Although “The Sopranos” was billed as a drama and won awards in that category, the show’s tone owed just as much to the sitcom — not just because the show was (grimly) funny, but because so many of the storylines highlighted the idea that people tend to be prisoners of their natures. Series creator David Chase and his writing staff had a deeply pessimistic view of the human animal, emphasis on animal. Whether the character being highlighted was one of the leads, or a colorful supporting player, both the laughs and the gasps often came from the spectacle of people being given a compelling moral or social reason to change their behavior and perhaps even giving it a shot, then ultimately reverting to type.

Yes, there were exceptions — the druggie Christopher fell back into old behavior a couple of times, then got clean for good, enduring taunts and constant enabling behavior from his fellow gangsters. But they were just that, exceptions. And that’s the core appeal of comedy: After a while, you know who these people are, and so you sit in front of your TV with bated breath, waiting for the moment when, say, Lucy, having promised not to interfere with Ricky’s act, dons a matador outfit, grabs a couple of bongos and sneaks into the Copacabana. And that was part of the central appeal of “The Sopranos.” The show often contrasted modern America’s deep-seated belief in the transformative value of therapy, confession and self-help against the hard reality of human nature, which habitually seeks comfort and routine. And so Tony promises Carmela, or himself, that he won’t cheat again, then does; he gets shot by his Uncle Junior, comes out of a coma fully intending to become a kinder, gentler, less selfish person, then is back to his old tricks within four episodes. Etc.

“The Sopranos” has more sitcom ancestors than can be listed here, but two had an especially powerful influence on the show’s bloodline: “All in the Family” and “The Honeymooners.” You can sense strong echoes of the former, adapted by Norman Lear from a successful English series titled “Til Death Do Us Part,” in the gangsters’ bewilderment over the social changes happening around them — everything from Paulie Walnuts’ fury over the mass-marketing of Italian coffee drinks to Tony’s vocal dislike of his daughter Meadow’s half-black, half-Jewish boyfriend, Noah Tanenbaum (Tony called him “the Hasidic homeboy”). Another point of connection: “All in the Family” was at least 80 percent a comedy, but it could (and often did) detour into dark drama, such as the episode where Edith Bunker was almost raped (Dr. Melfi became a victim of rape in Season 3). Yet somehow it always found its way back to its dominant groove: sardonic humor.

“The Honeymooners” influence is evident in the knockabout approach to verbal and physical humor (complete with ludicrous, Ed Norton-style get-rich-quick schemes floated by minor characters); in star James Gandolfini and other actors’ slow-burn approach to comedy; and in the blue collar, East Coast, big city sensibility that dominates so much of the series, even though most of the action is set in the upper-middle-class North Jersey suburbs. When this author interviewed Steve van Zandt, aka Sylvio Dante, for a piece in advance of the show’s premiere, he summed up “The Sopranos” in one phrase: “It’s the gangster Honeymooners.”

The movie gangster has been around as long as movies. But the gangster story as we now know it — the default narrative, as it were — didn’t arrive until 1971. Francis Coppola’s adaptation of Mario Puzo’s novel “The Godfather” enthralled audiences with an epic that wasn’t just about double-crosses and whackings, but the interplay of Da Family and the family, and the ways in which the self-justifying mentality of the “made” life mirrored moral compromises in society at large. “The Sopranos” stole more than a few pages from the Coppola-Puzo playbook — especially the tendency to juxtapose domestic misdemeanors against felony crimes and suggest that the second is sometimes a ghastly mirror of the first. The classic first season episode “College,” for instance — the one where Tony tracks down and murders a snitch while touring colleges with Meadow — is a contemporary suburban answer to the wedding/baptism sequence from the first “Godfather,” with Michael Corleone attending his daughter’s christening while the family’s enemies are being executed in New York and Las Vegas.

