World Screen @ 35: The Sopranos Effect

As World Screen celebrates its 35th anniversary, we want to present a series of articles that recap and highlight the best of the interviews we have conducted. We are focusing on the evolution of scripted TV series.

Most in the industry believe The Sopranos was the watershed drama that changed the genre forever. Indeed, many refer to television as “before The Sopranos” and “after The Sopranos.”

In our last article, we looked at Oz, the HBO drama that opened the door to The Sopranos and many hits that followed. Today, we hear from writers who worked on the series and the impact it had on them and other talent.

The Sopranos premiered on HBO in 1999 and aired till 2007. For six seasons, it altered the scripted drama genre forever and helped establish HBO as the standard-bearer for serialized storytelling, cinematic production values and multi-layered antiheroes.

Created by David Chase, the series follows a gang of mobsters in New Jersey, led by Tony Soprano, whose conflicting responsibilities as mob boss, husband and father lead him to seek the help of a psychiatrist. Chase masterfully blended psychological themes into everyday occurrences, while juxtaposing humor and violence.

Showered with critical acclaim—Vanity Fair called The Sopranos, “one of the masterpieces of American pop culture” in its April 2007 issue—the show was nominated for hundreds of awards, winning dozens, including 21 Emmys, of which three for Outstanding Drama Series. James Gandolfini, who played Tony Soprano, won Outstanding Lead Actor three times and Edie Falco, as Tony’s wife Carmela, won three for Outstanding Lead Actress. Both actors also won Golden Globes and SAG awards and supporting cast members also took home various statuettes.

Chase abandoned all the familiar formulaic television storytelling devices and instead slowly peeled off layer after layer of his characters’ human flaws, contradiction, conflicted intentions and questionable morality. in an interview in 2012, Edie Falco commented on the rise of flawed characters on television, “I think it’s a simultaneous shifting in people making the shows and people watching the shows,” she said. “There seems to be an appetite now for people that audiences can actually relate to, as opposed to people being presented to them who in reality don’t exist, such as people with one dimension—they are good; they are bad. This way, more viewers can actually say, ‘Oh, I know that guy,’ or ‘Oh boy, I’m kinda like that.’ It’s a deeper way to tell a story if you are using characters that people understand and can relate to.”

The Sopranos paved the way for other writers and showrunners to take chances and trust their instincts. In a 2004 interview, Alan Ball, a producer of the Oscar-winning feature film American Beauty, creator of Six Feet Under (2001 – 2005) and later True Blood (2008 – 2014), talked about his initial contact with HBO executive Carolyn Strauss.

At the time, he was “doing a sitcom for ABC that was not very good,” he recalled. “Everyone wanted to meet me after American Beauty opened, but I was busy. I didn’t meet anybody. But when Carolyn Strauss from HBO called, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll meet with HBO,’ because The Sopranos had premiered and I was so jazzed by the show because I was seeing what television can be capable of. So I met with her, and she said, ‘I love your movie. I’m thinking about doing a show set in a family-run funeral home about America’s relationship with death.’ And I thought, ‘What a fantastic idea.’ I had spent some time in funeral homes growing up, with the funerals of my family members. But I was doing the ABC show, and I said, ‘Best of luck with that, I wish I could do it, but I am busy.’ And then my show got cancelled. I was very burned out. I was very upset that the show had been cancelled. I went home for the Christmas vacation, and I wrote a pilot. For me, it was a catharsis, and it was a way of dealing with the show being cancelled. It’s no accident that the pilot takes place over Christmas. I was visiting my mom. My house is haunted with the ghosts of my sister and my dad. And Christmas is always a time that makes that particularly difficult. I put it all into the script. I came back to Los Angeles. I called my agent; we took the pilot to HBO. They read it. They asked for a meeting. Carolyn said, ‘I loved this; I loved the characters, I feel it’s a little safe. I’d like to see the whole thing be a little more fucked up.’ And I felt, ‘When are you ever going to get a note like that?!’ [Laughs] And I thought, ‘I can do that.’ And I did a second draft.”

