The Myths of Peak TV, Part 2: Or Where I Was When The Sopranos Debuted

 

I was beginning two things around January of 1999: my freshman year of college and my initial steps into becoming a TV critic.

It’s worth remembering what the technological world was like in 1999. The internet was still in its formative stages and we weren’t that far removed from dialup. Your average cell phone (which no one in my family owned at that period) was something that took up your entire pocket. DVDs were only starting to come into existence and most people could barely program their VCR’s (I certainly couldn’t) Back then, if you missed an episode of your favorite show you had to hope that the network you watched it on would rerun it sometime that year and if you didn’t see it, you had to pray that the show made it into syndication where if you were lucky, a syndicate channel or a fringe pay cable channel might show it in a rerun at a time you could see it. Maybe.

Most original programming was on network TV. Basic cable had some original programming but most of it was of mediocre quality. There was some original programming on HBO, Cinemax and Showtime but the lion’s share of it was what could politely be called soft-core and that pertained to even the few series that weren’t directly pornographic. HBO had made some waves with shows like Dream On  that was as much known for its sex scenes than any original content. In all honesty Showtime had made more strides in the mid-1990s than HBO was with intriguing comedies such as Rude Awakening and Linc’s and minority based dramas such as Resurrection Blvd and Soul Food. HBO was known for some quality TV movies which were doing well at the Emmys the past few years but no one was willing to argue that it was a groundswell for creative programming. Yes there had been shows such as The Larry Sanders Show and Sex and The City but the network considered them in the same breath as they did Arliss and Tracy Ullman.

I should mention that after a fair amount of wearing my family down, I had convinced them to subscribe to HBO and Showtime as a pay cable service the previous year. I’d seen previews of some of their original programming (this tended to happen around Thanksgiving) but my motives were not, shall we say, leaning in that direction. It was the more, ahem, adult programming and films I was interested in. And to be honest, the average cable subscriber in the 1990s probably thought that was what basically what they were good for. I’d become fascinated by other HBO programs – Mr. Show,  Dennis Miller Live, much of their comedy specials which then as now were remarkable – but the idea of television at the level of network was inconceivable to a nineteen year old.

So I had HBO on Sunday January 10, 1999 and I remember exactly where I was and what I was doing at 9pm when the first episode of The Sopranos debuted.

I was watching The X-Files.

So, according to the Nielsen ratings, were 21.25 million other viewers. The episode was called ‘The Rain King’ and Mulder and Scully were being called into investigate freakish weather phenomena in flyover country. The highlight of the episode was when a tornado lifted up a cow and launched it into the motel room Mulder was staying in.

This was not, I should add, a very good episode of the series: in fact the show was in the process of beginning to fall from its peak quality from 1994 to 1998. I’d like to say this was only clear in hindsight but even at nineteen it was becoming clear that the show I’d watched and love for four and a half years wasn’t’ the same. I wasn’t wild about the tonal shift from scares to comedy which made up much of the next two seasons, any hope I had the mythology was ever going to make sense was essentially falling apart and the series, which had been nominated for Best Drama that last four years, was about to fall out of favor with the Emmys, not being nominated that year.

Nevertheless like most viewers I remained steadfast to the show that brought me and while I knew of The Sopranos existence and due to the way cable worked had multiple occasions to watch it on Sundays at 9 during the show’s first season the only show I cared about at that time was The X-Files. Indeed, the night of ‘College’ the episode now considered one of the most important in all of television history I was watching The X-Files. To be clear that night the series was airing the first part of what the show had publicized as ‘Full Disclosure’ in which they promised to reveal every single detail about the mythology to the viewer after five and a half seasons. Had they actually been willing to wrap up the whole mythology – and end the series the following year, which many thought they would – it might have had a bigger impact among culture than it did. But the fact remains myself and roughly 18.7 million other viewers were watching that episode on February 7th which by the most generous estimate is anywhere from four to five times as many people who were watching that particular ‘landmark moment’ in TV history.

And it’s worth noting that there were many other things going on during the several months that The Sopranos were on the air and indeed until the network season ended in May that were much more significant to the average viewer during that period. Here’s just a sample of some of the events that were going during this crowded era.

