The Sopranos Changed Television Forever (Mostly for the Better): ’99 Rewind
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The post The Sopranos Changed Television Forever (Mostly for the Better): ’99 Rewind appeared first on Consequence.
Welcome to ’99 Rewind, our celebration of 25th anniversaries of the films, TV, and music from 1999. To kick things off, time to get yourself a gun as we look back at The Sopranos.
In 1999, TV was ready to grow up. While compelling series had been produced for the small screen for decades, the medium was largely seen by both the industry and critics as inferior to film. To be sure, unlike movies, TV had the power to engage with audiences on a much more personal level: By bringing memorable characters directly into our homes, where they’d pay weekly visits for years at a time, classic series like Hill Street Blues, Cheers, and ER created deep emotional connections with their audiences.
However, in the age when broadcast TV still reigned supreme, the demands of 22-episode seasons and limited budgets did sometimes mean that the storytelling could struggle on a week-by-week basis, and the production quality wasn’t always equal to what you might see at the local multiplex. You could feel a desire within the world of television to raise the game in the 1990s, whether it was NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street bringing deep nuance to the world of crime procedurals, or The X-Files experimenting with black-and-white episodes and long one-shots.
The Sopranos wasn’t the first HBO drama to push toward greatness, but it became the first one to transform not just how cable television was seen by the general public, but television at large. And it feels exceptionally apt as a portrait of what 1999 represents as a year — the turn of the century coinciding with major cultural moments that brought about true upheaval. That’s exactly what The Sopranos did, unlike any show before it or since.
There’s a quantifiable way of measuring this, and it comes from looking at the Emmy Awards. The Sopranos was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the Emmys every year it was eligible, beginning with Season 1. It didn’t receive the trophy during its early run, as it happened to coincide with the heyday of The West Wing, which won the top prize for four consecutive years. But after creator Aaron Sorkin left the NBC political drama, it lost enough shine for The Sopranos to make history with Season 5 as the first cable series to win in this category.
That first win represents a major tipping point for television as a whole: Since The Sopranos’ victory in 2004, only two more broadcast dramas to date have won the Outstanding Drama Emmy: Lost in 2005 (a year where The Sopranos was not eligible) and 24 in 2006 (when only the first half of The Sopranos Season 6 was considered).
Since the final season of Sopranos won in 2007, no broadcast drama has won in this category, and broadcast dramas in general now struggle to be nominated. (NBC’s This Is Us Season 5 managed to sneak in in 2021, a rare exception.) At a certain point post-Sopranos, all TV networks wanted to be HBO, which is to say they wanted to not be TV on some level. It’s not hard to figure out why: Only recently has TV been praised for its virtues above the world of film. Prior to that point, the industry’s inferiority complex was massive — though even the most snooty cinephile, back in the day, would deign to admit that they liked The Sopranos.
To rave about how The Sopranos raised the bar for television on a creative level feels redundant after 25 years of non-stop praise; from the show’s earliest days, critics found the almost meta take on gangster life intriguing, at the very least. (Oh, except for Hal Boedeker of The Orlando Sentinel, who said in his January 1999 review that “a gangster’s midlife crisis is a weak, unpalatable premise for a series.”)
It wasn’t just beautifully made and beautifully acted by a stellar ensemble: As culture writer Steven Johnson wrote in his 2005 book Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, the complex storylines of the series, with several narrative threads spread out across multiple episodes, were challenging enough to actually help the viewer improve their cognitive abilities. It certainly taught viewers the skillset needed to remember multiple mafiosos and their shifting allegiances.
Yet the ways in which The Sopranos changed TV aren’t all necessarily positive. Let me put it like this: In the days before DVRs, when you’d sit on your couch on Sunday right at 9:00 p.m. to watch a new episode of Six Feet Under or The Wire, a speedy sizzle reel spotlighting HBO’s other notable original programming would play beforehand — just a series of quick flashes of faces. James Gandolfini’s was usually the first to appear, then a side-by-side shot of Michael C. Hall and Peter Krause, and so on.
