Will There Ever Be Another Sopranos?

Nearly fifteen years after its finale aired, The Sopranos is back.

Not quite in the same format, of course. This time it’s on the big screen, rechristened The Many Saints of Newark and playing in theaters wherever tickets are sold. (Plus streaming on HBO Max as part of the head-scratching deal that Warner Bros. made for all its theatrical releases in 2021.)

But however you choose to see it, The Sopranos is back. Old conversations and debates have been rejuvenated, with new fans joining in. Who burned the barn? What happened to the Russian? Will Meadow ever learn to parallel park?

There is, however, one debate that is particularly intriguing. A debate less related to the story or characters than to The Sopranos‘ place in the TV pantheon.

Most critics and historians will rightfully assert that The Sopranos changed television. It broke new ground regarding the types of stories that TV could tell, the protagonists that audiences would root for, and the visual palette that a TV budget could afford. It rewrote the rules for TV drama, much as The Simpsons did for comedy, and TV has been playing by its rulebook ever since.

This raises the question: Will there ever – can there ever – be another Sopranos?

Can another show create that perfect storm – critical hit, ratings smash, upending our general perception of TV? Or has pop culture become too crowded and fragmented for a single show to yield that level of influence?

To be sure, television has become a different medium since the turn of the millennium, with evolutions that largely feel untethered to any specific “event” series. In the time since The Sopranos hit the airwaves, we’ve witnessed the rise of cable, heralded by a marked uptick in antihero dramas and cerebral comedies, followed by the explosion of streaming TV outlets and the increased popularity of binge-watching. There is a greater assortment of shows on the air than ever (even if output quantity has been somewhat dinged by the pandemic), appealing to every taste under the sun.

In a medium this vast, it’s difficult for any show to gain a foothold in common culture, let alone the influence needed to mix up the Sopranos cocktail. Sure, the occasional Better Call Saul or Rick and Morty or Ted Lasso will briefly hit the zeitgeist at some point or another, but they’ll invariably be pushed aside by one of the eight dozen other shows vying for the top spot on the Metacritic lists.

To understand how difficult it would be for any show to command the cultural attention once afforded to David Chase and HBO, let’s look at three TV shows from the 2010s that came closest in their attempts.

The first show that comes to mind is Game of Thrones, arguably the most globally-viewed and commercially successful show of the past ten years. There is no question that Thrones was a global phenomenon – between international markets, streaming services, and illegal torrents, the vast number of eyeballs glued to its final season remain forever uncountable – and it created cohesive watercooler moments in a culture that spent much of the decade splintering into smaller and niche-ier directions.

But for all the buzzing excitement (and at times teeth-gnashing anger) generated by Thrones, its TV influence is largely limited to one area: spectacle. HBO proved that an ongoing television series could sustain a movie-level budget, with episodes consistently costing well north of $10 million a pop, and still be profitable. It gave rise to the era of blockbuster TV, with gargantuan productions as varied as The Mandalorian, The Crown, and The Morning Show. (Thrones also carried the banner for a time as the prime Anyone Can Die show, though prior HBO series were hardly averse to abruptly killing off popular characters.)

The second show to consider is House of Cards. Although the series is now forever tainted by the general yuckiness surrounding Kevin Spacey, the political Netflix drama was a cultural touchstone in its early years. It was the first series created exclusively for a streaming service (Netflix had previously marketed Lilyhammer as an original series, but that show aired in tandem on Norwegian TV), with all 13 episodes released simultaneously on a single Friday. And early on, it received glowing press, with plenty of OMG moments for Twitter to buzz over in the (relatively) less insane political climate the series premiered in.

But House of Cards‘ distinction is largely circumstantial; it’s only the most influential streaming series by dint of being the first. And despite the early buzz, the show quickly devolved into a punchline for both critics and cable news pundits. By the time the Spacey-free final season rolled around, you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone buzzing about it.

The third show – by far the least commercially successful of the trio, yet perhaps the most groundbreaking – is Louie. Another series blemished by the personal allegations leveled at its star (Hollywood’s got issues, folks), Louis CK’s dry, auteurist comedy was nonetheless around long enough to inspire a new wave of experimental television that had not been seen before the 2010s. A slew of shows that were structured as comedy – half-hour installments that, though they sometimes tied in to larger arcs, felt distinctly episodic – yet carried an air of pathos that seemed more fitting for a studious character drama. Think of some of the best comedies of the past decade – Better Things, Atlanta, Master of None, Review, Bojack Horseman. They all operate on their own levels and strive for radically different goals, but they each thread the needle between drama and comedy with a distinctive voice that would have been unthinkable prior to 2010.

It would be wrong to say that Louie deserves all the credit for the new age of revolutionary comedy, or that it’s the only series of the era to revolutionize TV comedy – the early 21st century offered plenty of other genre-breaking sitcoms, from the UK Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm. But the show’s influence on modern television is as undeniable as… um, the allegations against its creator.

Ifndividually, these shows all have their cultural shortcomings (especially since only the first of them is still being talked about today, and hardly in reverential terms). But you can stitch together the blockbuster prestige of Game of Thrones, the format realignment heralded by House of Cards, and the artistic influence of Louie, and get a Frankenstinian TV monster that’s at about the game-changing level of The Sopranos.

The way TV is headed, there probably will never again be an environment stable enough to yield another series as groundbreaking as The Sopranos, or The Simpsons, or Twin Peaks. Those shows premiered in a far less crowded and less competitive environment, in the days before YouTube and social media demanded our attention at every waking moment.

But in fairness, the influence of those series continues to this day. The Sopranos kicked off a wave of innovative TV drama and a new golden age that’s only recently begun simmering down. The best shows of the past two decades cumulatively showcase the vast potential of television like no era before. Perhaps we’ll never again have a single series that’s as much of a cultural, critical, commercial flashpoint – but the way TV has grown and changed in the 21st century, do we really need one?