Eureka. When ending on a cliffhanger or Tear Jerker, the end credits music actually reflects the ending instead of playing the usual generally upbeat theme. This is most notable in one season 3 episode which saw the death of Nathan Stark, on what was supposed to be his wedding day no less — the ending music playing during the credits was a much more somber piece.
  • A less-overt version, where the music's general upbeatness fits the scene but is way over the top in tone, occurs in Farscape: The Peacekeeper Wars. The birth of Aeryn and Crichton's child is met with music like that child was the 3rd coming of Christ; the song, called We Have A Son on the soundtrack, is rife with chimes, choir, crashing cymbals, trumpets, and so on. A good piece of music, it is perhaps over-the-top compared with the music most commonly suited to birthing scenes. Semi-justified in that this was a pregnancy that had to overcome three years of tension, two wildly different cultures, a case of potential mistaken babydaddy, 4 deaths split between the 2 people involved, torture, a nuclear explosion, accidental implantation in another species, a galaxy-spanning war, and the kid was had in the midst of a battle after birthing problems. And his parents had gotten married quite literally a moment before. He deserves an overture after all that, let alone surviving what happened after he was born.
  • Firefly does this in "Safe". As Mal and Jayne get into a gunfight with the law, River is a fair distance away dancing at a local fair. For the first few cuts, the music in the fair sequence cuts off when we go back to the gunfight, but then it just keeps playing — so we have cheery folk music over people shooting at each other, capped off with River and Simon being kidnapped at the fair.
  • In FlashForward (2009), there's a scene where "Like a Rolling Stone" by Bob Dylan plays over an intense slow-motion gunfight. Likewise, there's a scene that shows the blackout occurring around Echo Park Lake that occurs to the quiet/upbeat tune of Björk's "It's Oh So Quiet" — even as a Metro bus drives ''over unconscious citizens" and plunges right into the depths of the lake.
  • A probably unintentional example: there was a Gallagher TV special shown on Comedy Central in the early nineties that showed a montage of the comedian's messiest moments set to Fishbone's "Party at Ground Zero", an upbeat ska song about nuclear war.
  • Game of Thrones:
    • In the third episode of Season 3, an upbeat rock cover of "The Bear and the Maiden Fair" performed by The Hold Steady played during the credits, immediately following the scene where Jaime's hand got chopped off.
    • In the third episode of Season 8, this soundtrack plays near the end of the episode, being a good example at the part where The Night King is walking towards Bran to kill him, before being slain by Arya.
  • An episode of General Hospital concluded with Laura singing Brahms' Lullaby to her baby girl. As the sound of her singing continued, viewers were treated to a montage of a local mafia thug's revenge on his rival — gunfire erupting in front of a restaurant, in an apartment, and in a house, while various people scrambled for cover.
  • An episode of Glee subverted it with The Beatles' "I Want to Hold Your Hand". Normally, this song is very cheery, but in the episode it was slowed down quite a bit. Enough to qualify as a Tear Jerker!
    • There's also a Tear Jerker moment at the end of mattress when the glee club prepares for their picture and have it taken, only for it to be promptly degraded to a cover of Charlie Chaplin's 'Smile.'
    • At the end of the episode "On My Way", the cheery song "Going to the Chapel" is playing just before Quinn gets into a violent car crash.
  • In the "Smothers' Day" episode of The Goldbergs Erica and Barry's breakfast for Beverly goes horribly wrong. Things break, pans catch fire, pancake batter flies everywhere, and the dishwasher overflows to the tune of Whitney Houston's "Greatest Love of All".
  • Season 2 of The Good Wife had a love scene between Alicia and Peter Florrick, done to NPR's All Things Considered playing on Alicia's radio. That weekend's episode of Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me noted that this was a first for NPR.
  • In one episode of Gotham, Nygma decides to cut up Kringle's dead body and dispose of it. The music playing? "Closer to the Bone"!
  • The Handmaid's Tale: The first two episodes end with Lesley Gore's "You Don't Own Me" and Simple Minds' "Don't You (Forget About Me)". The lyrics and title are appropriate, but the upbeat tone is quite a contrast with the very dark content of the show.
  • Harper's Island. In Episode 7, upbeat classical music plays in the background when Malcolm is burning the money... and continues to play when he is pulled offscreen and chopped to bits.