Around the same time of ‘College’ the television world was shaken when Doug Ross departed County General in the middle of Season 5 of ER. George Clooney, the heartthrob of the series, had decided to try his luck in movies and many viewers wondered whether he or the hit show he was leaving would regret the decision. As we all know, it worked out just fine for both Clooney and ER: the show was still number 1 in the Nielsen ratings for the next two years.

By the end of Season 6 of NYPD Blue, the series went through a death that was more shocking then that of Jimmy Smits’s Bobby Simone the previous November. Sylvia Costas, the ADA who was Andy Sipowicz’s wife ended up being killed by a stray bullet in the midst of a storyline that had taken up most of the second half of Season 6. This shocked more people than Bobby’s death; people had known Smits’s was departing; no one had been prepared for the fact that Sharon Lawrence was about to leave. (In hindsight, this decision may have been the point where the series jumped the shark.)

Chicago Hope, which had been nominated for Best Drama the first three years it was on the air ended its fifth season with something nearly as shocking. Jeffrey Geiger, played by Mandy Patinkin in the first season before he inexplicably left the cast, returned to the series to fire almost everyone who had been with the show in the four years since he’d left. Many of the actors had been planning to leave at the end of the season – including Peter Berg and Christine Lahti – but this decision still rubbed many fans of the series the wrong way.

And The Practice, the surprise winner of the Emmy for Best Drama in 1998, had since moved to Sunday nights as well and had become one of the biggest hits on TV. It ended a thrilling season with a stabbing of Lindsay Dole (Kelli Williams) the ambitious lawyer in the title firm as well as Bobby Donnell’s lover. The show involved the investigation into her assault as well as her struggle to survive. And it ended with a note of joy – Bobby proposing to Lindsay – and an incredible shock: that the man who had likely killed her was George Vogelman, a man whose trial for murder because the severed head of a victim had been found in his medical bag and whose involvement with the firm had hurt its reputation, both criminally and civilly.

There were also several major departures of long-running series from network TV in 1999. The final seasons of the comedies Home Improvement, Mad About You and The Nanny all-aired as did the final episodes of Deep Space Nine,  a show which many consider the inspiration for so much of the serialized television of today. I was more concerned about the cancellation of Homicide which also came to an end that year, though whether it was planned or unexpected remains unclear a quarter of a century later. (I will say that if it wasn’t, the writers really did a very good job of making it seem they were prepared.) And perhaps the more significant debut was Aaron Sorkin’s Sports Night a half-hour series that no one could tell if it was a drama or comedy but quickly developed a following big enough to get renewed for a second season.

I as a viewer was aware of many of these events at the time, even if I wasn’t regularly watching any of the series at that point in my viewing career. More importantly,  I can state with confidence that with the possible exception of Deep Space Nine (it was syndicated and viewership of those shows is often hard to learn) every single one of these shows on a weekly basis was watched by a substantial number more people than a single episode of the first season of The Sopranos. That doesn’t mean that many of these people weren’t watching The Sopranos too, of course, or that they weren’t aware of it. But the idea that suddenly in January of 1999, the entire world stopped what it was doing to watch a show on HBO on Sunday Nights, is simply not true. The myth that critics have been using doesn’t correlate with the math.

Speaking for myself I was aware of The Sopranos but I didn’t watch it when it was on the air in its original run: I was watching The X-Files and then I would watch The Practice with my mother. Indeed, it wasn’t until that summer that I watched it at all.

It’s worth reminding viewers that in the pre-streaming, no real DVD world, reruns were as prominent on cable as they were everywhere else in the summer. And because in 1999 no one in their right mind would consider binge-watching a realistic way to view a series, HBO would air its series over the course of thirteen weeks. Furthermore back then, it was their habit to rerun all episodes of previous seasons in a weekly fashion. I had caught up with OZ by this point and I would do so with many of their other series, including The Wire and Big Love down the road. It was in this fashion I ended up watching the entire series over the course of my summer vacation in 1999.

Now I’m not sure whether I was experienced at 20 to quantify greatness. I’d seen a couple of what were then contemporary series I was willing to rank at that level. I was already willing to quantify on Homicide at that level and definitely The X-Files. I thought that Frasier deserved the Emmys it got (though even then I knew that didn’t count for much) and I was quickly coming to consider The Practice a masterpiece. I was slowly, mostly through syndication, becoming won over to the high quality of the original Law & Order.

