The Sopranos
Ever since cable television appeared on the scene in the ’70s, both the industry and the press accepted as a given the idea that cable TV was the minor leagues and over-the-air television was the majors. For years, cable programs weren’t even considered for Emmys. You could do interesting, even innovative scripted programs on cable — particularly on pay cable services such as HBO and Showtime — but you could rest assured that it wouldn’t pull Nielsen ratings comparable to that of broadcast TV.
But about 10 years ago, that started to change, and “The Sopranos” — which entered its second season in 2000 — helped change it. By the end of the show’s first season, it was generating viewership numbers comparable to that of a low-end network show, and if you added in viewership from repeats, it could be considered a popular success by any yardstick. By season 3, it routinely drew anywhere from 7 million to 11 million viewers to each new episode. By that point, network viewership had already started to fragment, and the definition of a network series with “hit” numbers was being ratcheted downward, thanks in large part to shows such as “The Sopranos,” which won two Emmys against network competition in 1999 (for the Season 1 episode “College”), stole eyeballs away from the networks on Sunday nights and proved that there was more to TV than what ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox were offering.
By the time “The Sopranos” entered its third season in 2001, the networks were already drawing all sorts of lessons from it and trying to apply them. For one thing, they revisited network gospel that had held sway for decades: that series had to be driven by so-called “stand-alone” episodes that wrapped up all relevant threads by the final commercial break, and that viewers didn’t want to follow shows with a season-long narrative arc. “The Sopranos” proved otherwise. It was the most successful example yet of an American series modeled on the proven British TV format of self-contained, novelistic seasons with long-term setup/payoff plotting — a remarkable achievement considering that it was, when you got down to it, just an ensemble comedy-drama series that was all about the characters; it didn’t even have a unifying “mystery” gimmick like other long-form series (notably “The Fugitive,” “The Prisoner” or even “Twin Peaks,” which pulled people along with the promise of revealing who killed Laura Palmer). It was the first popular regular show that inspired detailed weekly recaps in mainstream media outlets. Blindsided broadcasters had no choice but to try to study and emulate its success. Some efforts were successful (“24″ and “Lost,” for instance) while others failed to catch on (“Kingpin,” “Boomtown”). “The Sopranos” accelerated a creative brain drain away from network TV that’s still happening; where cable TV talent once dreamed of moving over to the broadcast networks, now the fantasy ran the other way. By the early ’00s, the Emmys were increasingly dominated by “The Sopranos” and other cable series, and network executives responded by griping to TV columnists that it wasn’t fair that they had to compete against cable because it really wasn’t a level playing field. On cable you could curse and show R-rated sex and violence! And some of those channels didn’t even have advertisers to please!
Simply put, Chase’s show changed the medium, and it would never go back to the way it was. Tony and Carmela Soprano are the parents of modern American TV drama.
Lets look at some of the children.
