How The Sopranos Affected Television
P.J. Worsfold, 2/23/2007
To celebrate 50 years in the business, in May of 2002, TV Guide published its list of 'The Top 50 greatest shows of all time'. HBO's The Sopranos ranked fifth on this list, just behind All in the Family (Entertainment Zone). The Sopranos also held the top spots for cable production, dramatic series, and most recently premiered show. With its riveting storylines, superb cast, and insightful social commentary, The Sopranos is unlike anything before it. TV Guide's high praise typifies the reactions of audiences and critics alike to series creator, David Chase's brilliantly crafted gangster drama. While the show's profanity riddled dialogue, graphic violence and sometimes-negative portrayal of Italian-Americans has earned The Sopranos its share of detractors, The Sopranos is routinely lauded as one of television's greatest and most influential works. In 1999, The New York Times' film critic Stephen Holden suggested that The Sopranos "just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century" (Holden 23).
As I write this essay, the start of the second half of The Sopranos' sixth and final season looms less than six weeks away. While fans delight in endless rounds of online speculation on the fate of Tony Soprano and the members of his two 'families', my intent with this paper is to step back from the specifics of the show's plot and consider the impact of The Sopranos on the nature of television. My discussion will be divided into three sections; the first and easily the largest section will tackle The Sopranos' influence on the content and business of television. Next, I will consider some of the show's central values and ideologies, and in conclusion, I will contrast major criticisms of the show with a discussion on The Sopranos' overall positive contribution to television.
Carter describes The Sopranos as "a groundbreaker… whose influence is likely to be felt throughout the industry in the coming years" (Carter). Inspiring everything from obvious knock-offs to fundamental changes in the way the television business works, The Sopranos has had a profound and pervasive influence on many aspects of the medium.
In The Sopranos, Chase and his team create an environment that justifies "colloquial realism" (Yacowar 15). Thanks to HBO's less restrictive programming policies, the show's writers and cast are able to make frequent use of this colloquial realism, along with other gangster requisites including sex, violence, and drugs. Contrary to the wishes of some in the business , it seems that the success of The Sopranos has encouraged network executives to allow more latitude with regard to violent or racy content on their primetime rosters. Yacowar confirms this trickle-down effect as he argues that The Sopranos helped clear the way for The West Wing to make use of "more realistic speech, albeit in more measured tones" (15). This relaxed attitude toward objectionable content has also led to the inclusion of often-edited reruns of HBO hits to network lineups. This occurred with TBS, who are also owned by HBO parent company Time Warner, broadcasting Sex and the City. Similarly in Canada, CTV aired The Sopranos, uncut and unedited, against the CBC's broadcast of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games, a move that consistently earned CTV top ratings (CTV).
Chase has suggested that with The Sopranos he is addressing the "notion that life is so complex now that even a wiseguy needs help sorting it out" (Strum). As is often the case in the gangster genre's best works, The Sopranos uses the gangster aesthetic as a vehicle for broad social commentary. However, this fact seems to have been missed or ignored by some of the show's early clones. The success of The Sopranos precipitated various gangster themed programs with a distinct focus on style over substance. For example, CBS introduced Falcone in 2000, a show that centred on an undercover FBI agent's efforts to infiltrate the mob. Similarly, in 2003, NBC aired a mini-series entitled Kingpin about a Mexican drug-trafficker and his family. Both efforts were roundly criticized and quickly cancelled. In 2004, the A&E network took a somewhat different approach by combining The Sopranos with The Osbournes to create Growing up Gotti. This show focused on the trials and tribulations of Victoria, Carmine, John and Frank Gotti, the daughter and grandchildren of real-life mob moss, John Gotti. Although it ran for over a year, Growing up Gotti eventually met the same fate as Falcone and Kingpin.
The short-run and relatively small numbers of those who sought to capitalize on The Sopranos' look and subject matter underscores the fact that The Sopranos has much more to it than guns, cannoli and the girls at Badabing! However, as Carter points out, The Sopranos' scheduling may have also been an early factor in limiting a barrage of mobbed-up impersonators. The Sopranos first aired in January 1999, by which time most of the major networks' development for the following season had concluded (Carter). Whether planned or not, this scheduling decision may have given many TV executives time to realize that the success of The Sopranos could not be quickly duplicated.
