Crazy Ex-Girlfriend might’ve lost out on the Emmy for Outstanding Original Title Theme Music this past weekend at the Creative Arts Emmys, but don’t worry—they’ll get a second chance in 2017. “Every season of this show will have a new theme song,” says executive producer, co-creator, and star Rachel Bloom. The way the show’s characters describe its premise in Season 1’s theme is called a “saga sell”—think The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Nanny. The latter series opener—which also features animation—was an early inspiration for Bloom. “As [Rachel] often does, she sang it into her iPhone and sent me a scratch version of what she was thinking,” says composer and songwriter Adam Schlesinger. (Fans may be interested to know that he also played the sun in season one’s opener.)

These days, TV themes seem optional—acclaimed series like Mr. Robot and Jane The Virgin simply kick off with title cards, while other shows, like Superstore and Blindspot, have blink-and-you’ll-miss-it intros. All the better to binge watch—who wants to sit through a minute of music that doesn’t change from episode to episode? But it’s no coincidence that at the Emmys this year, three out of six nominees in the outstanding title theme music category were Netflix shows. When a series has the time to go big with its opener, TV themes and title sequences can be beautiful, fascinating earworms, the kind that rev up one’s anticipation rather than dampening it. Even after Sean P. Callery won this past weekend for Marvel’s Jessica Jones, it’s still worth examining all the nominated themes to look at the intensive, complex process of theme music design, a collaborative effort between each show’s composers, directors, and executive producers.

Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’s old theme song described the premise of the show—Bloom’s character moves cross-country in order to reconnect with a man she dated, briefly, as a teenager—so succinctly that in one episode, two characters had a conversation made up entirely of lyrics from the theme. But Season 2 picks up right after the game-changing cliffhanger that ended Season 1, so making a whole new theme song just made sense. “In Season 2, Rebecca has been very open that she moved for Josh, to herself and to other people,” says Bloom. “She’s not in that kind of self denial anymore, so the whole opening that says ‘it happens to be where Josh is, but that’s not why I’m here’ doesn’t really apply anymore. I really like the idea [that] we’re doing a comedy, but it’s not a sitcom that spits out copies of itself. We wanted to acknowledge that and create an emotional thesis statement for the season.

Crazy Ex’s fellow nominee The Whispers got cancelled after one season, but its theme—which alternates between a dark, electronic pulse and a tinkling melody—has real staying power. It fits perfectly with a show about a group of children who compulsively and collectively blame their trouble-making on a mysterious imaginary friend—whom their parents gradually realize is real. “There’s two basic elements” at play here, says show composer Robert Duncan, who will be working on NBC’s Timeless this TV season. The first is a sound “that conveys the innocence, the childlike element.” And secondly, “there’s the malevolent element of the invisible presence of the alien.” The plucky melody of a music box supplies the innocence; to offset that, Duncan continues, “I pulled out distortion pedals and put everything I could through it. Electric cellos, sound-effect noises, slamming different things in the studio—trying to make a little bit of sonic mayhem in the undercurrents.” Duncan worked in tandem with the artists who created the opener’s visuals, each working to match and complement the other’s work.

Duncan says that he wants to get himself to feel a certain way when he’s composing—here, it was figuring out what “gives [him] the heebie-jeebies”—and channeling that into his piece. He calls back to an old composing lesson: “You have to be accountable for every emotional interpretation that your audience can take away [from your work] in order to be successful at this job.”

This was particularly tricky for Victor Reyes when working on The Night Manager. The mini-series is a multilayered spy story, based on a novel by John Le Carré, the master of espionage. But Reyes and the show’s director, Susanne Bier, worked hard to “hide away from the genre, from making music for the genre,” as he says in a phone interview. That is, they wanted to keep the audience guessing—so they had to make sure not to give anything away in the score. Putting together a theme, though, was a little simpler for Reyes.