What are those theme songs that make you cringe and/or make your ears bleed ? A few that make me do that are the remix of ER's theme and the remix of Bones's (both of these ar more like theme blurbs than theme songs), along with the theme song from the latter part of Quantum Leap (on dvd).
I am not a huge fan of the Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes theme song. I was quite glad they scaled it back for this past season.
Not a theme song per se, but Grimm debuted with a voice over narrative for the second season. It was terrible and only lasted about 3 episodes.
If you were already depressed, Taxi's theme song would make you feel suicidal. But that's not really what the OP meant, I think. Lost and Threshold had those horrible sound effects instead of theme songs. Most children's shows have terrible theme songs. H.R. Pufnstuf had Jack Wild but, still. And in the SF genre, merciful amnesia has blanked out most of the Greg Mullavey/Imogene Coca sitcom theme, the one with astronauts and cavemen.
Eh, I always kinda liked that theme. It was fun show, for a little bit. I hadn't when I posted it, but he directed more than a few TV eps I remember liking back then, including a fucking great Wild Wild West episode.
Supertrain, NBC's super-colossal flop, ran only nine episodes but had three different versions of the opening titles and theme music. The third and final version was the worst. [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9n1FMEruSM[/yt] Please make those godawful blaring horns stop. I feel like I'm trapped between a disco and a marching band.
I don't mean to be too obvious here, but Enterprise's theme during seasons 3 and 4 is terrible, whereas before it had been sort of okay.
seaQuest 2032's theme song was pretty terrible, especially in comparison in to the seaQuest DSV theme.
Law and Order. because the uk channel it was on changed the theme to a really awesome one and i had no idea the original was such a dreary piece of music until recently. also, Firefly.
I agree with those who'd mentioned ENT's season 3-4 variant (the original version of "Faith of the Heart" was actually pretty tolerable IMO) and SeaQuest 2032 (the original SeaQuest DSV theme was actually really good!). Many of the TV themes of the 80s and 90s, which may have sounded good at the time (?), have not aged well - The Facts of Life is the first that comes to mind.