  • Helix has a strange relationship with easy listening music.
    • The Instrumental Theme Tune is a jazzy bit of Bossa Nova that slows and warps to a stop while the Bad Black Barf that signifies The Virus drips off of the "X" in the Title Card. Closed Captioning refers to it as "Happy Instrumental Music"
    • In the pilot, Dionne Warwick's peppy, Baião-influenced "Do You Know the Way To San Jose" serves as musical bookends: It's Source Music in the opening scene, as Patient Zero of The Virus is discovered by a researcher and his head of security, and Background Music in the closing scene, Patient Zero's first successful attempt to infect others as he circumvents a biometric lock to assault a lab full of screaming scientists.
    • In "Vector", another bouncy easy listening tune in the same genre as the Instrumental Theme Tune serves as musical bookends, playing as Source Music during two frightening encounters, when Dr. Doreen Boyle is accosted by an infected Dr. Tracey, and in the closing scene when Dr. Julia Walker encounters a likewise infected Peter Farragut during decontamination.
    • Subverting the trend is the music played during closing credits. It begins by picking up where the "Happy" Instrumental Theme Tune left off, and has the same instrumentation, but is instead tense with a rising background whine that evokes "Psycho" Strings before warping to a stop again.
  • On Heroes, Sylar is sauntering down the street with a folder of Company files after acquiring Claire's ability when he's stopped by two Company agents. They shoot him and after he pulls the bullet out, he quickly disposes of the agents. He sends one flying to the ground and the other right in the windshield of the car, destroying its dashboard camera. The entire scene is set to a perky Fatboy Slim / BPA cover.
  • Hightown: The theme song is "Vacation" by the Go-Gos, a bouncy melody about love used for a dark, dramatic show revolving around the drug trade along with its many victims. It was likely chosen since the show is set on Cape Cod, a vacation spot, but it doesn't fit otherwise.
  • House:
    • An early episode had the titular doctor and his hospital's new benefactor have a very serious discussion about House following the rules. When House decided to end the conversation, he pressed the play button on his portable music device. Hava Nagila begins playing. He presses the stop button, and says, "I was hoping for something a little more dramatic."
    • Taub and Foreman's Vicodin experiment in "Lockdown" is set to the Gregorian chant "Adorate Deum" for no readily apparent reason. Although given that they were tripping balls by the time the music started, it may very well have been playing inside their heads.
    • And who can forget "Broken", after House enters the Mayfield Asylum and starts detox. Light piano, guitar, and a happy-go-lucky soundtrack to go along with puking, screaming and pounding the glass until he bleeds. Yeah, nightmares for weeks...
  • Played for laughs in How I Met Your Mother. Robin's ex-boyfriend (played by James Van Der Beek) convinced her to play his seriously hard rock song, "Murder Train," during the "Adopt A Puppy" segment.
    Robin: Hey, lots of puppies got adopted! ...Of course, a lot of the people calling in thought we were going to kill them.
  • For the NBC special Cribs Inside the Obama White House, they felt the need to put in as many hip song instrumentals as possible, which sometimes resulted in this: for instance, using "Wonderful" by Everclear (about a kid dealing with his parents' divorce) and "Bitter Sweet Symphony" ("No change/ I can't change/ I can't change anymore...") — although using "Shut Up And Let Me Go" as the president wanted to get out of his limo ASAP and order some burgers was hilarious.
    • Sports broadcasts do this a lot. For example, during the 2009 NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament, CBS would play the very recognizable intro synth solo from The Who's "Eminence Front" over statistical graphics. The song is about how cocaine ruins lives. ("The snow packs as the skier tracks / and people forget / forget they're hiding")
  • Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • Some ITN News bulletins on ITV still used ITN's original theme music, Non-stop, until the early '80s. Early TV news took inspiration from cinema newsreels, which were often rather light affairs, but what seemed like a good theme tune in 1955 dated quite badly and seemed rather un-newsy by the eighties.
  • It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
    • The opening is a cheery public domain number called "Temptation Sensation" which is accompanied by a series of shots of the titular city from a car. Of course the show itself features an almost exclusively jerkass cast all of which are selfish, morally twisted and at times downright antagonistic people. Each episode following their twisted exploits all of which end in abstract failure and often ruining the lives of anyone caught in the middle. Additionally, that cheery music typically starts off being juxtaposed against jarringly morbid title cards, including, but not limited to, "Frank Sets Sweet Dee on Fire."
