The other night, we watched “A Home For the Holidays” on CBS, which is a lovely Christmas special focusing on families who have been blessed by adoption. They show little vignettes of families sharing their adoption stories and have different musical performances for a studio audience of adopted kids and their families.
One of the musical performances was American Idol winner Phillip Phillips performing his hit song “Home”, a beautiful song that was very appropriate for a show about adoption. If you are one of the six people in the world not familiar with the song (or if you, like me, like to listen to it) you can play it here:
But that was not the only thing to stick out to me – it is (at least) the fourth different television network to use that song. The unofficial list:
- FOX: Where it all started: American Idol
- NBC: “Home” was played during the Summer Olympics whenever they were getting ready to show a women’s gymnastics segment.
- ABC: Used it in promos for Extreme Makeover – Home Edition
- CBS: A Home For the Holidays, live performance
While I’m sure I’m missing some other examples, I find it fascinating* that all four of the broadcast networks have used the same song fairly prominently in their programming.
*Even though I am a big dork for obscure observances like this, I’m using “fascinating” very loosely.
In this day and age, playing songs during TV shows is very common. Grey’s Anatomy helped The Fray sell millions of albums. And I’d be willing to wager that ESPN plays more music than MTV does. But for the most part, these songs tend to be pretty exclusive to a network – or at least a corporate structure. Off the top of my head, I can’t think of another song that has been used this prominently on multiple networks – let alone the big four broadcast networks (but if you can, drop it in the comments).
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