Legacy & Influence¶
The standard claim is that The Sopranos invented prestige television. That's roughly true, and it's worth being specific about what it actually changed.
The antihero¶
Before 1999, an American television lead had to be someone you could root for without qualification, because networks needed you to come back next week and advertisers needed you comfortable.
"College" (S1E5) broke that. HBO executives argued that a protagonist committing a premeditated, cold-blooded murder in episode five would lose the audience. Chase argued the audience would lose respect for Tony if he let a rat live.
Chase won, the audience stayed, and every difficult lead of the following twenty-five years exists because that argument was settled in his favor: Vic Mackey, Walter White, Don Draper, Tommy Shelby, Logan Roy, Kendall Roy.
The specific innovation was not that the lead did bad things. It was that the show refused to arrange his redemption.
The cable breakthrough¶
In 2004, The Sopranos became the first cable series to win the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series — a category that had been a broadcast-network preserve for its entire existence.
That single result reorganized the industry's prestige hierarchy. Within a decade the category was dominated by cable and then by streaming, and network drama had been relegated almost permanently.
It also validated HBO's whole model: subscription revenue instead of advertising, which meant no content restrictions, no need for episodic resolution, and no obligation to be likeable. Every "we're not TV" service since has been running HBO's 1999 playbook.
The alumni¶
The most concrete form the influence takes. The show was a training programme.
| Person | Then | After |
|---|---|---|
| Matthew Weiner | Writer, S5–6 | Mad Men |
| Terence Winter | Writer/EP, S2–6 | Boardwalk Empire, The Wolf of Wall Street |
| Todd A. Kessler | Writer, S1–3 | Damages, Bloodline |
| James Manos Jr. | Co-writer, "College" | Dexter (developed) |
| Tim Van Patten | Director, 20 eps | Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, The Pacific |
| Alan Taylor | Director, 9 eps | Game of Thrones, Mad Men, Many Saints |
| Allen Coulter | Director, 12 eps | Boardwalk Empire, features |
| Alik Sakharov | Cinematographer | Game of Thrones |
| Phil Abraham | Cinematographer | Director on Mad Men, Daredevil |
| Steve Buscemi | Director, then cast | Lead, Boardwalk Empire |
Mad Men and Boardwalk Empire are both, in a real sense, Sopranos spin-offs at the level of personnel.
The grammar¶
Techniques that were unusual in 1999 and are now standard:
Needle drops instead of score. Chase chose every song himself, and used the closing song as the episode's last line. Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Leftovers, and Atlanta all run the same device. See Music.
Film-grade craft. 35mm, long takes, natural light, shot-by-shot script breakdowns, location shooting. See Direction & Craft.
Unresolved plotting. The Russian in "Pine Barrens" who never comes back. Dreams left unexplained. Confrontations that don't happen. And then an ending built the same way.
Serialized psychology. The therapy structure made interior life a legitimate subject for a drama series, which is a straight line to In Treatment, Mad Men, and BoJack Horseman.
The cultural footprint¶
Language. Gabagool, goomar, and whaddaya gonna do entered general American usage well beyond Italian-American communities.
The mob genre. After The Sopranos, the operatic register was essentially unavailable — anyone attempting a straight-faced Godfather now has to answer for the fact that a show demonstrated these men are suburban and bored. See Mob Movies & Self-Awareness.
Therapy. Probably the most underrated effect: the series did more than any other work of popular fiction to normalize an American man being in treatment. Tony's own shame about it reads as a period detail now, partly because of this show.
Parody. The Simpsons did the title sequence. Family Guy, The Office, Curb, and 30 Rock have all leaned on it. Being parodied that widely is itself the measure.
The second life¶
Something unusual happened around 2019–2021: a large new audience found the show, and it skewed young — people who had been children when it aired.
The drivers: the 20th anniversary retrospectives; HBO Max putting the full run in one place; Talking Sopranos, the Imperioli/Schirripa rewatch podcast; the pandemic; a substantial meme ecosystem on Twitter and TikTok; and The Many Saints of Newark driving a measurable spike.
The result is that a series which ended in 2007 has a higher reputation now than when it finished, which almost never happens to prestige drama of that era.
The consensus position¶
The Writers Guild of America ranked it #1 on its 101 Best-Written TV Series list. Rolling Stone, Time, Entertainment Weekly, and Variety have all placed it first on greatest-series lists.
The strongest single formulation of the case, and the hardest to argue with: television drama before The Sopranos was a lesser form, and after it, it wasn't.