![]() Other people they ran into were not gangsters. All Italians are not gangsters." That was true for the show, too. ![]() Now these people would say, "You didn't portray Italians as they are. Why did you want to do a mob show, specifically? I was Italian-American, and I wanted to see Italian-Americans portrayed. As it turned out, they had missed their mark. But I was signing with a new agency, and they said mob comedies were dead, so I should forget about that. well, he didn't have a name, and Anne Bancroft as his mother. The Sopranos was originally conceived as a film, right? Yeah. The Sopranos: Steven Van Zandt as Silvio Dante, James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano and Tony Sirico as Paulie Walnuts. But over six seasons on HBO, Chase's offbeat story of the depressed, violent but oddly sympathetic mob boss Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini (who died in 2013), dramatically expanded the parameters of series television, enlacing its sometimes shockingly brutal mob tale with slapstick comedy, surrealist dream logic and narrative invention. There had been complex, challenging series before it, like Twin Peaks, The X-Files and NYPD Blue. Today is the 20th anniversary of the premiere of The Sopranos, on the US cable channel HBO, a moment that, as much as anything, signalled the beginning of TV's still-flourishing era of ambitious storytelling and artistic credibility.Īn immediate sensation – in 1999 the New York Times said "it just may be the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century" – The Sopranos demonstrated that viewers would embrace unconventional TV shows, setting the table for what has become known as "prestige TV". ![]() "I thought revisiting the show would be more pleasurable, but it turns out I've forgotten a lot more than I thought I would." Alas, it's unavoidable this month. If David Chase, Tony's creator, doesn't totally agree with that assessment – "It was a friend of mine in high school who said that," he says – that doesn't mean he's particularly fond of nostalgic reminiscence. "'Remember when' is the lowest form of conversation," Tony Soprano once told his mob cohorts in The Sopranos. ![]()
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