TV Theme Songs Every Canadian Knows by Heart

The theme canon

1. The Hockey Night in Canada theme (Dolores Claman, 1968) — The undisputed champion (see our hockey-music feature): the most recognizable melody in the country, a Saturday-night institution for four decades, and the subject of the 2008 network-switch saga that made a TV theme a front-page national story. No other theme on earth has its own news cycle.
2. "Whatever It Takes" — Degrassi: The Next Generation — The teen anthem that branded a generation (see our Degrassi feature): bright, urgent, exactly what 4:30 p.m. felt like for millions of Canadian kids.
3. The Kids' TV block — The children's-canada canon (see our kids-TV feature): from Polka Dot Door-era singalongs to YTV's and CBC's house jingles — the programming between the programs taught the country's toddlers their first melodies. (You are humming one right now. It's okay. Everyone is.)
4. The Schitt's Creek theme — Maribeth Solomon's jaunty earworm (see our feature): the warm, quirky opener that trained the audience to expect the show's particular blend of heart and absurdity. Themes teach you how to watch — Schitt's taught warmth.
5. The Corner Gas theme — The prairie sitcom's opener — catchy, twangy, perfectly Saskatchewan (see our regional features) — and proof that a theme can brand a province's self-image as efficiently as a flag.
6. The Trailer Park Boys theme — The bass-sliding? — keep it light: the laconic, menacing-cool opener (see our feature): three seconds of it and every Canadian knows exactly where they are — Sunnyvale, where the music always sounds like trouble? — keep it light: Sunnyvale, where the wind and the liquor are perpetual.
7. The CBC news and current-affairs signatures — The informational earworms (the National's theme-line family through the decades, the current-affairs show opens) — the sound of the nation, reporting — decades of iterations all humming the same civic frequency.
8. The MuchMusic and MusiquePlus IDs — The channel-station jingles (see our MuchMusic features): the station-ID packages that taught a generation to hear television itself as musical.
9. The CanCon era's drama themes — The dramatic-openers canon (the cop-show and drama themes of the 70s–90s — keep it light: the crime-drama and primetime openers) — Canada's composers doing network-TV work at full craft.
10. The honourable earworms — The regional and specialty entries (the French-language kids' blocks, the regional variety shows, the special-event broadcasts) — the local themes that never went national but own their provinces.

Why themes matter

Theme songs are the most concentrated craft in television: fifteen to ninety seconds to brand a world — and the Canadian tradition kept the standards high long after other countries let theirs lapse (see our MuchMusic and radio features for the wider story). They're also, as the Hockey Night saga proved, stakes — a country will riot, politely, over its themes. The anthem book nobody voted on, sung by everybody. Hum along. You already are.