The Who: How Rock’s Rebels Became Television’s Theme Song Kings

What happens to a great rock song after the world that created it moves on? Millions of people today know the music of The Who without ever buying a single record or putting a needle to vinyl. To a whole generation of viewers, Pete Townshend‘s synth loops and Roger Daltrey‘s primal screams aren’t 1970s arena rock artifacts—they’re the noise that kicks off a night of prime-time TV crime shows, complete with body bags and David Caruso dramatically putting on his sunglasses.

The CSI franchise turned four classic Who tracks into network TV theme songs. But step back from the television screen and you’ll find a much bigger, wilder story about how four loud British kids accidentally wrote the soundtrack for modern pop culture.

The Band That Was Never Supposed to Behave

The Who started out as pure noise and trouble. Powered by amphetamines, ear-splitting feedback, smashed guitars, Keith Moon’s reckless drumming, and John Entwistle’s heavy basslines, they didn’t do background music.

With Roger Daltrey swinging his microphone like a weapon up front, their early shows were built to grab you by the throat, blow out your eardrums, and leave the stage in splinters. Nobody in 1965 looked at this band and thought, “That’s going to sound great behind a prime-time cop show.” That’s what makes their second life on television such a strange trip.

The Who Sell Out

In December 1967, the band dropped The Who Sell Out, an album disguised as an underground pirate radio broadcast on Radio London. They packed fake commercial jingles and ridiculous fake ads for acne cream, baked beans, and deodorant right in between the actual songs.

Townshend and the guys originally tried to sell real ad space on the record to real companies, but when that fell through, they just wrote the fake ones themselves. The joke writes itself: the same band that put out an album called The Who Sell Out eventually built one of the most heavily licensed catalogs in rock history. But Townshend wasn’t being a hypocrite; he just realized early on that rock and roll and corporate money were already sleeping in the same bed.

When the Songs Became Bigger Than Their Moment

Great records don’t rot just because the band gets older. The Who built a catalog of songs that hit you like a freight train the second they start:

My Generation – A stuttering, furious middle finger from 1960s youth

I Can See for Miles – A wall of paranoid, heavy guitar noise

Baba O’Riley – That insane, looping synthesizer intro that explodes into a stadium chord

Won’t Get Fooled Again – The ultimate synth breakdown capped by the loudest scream in rock history

Who Are You – A pounding, rowdy street fight of a song that locks in instantly

These tracks don’t need ten minutes to get going; they hit hard within five seconds flat. Directors and producers keep coming back to them because those riffs do all the heavy lifting before a character even speaks a line of dialogue.

The Commercial Licensing Machine: Pitching Art to Corporate America

While traditional rock critics in the 1980s and 1990s were busy crying foul every time a classic rock guitar riff ended up in a TV ad, Pete Townshend was quietly orchestrating a masterclass in catalog management. He realized early on that hanging onto an ideological purity test meant letting your master tapes collect dust in a dark basement. If younger generations weren’t buying vinyl or tuning into classic rock radio, you had to take the music to where their eyes and ears actually were.

The Who didn’t just stumble into corporate licensing—they pioneered it. Way back in 1982, when major rock acts still acted like corporate sponsorship was a sin, The Who signed a landmark tour deal with Schlitz Beer, putting their faces and music straight into network TV commercials.

Decades later, Townshend cranked that engine into high gear. Suddenly, Eminence Front wasn’t just a deep cut from 1982’s It’s Hard—it became the icy, hypnotic groove driving multi-million-dollar GMC truck campaigns. Bargain and Let My Love Open the Door started popping up in prime-time commercial breaks for everything from luxury automobiles to telecommunication giants.

Townshend treated corporate sync deals as a vital distribution network. Instead of cheapening the art, licensing a track to a global ad campaign acted like a massive loudspeaker, firing forty-year-old master tapes right back into mainstream living rooms.

The Licensing Revolution

When the band hit a wall and went inactive during the 1980s and 1990s, Townshend leaned hard into the music publishing business. Purists called it selling out, but Townshend knew better than to let his life’s work vanish from public memory.

He understood that locking your music away to keep it “pure” guarantees nobody hears it, causing the band to die off. By actively placing those tracks into movies, TV shows, and global ad campaigns, he kept the music alive in the ears of millions of kids who weren’t even born when the records were cut.

That business mindset reached an incredible landmark when Townshend inked a massive nine-figure deal with Primary Wave Music, covering publishing, master recordings, and likeness assets. The deal proved once and for all that a classic rock catalog isn’t a dead museum piece—it’s a living, breathing engine.

Then Came CSI: Matching The Tracks To The Shows

In 2000, TV producer Anthony Zuiker was building a new crime show called CSI and needed a theme song that could command a room instantly. He ended up building an entire television empire on the back of The Who’s catalog, creating a strange mismatch between the dark lyrics and high-tech TV labs:

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (“Who Are You”) – Uses a massive chorus that’s actually about Pete Townshend getting drunk, getting into fights, and passing out in a Soho doorway

CSI: Miami (“Won’t Get Fooled Again”) – Uses that legendary synth loop and scream to open a slick police show, even though the song is a cynical rant about political revolutions failing

CSI: NY (“Baba O’Riley”) – Anchors a big-city cop drama with a track originally written about a dark, futuristic wasteland full of homeless kids

CSI: Cyber (“I Can See for Miles”) – Slaps heavy drum fills and paranoid guitar riffs behind cyber-cops, hiding a song about pure jealousy and romantic betrayal

The Who didn’t write theme songs for network television; television just realized The Who had already done the work thirty years earlier. The songs had so much muscle and drama baked into the tape that they were ready to roll long before the TV shows were even pitched.

From Rebellion to Television

That shift tells you everything you need to know about how classic rock survives. A teenager spinning “Won’t Get Fooled Again” in 1971 heard a bleak warning about political lies and broken promises.

Decades later, a kid hears that exact same synth line and thinks of crime scenes, fingerprint powder, and Miami beach shots. The tape hasn’t changed a bit, but the world around it keeps finding new ways to use the noise.

The Commercial Question

So did The Who sell out? It’s not that simple, because there’s a huge difference between ruining a song and letting a new audience find it.

Filmmakers have been leaning on this catalog for decades to bring instant life to their scenes:

Almost Famous (Sparks) – Captures the wild magic of being a teenage rock fan in the 1970s

School of Rock (Substitute) – Shows a new generation of kids how real rock guitar is played

Apollo 13 (“I Can See for Miles”) – Drives the high-stakes tension of the space race

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (“My Generation”) – Laughs with the 1960s Swinging London scene

Placing a track in a movie or a TV show isn’t a betrayal of the art; it’s a front door. If a kid hears a guitar riff on a TV show and goes hunting for the rest of the album, the music just did its job.

The Song Outlives the Audience

The kids who bought The Who’s first singles grew up, got jobs, and aged out of the club scene. The UK Mod rallies and 1960s street fights are all ancient history now.

The music, however, refused to stay behind. It migrated seamlessly from small London clubs to massive open-air arenas, from vinyl pressings to cinematic film scores, from radio airwaves to commercial syncs, and from rebellious youth anthems to prime-time television themes.

The Who started out making loud, angry records that refused to shut up or stay in the background. Decades later, those same tracks became the biggest theme songs on planet Earth. That isn’t a defeat—it’s proof that if you build music with enough firepower, it outlasts everything else.