After the retirement of its longtime anchor in 2005, Nightline underwent drastic changes that ultimately made the program a ratings winner. Instead of focussing on interviews related to the news of the day – a role that cable news had undertaken – it became more of a news magazine. Ted Koppel was replaced by three people. Terry Moran, Cynthia McFadden and Martin Bashir (who was later replaced by Bill Weir) anchor from studios in Washington and New York. The program went into a totally different direction with the theme music. It is composed by VideoHelper. I like this theme a lot. We knew Nightline featured hart hitting journalism. Now with so much percussion in the theme, it is hard hitting in the most literal sense of the word!

For most of the early years, Nightline used the World News Tonight theme to open the broadcast. That changed in 1997 when they started using a theme that they would use through the rest of the Ted Koppel years. He retired in 2005, amidst a flurry of network anchor retirement parties. During the last few months of his run, they experimented slightly with the program. One of the things they tried was doing multiple topics. During their months of experiments, Nightline used cold opens, so this theme was used until a few months before the retirement of Koppel.

Nightline started out as a series of special reports to update viewers late at night on the Iranian hostage crisis. Those special reports were called “America Held Hostage” and anchored by Frank Reynolds, lead anchor of World News Tonight. But he did not like doing double duty and Ted Koppel started substituting regularly. When the program officially debuted as Nightline, Ted Koppel was officially the anchor. The program was known for covering just one topic per broadcast, which allowed it to go in depth like no other news program on network television. This theme is very cool. The first minute is the topic cue, followed by the full theme. It is composed by Score Productions and was used from 1984 to at least 1987.