    • And of course, the soundtrack is almost entirely classical, baroque or easy listening music, which makes the entire show even funnier. Friend gets shot in the head mixed with serious acting? Not funny. Friend gets shot in the head mixed with serious acting while baroque music plays in the background? Strangely hilarious.
    • For an example with a licensed song: In Season 7's "Frank's Pretty Woman", the gang drags Frank's prostitute girlfriend, who just died of a heart attack, out of Frank and Charlie's apartment because it would be bad for the gang. No points for guessing the songnote .
  • Hyde from Jekyll ends up singing "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" after slaughtering a lion and waiting for the shocked K&U soldiers to follow him into the den. While the music doesn't show up, he also enjoys a Disney Favourites CD. He also signals his intention to play lions by whistling "Boys And Girls Come Out To Play."
    Benjamin: Give it up for a ballsy song choice.
  • The sentai spoof Kagaku Sentai Dynaman used this with the big boss fight: All through the combination and fighting sequence against the Giant Monster, the soundtrack is Bruce Springsteen's utterly un-subtle anti-war anthem "War." The end result is side-splittingly hilarious.
  • Kamen Rider OOO managed to pull this one off in the opening scene with an operatic version of "Happy Birthday". It's just not the first song to come to mind when you see kaijin brutally massacring a motorcycle brigade.
  • One of the darkest episodes of Las Vegas ended on a cliffhanger. Several, actually. By the end of The Teaser of the next episode, Sam Marquez had been kidnapped, nearly raped, and killed her attacker by opening the door of his jet. In flight. Mary may have killed her father who abused her as a child, and Danny, Ed, and Mary herself are all suspects, with Danny being caught on cell-phone cam at the scene arranging Mary's escape and taking the gun from her. Oh, and a shell-shocked Marine commits suicide with an IED — which he mentions is "easier to make than you think" — in order to keep from being redeployed to Iraq, possibly killing Danny's pregnant Love Interest in the process. And the casino gets robbed, with several members of the security team killed. The millions of bucks in back-taxes the casino owes is actually reduced to a subplot by all the GRIMDARK. The episode right after the cliffhanger used the standard theme song; Elvis' "A Little Less Conversation".
  • Australia's The Late Show (1992) parodied this with an ad for an album of "Inappropriate Love Themes", featuring stock romantic footage to music such as "The March of the British Grenadiers", "Popcorn" and the theme from Please Sir!.
  • Law & Order: Special Victims Unit:
    • Invoked in the Season 15 premiere, when serial rapist/murderer William Lewis goes for a drive and sings along to the chirpy foxtrot "Ain't We Got Fun" on the radio with a tied-up and gagged Detective Benson in the back seat.
    • A Season 16 episode opens with a cover of "Let Her Go" playing as a girl gets ready for a show, is seemingly kidnapped or something, stuffed into a suitcase, dumped, found in an alleyway, being helped by doctors and (at the end) Benson.
  • The Legends of Tomorrow pilot features an all-out Bar Brawl set to the tune of catchy 70s pop hit "Love Will Keep Us Together" by Captain and Tenille. A season five episode had a fight in a museum set to Sisqo's "Thong Song". Granted, it was a Sisqo exhibit (from the future) and a character activated it and it started playing the song.
  • Lie to Me has an example in the third season, although there was an in-plot excuse — Lightman and a friend were trying to convince attackers that they were ill-prepared and so "sexy music" is playing when a gun fight breaks out ("I'm in the Mood" by John Lee Hooker).
  • Lost:
    • In one episode, Michael tearfully pinned a suicide note to his chest and attempted to kill himself by driving into a shipping crate while "It's Getting Better" by Cass Elliot played over his car radio. Which turns into Fridge Horror when one realizes that its cheery chorus reflects the mood of some suicide victims right before they kill themselves.
    • At the end of "Sundown", the smoke monster massacres everyone at the Temple. In the aftermath, Kate, Claire, and Sayid stroll through the carnage and destruction while Claire's earlier singing of "Catch a Falling Star" plays creepily in the background. This was the only time in the show's run that a song was played purely for the audience's benefit, i.e. not from an in-universe source such as Hurley's discman or Jack's car stereo.
