The Sopranos changed the channel
The Sopranos changed television forever, Chris Harvey writes.
Remember a time before box sets, before binge viewing, before streaming? A time when families talked to one another, people ate at dinner tables? You’re remembering a time before The Sopranos.
Ten years ago, on June 10,
2007, the first great novelistic television series came to an end, after six seasons and 86 episodes. The saga about New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano and his dysfunctional family changed TV forever. It may have come with the traditional mob trappings — a strip club, shiny suits, Italian food and a parade of people getting “whacked” — but it was about a lot more than that. It was about power, masculinity and the limits of the American dream.
And the series did something no TV drama had done before: it jettisoned constant action and self-contained episodes for long, drawn-out plots and characters that evolved slowly — like real human beings — as the series progressed. Its central character — played by the late James Gandolfini — may have been a bulked-up, brutal, iddriven monster, who grabbed for whatever he wanted to satisfy his appetites — stuffing his face, bedding women, taking casual, bloody revenge — but, to our horror, we grew to like him. This was thanks to the brilliance of Gandolfini’s acting and the unprecedented insight we were given into his family life — from his long-suffering wife, sassy daughter, and spoiled, overweight son, to his carping, critical mother Livia ( based on creator David Chase’s own mother).
Chase’s other masterstroke was to give Tony Soprano a psychiatrist, whom he visits in the first episode after suffering a panic attack, and who goes on to analyze the void he feels because of a mother who never loved him.
Chase harnessed the power of the writers’ room, mixing and matching writers and directors who could give him what he needed for different elements. Terence Winter, who would go on to create Boardwalk Empire, was his “go-to guy” for scenes of violence or psychological terror. The young Matthew Weiner (Mad Men) was a writer Chase saw as capable of creating vivid characters.
In another time, the series would never have been made.
But revolutionary currents were forming in cable television, such as HBO, which made The Sopranos; they weren’t reliant on advertising or the mores of middle America, and were beginning to experiment with original drama and complex narratives, discovering what novelists have always known: people like deep, long, character-rich stories.
After the success of The Sopranos, other daring long-form dramas with conflicted, unheroic central characters were green-lit, leading to an unbroken succession of classic TV series. Former news reporter David Simon created the Baltimore drugs-trade drama The Wire (2002), out of two great works of journalism — Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997).
The cops of the homicide squad where Simon was embedded for a year soon realized the young reporter was not just tagging along, but taking down everything they said, the casual banter, the office clashes, everything. When he came to write The Wire, it was peopled with living, breathing characters whose deaths, when they arrive — such as when Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell orders the murder of his boss’s conflicted, likable nephew in prison — can be unbearable.
Unbearable is good. Like misery, it is an emotion that loves company, and the culture is driven by the conversations viewers have about what they’ve been watching. Some of its masterpieces have been slow-burning monuments to the faith of their makers. Breaking Bad, for instance, the story of a high school chemistry teacher with terminal lung cancer who decides to make quick money selling methamphetamine, didn’t reach peak momentum until at least season 4.
Of course, lots of us have now experienced the horror of the Red Wedding in Game of Thrones, or seen Kevin Spacey’s Frank Underwood in House of Cards opine that “democracy is so overrated.” In fact, now that we have discovered our taste for them, everyone is on the lookout for their next high-quality, boxset binge.
But is all this premium-quality television doing us any good? One survey last year suggested that we spend eight years, 10 months of our life watching TV — and around eight months talking about it. And the hours we spend watching without exercising will eventually kill us, according to Japanese researchers, who found that every additional two hours of viewing per day increases the risk of fatal pulmonary embolism by 40 per cent.
It may not be good for our physical health, but at least we have lived through an age where television drama stopped rotting our minds — and for that we have Tony Soprano to thank.
London Daily Telegraph