I’m always late to a series. I started Game of Thrones in 2017, six years after the first episode aired, and Breaking Bad in 2019, six years after it ended. I don’t like waiting a year for the next season, so I wait until there’s nothing left to wait for, and then I watch the whole thing in one go.
Dark, Netflix’s first German original series, was no different. By the time I got to it in 2024, all three seasons had been out for years, and I’d heard enough about its mind-bending plot to know it was a must-watch. I binged it the way I watch almost everything, lying in bed with the show playing on my Samsung Galaxy Tab S9+.
The story starts with children going missing in a small German town and turns on something like the grandfather paradox, with people travelling through time and getting tangled up in their own families’ past. I’d already watched plenty of YouTube videos on time-travel paradoxes and multiple universes, so it wasn’t as complicated as I’d been led to believe. It still ranks pretty high for me, because of the tight editing, the acting, the cinematography and a sombre soundtrack.
Somewhere in the first season, in an episode I can’t place any more, Familiar came on. I don’t remember the scene as well as I’d like to, but I remember the effect. That voice against that scene was perfection. The music didn’t announce anything. It arrived, and the scene became something else entirely. I had Shazam open before it finished.
Before Shazam, finding a song like that was so hard it was funny. Wherever I heard it, I’d try to hold on to one line of the lyrics, save it in a note, and search for it on Google later. It usually took a couple of attempts, but most of the time I’d get there in the end. With Familiar, Shazam had the answer in seconds: Agnes Obel.
She’s a Danish singer and pianist, and the song is from her 2016 album Citizen of Glass. Her voice sits slightly off from where you expect it, never quite centred and never quite steady, and that is most of the trick. Then a second, much lower voice comes in and sings with her. I only found out later that it’s her own voice too, pitched down until it sounds like someone else, a ghost keeping her company. Put that over the strings and the piano and you get something that feels very old and a little unsettling at the same time.
I have a special admiration for the people who choose songs for scenes like that. It’s a job most viewers never think about, but when they get it right, I get two things out of it. The scene becomes one I remember, and I get a new song for my playlist. The best example I know is Ramin Djawadi’s The Night King in Game of Thrones, eight minutes and fifty seconds of piano that carries the end of the Long Night, and I’ve written about it before.
It still happens, most recently with Reacher, one of the few shows I’ve followed from the start. If I catch a series from its first season, I’ll keep up as long as each new season comes out within two years of the last. Any longer than that and I skip it. Just last week I added Sweet Forever by Mondo Cozmo after hearing it at the end of the fourth season of Reacher. It plays as Reacher shares a sandwich with a lonely woman at the same place where, in the first episode, he couldn’t save another one.
Familiar has been on that playlist since 2024. It’s a heavy song, so it doesn’t come on that often now, but there were days when it was on repeat, days when work was weighing on me and I kept thinking about people who aren’t around any more. Some songs feel cinematic. This one feels like fog, silence and late-night thoughts.
