Question: I get frustrated watching Emergence because the music is so loud that it is difficult to hear the dialogue. Can’t someone notice that and fix it? —Marion
Matt Roush: If I ran every complaint I got on this issue, there’d be no room for anything else. At least this one was specific, so I’ll use this as my annual opportunity to address the incontestable fact that almost every show, especially in TV drama, is culpable in laying on the music too thick, so what’s intended as background becomes foreground. I’m especially aware of it in medical shows when music plays over scenes when surgical masks further inhibit dialogue, but action and suspense series are just as guilty. (The other most common complaint: TV shows are shot too dark.) If networks and producers get even a fraction of the mail I receive on this subject, they know it’s an irritant and they obviously don’t care. In my own limited experience, not being all that technically minded, we bought a sound bar to enhance and sharpen the sound coming out of our primary TV and have had less trouble because of it. Others have taken to activating closed captioning, which we sometimes do on streaming services with some of the British dramas, but that’s more about thick accents than loud music.
It’s intrusive, but at least you’ll get the dialogue.
To submit questions to TV Critic Matt Roush, go to: tvinsider.com