So I was aware that there much to be impressed by in regard to The Sopranos. The acting impressed me immensely though as much as I loved James Gandolfini and Michael Imperioli I was more impressed by the lead actresses. I remember being particularly annoyed that Lorraine Bracco didn’t get nominated for Best Actress that year. I remember being impressed by many of the guest performances, including that of Jerry Adler and the doomed John Heard. And I was willing to acknowledge that there were many storylines I found impressive in the first season, in particular the possibility of Big Pussy being a rat and how Artie Bucco would deal with the fact Tony had blown up his restaurant. I could tell there was a lot of talent on hand and I could see the ability of what David Chase had created.

But for all of that, if you had asked me having seen The Sopranos by the time of the Emmys in September of 1999 if The Sopranos was the most groundbreaking thing I’d seen on television in my brief history of viewing, I would have answered in a heartbeat: no. And while I probably wouldn’t have been able to articulate many of them at the time, in hindsight there is one big reason: by that point I was one of OZ’s biggest fans.

I have been told by at least one major Sopranos fan who criticized by admonishment of both Chase and the series that OZ was nowhere near as groundbreaking as The Sopranos. Well I’d seen the second season finale of OZ which aired months before The Sopranos debuted. Let me give a brief synopsis of events in that episode: I remember not only because I saw the episode multiple times over the years but because one of my first forays into TV criticism was a draft of an episode criticism that I wrote at nineteen but never published.

In the opening minutes two members of the Aryan brotherhood blackmailed the two characters who were essentially the comedy relief on Oz. They’d spent the season digging a tunnel and the Aryans had threatened them. These were the most benign members in Em City and we learned that they had loosened the structures of the tunnel so it was collapse and bury the Aryans alive. When it was exposed, they got away with it because they told the guards that they had done so under the orders of the Aryans and were terrified.

Then a priest who had been recently parole because of sexual abuse asked to return to Oz so he could find a place to sleep until he could get a room. There were moments where it looked like this would be a redemptive storyline – Father Mukada, who’d had issues with him in the previous episode, hired him to work in the chaplain’s office and the man he’d fondled as a boy came to apologize. Then Schillinger, who found the priest offensive, arranged to have him crucified in the gym and we saw every detail of it, including the nails pounded in. (The priest survived but didn’t return to Oz.)

Miguel Alvarez had been ordered to blind a CO or he would be killed by the Latinos. That episode he did just that – and we saw the CO’s empty eye sockets. Alvarez ended up hiding in Mukada’s office and holding him hostage out of desperation and was about to slit his throat with the scalpel he’d use to blind the CO  before the SORT team broke in and beat him severely before throwing him into solitary.. We saw every blow land and Alvarez would essentially be in solitary for the majority of the series going forward.

And perhaps most importantly the Beecher-Schillinger-Keller triangle that would make up the crux of the entire series reached the end of its first phase. Keller had spent most of the second season earning Beecher’s trust, seducing him and his return to solitary had caused Beecher to start drinking again. By the end of this segment, Beecher learned the truth about Keller and Schillinger’s relationship and the two of them broke his arms and legs.

We also saw in that episode Ryan O’Reilly take responsibility for his part in the murder of Dr. Nathan’s husband, Adebisi be framed for murder and be sent to the mental ward of Oswald, alongside one of the people he’d raped earlier in the season and Kareem Said, consider clemency from the Governor and then in what was a dramatic monologue confront him publicly on his sins, and refuse his pardon. It was all things considered, one of the least tumultuous season finales in the seven seasons Oz was on the air.

The thing about OZ that was revolutionary about it was that is always willing to go for the jugular on everything. It was claustrophobic, bloody, pushed the boundaries on what was accepted on television at the time (and in many ways, kept pushing them in ways The Sopranos never would) and nevertheless used that darkness to cover a vast array of subjects, not all of them related merely to crime. I’ve already written how it broke ground on such ideas as faith and consent in ways many series still haven’t even attempted, was even more groundbreaking on the LGBTQ+ front in a way no series had even tried to be before and perhaps most importantly had one of the most racially diverse casts in television to that point in time. There’s an argument that shows like The Wire and Orange is the New Black couldn’t have existed without OZ, and when we first meet David and Keith in Six Feet Under, they’re not just watching the show to plug the series. I can’t imagine Shonda Rhimes being able to do half of what’s she done on network TV if OZ hadn’t existed and there’s an excellent chance so much of Showtime’s programming for the next twenty years – from Queer as Folk to The L Word to Dexter would have been impossible without the ground that OZ forged.

