Fuhgetabout 'The Sopranos'? No Way
Thanks to Tony and Crew, TV Dramas Won't Ever Be the Same
By Linda Moss -- Multichannel News, 6/3/2007 8:00:00 PM
In The Sopranos, Home Box Office gave viewers a pot-bellied antihero who was a merciless murderer, petty thief, unfaithful husband, unloved son — and a neurotic basket case.
Nonetheless, Tony Soprano became a role model for broadcast and cable networks alike, blazing the trail for a series of unconventional TV characters to follow. Small screens have been populated by flawed protagonists, once found almost exclusively in literature and movies, ever since Soprano first started meeting with his shrink in 1999.
| Snapshot |
|---|
| Home Box Office |
| Source: SNL Kagan |
| Headquarters: New York City |
| Launched: November 1972 |
| Acting CEO: Bill Nelson |
| Owner: Time Warner |
| 2006 Revenue: $3.9 billion (est.) |
| 2006 Cash flow: $1.2 billion (est.) |
On Fox's big hit House, acerbic Dr. Gregory House is a pill-popper with a cane — no Marcus Welby. Fox's Jack Bauer on 24 isn't above almost gleefully torturing his enemies, including his own brother. On FX's The Shield, Vic Mackey is a bald, squat Los Angeles cop who committed a murder in the show's premiere episode. Also on FX, Rescue Me's Tommy Gavin is a crude, brawling alcoholic New York firefighter who gives the FDNY a bad name.
Blame sociopathic crime boss “T” for that rogues' gallery.
GROUND BREAKER
The last original episode of The Sopranos airs Sunday, and the Emmy Award-winning series leaves a legacy of stretching boundaries, for HBO, cable and TV in general. The series made a mark, breaking new ground in terms of the types of characters now being portrayed, warts and all, on the boob tube. And more widely, its success prodded broadcast and cable networks alike to be more daring and creative with their scripted dramas.
“The Sopranos has moved the bar for quality, and it's moved the bar for depth and insightfulness,” said FX Networks president John Landgraf. “The Sopranos is just a beautiful towering piece of art. I really adore it. I'm really going to miss it … [it] opened the door that a lot of us have gone through, and done really memorable work on the other side of that door.”
But HBO must now move on and overcome two big losses: not only of The Sopranos, its biggest hit show and a one-time cultural phenomenon, but also the departure of the brilliant executive who helped shepherd that property, Chris Albrecht. Albrecht, HBO's CEO, was abruptly ousted last month after being arrested for allegedly assaulting his girlfriend in Las Vegas.
HBO's strategy is to replace The Sopranos, which garnered 18 Emmys and 96 Emmy nominations since its 1999 debut, with a handful of shows. The goal is for those series, in combination, to attract the broad viewership The Sopranos drew. As a subscription service that doesn't sell ads, HBO doesn't have to fret about ratings per se. But it does have to produce programming that satisfies each segment of its subscriber base, so they feel they're getting their money's worth from their HBO subscription and don't cancel it.
But it's not easy to produce hit TV shows — or outsized characters such as Tony Soprano, played with fine-tuned brooding by hulking James Gandolfini.
At the height of its popularity, The Sopranos, set in the gritty blue-collar suburbs of northern New Jersey, resonated with audiences in a way that some TV writers and programmers predict can't be repeated.
“It can never happen again,” said Landgraf, because of today's audience fragmentation and abundance of high-quality, hour-long dramas.
PETTINESS, WITH A TWIST
Even the premium service concedes that another Sopranos isn't likely to emerge anytime soon, and it's planning accordingly.
“I don't think anybody in cable has ever had, or probably ever will, a series of that magnitude,” said HBO vice president of program planning Dave Baldwin. “These don't come along very often. It's not a factory where you can churn these shows out.”
TV historians and critics attribute The Sopranos' success to the genius of writer/creator David Chase, who served up one of America's favorite movie subjects, the Mafia and organized crime, for TV. But Chase thumbed his nose at the epic gravitas of movies like The Godfather, instead presenting an uncourtly mob boss, who does deals in a strip joint and outside a butcher shop, and has the kind of family issues that viewers could relate to. In Tony's case, that included a Machiavellian mother, a nagging wife, a ne'er-do-well son and panic attacks that lead him to a shrink's couch.
“The mob has always been a popular American dramatic topic,” USA Today TV critic Robert Bianco said. “And it was such an original twist on that, the idea of a mobster as this kind of mundane petty punk with mother problems.
“That central dynamic — that battle between Tony and his family, in particular his mother — really is what drove the show to the heights that it reached in the second season when it came back, which is when people really caught on to it.”
There was humor as well, with Tony “more like Homer Simpson than Don Corleone,” according to Robert Thompson, professor and director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University.
