FOR TONY SOPRANO, it felt like the end of something. The end of “this thing of ours”; the end of real men; the end of the American Dream. But for everyone else watching a Mob boss seek therapy for his panic attacks, it was a beginning:
The beginning of Prestige Television.
Before then, the humble telly-box was not taken seriously as ‘art’. Writing which explored the big, existential themes; auteur visionaries with limitless budgets; the finest actors grappling with morally ambiguous antiheroes — these were things you went to the cinema to see. Then along came The Sopranos, followed by several other contenders for “The Greatest TV Show Of All Time” (The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad), to upend our expectations of what small-screen storytelling could do. It was a reputational revolution neatly summarised by the tagline for a subscription cable service at its forefront: “It’s not TV. It’s HBO.”