    • In "Man of Science, Man of Faith" and "Adrift", Desmond, who holds several main characters at gunpoint and starts out seeming a little Ax-Crazy, constantly plays a record with the very upbeat song "Make Your Own Kind of Music" throughout his scenes.
  • "Itsy Bitsy Spider" was often played over scenes of the "Loving Murders", or of the killer preparing to strike.
  • On one episode of Malcolm in the Middle, the boys in the family get into a knock-down, drag-out fight with a group of clowns after one of the clowns insults Lois. Lois, who has been angry with her family for forgetting her birthday, watches the sequence with a loving smile as "You Decorated My Life" by Kenny Rogers plays.
  • The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was generally good with its music — except for the third season two-parter "The Concrete Overcoat Affair", which executive producer Norman Felton hired Nelson Riddle to score, expecting him to write music in the vein of his work for The Untouchables (as the story involved gangsters). Unfortunately, Riddle wrote the music in the vein of his work for Batman. Suffice to say Felton not only never hired Riddle to work on the series or anything else again. Ironically, Riddle's music suited the campy turn of the third season perfectly when it was tracked into episodes like "The Hula Doll Affair".
  • The opening credits of Married... with Children, set to Frank Sinatra's "Love and Marriage". Sinatra sings about how great married life is, but the opening sequence highlights Jaded Washout Al Bundy's Awful Wedded Life and his boorish, stupid, and greedy family members.
  • The Season 4 M*A*S*H episode "Deluge" had newsreel footage of a swing dancing competition back in the States, accompanied by an instrumental version of "The Tennessee Waltz". The video would switch back and forth between the dance footage and a scene of Hawkeye doing triage with Radar in the compound, while the audio stayed with the dance music.
  • Just about a minute of Midsomer Murders "Death and Dreams" episode — doubtlessly one of the most wicked in the whole series — manages to ruin nothing less than Mozart's world-famous Turkish March — possibly forever.
  • Mimpi Metropolitan: Episode 27 uses this for laughs by playing Johann Strauss II's waltz "The Blue Danube" while Bambang and Alan are beaten up by a woman they kidnapped for a reality show.
  • Modern Life Is Goodish has a recurring segment called the “Found Poem”, which consists of host Dave Gorman reading a selection of idiotic comments from the reader comments pages of a news story, to the strains of the sarabande movement from Handel’s Keyboard Suite in D Minor. The juxtaposition of the sombre music only makes the inane comments funnier.
  • Monk sometimes ran into this with "It's A Jungle Out There" from season 2 onward. The season finale for Season 7 began with Monk coldly telling a construction crew with no background music that they can't tear down that parking garage — his wife died there. Cue bouncy theme on trumpet.
    • In "Mr. Monk and the Very, Very Old Man", the murder is committed to an upbeat piano piece playing on the room's gramophone.
    • Done intentionally in a Christmas episode where a mysterious gloved figure's preparations in doctoring a bottle of wine with poison is accompanied by "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree".
  • The Monty Python's Flying Circus teaser "Blood, Devastation, Death, War And Horror" opens with footage of destruction and carnage, segued into the studio by bright, peppy music.
  • Moon Knight (2022) features a frantic car chase scored by Wham!'s "Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go" (which is playing in the radio of the protagonist's vehicle... a cupcake truck!).
  • The Mork & Mindy episode "Mork Meets Robin Williams" ends with Mork explaining the downside of fame to Orson, and ends by listing off people who became victims of their own fame: Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Lenny Bruce, Freddie Prinze, Judy Garland and the then recently assassinated John Lennon. You can hear Mork's voice shaking as he says this. The show fades out without a wisecrack or a "Nanu nanu", just the sound of a cold wind blowing in the background. And then, cue the happy, upbeat theme music!
  • Mr. Robot:
    • Season One features an intimate scene between Tyrell Wellick and Sharon Knowles, who he's been attempting to seduce in order to get revenge on her husband (as he took the CTO postion from him that he'd been anticipating), set to FKA twigs's song "Two Weeks," a very sexual song that continues playing even as Tyrell snaps and strangles her to death on the rooftop they're on.
    • Season 4 has "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year" playing as Dom's family get taken hostage on Christmas Day, and indeed as the whole season takes place at Christmas there are several other dark scenes taking place with Christmas music in the background.
