I thought long and hard about whether I should write this post [1]. In addition to being the sort of contrarian opinion that tends to seem kind of pompous (see footnote), it also concerns a subject (the role of The Sopranos in TV history) that only a small subset of TV watchers even care about, a subset I'm not even sure overlaps with this blog's readership. In the end, though, I decided to go ahead with it, consequences be darned. So, if you're part of that subset who cares about this stuff, welcome! Hope you enjoy the post! If you aren't, well, you're in for a long post full of stuff you don't care about, but welcome all the same! Really, though, this is a long post, so I guess I should just get on with it before it gets any longer.
Here's what I think: the way most critics[2] position The Sopranos as an unprecedented, watershed event in television history that brought the medium to new heights of artistry is fundamentally wrongheaded.
Now, first of all, note that I am not saying that The Sopranos sucks, or even that it isn't great, or that television isn't in the middle of one of its most artistically fruitful periods ever. I'm a relative newcomer to the show (having been only eight years old when its pilot aired), but I definitely believe The Sopranos is an extremely accomplished, sophisticated series worth celebrating. And I also believe that the last fifteen-ish years of television have been an embarrassment of riches, full of stylistic diversity, challenging programming, and a whole lot of innovation. And honestly, The Sopranos has a lot to do with this embarrassment of riches, too (more on that later). However, the prevailing narrative among certain TV-viewing intellectuals that The Sopranos saved TV from perennial mediocrity or that The Sopranos is the genesis of serious TV drama or that The Sopranos was the moment that TV became an art form—I just think that shows either an ignorance or a misunderstanding of television history.
I've got a lot of reasons for thinking that the critics are wrong about The Sopranos—enough that it's kind of unwieldy to explain them in the argumentatively linear, essay-style way that I normally do on this blog. So, for the sake of readability, I'm going to just list a bunch of things The Sopranos is given credit for innovating and then do my best to explain why each one doesn't hold water for me. It's not the most eloquent way to structure an argument, but there's a kind of structural simplicity to it that's appealing. Or maybe it's just that I'm still stuck in year-end list-making mode.
Obviously, I'm going to be making generalizations about opinions and ideas surrounding The Sopranos, so let me admit up front that I'm aware that more nuanced versions of these ideas exist. But, for the sake of argument economy, I'm just going to hit the most common denominators in Sopranos adulation.
Sex, Violence, and Language
This first one's the easiest to refute, especially since the refutation stems from facts that are pretty well-known. But for some reason, it's also one of the most common points of discussion when bringing up The Sopranos' innovations. Here's the popular narrative: due to the standards of decency on the once-dominant broadcast networks (i.e. ABC, NBC, CBS, and, eventually, FOX), television's treatment of sex, violence, and "blue" language was repressively coy and rife with censorship, but the 1999 debut of The Sopranos on the censor-free HBO showed television's possibilities for unbridled profanity, nudity, and gore.
The first problem with this idea is that it completely ignores how cultural watchdogs have always criticized television for being a cesspool of violence, sex, and, to a lesser extent, foul language. It's a stance that dates back decades prior to The Sopranos. That's not to say that broadcast networks didn't have censoring practices (one of the most infamous being the prohibition of showing married couples sharing a single bed in television's first few decades), but for the most part, sex and violence have always been a presence on the TV landscape. Profanity is a more recent addition, first appearing in the late '60s, but even then, that's still thirty years before anyone had heard of Tony Soprano.
Oh yeah, and Lucy couldn't say "pregnant." So yes, censoring existed.