At the same time, though, the first “Godfather” and its sequels glamorized and dramatically insulated the Corleones: painting the family’s foes as petty, uncouth and unworthy of their power; having patriarch Don Vito refuse to get involved in the drug trade; rarely showing the Corleones killing anybody who didn’t “deserve” it, and so forth. Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Nick Pilleggi’s film “GoodFellas” brought the Corleone myth down to earth, and got blood all over its nice, Ivy League suit. The gangsters in Scorsese’s movie aspired to bourgeois respectability but remained louts. They had fancy houses and cars and front-row seats at nightclubs, but suburban WASPs still sneered at them. And the film never pretended that gangster rat Henry Hill and his cohorts were somehow different from, or better than, other gangsters, or that there was even such a thing as a “better” gangster. These swine didn’t just kill Johnny Roastbeef; they killed his new bride, too.

The mob aspects of “The Sopranos” draw more heavily on Coppola and Scorsese’s mob pictures than on other gangster films. Chase cops to the influence by referencing both filmmakers in dialogue (“Just when I think I’m out, they pull me back in!” growls Sylvio, imitating Michael in “Godfather III”) and in certain production choices (the cast is filled with “GoodFellas” refugees, and in a recent GQ piece about Scorsese’s film, Michael Imperioli, who appeared in both projects, admitted, “There probably wouldn’t be a “Sopranos” without “GoodFellas”). After Season 1, which showed violence being visited almost entirely upon other gangsters, “The Sopranos” started highlighting the collateral damage of thug life — weak-willed citizens bankrupted in bust-out schemes, small business owners and innocent bystanders getting hurt or killed for no good reason — and thus became more Scorsese-like. By the end the series was sui generis. But the long shadow of these two criminal forefathers continued to loom.

The “Marlowe” in the title of this slide isn’t the narrator of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness,” or Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled hero. He’s the bedridden crime fiction writer with a degenerative skin disease in Dennis Potter’s 1986 British miniseries “The Singing Detective,” maybe one of the most influential TV productions of all time. I don’t mean influential in the sense that filmmakers were in a great rush to borrow or steal specific aspects of it. I mean “influential” in a purer sense, as in “to move or impel.” Despite naming the main character “Philip Marlowe,” the miniseries was not a traditional mystery or crime thriller, but a character study in which reality and the hero’s perception of reality were one and the same. Its framing story was set in a hospital, but it dipped in and out of the hero’s memories and dreams whenever it felt like it, and often digressed into musical sequences in which characters lip-synced the lyrics of old, prerecorded songs. (“I’m a prisoner inside my own skin and bones!” cries Marlowe (Michael Gambon), cuing his doctors and nurses to deliver a rousing bedside performance of “Dem Bones.”) It was even more daring than Potter’s previous work for TV — which is saying a lot considering that Potter is the man who gave the world the lip-syncing musical tragedy “Pennies from Heaven” and “Blue Remembered Hills,” in which adult actors portrayed children. It was an intimate yet sprawling tale that was all over the place, and often seemed strung together by sheer nerve. There was no reason to think it should work at all, yet it did, beautifully.

“Twin Peaks,” which appeared on American television four years after “The Singing Detective,” was another inspired work of popular art that did whatever the hell it pleased, secure in the knowledge that if it carried itself with confidence, the audience would follow. David Lynch’s drama — which I wrote about a couple of weeks ago — was a murder mystery, a soap opera, a morality play and a surrealist freak show (Potter and Lynch were both influenced by Luis Bunuel; David Chase has cited Bunuel as a hero, too.) “Twin Peaks” had nothing in common with Potter’s work save for its utter disinterest in giving audiences The Usual — and that’s the only common ground one really needs, because it’s at the heart of all truly great series, that sense that every single time you sit down to watch it, there’s a good chance you’ll see something other than what you expected.

“The Singing Detective” ran on American public TV but was never more than a cult success here (although Keith Gordon did an interesting but unsuccessful feature film version with Robert Downey Jr. in 2003). “Twin Peaks” got an initial burst of attention, then declined in the ratings and got canceled after less than two seasons. But the reputation of both programs has only grown over time, and had liberating effects on the TV industry. After watching them, it was no longer possible for writers and producers to go back to business as usual, grinding out the same-old same-old while reassuring themselves that the medium did not permit original, expressive, deeply personal art. You had to either try your best to do something different or admit you were a hack and make peace with it. Chase — who had previously worked on “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure,” likable, smart series that nonetheless weren’t anywhere near as strange and compelling as “The Sopranos” — went with option No. 1.