  • The Murdoch Mysteries episode "Let Loose the Dogs" opens with a drunken and violent crowd watching a ratting competition, as the BGM plays "The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo", contrasting the song's portrayal of "civilised" gambling with the realities of a Beastly Bloodsport.
  • Mocked in one episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000. In the episode featuring Danger!! Death Ray, when the main character is checking up on his dying friend, Tom Servo chastises the soundtrack playing the character's usual upbeat theme.
  • Averted in one episode of The Nanny, where Fran is depressed at not being pregnant. Instead of cueing the overtly upbeat theme tune, we just fade to a still from the opening.
  • New Tricks has a high quotient of these; regardless of how bloody and unpleasant the crimes investigated may be — or how low our heroes may be at the moment the credits roll — You will always be assured that "It's alright, it's okay" by a cheerful Dennis Waterman. For added dissonance, you can quote Little Britain's version of Waterman, optimistically remarking that he could "write the theme choon, sing the theme choon..." Later series would sometimes use a more melancholy piece of music in these situations to avert this.
  • Nip/Tuck:
    • The creepy, jaunty, jazzy music that plays in the background of the scene when Colleen Rose kills the agent by filling him with teddy bear stuffing...
    • The season two finale featured a character killing himself in front of his mother, who later lays beside his body, holding him, and a character getting attacked in their bed by the Carver, a serial rapist who disfigures his victims, the season ending with the slash of the Carver's knife, all set to the Art Garfunkel ballad "All I Know".
  • Whoever does the soundtrack for NUMB3RS loves this trope too much. The most egregious example: at the beginning of one episode, the song "Drift Away" plays in the background as a woman is driving home...and continues playing as she pulls into the garage and is killed by an unseen gunman.
    • The end of one episode which has the team doing the required chase sequence, while sad music plays. Then again, there WAS also someone about to be executed for a crime he didn't really commit, so it was fairly fitting.
    • Invoked in the season 4 episode "Thirteen" which has the killer using Bible Numerology to choose his victims, then recording and killing them in the ways that Jesus' apostles where killed (even their names are the same) all while playing soothing music in the background.
  • The finale from the second season of The O.C. involves a scene of a gunshot and its effect, in slow motion, set to the rather calm tune of Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek".
    • Parodied on a Saturday Night Live Digital Short titled "The Shooting", also known by the name "Dear Sister", in which every character in the scene gets shot by some other character, with that very same song starting up each time. Thanks to the Internet and the fact that the sketch wasn't put on NBC's website due to copyright issues (and to a lesser extent the Virginia Tech shooting that happened two days after the sketch aired), this spawned countless fan parodies, featuring scenes of violence from all manner of media all slowed down and set to "Hide and Seek"...
    • This is SPARTA!
    • A Death Note clip in AMV Hell 4 used this song and the scene where Matsuda shoots Light several times, with the song clip starting from the beginning each time.
    • And in AMV Hell 4 the song pops up again, during a clip of Cowboy Bebop's final episode, in which Spike points at the camera and says, "Bang." followed immediately by a slow-motion shot of someone who was watching said clip falling out of his chair, playing dead.
      • That's a Running Gag. An earlier Hell features the same song to another scene from Cowboy Bebop, if I'm not mistaken, at two different times.
  • Here's a way more dissonant appearance for "Hallelujah": Ok, so songwriter Leonard Cohen is Canadian. Ok, so he's one of the greatest songwriters of the last century (though usually by way of being Covered Up). So the Vancouver 2010 Olympic opening ceremony is looking for a song by a Canadian to perform after the declaration that opens the games (which the American TV announcers prefaced as a "song of peace"). And they pick Hallelujah, a mournful song about broken love. Fine performance by KD Lang, totally not matched to the event (unless you count the tragic death by accident of the Georgian luge racer on the track earlier that day, but that wasn't planned).
  • The 1986-1987 children's show Photon has multiple scenes with music chosen based on popularity alone, without any consideration of whether it's appropriate or not. For example, "Addicted to Love" by Robert Palmer plays while a teenager goes on a suicide mission to destroy a black hole.
  • The Prisoner (1967): The final episode, "Fall Out" has possibly the Ur-Example in the TV medium. The Beatles' "All You Need Is Love" is prominently played first as Number Six is being brought in to be exonerated as The Village's new paragon, and a second time — far less appropriately — as Number Six and friends bloodily shoot their way out of the assembly chamber. In a similar vein, you may never be able to hear "Dem Bones" quite the same way again.
