Sopranos writer: Clever TV has been whacked...
I’ve already been asked to dumb it down. It’s a funeral
SOPRANOS creator David Chase has claimed “clever TV is dying” after being told to “dumb down” future productions.
Instead of celebrating the 25th birthday of the hit HBO series, he said “maybe we should look at it like a funeral” as it couldn’t be made now.
Chase created the criticallyacclaimed series, about mafia boss Tony Soprano, played by the late James Gandolfini, coping with family and work, which often tops the list of greatest TV shows.
Talking to The Times about the 25th anniversary of the drama which debuted in 1999, the 78-year-old writer and producer reflected on the start of increasingly higher-quality TV shows in the 1990s and 2000s,.
Ground-breaking series such as The Wire, The West Wing and Breaking Bad led many critics to say the viewing public was enjoying a golden age of television.
However, Chase said instead of celebrating 25 years “maybe we should look at it like a funeral”.
He added: “That was a blip. A 25-year blip, and to be clear, I’m not talking only about The Sopranos, but a lot of other hugely-talented people out there who I feel increasingly bad for.”
Chase added before the 1990s and 2000s, US channels were an “artistic pit” and a “s***hole” He said: “The process was repulsive. In meetings these people would always ask to take out the one thing that made an episode worth doing. I should have quit.”
However, Chase claimed streaming companies are now “going back to where I was”, and also putting in commercials, referring to Amazon’s Prime Video and Netflix introducing advertisements on their platforms.
He added: “I’ve already been told to dumb it down. So, it is a funeral – something is dying.”
Since The Sopranos ended in 2007 after six series, Chase has had a highlysuccessful film career.
In 2012 he released Not Fade Away, about friends starting a rock band in the 1960s, also starring Gandolfini, who died of a heart attack in Italy in 2013 aged just 51.
In the Writers Guild Of America list of the 101 best-written TV series, The Sopranos emerged as No1.
The union said it “did indeed become a show about a mob boss with mother problems”.
But it added: “It quickly sprawled to comment upon, or observe, innumerable aspects of American life, from the efficacy of psychotherapy to how a family-run business, even the Mafia, was dying out to corporatising culture”.