Illustration by Kagan McLeod

Bob Dylan's "Forever Young" was never a hit, but these days people are listening to the 39-year-old rock classic so frequently that it may as well be on Top 40 radio. It's the opening theme to NBC's "Parenthood," a binge-watching fixture on Netflix, Hulu and DVRs everywhere. Like "Breaking Bad," "The Wire," "Lost" and other TV series with rich character development and abundant cliffhangers, "Parenthood" is made for living-room marathons, and it comes with a main-title theme built to withstand repetition.

TV Shows With Iconic Theme Songs

Check out some of the Journal's favorite theme songs.

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"It's a lyric where you don't get tired of listening to it after a few times," says Jason Katims, executive producer of "Parenthood," which recently premiered its fifth season. "You tend to gravitate toward it, and you want to watch it over and over again, as opposed to saying, 'OK, I know what this is. I don't need to see it again.' "

In the age of binge-viewing, it's more important than ever that a theme song be catchy. Now that viewers can watch any show at any time, a familiar song can provide an anchor for a series and preserve the sense of ritual attached to following it. A great theme becomes part of a show's core spirit, so a burst of spooky slide guitar instantly evokes "Breaking Bad" character Walter White's ingenuity and menace. Some shows use theme music to add artistic or mysterious touches for regular viewers. Netflix's "Orange Is the New Black" links Regina Spektor's "You've Got Time" to a series of fast-cutting close-ups, mesmerizing viewers into finding new things in both the music and images upon every viewing.

Regina Spektor's song "You've Got Time" is the theme song for "Orange Is the New Black." Shervin Lainez

"Weeds" and "The Wire" use alternate versions of distinctive songs to reward repeat plays. "With binge-watching, [the theme] is unbelievably important," says rapper Jason Keaton, who goes by the name T.O.N.E.-z and who co-wrote the theme to FX's "Justified." "You never skip past the theme song when it's that good. Subconsciously you're thinking, 'I want to hear the rest of it.' "

The rise of binge-watching has played a significant role in the evolution of television theme songs. In earlier days, the songs were a form of preshow narration, setting up for new viewers the premises of shows like "Mister Ed," "The Addams Family" and "The Beverly Hillbillies." As the songs evolved, they became beloved—viewers of a certain age have a Pavlovian habit of saying, "Book 'em, Danno," upon hearing the Ventures' "Hawaii Five-O" theme, for example. "For me, these are almost like folk songs," says Sean Callery, an Emmy Award-winning composer who wrote the scores for "Homeland," "24" and others. "Most everybody knows the licks to 'The Simpsons' or 'Star Trek.' "

Taylor Schilling, front; Vicky Jeudy, back left, and Dascha Polanco in a scene from "Orange Is the New Black." Netflix

As viewers intuited more easily what shows were about and TV no longer needed elaborate explanations, the songs shrunk. From "Cheers" to "Friends" to the instrumental snippets that began "Seinfeld" and "Lost," themes aimed to quickly establish a mood rather than lay out a complex back story.

"Think about the long version of the 'Gilligan's Island' theme—that thing was, like, six minutes long! That son of a bitch had a bridge!" says Craig Thomas, executive producer of the CBS show "How I Met Your Mother," which has an 11-second theme that Mr. Thomas wrote with the show's co-creator Carter Bays. (The two used to be in a band called the Solids.)

John Flansburgh and John Linnell of They Might Be Giants, who perform the "Malcolm in the Middle" theme song, "Boss of Me" Dominic Neitz

Mr. Keaton (T.O.N.E.-z) studied classic television theme songs when he created the vocal for FX's "Justified." Almost a decade ago, he met Brooklyn producer Oscar "Rench" Owens, who agreed to let him work in his studio. Mr. Keaton recorded several vocals, and Mr. Owens asked if he could synchronize one of them with a bluegrass track. The "Justified" producers heard one of these tracks, "On the Run," from a mix tape floating around the Internet, and invited the duo to submit a possible theme song. In 2010, "Long Hard Times to Come," by Gangstagrass featuring T.O.N.E.-z, was nominated for an Emmy Award for original main title theme music.

Bryan Cranston in a scene from "Malcolm In the Middle" 20th Century Fox/Everett Collection

"I thought about that TV show 'Friends,' and I came up with something simple that's easy to learn," says the rapper. "It's still new to people three years later. "It's not like ['The Golden Girls' theme] 'Thank You for Being a Friend' where after four episodes, you're like, 'All right, man!' and you want to fast-forward it."

Mr. Callery, Mr. Keaton and other composers say the formula for an ideal theme is relatively simple. As with pop songs engineered for maximum radio play, it has to be good. Bruce Gilbert, music supervisor of "Orange Is the New Black," insists neither producers nor Ms. Spektor had binges in mind when they created the theme. "From the creative perspective, that wasn't a concern," he says. "We lucked into something."

Mr. Gilbert was also music supervisor for "Weeds," which opened in 2005 with a long-forgotten song—Malvina Reynolds's satirical "Little Boxes," a '60s hit for folk singer Pete Seeger. The song became such an important part of the show that Mr. Gilbert asked musical stars from Elvis Costello to Rise Against to cover it every week, a unique way of using the opening theme to reward repeat viewing. "We were already of the mind that people would be checking out the main titles every time," he says.

Roughly four years ago, when Mr. Katims and his crew were readying "Parenthood," they were looking for an iconic theme with "a sort of grandness." They choose Bob Dylan's "Forever Young." The producer has since come to think of the nuanced song as the perfect work for this type of viewing.

Larry Love of Alabama 3 (performer of 'The Sopranos' theme song) Getty Images

"Main titles go by so fast," Mr. Katims says. "You often have a lot of layering, visually. You're throwing a lot at the audience at once. Sometimes that could be considered a negative, because it's too much to take in. With binge-watching, it actually becomes a positive—the more complexity there is in a main title, the more you get to see new things in it as you watch. Similarly, with the song, the more you listen to it, the more layers it has."

One of the first theme songs of the modern binge-watching era was "Woke Up This Morning," an electronic-blues anthem by Alabama 3 of London, England and used on "The Sopranos." The band's frontman, Larry Love, wrote the dark lyrics about Sara Thornton, a British woman who killed her husband, claiming years of domestic violence.

James Gandolfini in a scene from "The Sopranos," whose theme song is "Woke Up This Morning" by Alabama 3. HBO/Everett Collection

In addition to being catchy, the song has different levels of meaning that reveal themselves as viewers absorb its lyrics—they gradually figure out the song isn't about New Jersey mobsters. "It sticks in your head. It's the same commercial insistence of a radio jingle," Mr. Love says. "Most people say they might get up to make a cup of tea [during the opening titles], but they still keep the damn thing on."

Corrections & Amplifications
In earlier versions of this article John Linnell of "They Might Be Giants" was incorrectly identified as Dan Miller.