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.

Like “Twin Peaks” — a series to which David Chase repeatedly paid tribute, most notably in the dream sequences — “The Sopranos” was about the meaning of the word “community.” The series portrayed a lot of small, circumscribed societies — tribes, practically — that existed within larger social organizations: towns, cities, states, nations. The miniature communities often managed to stay removed from the larger ones. But sometimes the boundaries were breached — for instance, when businesspeople, cops, politicians and other civilians got drawn into the family’s orbit via the Webistics scam, the Esplanade project and other schemes. The interplay of mob life, domestic life and the larger world was never far from the writers’ minds. Often it was the glue that held the show together. When something happened within one miniature world or tribe, there was often a ripple effect (sometimes unforeseen) that had to be dealt with further down the road.

The continuing popularity of the show proved, among other things, that a sprawling, overpopulated series could spend a certain amount of time each week examining the morality (or amorality) of America in microcosm without losing sight of the genre elements that made it popular (though there were exceptions to this rule — Exhibit A being the fourth season episode “Christopher,” a swipe at Italian-American anti-defamation activists that might be the show’s weakest hour). “The Sopranos” also showed that viewers more attentive than network bosses thought, and that it was possible to stage subtle callbacks to long-ago episodes and be confident that a sizable percentage of the audience would get it. For instance, at the end of the Season 4 episode “Whoever Did This,” Tony, who has murdered and helped dismember fellow mob captain Ralphie Cifaretto, sits at a dressing room table in Bada-Bing. There’s no snapshot of Tracee, the stripper who Ralphie wantonly killed in Season 3, hanging amid the other photographs taped to the mirror, but anyone who had watched the show knew what the scene was supposed to remind us of.

Another David, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, built on this aspect of “The Sopranos” with his own crime saga, “The Wire.” This wasn’t Simon’s first foray into TV: he was a producer on NBC’s “Homicide: Life on the Street,” which was based on one of his books, and adapted another of his works, “The Corner,” as a limited-run HBO series. “The Wire” — which debuted in June, 2002, 3 1/2 years after “The Sopranos” — built those examples into something exponentially more ambitious. The series concentrated on cops vs. drug dealers in Season 1, then brought in organized labor in Season 2, police department politics in Season 3, the public school system in Season 4 and the media in Season 5. The show’s opening credits epitomized Simon and company’s boundless narrative ambition: With each new season, the opening montage added new images while retaining many of the old ones, and by Season 5, it even managed to work in a roll call of colorful criminals that had met untimely deaths in seasons past. It’s doubtful that “The Wire” could have even existed — much less been emboldened to stack new layers of detail onto existing ones, wedding-cake style — if “The Sopranos” hadn’t proved that viewers were willing to absorb immense amounts of detail over a long period of time as long as you kept them entertained.

HBO’s “Six Feet Under,” a black comedy about the Fisher family of Pasadena, Calif., gets most of its creative DNA from creator Alan Ball’s Oscar-winning screenplay for “American Beauty.” And many other TV series about dysfunctional suburbia are similarly indebted to that beloved/despised 1999 movie — notably Showtime’s “Weeds,” about Agrestic, Calif., housewife-turned-pot-dealer Nancy Botwin, and ABC’s “Desperate Housewives.” But Ball didn’t invent the sick-soul-of-the-suburbs genre. That mode has been around in various guises as long as the suburbs have existed, and even David Lynch took a whack at it in his small-town thriller “Blue Velvet” — a film whose early image of ravenous beetles devouring each other beneath a well-manicured lawn could serve as a metaphor for all such tales. Here, too, the influence of “The Sopranos” should not be underestimated. It is commonly thought of as a show about gangsters first, suburbanites second. But as the previous slide suggested, it was the show’s portrait of a community (or perhaps a lack of true community) that defined the series. Well, that and the series’ blend of domestic angst, materialist anxiety and pitch-dark satirical humor (for instance, that moment in “Made in America” where bratty A.J.’s SUV bursts into flame while the DVD player blasts Bob Dylan’s “It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Bleeding”).