Now, there's no question that The Sopranos' use of sex, violence, and profanity is more explicit than, say, Columbo's. But, by 1999, it wasn't exactly unprecedented, either. Premium cable channels like Showtime and HBO had been around since at least the early '80s, and almost from the beginning, such networks realized that their freedom from broadcast television standards allowed them to show content that NBC, CBS, etc. couldn't. So The Sopranos wasn't exactly the first time cable TV had heard the word "fuck" or seen a breast. It wasn't even the first artistically serious series (i.e. not porn) to have that sort of content; on HBO alone, Oz, The Larry Sanders Show, and Sex and the City are scripted shows that all predate The Sopranos and feature nudity, profanity, and (at least on Oz) graphic violence. Even network television was tending toward more explicit content and had been since at least the '70s. By the mid-'90s, ABC's NYPD Blue had characters saying "shit" and baring buttocks, and although that series was edgier than most network series (and, in fact, routinely received FCC fines for said edginess), there's no denying that network television had gotten pretty violent and pretty sexy by the time The Sopranos rolled around. Now admittedly, the language on The Sopranos was much coarser than even NYPD Blue, but honestly, to this observer, the list of sexual and violent content The Sopranos has over its broadcast contemporaries is pretty small [3]. In fact, as far violence goes, The Sopranos is, save for a few extremely gruesome moments that don't even occur in every season, basically on-par with several broadcast network shows, explicitness-wise (The X-Files, anyone?).
All that is to say, The Sopranos' use of explicit content[4] wasn't so much groundbreaking or innovative as it was in line with ongoing trends in the TV medium—a conclusion that we're going to see a lot of before the end of this post.
Serialization
Another innovation The Sopranos is regularly credited with is the rise of serialization in TV. The story goes that before The Sopranos, TV was an episodic medium, with all its stories wrapping up before the credits rolled each week, but the interlocking storylines and accumulating character history on The Sopranos showed the world TV's potential as a serialized medium. For a good articulation of this idea, look at this article, which has a lot of fascinating things to say about modern serialization and blames The Sopranos in particular for the tendency for modern dramas to air "installments" instead of "episodes."
There's a vague truth to the timeline here: broadly, primetime TV[5] after the millennium (and, therefore, after the arrival of The Sopranos) relies more on continuing storylines and a general memory of past character events than primetime TV before the millennium. However, I think people tend to give The Sopranos way too much credit for this shift. First of all, the beginning of the new millennium is largely a false dividing line between episodic and serialized television, a dividing line established around the idea of The Sopranos' influence. Basic forms of serialization such as character arcs have been around since at least the early '80s with Hill Street Blues and Cheers, and by the '90s, shows like Twin Peaks, Seinfeld, Babylon 5, and My So-Called Life were innovating serialization with a complexity and sophistication that approached that of The Sopranos. So, yes, while TV after The Sopranos is generally more serialized than before The Sopranos, that's only because it was already tending in that direction. The millennial proliferation of continuity and ongoing storylines is just the accumulating influence of that trend, not an indication of any one show's unprecedented influence [6].
In fact, if I had to point to a single series where TV serialization "came of age," it would not be The Sopranos but rather Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Go watch Buffy's second season (1997-98, ending months before The Sopranos even debuted); it not only features the season-long accumulation of storylines that The Sopranos is often credited for innovating but also more closely approximates the propulsive, cliffhanger-based feel of modern serial storytelling than The Sopranos ever does.
I hope we can all agree the Buffy's second season rocks. Spoilers, I guess.
That's another thing that rarely gets mentioned when discussing The Sopranos' influence on TV serialization: the way that The Sopranos treats its storytelling is totally different from the modern storytelling conventions it supposedly inspired. The type of serialization most commonly used today (and for the past decade of TV at least) is just about what that linked AV Club article says: episodes serve as installments that are not standalone but in service of a longer story, often end with cliffhangers, and progress in a generally linear fashion (e.g. episode 3 must be watched before episode 4). Think Breaking Bad or the later seasons of Lost. The Sopranos, on the other hand, tells its stories on a largely episodic basis. While the show occasionally has the cliffhangery forward momentum of a modern serial, most of its episodes feature self-contained plots that, by the end of a season, add up to a larger story. Look at the Season One episode, "College." Tony taking Meadow on a college visit is a plot that has very little to do with the episodes preceding "College" and does not directly feed into the episodes that follow it; it's basically independent. However, by the end of the season, it becomes clear that this episode, albeit standalone, provides valuable thematic and character work that the rest of the series draws upon. That's how The Sopranos works: each season is like a collection of short stories that add up to a larger narrative. It's a kind of storytelling that is really rare in modern television, at least among the shows The Sopranos seems to have influenced (one could argue that this was the main storytelling mode prior to the rise of more conventionally serialized TV, but that's another topic for another day). Mad Men (created by Matt Weiner, not coincidentally a Sopranos alum) is one of the only series currently working in this mode.