  • The "Fun Fun Fun in the Sun Sun Sun" ending theme of Red Dwarf occasionally fell into this, depending on the episode preceding it.
  • Done in the Title Sequence to Rome, where the bouncy, upbeat Instrumental Theme Tune is contrasted with the animated graffiti on the walls reenacting gory and/or erotic scenes from Roman mythology.
  • In a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying It's a Wonderful Life, a heartwarming Christmas carol plays while everyone is beating the living daylights out of Mr. Potter.
    • Lampshaded, parodied and invoked on a sketch about Mama Cass recording Make Your Own Kind of Music. Her producer assured her that it would be a hit — but that it would really take off in the future when it would be used as music for violent action scenes in various movies, with said producer actually having staff act out possible scenes said scenes as Cass sang. Cass herself disapproved, and ultimately expressed her disapproval by going on a violent rampage... and the song began playing as she did.
  • Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe loves these. The best are explaining how television works by showing your idea gradually turned to shit, literally, played with the brightest and poppiest song ever made in the background, and showing that the BBC can play any song they want but have to pay to clear other media, leading to "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" playing over the top of a photo of John Selwyn Gummer.
  • Scrubs seems to enjoy a fair amount of use of this trope. Let us count the ways.
    • "My Own American Girl" has U2's "Beautiful Day" as J.D. and Turk walk in for another long day at Sacred Heart, where J.D. also interprets one of Dr. Cox's rants over the song.
    • "My Choosiest Choice of All" has "Light & Day/Reach for the Sun" by The Polyphonic Spree playing over a montage that includes the Janitor tackling Kelso.
    • "My Lunch" has Three Patients die over the song "How to Save a Life" by The Fray, those deaths fueling a Heroic BSoD for Dr. Cox.
    • "My Transition" has a rendition of Chili's Babyback Ribs jingle played as an instrument of torture.
    • "My Friend With Money" plays it for laughs with "Isn't She Lovely" by Stevie Wonder to a scene of a very pregnant, very irritable, Jordan Sullivan walking through the hall, destroying everyone and thing in her path.
    • "My Words of Wisdom" averts this. J.D., knowing that Dr. Cox's daughter has been named Jennifer Dylan (J.D., natch), bursts out with "It's a Beautiful Morning" by The Rascals, until Carla reminds him that they're at Laverne's funeral.
    • "My ABCs" plays it straight and subverts it at the same time, with a somber rendition of the Sesame Street Theme by Joshua Radin played as a patient dies and J.D., Cox, and Eliot are contemplating the troubles with their interns.
    • Humorously played straight while J.D. has an Imagine Spot about Neena, the toughest lawyer in town, literally busting balls to "One" from A Chorus Line.
    • They also managed to avert this with "I'll Follow You into the Dark". Rather than trying to use it as the love song it is commonly mistaken for, the song was played to great effect at the end of an episode about accepting death.
  • The Secret Life of the American Teenager theme song is a very upbeat cheesy pop song called "Let's Do It (Let's Fall In Love)" which is always played after the opening scene. The song can be quite jarring if the opening scene is an attempt at a dramatic moment. (Which it often is.)
  • The happy, upbeat ending to the "Katie And Emily" episode of Skins, where Thomas and Pandora get back together and Naomi and Emily finally publicly admit their love for one another, is set to Glasvegas' epic "It's My Own Cheating Heart That Makes Me Cry", an astoundingly depressing song about how one man's fear that his girlfriend is cheating on him comprehensively destroyed their relationship.
    • Of course, given S4, it may turn out to just be brutally spectacular foreshadowing...two episodes in, and both of those couples are already on the ropes due to infidelity.
      • The music guys are well aware of this, by the way. Their summary for the tracklist for the utterly depressing "Emily" (4x02) is "At least some of the music was uplifting?"
