There’s a reason Lizzy McAlpine‘s “Doomsday” now lives in the minds of “School Spirits” fans the way ghosts haunt the hallways of Split River High. For Whitney Pilzer, the music supervisor behind Paramount+’s supernatural mystery series since its first season, moments like that one aren’t engineered.
“It’s so impossible to predict,” Pilzer says of the song’s viral resonance after it scored one of Season 1’s most memorable sequences — Maddie being pushed into purgatory by ghost Janet. “But we all knew ‘Doomsday’ was just special. Especially the way our music editor Todd cut it in. It just landed perfectly.”
That instinct was baked in from the start. In her first meeting with showrunners Nate and Megan, Pilzer says it was immediately clear that music wasn’t going to be an afterthought. “They were very upfront that they love music,” she says. “We started riffing on artists we loved, and they shared these massive Spotify playlists they’d make while writing — songs that inspired them. We have really similar tastes.” From that first conversation, she knew the show would be something different. “I could tell it was such an incredible opportunity to just have full creative expression.”
Three seasons in, “School Spirits” has quietly become one of the more musically ambitious shows on streaming. The Paramount+ series, which follows a group of ghosts stuck in purgatory inside their high school, uses its premise — characters tethered to different decades — as both a narrative engine and a musical one. The result is a soundtrack that spans eras without feeling like a jukebox, anchored by a rotating cast of artists whose voices have become part of the show’s identity. “That’s one of the most gratifying things as a music supervisor — to have a placement move the needle for an artist,” she tells Variety. “It’s a very cool experience.”
Nowhere is that era-specific approach more vivid than in Season 3, Episode 4, when the ghosts take shrooms and spiral into a full psychedelic dance number set to Sufjan Stevens‘ “Chicago” — a sequence built around Quinn’s self-discovery arc. The team initially explored tracks from the ’60s and ’70s before Pilzer and the showrunners — who were all in high school around the same time as Quinn’s character, circa 2004 — realized the more personal choice was the right one. “Chicago was such a coming-of-age anthem for all of us in real life,” Pilzer says. “To use that for Quinn’s self-discovery journey just felt so magical.”
Getting there, though, requires a process that starts much earlier than most people realize. Pilzer is one of the first people on and the last off, involved from the moment scripts arrive all the way through final delivery. Before she even reads a script for Season 3, she’s building out massive bins of pre-cleared music, organized by budget tier, for editors to pull from as rough cuts come together.
Budget, she’s candid about, is a real factor. “We have budget constraints, so I’m going out to labels and publishers saying I need bins of music in these three tiers so we can be really strategic,” she says. When a song lands that’s outside the affordable range, the team works around other placements in the episode to make the math work — a negotiation that runs all the way through the final mix. “It really just felt like a huge puzzle the whole time,” she says.
Occasionally, that puzzle produces happy accidents. Pilzer had included Djo’s “Potion” in one of her editor bins largely on personal enthusiasm — she’d been listening to it on repeat. When she saw it appear organically in a rough cut montage, placed there quietly by an editor, she was thrilled. “I listened to that song on repeat, so I was really excited,” she says. The K.Flay cover of “Brain Stew,” used over a long, quiet montage of Maddie looking at old photos in her school bedroom, was a harder fight. “We knew it was going to be expensive, but we worked around it so we could keep it,” Pilzer says.
In Wally’s crossing-over moment in Episode 7, the team explored nearly 80 options — at one point considering ’80s tracks to reflect Wally’s era — before landing on Joy Oladokun and Jensen McRae’s “wish you the best.” “Music is used a lot of times to fix bad acting,” Pilzer says plainly. “But we don’t have to do that on our show. The performances are incredible. The music is able to just support what’s already there.”
It’s a sentiment shared across the whole production extending to the cast as well. Sarah Yarkin, who plays Rhonda, helped source the song used over Rhonda and Quinn’s long-awaited first kiss after the team cycled through countless options. When Miles Elliot, who plays Yuri, asked on set if they could use a song from a major artist, Pilzer had to gently explain the economics. “I was like, ‘well, if you can cough up 100k,'” she laughs.
McAlpine, whose music has been featured in every season, returned this season in a different form entirely. The singer-songwriter was written into the script to perform a Joan Baez-inspired arrangement of “House of the Rising Sun” — her first time on camera — after the production learned she considered the “Doomsday” placement among her favorite uses of her music ever. She created her own recording of the arrangement for the show. “She was so pro. It was very impressive,” Pilzer says.
The recurring use of artists like McAlpine, Ethel Cain, Djo, Rachel Chinouriri and others across multiple seasons is intentional. Pilzer sees is less a matter of brand consistency than of genuine world-building — a way of giving the show a sound as recognizable as its setting. “Their voices have become part of the fabric of the show,” she says. “Music shapes the world of our characters rather than just underscoring their emotions. It’s a character in its own right.”
For a show built around characters who can’t move on, its music has a striking habit of staying with you long after the credits roll.
English (US) ·