So, basically, yeah. It seems like the current trends in TV storytelling would have happened anyway, with or without The Sopranos.
Antiheroes
Here's another one The Sopranos gets credit for inventing: the idea that a TV protagonist can be a morally reprehensible, generally unlikable character. To be sure, Tony Soprano is an antihero—you won't hear me holding him up as any sort of moral exemplar. And also, it's definitely true that a whole host of shows created after The Sopranos have featured characters similar to ol' Tony. You could make a pretty extensive list of post-Sopranos shows with arrogant, middle-aged, white, criminal protagonists: Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Deadwood, and The Shield all fit the bill. So I'm not denying that The Sopranos didn't have at least some influence on the types of characters featured in TV dramas.
But again, the gradual hardening and de-moralizing of TV protagonists (especially male ones) was something that was already happening without the help of The Sopranos. NYPD Blue is probably the most obvious pre-Sopranos example of this trend, but I think you could argue that The X-Files also dabbled in antiheroism, especially circa its fourth and fifth seasons (1996-98) when the character of Fox Mulder became increasingly arrogant, criminal, and blinded by obsession (exhibit A: Season Four's "Never Again," which suggests that Mulder is too self-absorbed to maintain normal human contact). Seinfeld, with its four central narcissists, is another show that did a lot of groundbreaking for antihero characters; there's an argument to be made that the Seinfeld character's nearly weekly rationalization of reprehensible behavior is as much of a precedent for Breaking Bad's Walter White as anything in The Sopranos [7].
Douche Mulder, chillin' like... an antihero. Nice shades.
So yes, The Sopranos did help to create a character type that became pretty prevalent in a certain breed of television. But Tony Soprano's antiheroism is more a product of a trend already in its mid-stages than an unprecedented innovation. Credit where credit is due.
Cinematic Finesse
I don't think there's any arguing that The Sopranos is a "cinematic" show; that is to say, its camerawork, musical cues, visual inventiveness, and pacing are frequently beautiful and reminiscent of the level of polish found in a certain brand of prestige filmmaking. The Scorsese influence is all over The Sopranos, not just in its narrative content but also in the overall cinematic style, and if you pay attention, it isn't too hard to see all sorts of other art house cinema flavors in the show as well, particularly those flavors of the "New Hollywood" blend. Yes, The Sopranos' crew clearly learned a lot of lessons from film, and those lessons are part of what makes the show good. And so, not without reason, many critics argue that it was The Sopranos that first brought the cinematic finesse of sophisticated filmmaking to the small screen.
But (wait for it) The Sopranos was also not the first series to take advantage of sophisticated cinematic techniques. Putting aside the fact that television basically has always had to use filmmaking techniques because it is itself a form of film (at least from a technical standpoint[8]), the list of pre-Sopranos TV shows that are in some way artistically "cinematic" is notable. The most important of these is probably Twin Peaks, which debuted nearly a decade before The Sopranos and is almost unquestionably an influence on the cinematic style of The Sopranos. Here's the thing: not only does Twin Peaks have a "New Hollywood" art house visual style, psychologically complex imagery, and imaginative visual and musical cues (all things normally attributed to The Sopranos), but it was also created and occasionally directed by David Lynch, Mr. Art House himself! Another key "cinematic" show is, again, The X-Files, which (though admittedly more often influenced by blockbuster/thriller cinematography than Scorsese) as early as its second season played around with artful surrealism and absurdity that anticipates a good deal of The Sopranos' overriding aesthetic. Go back even further, to the first decades of TV drama, and you have The Twilight Zone and Alfred Hitchcock Presents (in addition to any number of anthology shows from the '50s) sporting a style with obvious roots in film noir, another Sopranos cinematic touchstone.