OZ was even revolutionary in its opening credits. Every season, the credits who show in a letterboxed framed individual shots that were going to appear throughout the next eight episodes. Because of both the lighting and the fact that none of the cast members were shown in the frame, the viewer wouldn’t realize the significance until the episodes played out over the course of the season. To use the most memorable example, in the opening credits of Season 3, we saw a man’s hand holding a gun in a cell and checking if it had bullets. It was not until the final minutes of Season 3 that we realized which cell it was, who had the gun and who’d given it to him. And unlike The Sopranos where they would show objects and never have them payoff, the consequences of this gun in OZ would not only be immediate starting in Season 4 but have repercussions for the entire season to come. In all my years of viewing TV, the closest I’ve seen anyone come to trying a trick like that would be Breaking Bad on multiple occasions.

By those standards its perhaps understandable that I had the initial impression that OZ was truly a game changer and that while The Sopranos was a brilliant masterpiece, it didn’t exactly break ground in the same way.  There’s actually an argument that in a weird way The Sopranos was by far the most conventional of the first five dramas of the revolution. (No I’m not crazy: hear me out.)

By the time I had watched a single episode of The Sopranos I was prepared for violence to come at any moment and that death could come for anybody. It’s kind of hard not to be shocked by that when the premiere episode of OZ killed off the character you’ve been led to assume would be the lead by setting him on fire at the end of it. And many of the deaths on The Sopranos were shocking perhaps in their suddenness, but not necessarily in their method. Anyone who was a fan of Six Feet Under knew that every episode would open with a death but it might not be the person you expected and it certainly would be how you expected it. (I don’t think I ever saw a character on The Sopranos die because she saw a bunch of blow-up dolls accidentally released into the air, believed the Rapture was coming and ran outside, only to get hit by a car.) On The Wire you basically got a much more direct lesson than what David Chase was trying to tell us on The Sopranos about how absolutely broken every element of the American system was, and to be clear it took him nearly to the end of the series to acknowledge it wasn’t just the Mafia that was always going to do the easy thing rather than the best thing. I think we got that by the time the first season of The Wire was half over. And the dialogue on The Sopranos had wit and brilliance but it was nothing compared to what the average character said on Deadwood in a single line. (Chase famously loathed both Milch and Aaron Sorkin because he claimed, ‘people didn’t really talk like that’.)

In that sense while The Sopranos didn’t follow a traditional narrative, it was not that different from the basic arc of what we saw on network TV. David Chase was trying to tell everybody who watched that characters do not change and will always choose the path of least resistance, even if that results in violence or death. The thing is, network TV had been thriving on this very system for half a century. You knew that week after week exactly what you were getting from the characters on NYPD Blue or ER or Law & Order. And the viewer learned very quickly what we were going to get week after week on The Sopranos. The only real difference – and I’ll admit it was a huge one – was that Tony Soprano and his family, both real and criminal were never going to change, always engage in selfish and self-centered behavior and that people were going to die on a regular basis as a consequence. That’s a very big variation on the formula of cop shows and medical shows, I grant you, but its still a formula. I don’t deny that was groundbreaking to what critics were used to from television at the time but compared to what Oz had already done and what series such series as 24, The Shield and Lost were going to do very shortly, it’s almost pedestrian.

So why did so many critics and audiences turn to The Sopranos and hail it as the symbol of the revolution and not only did Oz not considered that way, during its original run most critics were mixed towards in it  in  a way they wouldn’t be to so many of the shows going forward? Well, to state the obvious, Oz had one of the most diverse casts in TV history and The Sopranos, charitably, did not.

