There’s a reason Lizzie McAlpine’s “Doomsday” lives on in the hearts of “School Spirits” fans like a ghost haunting the hallways of Split River High School. For Whitney Pilzer, the music supervisor who has been behind Paramount+’s paranormal mystery series since its first season, moments like that weren’t intentional.
“It’s so impossible to predict,” Pilzer says of the song’s response after it set the scene for one of Season 1’s most memorable scenes, when Maddie is thrust into purgatory by the ghost Janet. “But we all knew ‘Doomsday’ was special, and the way our music editor Todd cut it in particular, it landed perfectly.”
That instinct was built in from the beginning. In his first meeting with showrunners Nate and Megan, Pilzer says he quickly learned that music wasn’t an afterthought. “They were honest about how much they love music,” she says. “We started riffing on artists we love, and they shared huge Spotify playlists that they had created while writing, songs that inspired them. We have really similar tastes.” From that first conversation, she knew the show was going to be something different. “It turned out to be a great opportunity for maximum creative expression.”
Three seasons in, “School Spirits” has quietly become one of the most musically ambitious shows on streaming. The Paramount+ series follows a group of ghosts trapped in a purgatory within a high school, and uses its premise — characters tied to different decades — as both its narrative and musical engine. The result was a timeless soundtrack without feeling like a jukebox, supported by a rotating cast of artists whose voices became part of the show’s identity. “One of the greatest joys of being a music director is being able to move the needle for artists,” she told Variety. “It’s a really great experience.”
Nowhere is the period-specific approach more vivid than in Season 3, Episode 4. Ghosts take mushrooms with them as they spiral into a full-on psychedelic dance number to Sufjan Stevens’ “Chicago.” It’s a sequence built around Quinn’s arc of self-discovery. The team initially researched tracks from the ’60s and ’70s until Pilzer and the showrunners (all of whom were in high school around the same time as Quinn’s character, circa 2004) realized that a more personal choice was the right one. “Chicago was really a coming-of-age anthem for all of us in real life,” Pilzer says. “It felt so magical to tap into that for Quinn’s journey of self-discovery.”
Getting there, however, is a process that begins much earlier than most people think. Pilzer was one of the people involved from start to finish, from the moment the script arrived to final delivery. Before she reads the Season 3 scripts, she builds up a large bin of cleared music organized by budget tier for editors to use when putting together rough cuts.
She’s candid about how budget is a really important factor. “We have budget constraints, so we’re appealing to labels and publishers to have these three tiers of music boxes so we can be really strategic,” she says. If a song appears outside of the affordable range, the team will make calculations by adjusting other placements within the episode. This negotiation continues until the final mix. “It really felt like a giant puzzle the whole time,” she says.
Sometimes the puzzle produces happy coincidences. Pilzer had Djo’s “Potion” in one of his edit boxes, largely based on personal enthusiasm. She heard it over and over again. She was thrilled when she saw it organically appear in a montage of rough cuts that had been quietly placed there by her editor. “I was so excited because I had been listening to that song over and over again,” she says. The cover of K. Flay’s “Brain Stew,” used for a long, silent montage of Maddie looking at old photos in her school bedroom, was a tougher fight. “We knew it was going to be expensive, but we worked around it so we could maintain it,” Pilzer says.
For Wally’s crossover moment in episode 7, the team considered nearly 80 options, even considering 80s songs to reflect Wally’s era, before settling on Joy Oladokun and Jensen McRae’s “wish you the best.” “Music is often used to correct bad acting,” Pilzer says frankly. “But with our show we don’t have to do that. The performances are incredible. The music just needs to support what’s already there.”
This is a feeling shared not only by the cast, but by the entire production. Sarah Yakin, who plays Rhonda, helped source the song for Rhonda and Quinn’s long-awaited first kiss after the team considered countless options. When Miles Elliott, who plays Yuri, asked if they could use songs by major artists on set, Pilzer had to gently explain financial reasons. “I was like, ‘If only I could cough up 100,000 coughs,'” she laughs.
McAlpine, who has featured music every season, is back in a completely different form this season. It was discovered during production that the singer-songwriter considers “Doomsday” among her favorite uses of music, so a Joan Baez-inspired arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” was written into the script for her first on-camera performance. She made a recording of the arrangement herself for the show. “She was very professional, very impressive,” Pilzer said.
The recurring use of artists such as McAlpine, Ethel Caine, Joe, and Rachel Chinourili over multiple seasons is intentional. Pilzer sees it less as a matter of brand consistency and more as a matter of true world-building: how to give a show a sound that’s as recognizable as its setting. “Their voices are part of the fabric of the show,” she says. “Music not only emphasizes the emotions of the characters, but also shapes the characters’ worlds. It’s a character in itself.”
For a show built around characters who can’t move on, its music has a surprising habit of lingering in your ears long after the credits roll.
