There was All in the Family, with its humanized bigot, Archie Bunker the morally complex Hill Street Blues and other unconventional fare, such as Twin Peaks and the prison series Oz. Granted, it wasn’t the first series to push the envelope. The networks imposed rigid standards and rules when it came to language, story lines, sex, violence, race, and other content-controversial subject matter was anathema, and nobody wanted to rock the boat, or, heaven forbid, alienate the sponsors.
“Pre- Sopranos TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life,” write critics Matt Zoller Seitz of New York magazine and Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone-both of whom covered the show for the Newark Star-Ledger-in their 2019 book, The Sopranos Sessions. Written by Chase and Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, the film explores the social and familial forces that helped shape a sensitive, impressionable youth into the angst-ridden mobster who riveted audiences from 1999 to 2007.Īnd what was it, exactly, that made The Sopranos can’t-miss TV during those years? For one thing, it was unlike anything that came before. Now The Sopranos gained a whole new kind of currency with the release in October 2021 of a prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, starring James’s son, Michael Gandolfini, as a young Tony coming of age in the titular city during the racially charged summer of 1967.
A book by Deborrah Himsel, Leadership Sopranos Style: How to Become a More Effective Boss, holds up the fictional New Jersey mob boss as a model manager, if you overlook a few cold-blooded murders. It has largely supplanted The Godfather as the go-to mafia reference Donald Trump’s brazenly transactional tenure in the White House earned him plenty of unfavorable comparisons to Tony Soprano.
And the series is now ingrained in the lexicon. Pushing creative and moral boundaries along with audience expectations, it influenced a raft of prestige TV that followed in its wake-including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, and Game of Thrones (some of which involved writers and directors who worked on The Sopranos).
As countless critics have noted, the richly textured, complex work-centered as it was on a nuanced antihero-redefined high-quality television. In part, of course, we can thank internet streaming services that guarantee video immortality-but it’s also because creator David Chase injected the series into our cultural bloodstream. The following is adapted from the introduction to LIFE’s new special issue The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Everything, available at newsstands and online:įourteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run with a famously abrupt blackout-and eight years after its indelible star, James Gandolfini, died of an infinitely more tragic heart attack-HBO’s transformational mob family masterpiece lives on.