      • Which bits? The Temper Trap's "Sweet Disposition" was about as positive as it got; everything else ranged from the intentionally creepy (Max Richter's "Organum") to the devastatingly miserable (Dinosaur Jr's "Said The People"). Of course, it should be noted that the music guys (Alex Hancock and, latterly, Kyle Lynd) are geniuses capable of turning the whole show into Awesome Music
  • Smallville:
    • In season three, "Covenant", Mozart's Requiem is played as Lex Luthor thrashes on the floor dying from poisoned wine, Jonathan lies unconscious in a cave, Clark abducted by Jor-El, Chloe and her father meet a fiery end in a huge explosion the moment they arrive at a new house, and Lionel gets his head shaved.
    • In season four, "Gone", this plays as someone stabs Lionel. And a bright little song when Clark goes to find Chloe but gets two very dead officers.
    • In season five, "Lexmas", a Christmas song plays as someone shoots Lex.
    • In season six, "Promise", wedding music plays as Lex beats a blackmailer to death.
    • In season seven, "Gemini", another Christmas episode, Christmas music plays as someone blackmails Lois and trap Chloe and Jimmy in the elevator with a bomb.
    • In season nine, "Persuasion", a jazzy little piece as Clark burns down two skyscrapers with his heat vision.
  • The Sopranos loves doing this. There doesn't seem to be an instance of non-diegetic music on the show that doesn't involve this trope. One example: in the first episode, Tony and Christopher chase down a guy and beat him up while a perky a capella love song plays on the soundtrack.
    • Probably the most famous example comes from the series' final scene, from "Made In America". The usage of "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey, a generally uplifting song that younger audiences may be more familiar with due to Glee, contrasts the tense and ambiguous atmosphere as Tony has his last meal with his family in a diner and is supposedly whacked by a mysterious man in a Members Only jacket.
  • Somewhat unusual example from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: in "The Siege of AR-558", the crew is on a planet helping a squad of marooned Starfleet officers defend an outpost that they captured from the Dominion. After a few battles take place, their only hope for survival is to take a fairly brutal Dominion weapon that has killed many members of Starfleet and use it on the Dominion soldiers. Nog, while in recovery from having his leg amputated due to injuries, becomes obsessed with a recording of the relaxing lounge jazz song "I'll Be Seeing You". This is already a fair amount of Soundtrack Dissonance, considering the fact that the show takes place in the 24th century, but it becomes even more dissonant when the song plays while the Starfleet officers hear explosions and screams of anguish as the Dominion soldiers are killed by the weapon, and see bright flashes in the sky. The dissonance is also commented on by some of the characters. This is followed by a sorrowful music score as the Jem'Hadar attack them in a brutal hand-to-hand battle.
  • So "Fire of Unknown Origin" (by Blue Oyster Cult) sounds like a cute song, right? Perfect for a light-hearted/pranky episode of Supernatural. But just listen to it all the way through, especially the line "Fire of unknown origin/Took my baby awaaaay" and you start to wonder how the hell Sam and Dean can listen to it, let alone Dean turning up the volume and singing along with it to wake Sam up.
    • There's also soldiers shooting out Croatoan zombies to "Do You Love Me?"
    • Bad Moon Rising also provided a nice case of Soundtrack Dissonance. While the lyrics did fit the mood (the Winchesters getting in a demon-induced car accident, with Dean already on the brink of death in the backseat), the melody is quite cheery and and certainly not dark.
  • Super Sentai: In Chouriki Sentai Ohranger the Insert Song of the female members that talks about what kind hearts and strong bonds Momo and Juri have plays over Juri engaged in a brutal Catfight with a Brainwashed and Crazy Momo. Oddly this is only time the song is played in the entire show.
  • Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Derek's ashes are buried in an anonymous grave all to the tune of a Scottish comedy song sung by a little girl and a killer robot. Specifically, "Donald, whaur's yer troosers?" Which is revealed later to actually be a good robot, raised to possibly be an Anti-Skynet.
  • Too Old to Die Young: During a Car Chase, Rob turns on the radio and tunes it to a driving techno beat. In the passenger seat, Little Billy changes the station to a country ballad. The two then silently squabble over the radio station until they settle on "Mandy" by Barry Manilow. The rest of the car chase plays out to this song.
  • The 1970s Game Show Treasure Hunt was known more for its novelty skits from host Geoff Edwards than anything else (after all, it was a revival of the 1950s Jan Murray-hosted show, revived in the 70s by The Newlywed Game creator Chuck Barris). If you were lucky enough to pick the Mystery Box that had the top prize, the show ended not with exuberant victory music, but rather one of the mellowest pieces of music ever heard on a game show.