While commenting on what distinguished The Sopranos from other dramatic fare of the day, NBC Entertainment president, Kevin Reilly remarked, "(The Sopranos) showed us that audiences could connect to a guy so deeply flawed as to be a murderer" (Poniewozik 58). The success of The Sopranos on television demonstrates what the film Little Caesar demonstrated more than 70 years ago, the appeal of the antihero. Poniewozik and McDowell observe, that although "television has occasionally featured wrongfully accused men (The Fugitive) or misunderstood rogues (The Dukes of Hazzard)," before Tony Soprano, TV was mainly "a good guys' zone" (58). While I would point out that Dallas' J. R. Ewing is a notable exception to Poniewozik and McDowell's good guys' zone, Tony Soprano has certainly led television's recent charge of antiheroes. Thanks to Tony, television producers everywhere have learned, or been reminded, that combining the cathartic effect of an unrestrained bad guy with the humanizing effect of even the hint of a soft-side, is a great way to leave audiences begging for more. Some of today's best small-screen antiheros include House's Dr. Gregory House, Nip/Tuck's Dr. Christian Troy, and Deadwood's Al Swearengen. Probably the most extreme television antihero is the title character in Showtime's series Dexter. Premiering in October 2006, Dexter details the exploits of Dexter Morgan, a forensics analyst by day and a vigilante serial killer by night.
The Sopranos is often credited with influencing a resurgence of the serial drama in primetime television. Characterized by plot arcs that span several episodes or seasons, the serial drama has it roots in popular Victorian literature and is one of television's oldest formats. With shows such as Dallas and Dynasty, the serial drama was very popular in the 1980s. However, television in the 1990s was dominated by sitcoms such as Roseanne, The Simpsons, Friends, Seinfeld, Full House, Cheers and Home Improvement. While David Lynch's critically acclaimed serial drama Twin Peaks is among a few notable exceptions to 1990s sitcom dominance, HBO set the stage for the serial drama's comeback with its premier of Oz in 1997, and The Sopranos two years later.
If successful, the serial drama offers distinct advantages over traditional episodic television. Writers and producers are able to create the rich plots with detailed characters, which have audiences champing at the bit for the next week's episode; while network executives can more accurately gauge audience numbers, which they can use to court advertisers or forecast subscriptions. Although Oz was a success, The Sopranos quickly became a pop-culture phenomenon, establishing the serial drama as the ideal means to create vast amounts of water-cooler chatter and legions of repeat viewers. HBO played on the success of The Sopranos with a succession of well-received serial dramas including Band of Brothers, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood. Acknowledging the strength of the serial drama format, the major networks followed HBO's lead with numerous serialized offerings, some of the best of which include Fox's 24 and ABC's Lost.
The CBC's Rachel Giese celebrates the resurgence of the serial drama, arguing, "they've made watching TV an active rather than passive experience" (McKinnon). However, many critics feel that the today's television landscape is now characterized by a glut of serialized programming. According to the September 11 2006 issue of TV Guide, of the 92 shows scheduled to premier over the fall season, more than half were serialized soaps, dramas, or thrillers (Watching 24). Although The Sopranos clearly influenced the recent popularity of serialized drama, the show certainly did not act alone. HBO's other serial dramas and their soap opera meets sitcom cousin, Sex and the City are partly to blame; as are the early network offerings, some of which have come to garner audiences significantly larger than those of The Sopranos.
HBO's Chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht, who is largely responsible for the network's strong lineup of original programming (LaBarre), must delight in the knowledge that ABC, CBS, and Fox all passed on The Sopranos before HBO gave the show the green light (Yacowar 14). After all, now his cable outlet, once confined to television's margins, gets to show the major networks how it's done. Although one could argue that The Sopranos would never have been a success on traditional network television, the fact remains that The Sopranos and a handful of other HBO productions have influenced a major transformation in the industry. The results of this change are twofold. First, as HBO has arrived as a leading producer of quality television programming, the balance of power within the television business has shifted. Secondly, the success of HBO's subscription based programming, and the alternative distribution channels that have sprung up to support it, have ushered in the start of what many feel will be the industry's transition from the cable to the digital era.