Now, The Sopranos had a bigger budget than any of these series, and it shows; I'll grant that The Sopranos looked nicer than almost any show that came before it. But to say that it brought a host of unprecedented cinematic influences to television seems a little short-sighted to me.
Quality
Okay, this last one is a bit more subjective, so your mileage here may vary depending on how closely your television sensibilities adhere to mine. But this topic also taps into my biggest pet peeve in the critical conversation surrounding The Sopranos, so bear with me as I climb into my pulpit. Here we go.
The Sopranos did not save television from mediocrity. Or, to put it another way, television did not magically ascend to the pedestal of high art once The Sopranos appeared.
Just look at the opening line from the first chapter of Brett Martin's Difficult Men (see footnote #2), in reference to the television landscape prior to The Sopranos: "In the beginning, there was the Vast Wasteland. And it was bad." And that's a really common opinion among a certain class of critical elite. Seriously, why do people say things like this?
Listen, I know television has always had its share of crappy shows and that at certain points in history, said crappy shows have had more dominance over the airwaves than at other times. And I readily acknowledge that TV is in a sort of Golden Age right now and that the sheer number of quality shows currently running is pretty much unprecedented. But I refuse to believe that any medium that produced The Twilight Zone, The Andy Griffith Show, Cosmos, Late Night with Conan O'Brien, Cheers, Mr. Roger's Neighborhood, The Cosby Show, Twin Peaks, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, Sesame Street, Star Trek, Batman: The Animated Series, Roots, My So-Called Life, and so, so much more could ever be a "wasteland."
Seriously, y'all. We had The Simpsons.
There's an alternate version of the "Sopranos made TV good" line of thinking that I also don't get, which is that after The Sopranos, good TV drama became that which followed the rules "established"[9] by The Sopranos—that is, mature content, cynicism, existentialism, antiheroism, cable-length seasons (13-ish episodes[10]), serialized stories. To be fair, there have been a decent number of good-to-great post-Sopranos shows to fit this description, some which I have seen (Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Wire) and some which I know only by reputation (Deadwood, The Shield). But there have also been a lot of good-to-great post-Sopranos dramas that haven't followed those rules. Consider the following list of shows (broadcast on major networks, no less) that debuted either alongside or after The Sopranos and bear little resemblance to any of the dark, antihero trappings of that series: Friday Night Lights, The West Wing, Freaks and Geeks, Firefly, Parenthood, Pushing Daisies. Not all of these shows were hits or were respected by their networks, but all of them managed to achieve sophisticated artistic success in non-Sopranos-influenced ways.
Which is to say, the idea that the only way to make good TV drama is by the methods of the cable dramas that cropped up in The Sopranos' wake is ludicrous. I feel like (and maybe I'm wrong, so please correct me if I am) most people nowadays see that the majority of good shows are on cable networks, note that The Sopranos was one of the first truly great cable shows, and then draw the false equivalency that the cable model seen on The Sopranos is the only way to make great shows. However, I'd like to present a different analysis of the data: the reason why a majority of good shows are on cable networks is that the majority of networks making original content are cable networks. When you've got, say, fifteen different channels with original programming and all but four of these channels are on cable, the statistical reality is that the ratio of good cable shows to good broadcast shows will skew at least a little toward the cable end. And when every drama series produced on these cable networks sets out to play by the perceived innovations of The Sopranos, it stands to reason that a decent number of the great shows will end up being similar to The Sopranos.
