> Its music held some promise at the start as Abel Korzeniowski, who’d done
> a bang-up job on Showtime’s earlier horror series Penny Dreadful,
> was announced as the composer in August 2019 before shooting had
> commenced. But showrunner turmoil and the stop-start nature of the
> production somehow resulted in his departure from the project, and a month
> before the show aired it was revealed Sean Callery was on board as
> composer. Callery had done capable work on a limited budget for 24
> and backed the Netflix Jessica Jones series with some nice noir
> tones, so there was still reason for optimism. But even with Callery
> creating multiple new themes, the end result was a shockingly nondescript
> regurgitation of modern action tropes, leaving little sense that this had
> anything to do with the Halo franchise. It’s not as much of a bad
> score as it is a confounding entry in the context of a franchise with an
> established musical legacy. Blame shouldn’t be thrown at the composer but
> rather the producers and the network; the uncertainty about what kind of
> show they were making would have necessitated substantial compromises for
> any composer, and poor Callery seemed to be in a no-win situation.

> A second season dropped in March 2024, and while it was seen by some as an
> improvement (how could it not be?) the show was canceled that summer.
> Callery wasn’t retained for season 2, but someone still on the show made
> the kind of composer choice that made me gasp and tell my wife it was
> almost enough of a reason to watch the new season: Bear McCreary
> and his Sparks & Shadows crew (or more specifically Etienne
> Monsaingeon, Alexandre Cote, and Brendan Mercer). McCreary provided a new
> arrangement of O’Donnell’s series theme for the main title sequence while
> all other composing seemed to have been done by his team. None of their
> work has been officially released, though in a bizarre turn of events an
> album of Callery’s score for the first season was finally released months
> after the show was canceled.

All the stories I heard from the production of this series, they rat fucked Sean Callery, period. end of story. No if, ands or buts about it.