And here’s another point of influence: “Six Feet Under” was never more “Sopranos”-like than when it departed from the usual ensemble comedy-drama format and threw curveballs at the unsuspecting viewer. The wildest and most controversial of these was probably Season 4′s “That’s My Dog,” which largely abandoned ongoing plot threads to show David Fisher getting kidnapped, terrorized and nearly murdered by a hitchhiker. “The Sopranos” specialized in this sort of wild, self-contained, borderline-standalone episode — epitomized by such hours as “Pine Barrens,” the bulk of which concerned the pursuit of a lethal Russian gangster who was never heard from again, and “The Test Dream,” which spent nearly a third of its running time inside Tony Soprano’s subconscious (an indulgence of which “Six Feet Under” often availed itself; Ball’s show spent almost as much time in dreamland as Dennis Potter’s miniseries). Granted, “The Sopranos” did not invent the curveball episode, much less the curveball plot twist (see Richie Aprile’s murder by Janice in Season 2). But by building the possibility of surprise, shock and outrage into the weekly viewing experience, it gave subsequent series permission to shake things up whenever they felt the urge.

“Good cop and bad cop have left for the day,” said Los Angeles detective Vic Mackey in the pilot of “The Shield.” “I’m a different kind of cop.” Mackey might have overstated the case a bit; in the psychological particulars, he was unique, all right, but still pretty bad: a schemer, a thief, a murderer and a lot of other things besides. Created by Shawn Ryan, this series about corrupt cops in Los Angeles (loosely based on officers involved in the Ramparts scandal) expanded the cable drama revolution from premium services to commercial-supported channels. And its creative and popular success (epitomized by its star, Michael Chiklis, unexpectedly winning a Golden Globe and an Emmy as outstanding lead actor in a drama one year into the show’s run) paved the way for other relatively small venues to get into the adults-only drama game. It’s doubtful that AMC, future home of “Mad Men” and “Breaking Bad,” and TNT, home of “Damages,” “Saving Grace” and other hard-edged shows, would have gone down this road if “The Shield” hadn’t paved it for them. But ‘The Sopranos’ got there first.

The most cunning aspect of “The Shield” was its emphasis on plot, plot and more plot — and in a roundabout way, that came from “The Sopranos,” too. Some viewers wrote angry letters to TV critics complaining that “The Sopranos” had too much talking and not enough whacking. “The Shield” was what they really wanted, to the point where “The Shield” sometimes seemed as much a catalog of cruelties as a cops-and-robbers action series (especially when the focus shifted to Vic’s colleague-turned-nemesis Shane, one of the most vicious characters in TV history).

All the way up through the final season — at which point the pace became a tad more contemplative en route to an anti-climactic (and thus more surprising, for “The Shield”) wrap-up — the series was written and directed at a pitch comparable to “24,” meaning borderline-hysterical. “So, we cause a triple murder before breakfast, start a race war before dinner,” Shane quips. “That’s a pretty good day.” And although the writers subjected Mackey and his gang to serious ethical scrutiny, and sometimes delved into the dynamics of friendship, marriage and workplace animosity, “The Shield” was never a show that spent a lot of time making larger statements about the hypocrisy and materialism and godlessness of modern American blah, blah blah. It was too busy setting up elaborate scams and heists, smacking people around, coining colorful R-rated insults and filling snitches full of lead. For the most part, the characters fell into one of two camps: those who worked with Vic and those who opposed him. “Let me guess,” says Captain Monica Rawling to the hero, “You’re either with Vic Mackey or you’re against him.” “Keeps things simple,” Vic replies.

One of the few big questions that “The Sopranos” never asked was, “What happens to a law-abiding family when one of its members turns to crime”? The psychology and morality of Chase’s characters were pretty much frozen when the story began. Tony Soprano had been a mobster since adolescence; his wife Carmela had reaped the bounty of Tony’s lifestyle for nearly as long; and while their daughter Meadow and son A.J. occasionally became fixated on the fallout of their dad’s profession, the show viewed their distress with a raised eyebrow, because it was usually more about social discomfort than moral qualms.