Way back at the beginning of this post, I said I'd eventually explain why I think The Sopranos is both undeserving of its "most innovative show ever" crown and yet also largely responsible for the recent explosion of good shows on TV. Well, the explanation is that statistical reality in the previous paragraph. The Sopranos is basically the reason why there are currently more cable networks than broadcast networks producing original series. See, even though HBO had been making original content for a decade prior to 1999, the media hype and subsequent ratings boom surrounding The Sopranos was unlike anything HBO or any other cable network had ever experienced. The Larry Sanders Show may have proved that HBO could create an original show, but The Sopranos proved that HBO could create an original show that would attract a critical and popular audience. And that made other cable networks realize that they could create their own original series and attract that same audience. Enter FX, Showtime, AMC, et al. Now, thanks to the example set by The Sopranos and the hype-envy it inspired, we have a whole gaggle of networks producing series, hence the increased number of good shows produced.
In Conclusion
I'm sure those of you who've stuck it out this far felt a thrill of excited when you read that heading. Yes, dear readers, you've made it to this post's endgame. Just a little more rambling, and you can be on your way.
Basically, what it comes down to is that a lot of critics treat The Sopranos as the Citizen Kane of television, whereas I see it more as TV's Nevermind. What do I mean by that? Well, think back to 1991 when Nirvana released Nevermind (which is ridiculous for me to say, considering I was one year old then, but let's not quibble with the details). Nevermind is a great album, but even back in '91, it was not an innovative one, not in the sense that it broke new sonic territory. It's well-crafted, but the sounds of '80s indie rock (especially the Pixies, an influence Kurt Cobain openly acknowledged) are all over the record, in addition to early-Beatles, punk, and country. Extremely good, even classic, but nothing completely new. Yet because of the context of its release and the media hype surrounding it, Nevermind started a mini-revolution in the music industry, inspiring the signing to major labels of many previously underground bands and the formation of many new "alternative" groups that mimicked the Nevermind formula. Nevermind wasn't a beginning of a new sound or an out-of-nowhere innovation, but its position in the media made it the most visible work to point to when analyzing accelerating trends.
Same with The Sopranos. The things it's known for—the mature content, the antiheroism, etc.—are a conglomeration of trends that had already been going on for a while in TV when it debuted, bolstered by a tidal wave of media attention. That makes it sound like I think the show is derivative, but I promise I don't think that. In fact, despite what I've been saying this whole post, I do think it's a show with new ideas, but those ideas are philosophical ones, not the supposedly convention-breaking ones that seem to get a lot of press. Maybe one day I'll write a post that tackles those themes—it really is a great show that has interesting things to say about the human condition. But for now, can we just stop with making The Sopranos some giant boundary between TV past and TV present, bad and good, sophomoric and sophisticated? It makes the history of television unnecessarily divided.
After all, The Sopranos isn't a beginning. It's a middle.
Phew. And that's it. That's the end of this long, long post. Thank you so much for sticking it out. Now that you've read it all, what do you think? Agree? Disagree? Am I completely out of my mind with this stuff? Do I think too much about television? Yes, yes I do.
Until next time!
1] Okay, okay, that's the sort of thing someone would usually say at the beginning of some post that takes an unpopular stance on a controversial issue or that discloses some deeply personal narrative or belief. This post is none of that, so I apologize if that first sentence has the pretensions of introducing a topic with more gravitas than television criticism. But the truth is, I really did debate whether or not to write this post, the reason being that it is really hard to say things like "[such and such majority] is wrong about [this and that widely held opinion]" without coming off as a contentious asshole, especially when the aforementioned majority is much older and more experienced than the contender. That's not to say that such things shouldn't be said (this post still exists, after all), but there's a right way and a wrong way to say them, and it's quite likely that parts of this post veer into the wrong way. So, preemptively, I'm sorry for sounding like a contentious asshole. Know that I had every intention of not sounding like one, and the existence of my sounding like one anyway is irrefutable proof of me being a sinful human being still in dire need of more sanctification. End of cop-out apology.