As the end of the millennium approached and while the major networks sat embroiled in contract renegotiations, HBO was in the midst of deploying its "3Ses" (LaBarre), Sex and the City, which debuted in 1998, The Sopranos, which debuted in 1999, and Six Feet Under, which debuted in 2001. By 2002, HBO's "3Ses" were among the most popular shows on television, drawing "an average of around 12 million, 14 million, and 12 million viewers per episode, respectively" to a network that reached "only one-quarter of all TV households" in the U.S. (LaBarre). With these three shows combined with the earlier successes of The Larry Sanders Show and Oz, "HBO rewrote the conventions of TV" (Yacowar 14). Today, the cable outlet frequently "garners more Emmy nominations than the big-three broadcast networks" and produces Golden Globe, Oscar, and Peabody Award winning original miniseries and movies (LaBarre). Thanks in no small measure to the strength of their original programming; HBO is now in direct competition with the world's largest entertainment and media corporations.
As both Sex and the City and Six Feet Under were both tremendously popular, The Sopranos is not the only contributor to HBO's success. Some however, call it the most important. Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television, at Syracuse University argues, "The Sopranos put America on notice. HBO is the place where great television is made" (Patterson). Aside from the obvious benefits of increased revenue and subscription numbers, The Sopranos, along with the other previously mentioned HBO productions, has helped affect a major redistribution of power in the television business. While networks scramble to reclaim market-share, HBO has firmly positioned itself as the source for innovative programming. Patterson and McLean put it best by saying that when Fox passed "The Sopranos over to HBO, it also passed on the baton for revolutionizing TV" (Patterson).
Todreas divides the history of American television into three eras, broadcast, cable, and digital (Rogers 55). While there are several unique characteristics that separate the eras, I will focus on one that is particularly well demonstrated by the success of The Sopranos. Rogers et al. argue that the business model that the broadcast and cable eras of television revolve around is based on the concept of second-order commodity relations. Nienhaus describes second-order commodity relations as a process whereby symbolic objects "produce aggregate individual time for sale to third parties" (46). In other words, in the broadcast and cable eras of television, networks were essentially in the business of selling audiences to advertisers. The purpose of programming in this case is simply to capture audiences, which are then in a sense sublet to advertisers. On the other hand, Rogers et al. posit that the digital era is one of first-order commodity relations, which Nienhaus describes as a model where "symbolic objects or flows are actually exchanged for money" (46). In the digital era, the third party or advertiser is removed from the equation and television networks sell their programming directly to the audience.
By all accounts, the transition from the cable to the digital era is in its early stages and no one can be sure if the television industry will ever adopt a purely first-order model. Yet, even at this early stage, The Sopranos is demonstrating and influencing many of the changes associated with the move toward the first-order relations of the digital era. Rogers et al. argue, The Sopranos is "at the epicenter of a shift in the economic organization of the television history" (47).
The most obvious example of television's move toward the digital era is the tremendous popularity of commercial free, adult themed original programming that subscription-based cable outlets provide. HBO was a pioneer in this field and its offering of The Sopranos has inspired many converts to the subscription-based model. Taking the model a step further in 2002, HBO introduced its On Demand service, which allows viewers unlimited access to a large selection of HBO programming including The Sopranos. The On Demand model is perfectly suited to the serial structure of The Sopranos, which lends itself well to repeat and back-to-back viewing sessions.
Another digital era fit with The Sopranos' serial structure are the DVD sets of each season's episodes, the popularity of which has surely helped influence other television producers to make their programming available on DVD. As of 2004, The Sopranos was the fourth most popular television series available on DVD, generating just under $200 million in U.S. sales alone (Dawtrey). Although The Sopranos isn't currently involved, the show's format and tradition of audience dedication have no doubt helped inspire the addition of various TV shows to Apple's iTunes store. Once downloaded for a cost of $1.99, users can watch the shows on their computers, iPods, and, with additional hardware, on their TVs. While HBO and Apple remain in talks to make The Sopranos available on iTunes, various network hits including Lost and Desperate Housewives, are currently available to iTunes customers. In an effort to capitalize on this newly created distribution channel, Microsoft recently unveiled its own TV show downloading concept based around its Xbox-360 platform.
The Sopranos espouses many often-conflicting ideologies and values; the traditional family structure clashes with capitalist individualism while the mafia's omertà competes with tenets of Catholicism. Perhaps this is why the show resonates with everyone from real life mobsters (Wolf) to highbrow film critics. Although not everyone can identify with all of the conflicts in Tony Soprano's life, chances are that some of them are familiar. Marital problems, the care of aging relatives, the challenges of childrearing, and workplace pressure are at the root of the complexity, stress and guilt that seem so abundant in contemporary society. These issues that have brought Tony to a point where he must either face his own destruction or look within and begin to adapt. Tony's mental growth is a central premise of The Sopranos and it illustrates one of the show's most important values, the notion that through introspection and self-awareness individuals can adjust to changing surroundings and end destructive cycles.
