The opening theme music was memorable and the best part of the series.
Yeah, it was indeed pretty much the best part of the series... Unfortunately, despite the potential of BIG VALLEY -- a well-cast show with
some pretty good episodes, most of the show was pretty by-rote and pedestrian. And, despite the title, a program that felt largely interior (the exterior scenes filmed someplace bland and non-cinematic like Thousand Oaks, southern California). And while they had to, for budget reasons, shoot locally around Los Angeles in areas which were (then) undeveloped, there are almost no establishing shots of the San Joaquin Valley that they could have used within the body of the episodes -- only existing in the opening theme (and only in Seasons 3 and 4, really).
Probably weirdly complicated by Stanwyck's contract clause that demanded that all her close-ups had to be shot indoors (even for scenes filmed outside for the master shots) under controlled studio lighting conditions. And then the other actors' close-ups had to match.
And there seemed to be only one new musical score per season, the cues from that score repeated endlessly through that particular season. (Common in '60s TV).
There were two vibes for the four-year-long series: a mood of decay and loss for the first two seasons, and a more grand guignol (mildly "mod") tone for the last two seasons. In keeping with the quickly shifting zeitgeist of the last-half of that decade.. (All of that description sounds slightly exaggerated, as it really only applies to the better episodes -- and the color neo-noir installments were really the only ones that worked).
The rest of them could be so danged boring...!
I also view the series' title as a bit of a 1960s metaphor -- as I've always envisioned the decade as being, literally, a large valley, gradually rising upward during the last-half of the '60s... Just as the early-'60s was a funereal, end-of-the-world twilight zone (like
that show).
Silly subjectivity -- or objective profundity? We never found out...
