TV on the radio - it's the way to go

THE people most mourning the cancellation of the poxy US teen drama The OC are not the show's fans - which is probably because they are all teenagers with advanced ADD who just see it as a good excuse to spend even more time on their Xbox.

Where the show will be really missed is in Indieville. So many tyro bands got their first break on the show. With their music playing out to a worldwide CD-buying teen audience, getting a song on the show was viewed as the first step to "breaking America".

So seriously did The OC take its music that it reconfigured the TV show as a concert venue. They introduced their own rock music venue, the Bait Club, just so that the music could be fitted into the show in a seemingly more organic way than just playing it over a certain scene.

Among those to grace the stage of the Bait Club were The Killers, The Thrills and Death Cab For Cutie. The last band, as much as they would hate to admit it, were largely propelled somewhere near the mainstream because of the show's reach. Not only was their music played a lot but one of the lead characters in the show (don't ask me which one, those half-human half-dolls all look the same to me) constantly name-dropped the band and had posters of them on his wall.

For many cynical observers, The OC was merely co-opting bands of the Death Cab For Cutie type in order to leaven the inanity of the show's characters and plotlines. Not that the indie bands were caring too much as they practically stalked the show's music supervisor, Alexandra Patsavas, hoping for the elusive call-up.

The show even felt confident enough to release an album called The OC - Covering Our Tracks, which had even more obscure indie bands covering the songs played by the slightly better known indie bands on the show. You had Goldspot covering Modest Mouse and Syd Matters covering the Super Furry Animals.

Given the narrative constraints facing her, Patsavas did a great job on the show. So much so that she was largely responsible for U2 debuting their single Sometimes You Can't Make It On Your Own - not to mention Coldplay doing the same with Fix You.

The real power of music placement on TV, however, was witnessed last year when Patsavas, who has become the Rosalie Trombley of the modern musical era, went to work as music supervisor on Gray's Anatomy and was looking for a big song for a big scene in the show. At the time Snow Patrol (then unknown in the US) had just released their Eyes Open album and Patsavas found what she was looking for in the song Chasing Cars.

During an important scene in the Gray's Anatomy season finale last year, Chasing Cars was featured prominently. For Patsavas it was "a beautiful and complex song that served as the perfect soundtrack to a series of very complex moments".

Twenty four hours after the programme went out, Chasing Cars was the number one downloaded tune in the US iTunes store and quickly found itself on high rotation across radio and music video channels.

As some indication of how important Snow Patrol viewed their exposure on the show, they recorded a special acoustic version of the song for the DVD release of Gray's Anatomy. And it didn't stop there - as people in the US began to plunder the band's back catalogue, their song Chocolate was used on The Last Kiss film.

Little wonder Gary Lightbody sees the Gray's Anatomy intervention as "staggering", saying "it's extraordinary how much an effect the show had for us - I've heard that somewhere between 20 and 25 million people watched the season finale show."

The lesson is clear: forget the six-month tour, forget Rolling Stone, forget MTV. Just hit the medical dramas and everything else will follow.