When fans describe ‘The Wire,’ no adjective seems to surface as often as “gritty.” After five seasons, creator David Simon’s painstaking arrangement of granular bits of research and authenticity, whether the detectives’ banter or Snoop’s drawl, have added up to a tone as low key and abrasive as the real Baltimore. 

For writers, costume designers and prop masters, mimicking reality falls into the standard job description, but music supervisor Blake Leyh – who, on another show, might compose sweeping themes and clever montages – has to fight the instinct to draw sentimental connections through song choice. “I want to make the scene less emotional, less melodramatic,” he says. “We put music in there as a device to push you away from the people a little bit. It’s something you would so rarely do in a Hollywood movie; you would want to pump up the emotion. But on ‘The Wire,’ so often we’re trying to go against that.” 

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When ‘Big Love’ creators Mark Olsen and Will Scheffer decided to play ‘Blue Hawaii’ as the out song on their season-two premiere, Olsen saw the perfect opportunity to spotlight the show’s new composer, Talking Heads front man David Byrne. Predictably, the test drive blew their hair back. Byrne’s stripped-down cover of the song, intended as a placeholder until he could refine it in the studio, struck every chord they could think of. “It had irony, it had heart, it had nostalgia,” Olsen says. “It had everything we wanted baked into that moment.”

After Byrne worked up a more complex iteration of the piece, Olsen and Scheffer fell into the unenviable position of telling a pop-culture luminary that they preferred his earlier work. Luckily, Scheffer says, Byrne’s ear saved them the discomfort. “It was kind of funny because we didn’t really know what to say. Then David wrote us back and said, ‘You know, I like the first version the best.’”

[More online at HBO.com]