2] I admit that a vague institution of "most critics" is a kind of weaselly straw man to invoke (and, full disclosure, I continue to invoke it throughout the post), but believe me when I say these ideas are not only out there but also widespread. It's a little bit beyond the scope of this post to give a comprehensive run-down of every single major TV critic's opinion on The Sopranos, but for the sake of integrity, here's a good overview of the general critical climate when discussing the show. Here's another one. For further reading, look to Brett Martin's informative-but-entirely-symptomatic-of-the-problem book, Difficult Men, whose depiction of David Chase (Sopranos creator and showrunner) as some sort of television messiah verges on insufferable.
3] It's also worth mentioning that The Sopranos isn't even that violent or that sexual. It has one or two instances of nudity per episode, a few sexual references (that were, admitted, a little dirtier than a network would allow), and a handful of violent encounters per season (compare that to network cop shows, which have a handful of violent encounters per episode). Granted, none of those are anything to sneeze at; it's definitely an R-rated show. But for a series that has a reputation for pioneering explicit content, the majority of a given episode of The Sopranos consists a lot of non-explicit stuff (language aside—that's pretty rough throughout).
4] Not quite sure where to say this in the article proper, but I do think it needs to be said: explicit content is not synonymous with sophistication or artistic excellence. I know that's a pretty obvious thing to say, but sometimes it seems like critics attribute the artistic success of The Sopranos to the writers' freedom to be as violent, sexual, and profane as they pleased. I think that's a silly thing to say; The Sopranos is good because it has good writers, directors, actors, etc. Of course these people used violence, et al. to accomplish their artistic goals, but the mere permission to use this explicit content did not guarantee a masterwork. The lack of permissiveness also does not preclude a series from being a masterwork; if The Sopranos had aired on Fox or CBS (two networks that showed early interest in picking up the show), it would not have been the same TV-MA show, but, given the caliber of its staff, it's quite possible that it still would have been very good. For whatever reason, there always seems to be a certain subset of consumers that equates dark, explicit content with artistic greatness, and I guess I just don't get why people think that. I mean, look at it this way: one of American cinema's greatest decades is the 1940s, and the standards and practices for explicit content at the time were less permissive than TV in the '70s. Yeah, so, there's that. End of digression.
5] I specify primetime because daytime dramas have been doing serialization since, like, forever. Heck, they even did it before television, when soap operas were radio broadcasts instead of televised broadcasts. So really, you could say that every show with an ongoing storyline has its roots in soap opera tradition. That's right, folks: The Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men are indebted to All My Children, General Hospital and the like. Deal with it!
6] One thing that the linked AV Club article astutely points out is that the early-2000s arrival of seasons of TV on DVD is another contributing factor in the increase of serialization and the treatment of episodes as installments rather than self-contained stories. Audiences could pay closer attention to storytelling details when the DVD allowed for pausing, rewinding, and rewatching, and binge-watching a season caused episodes to blur into a continuous story.
7] I'm sort of kidding, but... hmm...
8] Although, to be completely accurate, only some of TV is actually "film," in the sense that it is shot on 35mm film or something like that. A good portion of TV history was shot on video tape. But let's not split too many hairs, because if we're doing that, we'll have to start calling Gravity and Zero Dark Thirty "videos" instead of "films," too, and that would be all kinds of confusing.
9] See rest of post for explanation of skeptical quotation marks.
10] If there's one thing I think The Sopranos definitely should take credit for, it's the innovation of the cable-length season for TV dramas. I think there are good things about the traditional 22-24 episode season that cable shows have lost (though that's a topic for another post—this one has gotten plenty long enough), but for crafting tight, well-paced, complex drama, there's no beating the shortened season length that The Sopranos popularized.
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