Chase served it all up with plenty of flashes of shocking violence, nudity and tough language, and avoided the tidy, traditional storytelling arcs of network TV — as only could be done on a non-ad-supported service.
“Every episode is its own little world,” TV Guide critic Matt Roush said. “Sometimes you follow through, and sometimes you don't. It's messy, like life is messy.”
TV historian Tim Brooks, Lifetime Television's executive vice president of research, said that HBO, “in that rarefied environment protected from advertiser pressure … after many false starts and many shows that didn't make it, came up with a show that combined character study, violence and intensity that was unmatched.”
And, according to Brooks, “The broadcast networks, and cable for that matter, were very envious of that.”
In fact, in 2001 then NBC-president Bob Wright wrote a sour-grapes letter to his network executives and TV studios, asking whether the Peacock Network could learn any lessons from The Sopranos. Wright groused that broadcasters were at a programming disadvantage, compared with cable, because of strictures on depicting violence and sex.
“It [The Sopranos] forced broadcast television to improve the quality of its dramas,” Bianco said.
Brooks said that he considered The Sopranos so influential that he broke his rule and included it in the eighth edition of his The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, where he normally only included shows “seen by most Americans.” HBO is only in about one-third of U.S. TV homes.
“It has been a beacon for development of serious drama, of testing boundaries,” Brooks said.
Tony Soprano set the stage for the cutting-edge scripted dramas, like The Shield, that FX has built its brand on.
And it laid the groundwork for Fox's House, according to Alan Sepinwall, TV critic for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.
“I don't think you'd see a show like House without The Sopranos, because one of the things it proved is that if the writing is good enough, and the acting is good enough, the traditional rules about likeable characters and relatability don't necessarily apply,” Sepinwall said.
The mob show's impact on HBO was immeasurable.
“It brought us a great scripted drama at the time when scripted drama was dying on the networks,” Baldwin said.
A huge plus was that The Sopranos' audience was so broad, reaching “many, many different demos,” that HBO used it to establish a beachhead on Sunday evenings, going head-to-head with the broadcasters “on the biggest night in television,” according to Baldwin.
“Practically every important audience segment that purchases HBO is represented in a big way in The Sopranos audience,” he said. “And that's how you build to an overall large audience.”
HBO's strategy going forward is to satisfy those varied audience segments with several shows, rather than one hit like The Sopranos.
“Losing this show means that we have to work a little bit harder to get back good programming for all of those audience segments … that were so easy to get with one show,” Baldwin said. “We have to do that with multiple shows. Not that it's an impossible task, but it's a matter of planning and timing.”
That tack makes sense, but may not be so easy to pull off, according to Thompson.
“What you're essentially saying is, 'Can we survive with five modest hits, as opposed to one monster hit?' ” Thompson said. “Yes, that model would work. The question is that [getting] five modest hits is easier said than done.”
It's true that The Sopranos viewership has been trending down. The first seven episodes of the second part of the sixth season, the show has averaged 7.5 million viewers, with a total of 10.9 million viewers for its plays across the week. The season's first half last year averaged 8.9 million viewers on its premiere play on Sunday nights, and 13.1 million for the full week.
Still, Thompson raised the issue of how many HBO customers will churn out this year, in the aftermath of the end of The Sopranos, since he believes the show was “an anchor” that drew viewers to the premium service.
“Is there going to be a subscription Armageddon the day after this thing plays?” he asked. “That's a big question.”
HBO officials deny that there will be subscriber defection, citing past history. They pointed out that HBO's distribution has been on an upswing since The Sopranos debuted, making overall year-to-year gains even during the period, more than a year, from June 2004 to March 2006 when the show wasn't on. HBO has 28.7 million subscribers now, according to SNL Kagan, versus 23.7 million in 1998 just before the show started.
Even though The Sopranos' popularity may never be duplicated observers say not to count HBO out, even without Albrecht.
“HBO does have an aura and should be able to exploit that in the future,” Roush said. “If they keep taking risks, the risks will eventually pay off … They'll get attention, whatever they do.”
At least one TV critic, Sepinwall, doesn't think that HBO's newest series, John From Cincinnati, has the potential to be a broad hit. The show is a surreal tale about a seemingly jinxed multigenerational family of champion surfers whose lives are changed by a mysterious visitor. Sepinwall described it as “very obtuse, more like an art film.”
In the meantime, Tony and his crew will live on, in syndication on A&E Network, and in their influence on the TV landscape.
“The whole season is about Tony trying to come to grips with his legacy,” Roush said. “I do think this is one of the cultural benchmarks for dramatic television, much like Hill Street Blues helped TV grow up back in the '80s. … The Sopranos took it to a new level.”
NEXT WEEK: A Sopranos Scrapbook
