Best Non Original Soundtrack to a Film or TV Series

Music
1

Trying to think of a better one than the current Netflix series One Day: The Fall, Cocteau Twins, Velvet Underground, Radiohead, Nick Drake, Karen Dalton, Portishead, Cranberries, Suede, Stone Roses, Semisonic, Gene, Gomez, Cat Power, Pixies, Jeff Buckley, the list goes on. They’ve basically taken one of the mixtapes I made for my girlfriend in the early 90s.It must have cost them a fortune.

The program itself is not my cup of tea (I liked the book), but I’m watching it just for the music, which I’ve never done before.

The Wonder Years was also good.

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2

Yeah agree, whoever was in charge of the music has smashed it. Actually really enjoying it so far, much better than the film.

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It’s a great playlist if you haven’t seen the episode. If you have seen the episode, it’s bloody amazing.

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4

Royal Tenenbaums

High Fidelity

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5

Derry girls had a banging soundtrack

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6

I loved my Juno soundtrack CD, very formative.

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7

Frances Ha has a great soundtrack of a mix of songs from French new wave film scores and 70’s rock. Loads of really memorable scenes parked with the music too, like when Frances goes on her lonely trip to Paris soundtracked by Every 1’s A Winner by Hot Chocolate

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8

Small Axe

Office Space has loads of silly but great hip hop

Nothing But a Man - never actually seen the film but soundtrack is filled with lots of great Motown tracks.

Kids - has some original songs but also introduced me to Slint and has stood the test of time

Muppets from Space - absolute joy from start to finish.

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9

It’s also a nice example of a film using other film soundtrack music a fair bit to evoke/reference those influences.

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Still listen to the Eternal Sunshine soundtrack a fair bit, though i think it’s about 50/50 original

11

Anything set in the early / mid 00s is basically catnip for me for some reason, eg Looking for Alaska, a Hulu miniseries by Josh “The OC” Schwartz

Not stuff I would go out of my way for now, but something about the way it just distills loads of great songs of that era.

Along the same lines everything in Saltburn sounded banging.

12

The Bear.

Season 2 specifically.

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13

Mr Robot was not a show I enjoyed but some of the music supervision was great.

I’ve found a lot of choices on modern shows to be ear scrapingly obvious, or they might derail the entire show.

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14

Killing Eve season 1

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15

If you mean the complete list of songs from a film/series, then Goodfellas for me. A brilliant run-through of 60s-70s American music. The album they released, with the cheapest tunes the label could afford, was pretty pants though (However, some bright spark did compile everything together for a torrent that was doing the rounds 15-20 years ago).

Also, American Graffiti is one of the best rock and roll comps money can buy.

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16

Seems a little too obvious, but can’t really think of a better one than Trainspotting off the top of my head, especially given how many iconic scenes it soundtracked rather than just a good song popping up somewhere.

T2 was pretty decent, too.

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17

Was looking at how much Skins season 1 encapsulated/defined my music taste at the time:

Was also thinking The Crow and Batman & Robin but they were mostly original songs weren’t they?

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18

I absolutely loved the music throughout Halt and Catch Fire

19

Rushmore is great. John Lennon, Kinks, Cat Stevens, The Creation, Faces, Yves Montand…although sometimes it’s the combination of a brilliant film and brilliant soundtrack.

20

Oh something a bit different because it’s all stuff from the 20s and 30s - Boardwalk Empire, although the official album releases were not anywhere near a full representation of the music used and had some covers etc on. I did have a full playlist on Spotify at some point.