Maybe sometimes, to represent The Wire, Michael Kenneth Williams would be featured instead of Dominic West, or there’d be a shot of Sex and the City’s Sarah Jessica Parker. But the message was pretty clear: If HBO is the definition of premium television, then premium television is about white men.
Blaming the proliferation of white male TV anti-heroes on The Sopranos isn’t quite fair to The Sopranos, but the connection between that show’s success and countless imitators that followed is hard to deny. TV’s greatest storytellers have spent the years since The Sopranos premiered convinced that the male antihero is the perfect protagonist, and there’s no way of quantifying the amount of toxic male energy that’s put out into the universe.
Not to mention the degree to which shows like this have reduced people of color to stereotypes and female characters of all races into virgins or whores… Actually, women on antihero TV shows are less about the binary and more like the Three Fates of mythology: virgin, whore, and bitch.
Carmela (Edie Falco) was always one of The Sopranos’ most fascinating characters, morally complicit in her husband’s actions and doing her best to not think about that too much. It was a career-defining role for Falco, but with Carmela often put in the position of having to scold Tony for infractions big and small, it’s not a surprise to find online commentary debating her as a character, even today. On The Sopranos subreddit, a post asking “Why so much hate for Carmela??” was posted nine months ago and currently has over 300 comments.
In the Reddit discussion, the question gets debated with some reasonable nuance, with plenty of Carm defenders speaking up. However, many also raise the same point that Breaking Bad star Anna Gunn made in a 2013 New York Times editorial about the fan reaction to her character on that show, Skyler White:
“As an actress, I realize that viewers are entitled to have whatever feelings they want about the characters they watch. But as a human being, I’m concerned that so many people react to Skyler with such venom. Could it be that they can’t stand a woman who won’t suffer silently or ‘stand by her man’? That they despise her because she won’t back down or give up? Or because she is, in fact, Walter’s equal?
“It’s notable that viewers have expressed similar feelings about other complex TV wives — Carmela Soprano of The Sopranos, Betty Draper of Mad Men. Male characters don’t seem to inspire this kind of public venting and vitriol.”
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For over a decade after The Sopranos, as Gunn nods to, the glorification of male antiheroes was such a trend that FX’s John Landgraf infamously passed on Breaking Bad because it would have been the network’s fourth male antihero series. In the last ten years, we’ve seen things shift enough that characters like Tony Soprano or Walter White are no longer considered an essential element of prestige TV.
Or at least, it’s increasingly common to see women characters in equally compromised positions: Laura Linney got to be just as vicious as Jason Bateman on Ozark — more so, even — and watching Cersei (Lena Headey) at the height of her vicious powers kept us hooked on Game of Thrones.
That’s a course correction that took a while, yet in order for those characters to exist at all, the power of the TV antihero as a general concept had to be established. And that remains perhaps The Sopranos‘ most powerful legacy, as the show didn’t just shift our attitudes about TV, but about the kinds of characters we want to watch on TV.
Tony Soprano’s ruthlessness, as played by Gandolfini, was just one facet of what made him so compelling a protagonist — a nuanced character, developed with depth and maturity over the series’ run. And he was surrounded by people equally complicated on a moral level, including Carmela herself. Even if you didn’t know what it was like to live next door to a mobster, you could recognize those sorts of grey areas in the world around you, the kinds of grey areas that TV has come to excel at exploring.
Twenty-five years after Tony sat down for his first therapy session (and 17 years after a family dinner at the local diner ended with a sharp cut to black), TV has reached a level of maturity no one could have anticipated, with the best creators now eager to explore what’s possible when you tell a story over many episodes, maybe for many seasons. That’s a gift given to us, at least in part, by the legitimacy The Sopranos brought to the medium. Long may it stream.
The Sopranos is available now on Max.
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The Sopranos Changed Television Forever (Mostly for the Better): ’99 Rewind
Liz Shannon Miller
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