Fred Gardaphe, head of the American and Italian/American Studies Program at Stony Brook University argues that The Sopranos is telling us that "the American man is changing" (Barreca 7). Gardaphe notes that "like many male baby boomers… Tony is trying to figure out who he is" (7). Tony's struggle to define himself and resolve deep seeded anger leads him to Dr. Melfi; a step that eventually leads to an attempt on his life. From Tony's first therapy session where he asks, "whatever happened to Gary Cooper, the strong, silent type?" (Chase) to his frequent assertions that his therapy with Dr. Melfi is going in circles, The Sopranos remains critical of psychiatric therapy, never suggesting that it offers an easy fix. Chase himself has argued, "classic talk therapy that goes on and on and reinvestigates every aspect of your infancy just plays into a victim mentality" (Bayles). However, Tony's work in Dr. Melfi's office is only part of the process. His therapy has given him a set of tools with which to interpret and navigate his own life. Tony's own introspection and analysis are responsible for his continuing evolution as a husband, as a father and as a gangster, even if he has created more questions that answers.
Although Tony longs for the past, over the course of five and half seasons, the audience has seen Tony struggle to better understand himself and adapt to what challenges come his way. Tony is on a quest "that will slowly and with great pain, sorrow, and difficulty, lead to other possibilities than the unthinking release of chaotic energy… that have locked previous gangsters in a doomed cycle of savagery" (8 Nochimson). His fate is yet to be decided, but Tony's success in becoming the self-aware antihero of the gangster genre is his ultimate victory and an affirmation of the value in the introspective process that The Sopranos espouses.
While Holden argues that The Sopranos "looks, feels and sounds like real life as it's experienced in the United States in the cluttered environment of the Internet, mall shopping, rap music and a runaway stock market" (Holden XI), the term real life is highly subjective. The type of reality depicted on The Sopranos may not be suitable to everyone, nor is it necessarily an accurate reflection of everyone's reality. Others may feel that although The Sopranos does represent a reality, it's one they would rather not see recreated on television. In any case, the graphic nature of The Sopranos may not agree with everyone, which is fine, the television landscape offers plenty of alternatives. The more important issue is whether violence on television leads to violence in society. This issue is well passed the scope of this paper; however, on this matter I am firmly of the belief that social value in violent art far outweighs its potential to influence violence.
As I mentioned earlier, The Sopranos has been criticized for its negative portrayal of Italian-Americans. I find the logic behind this argument as shortsighted as the logic that suggests you can create a successful mafia-drama by relying on a cast of gun toting heavies in nice suits, even if their last names end with a vowel. There have been countless arguments raised to counter claims of negative-stereotyping , but they all stress the same point with which I agree; organized crime in The Sopranos is simply a "vehicle used to drive the narrative" (150 Anastasia) based on Tony Soprano, the everyman. Barreca concurs and adds, "to reduce The Sopranos to being a story about violent Italian-Americans is like saying Hamlet is a story about moody Danes. The people who make this argument are not entirely incorrect, but they sure are missing the point" (Barreca 2).
It is my position that The Sopranos has been, and continues to be, a powerful and largely positive agent for evolution and change within television. By offering audiences film-like quality with characters and storylines that they can sink their teeth into, The Sopranos has been a welcome reprieve from the banality of most commercially driven fare. By introducing and championing new scheduling and delivery formats, The Sopranos has helped transform a business that has been "enslaved by its (advertising) sales department" (Lowry 17) since the 1950s. Finally, by honestly exploring issues such as social class, immigrant assimilation, and ethical compromises of the workplace, The Sopranos has offered rare insight on "aspects of contemporary American life barely touched on in film and television" (Bayles). Chase has shattered the traditional view of the family on television, reminding us that reality rarely lives up to expectations. Yet he does this not for shock, but to demonstrate that pressure and stress are endemic to modern life and, rather than wishing them away by buying more stuff, we ought to question, explore and resolve the root causes of our social malaise. Not only does Chase offer social commentary, he offers the means to a solution.
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