HISTORY's Moment in Media: "The Sopranos" Ushers in the Golden Age of TV

But HBO truly stopped being mere TV at 9 pm on January 10 1999 23 years ago this month when The Sopranos premiered The family drama about a mobster with a shrink would go on to run for six critically acclaimed seasons and in that time it would transform the network revolutionize the medium and launch the modern golden age of prestige TVThe Sopranos was the creation of David Chase a longtime and successful TV writer who chafed against the simplistic storytelling that dominated the medium and always harbored dreams of making feature films An Italian American devotee of Mafia stories he39d had the idea for a project about a mobster in therapy Fox commissioned Chase to make a pilot which he didn39t think would go anywhere most pilots don39t but he hoped it would parlay into a calling card for a chance to make a bigscreen movie After Fox passed Chase39s agent shopped it to a network that was looking to make a name for itself HBOThe critics were unanimously rapturous After that first season wrapped The New York Times declared that quotit just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter centuryquot As Esquire would later write quotit made TV grow upquot Before The Sopranos NBC39s medical drama ER was the epitome of a respected dramatic series full of dogooder doctors who only screwed up because they cared too much Starting with The Sopranos ambitious TV series were more like well movies with novelistic sweeps complicated antiheroes and ambiguous resolutionsChase desperate to get from TV to the movies had brought the movies to TVHBO became near synonymous with ambitious television Sex and the City had premiered just six months before Six Feet Under would debut two years later Then in just the next handful of years came The Wire Big Love Angels in America Da Ali G Show and EntourageMore than that Chase39s insistence on complicated ambitious storytelling soon spread across the cable dial and eventually across streaming services In some cases the lineage was direct Writer and producer Matthew Weiner created Mad Men and brought it to AMC after HBO passed on it Fellow writer and producer Terence Winter created HBO39s Boardwalk Empire Writers Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess created the CBS drama Blue Bloods and writer Todd A Kessler helped create FX39s DamagesAnd the model HBO pioneered establish your brand with a big ambitious show was soon picked up by other networks and services too Just as Mad Men made AMC Orange Is the New Black made Netflix and Transparent made Amazon PrimeNearly 20 years later The Sopranos is still going strong Early in the pandemic HBO reported that viewership for the trendsetting series had spiked 179 percent a new generation with plenty of time on its hands had rediscovered its pleasuresOr maybe it39s that even all this time later and amid a pandemic surrounded by political dysfunction and battered by a pending climate crisis its recurring message about societal decline seems just as relevant quotIt39s good to be in on something from the ground floorquot Tony Soprano famously said in the pilot episode scripted by Chase quotI came too late for that and I know But lately I39m getting the feeling that I came in at the end The best is overquotClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: "The Sopranos" Ushers in the Golden Age of TV

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: "The Sopranos" Ushers in the Golden Age of TV

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