“Breaking Bad,” the other great dramatic series on AMC, zeroed in on that mostly-unexplored aspect of “The Sopranos” and built a show around it. Virtually every episode of the show treats straightforwardly and earnestly what “The Sopranos” tended to deal with glancingly: the systematic corruption of a once law-abiding character. High school chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin Walter White — portrayed by former “Malcolm in the Middle” pratfaller Bryan Cranston, an actor for whom no praise is adequate — never meant to be an arch-criminal. He got into the drug trade after a diagnosis of inoperable lung cancer for what he told himself were good reasons: to build up a nest egg for his wife (Anna Gunn), their cerebral palsy-afflicted son (R.J. Mitte), and another child on the way. Walter assumed he was a terminal case. But now we’re several seasons in and he’s nowhere close to dead. With each passing week, he concocts ever more elaborate justifications for doing what he’s doing, and draws more people (strangers, friends, even relatives) into his criminal enterprise. In the first season, Walter got sweaty and nauseous just thinking about breaking the law. Now he’s a straight-up gangster capable of committing cold-blooded murder to protect his business, and of having the following deadpan exchange with onetime-student-turned-accomplice Jesse Pinkman.

Walter: “We need a distributor now. Do you know anyone like that?

Jesse: “Yeah. I mean, I used to. Until you killed him.”

It seems fitting that two of this season’s more talked-about dramas, AMC’s “Mad Men” and HBO’s “Boardwalk Empire,” come from ex-”Sopranos” writer-producers: Matthew Weiner and Terence Winter. These shows literalize this slide show’s conceit of “The Sopranos” sitting at the center of a vast and ever-growing creative family tree. And whatever unique merits the two series possess, they appeal to viewers that fixated on certain aspects of David Chase’s show: namely the domestic and psychological dimensions of materialistic suburb and city dwellers (topic A on “Mad Men”) and the interaction between criminals and the rest of society (“Boardwalk Empire”).

Weiner’s “Mad Men” doesn’t delve into dreams as often as “The Sopranos” did. But it has a similar fondness for theatrically figurative images (Don Draper entering visions of his past life on the farm, or being visited by the ghost of the real Don Draper’s wife). And like Chase’s series, it likes translating psychological conundrums into dramatic situations. Think of Draper’s pitch for the Kodak carousel at the end of Season 1, which comes from Don’s own unattainable fantasy of an idealized home life; “Nostalgia literally means the pain from an old wound,” he tells the clients. Weiner’s series, like Chase’s, just likes watching people cook up “logical” or “moral” rationales for doing whatever makes them happy at any given moment. Sometimes these preoccupations converge; one of the most fascinating examples is Don’s second-season encounter with a commune of Los Angeles hedonists, in a two-episode arc that it evoked Tony Soprano’s comatose dreams in Season 6. In both examples, the morally defective lead characters were thrown into what amounted to alternate universes, encountering people and situations that commented on facets of their personalities, and that might have pointed the way toward happiness if either man had able to interpret and act upon what he saw. (People don’t change, remember?)

In contrast to “Mad Men,” an intimate series in which the main action is internal, Winter’s “Boardwalk Empire” is extroverted, brassy and filled with action and spectacle. The show is more interested in plot than “Mad Men” or “The Sopranos”; it’s a rare scene that doesn’t set up a plot point that’ll be paid off later. The show’s fixation on the relationship between politics and crime links it not just to “The Sopranos” and “The Wire” but to some of the older gangster films that Chase loved to quote. And like “The Sopranos,” “Mad Men,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad” and so many noteworthy drama series, “Boardwalk Empire” keeps circling back to the notion that there’s a big difference between the image of America and the reality. It seems utterly convinced that, nine times out of 10, class, ethnicity and biology decide what kind of lives people will have before they’re old enough to use a knife and fork — and that the constraints are so severe that drastic action is the only kind worth taking.