I’m kind of amazed that neither at the time or even in later loving reconstructions of it from both Alan Sepinwall and Brett Martin, no one picked up on the fact that in an era where such network hits as Friends and Frasier were being attacked for not having any African-American characters even as guest stars The Sopranos went through its entire run with not a single minority cast member and almost no minority regulars at all and this was not only not criticized but ignored. Indeed  in Sepinwall’s book The Revolution was Televised, only two other series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mad Men had nearly as bad a racial disparity. The former would at least have African-American regulars in arcs over its run and the latter justified its decision by claiming it was looking at the 1960s from a strictly silent majority perspective. (It’s worth remembering, however, Matthew Weiner the head showrunner also worked on The Sopranos in its later years.)

And that is perhaps the most fantastic element of The Sopranos. Tony Soprano is the boss of one of the major crime syndicates in New Jersey and yet somehow in six seasons, the only threats to his power are technically internecine. He faces off against rival families or power grabs from within, yet somehow none of the mafia in either New Jersey or New York has any struggles for turf involving any kind of minority gangs. You’re telling me that somehow in the most diverse states in America Tony never ran into the Jersey equivalent of Avon Barksdale or Marlo Stansfield? There wasn’t a single runner or soldier from any African-American gang in all of New Jersey? We would see in Boardwalk Empire that African-Americans were having gang wars in 1920s New Jersey but there were absolutely none in the present? Christopher never bought his dope from any African-American pushers? There were no black convicts in the jails that so many of the gangsters spent much of their time in? It’s one thing for no one in Carmela’s circle or Meadow’s schools to be minorities, though once Meadow went to Columbia that became harder to fathom but I don’t even remember seeing any evidence of Colombians, Mexican or any LatinX gangsters in all of New Jersey.

One of the major strikes against Peak TV has justifiably been that so many of the best series centered on ‘White Male Antiheroes’. But The Sopranos took it to a new level. Tony Soprano was a White Male Antihero, whose entire crew was made up of white male antiheroes and whose only enemies were white male antiheroes. The cynical part of me wonders if that is perhaps one of the major reasons The Sopranos was by far the biggest commercial hit of HBO during its first decade of Peak TV. Considering that The Wire struggled season after season for renewal and Deadwood had more black recurring roles in three seasons then the Sopranos did in seven, then it does make you wonder why this is the show that so many critics consider revolutionary and the greatest ever.

And not to harp on the point, the most watched show on HBO during its first decade peaked at 11 million viewers per season in 2002. These days that would be a huge number for a network show. But in 2002, if any show had this many viewers by their fourth season, it was a sign that the viewership had irrevocably declined and cancellation was around the corner.

The networks must have looked at the numbers of The Sopranos in 1999 and been concerned but if anyone of them had been worried by it, they would have been justifiably laughed out of their jobs. Five to six million viewers was a huge number for HBO but at the end of the 1999 season, Homicide was cancelled because it was only averaging a little more than seven million viewers a week. It took an immense amount of critical drive from TV Guide to Sports Night to get a second season and it was averaging eight million viewers a week. I’m pretty sure, though I can’t prove it with certainty, more viewers were watching the final season of Deep Space Nine then the first season of The Sopranos.

And this disparity between the lens of the critic and what the public was watching during the 2000s is a circle that no chronicler of that era has ever acknowledged. When The Shield debuted in March of 2002, it was the most watched basic cable show in history with 4.8 million viewers. Less than a month later, Once and Again – a critically acclaimed and beloved series which had won multiple Emmys by this point – was cancelled by ABC after three seasons because it was averaging barely 7.5 millions viewers per episode – not enough to justify keeping it on the air. I know that because I barely noticed the premiere of The Shield and I was emotionally devastated when Once & Again was cancelled.

To be very clear I’m not denying the immense quality of so much of the television that was on the air during this period. I watched almost all of it and I agree with the critical assessment. But the myth of Peak TV is that everybody in America was watching these shows to and while that may be true, the numbers of the Nielsen ratings paint a very different picture. And in order to understand the era of Peak TV we have to acknowledge what the cultural milestones of television – many of them simultaneously occurring with the rise of Peak TV  - were because they are critical to understanding not only the reality of what people were watching, but in many cases why there was so much of it.

In my next article in this series I will deal with many of the shows that were debuting while The Sopranos was beginning its run, almost all of them on network TV and all of them vital to both the Zeitgeist and how television existed during the first decade of the 2000s.