The Sopranos also had a profound impact on the writers who worked with Chase. Terence Winter, who served as a writer and executive producer on the show, and later created Boardwalk Empire, said in a 2012 interview, “The Sopranos really gave birth to a slew of shows like The Shield, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and certainly my show. The idea that you can have, for lack of a better word, an antihero as the lead certainly opened up that avenue of exploration. The Sopranos was very different in its storytelling: it didn’t pander to the audience; it assumed that the people watching were smart, and didn’t talk down to the audience. It didn’t spoon-feed the audience every answer to every question and didn’t necessarily make you feel good a lot of times. A lot of network TV is meant to make you feel like everything is going to be fine—we caught the killer and here’s the answer and buy this soap! The Sopranos didn’t make you feel that way. Often you would end an episode and think, Wow, everything is not fine, the world can be a screwed-up place, I didn’t get the answer I wanted, or I’m not sure how this ended, it’s subject to interpretation. For me, that’s entertaining and much more interesting, but it also can be very disconcerting for people. The ending of the show sent people into a tailspin because they weren’t given a clean-cut answer of what happened.”

Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men (2007-2015), also worked as a writer and executive producer on The Sopranos. In a 2015 interview, he explained the influence that experience had on him. “The Sopranos was so revolutionary; even if I hadn’t been working on [the show], it would have changed things for me because I watched it so much. [I was drawn to] this sort of non-cliché, non-television, non-baloney storytelling that would not lie about human emotions, that was not filled with people surmounting the impossible and really caring about everything they did and being completely honest with each other, that instead highlighted the grey areas and the less virtuous moments in our life. Don [Draper] is not a criminal like Tony Soprano, but I recognized more honest human behavior. That was something that I started with in the pilot on some level, but I don’t know if I would have had the confidence to follow it had it not been for The Sopranos. I think Mad Men would have been a lot more plot-driven if I had never seen or experienced The Sopranos.”

Not only did The Sopranos change the way scripted series were written and characters were crafted, but it also triggered in the viewing audience a desire to consume TV shows as ongoing chapters in books or as extended movies.

As actor Damian Lewis, who had starred in HBO’s Band of Brothers (2001), said in a 2016 interview, “You can probably trace this current trend with this type of TV show being made back to about 2001, 2002, when we made Band of Brothers and when The Sopranos was being made. It became clear that there was an appetite for a 12-hour movie, which effectively is what we are talking about. Subsequently, we’ve had The Wire and Mad Men and Breaking Bad and Homeland—all these seminal shows of the last several years, which have been committed to telling a 12-hour story like a 12-hour film. Viewers have loved having the opportunity to watch something over 12 hours, and so we have binge-watching, which is kind of a new thing.”

And of course, The Sopranos’ success gave HBO management the confidence to follow and support showrunners’ visions, as Richard Plepler, at the time HBO’s co-president, explained in a 2012 interview.

“I must say that the biggest satisfaction [of working at HBO], to be honest, has been the rejuvenation of our creative culture that Mike [Lombardo, HBO’s president of programming] and I have been so proud to lead in the last four and a half years. After the success we had with The Sopranos and Sex and the City, people forgot what it is that brought us to the dance in the first place, which was listening for original voices, being brave enough to trust those voices, not looking for success but looking for quality and knowing that quality would eventually bring us success. We were very disciplined in returning to that core ideology together and embracing people in the creative community who, after all, are the way you get there. It’s been an enormously rewarding partnership for me with Mike, and our partnership with showrunners and talent, from Alan Ball (True Blood) to Terry Winter and Tim Van Patten (Boardwalk Empire) and all the teams. It’s enormously gratifying. I think the surprise—I wouldn’t even use that word—the joy is in rediscovering that if you trust the artistic vision that brought us here in the first place, which we have done in the last four and a half years, the audience will be there for you, the market will respond to excellence. You do not have to make television for the lowest common denominator either here or anywhere in the world. You can make quality television and there is a huge market for it and it’s deeply appreciated in the culture.”

In our next post, we will hear from more showrunners and executives who explain how the success of The Sopranos influenced significant changes in programming and the fortunes of several basic cable channels.