  • The Umbrella Academy (2019) is really great at this trope, especially for actions scenes showing off the characters' high level of combat skills to the music of upbeat bops.
  • The Untamed: When Wei Wuxian sneaks into the other chambers of Golden Qilin Tower via a paper talisman, the track playing at the moment is reminiscent of a modern-day spy comedy film, which can sound odd and jarring.
  • Veep uses music sparingly, but it's almost all sprightly, patriotic pieces that wouldn't sound out of place on The West Wing. Considering the show is a scathingly cynical satire of petty backstabbing politicians, the noble music just makes it funnier.
  • In Veronica Mars, Aaron Echolls beats the crap out of his daughter Trina's abusive boyfriend to the dulcet strains of "That's Amore". It's a combination of horrifying and hilarious that's wonderfully uncomfortable. Earlier in the series (in fact, in the episode where he was introduced), Aaron Echolls beats the crap out of his son, Logan, while "Ventura Highway" by America is playing. Both times, most of the damage is done by a belt.
  • Vinyl features this all the time. Soft music plays over dark scenes, hard rock places over tense arguments to ironic and hilarious effect. Buck Rogers states, "I put the jukebox on random, because that's how life is!" One especially dark instance is Buddy Holly's "Rave On" that plays on the car radio in the flashback that ends with Ernst's accident, and just to rub it in, Buddy appears in an Imagine Spot.
  • The West Wing would occasionally end with a major shocker. Then the credits music was almost saccharine.
    • The third season finale ends with the President at a play while he's waiting for word on the ordered assassination of a foreign official. The actors sing an uplifting song about patriotism, glory, and victory while American operatives gun down several unarmed people on an isolated airstrip.
    • A homeless war veteran who froze to death on a park bench is formally given a military funeral. The music that plays during this is the light-hearted Christmas carol "Little Drummer Boy." Somehow, it still works.
    • "Noël" ends with Josh walking to the hospital with Donna after a tense therapy session, wherein he's forced to come to grips with the fact that he has Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder...all while a nearby choir sings "The Carol of the Bells". Earlier in the episode, we also see scenes of Josh having a panic attack inter-cut with his near-fatal shooting at Roslin...while Yo-Yo Ma plays Bach. Interestingly, this trope is actually a plot point in that episode, as we gradually find out that music triggers Josh's PTSD because it reminds him of the police sirens at Rosslyn.
    • Discussed in the first season episode "Five Votes Down", when Sam tells Mandy her choice of having "Happy Days are Here Again" play after President Bartlet delivers a speech about the horrors of gun violence may not have been the best one.
      Mandy: It's optimistic.
      Sam: I'll say.
  • Unintentional example: The BBC has been using the perky, quirky song "Young Folks" by Peter, Bjorn and John for its trailers for the 5th season of Who Do You Think You Are?, a series in which celebrities investigate their family history. With lyrics like "talking about me and you" it works well with the basically optimistic theme that everyone has an interesting history worth exploring. But it does not sound right at all over footage of a man wiping away tears as he walks through the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin. Even if that man is Jerry Springer.
  • In The Wire, whenever Omar Little makes his appearance, he's always whistling "The Farmer in the Dell".
  • Someone needs to explain why the epic, dramatic music that plays over sea battles in Pirates of the Caribbean movies was borrowed and used as incidental music for VTs on The X Factor. Because it really, really doesn't work.
  • The X-Files:
    • In the episode "Home", the family of mutants beat the sheriff and his wife to death to the strains of Johnny Mathis' "Wonderful, Wonderful". Even worse, at the end of the episode, the song plays again as the surviving mutant son attempts to impregnate his mother inside a rocking car.
    • In the episode "Chinga", a possessed child's doll puts "Hokey Pokey" on an old lady's record player, then smashes another record and slashes the lady's throat while the music cheerfully plays. Used similarly in other murder scenes.
    • In the episode "Kill Switch", a building is blown up and a woman has her consciousness sucked out to "Twilight Time", a sweet romantic song by the Platters.
  • In "F Sharp" from Yellowjackets the cheery "Hold On" by Wilson Phillips plays as Misty Quigley sabotages the flight recorder, causing herself and her fellow plane crash survivors to be stranded in the wilderness of Canada for 19 months. Those few that survive the experience, that is.

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