The current golden age of TV has a readily identifiable start point: January 10, 1999. That’s the date when “The Sopranos” debuted on HBO.
I am hardly alone is considering the show a milestone. In 2013, TV Guide rated it as #1 in its “60 Best Series of All Time.” Similarly, in Rolling Stone magazine’s 2016 list of the “100 Greatest TV Shows of All Time,” it was also ranked #1. Personally I tend to eschew such numbered rankings when it comes to entertainment. But I can’t ague with their assessments.
It certainly changed my TV viewing habits. At the time when it started airing in 1999, I had ended my cable TV subscription a few years earlier. Too many times I found myself sitting in my living room easy chair, TV remote control in hand, flipping through the many channels in my cable subscription and finding little if anything to even pique much less hold my interest. It felt like a waste of money to keep subscribing. I often found myself singing the chorus of the 1993 Bruce Springsteen song “57 Channels (And Nothin’ On).”
Admittedly, it helped me make it through those years of no cable to have a genuinely world-class video store about eight blocks from my home. In addition to a very deep and broad stock of movies, the store also had a quite extensive TV stock. I actually started binging TV series back in the 1990s when I watched “Homicide: Life on the Street” on rentals. Interestingly, the show was based on a similarly-titled book by then-Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, who went on to create the TV series I would most likely rate #2 of all time, close behind “The Sopranos” – “The Wire.”
After “The Sopranos” debuted, word I heard on it was favorable. One friend who was quite impressed with the show was taping each episode. So I asked him to let me borrow his tapes to watch it. After only a few weeks, I was calling him early on Monday to get the tape of the previous Sunday evening’s episode. Even before the first 13-episodes of the first season all aired I had turned my cable account back on.
I watched that whole season again soon after. And followed the show addictively through its five further seasons until the controversial final episode on June 10, 2007. (I may be one of the show’s very few avid fans who had no strong reaction to that last episode. I felt like it simply left things open for the cast and its producers/writers to possibly return to after taking time to pursue other projects. Alas, James Gandolfini died before that could have ever happened. And interestingly, I discovered on reading his New York Times obituary that I had actually met him when he managed a Manhattan music video nightclub prior to his acting career taking hold.)
Recently, my two housemates, who hadn’t yet seen The Sopranos, started watching it. By now I’d actually rewatched the show at least three more times. So as I’d pass by or through the living room as they viewed it, there was a delightful familiarity to it all for me.
One of those housemates is almost as much a TV buff as I am. It was interesting to hear his comments on characters he liked and not as well as plot points and such as the show proceeded. And to hear him agree after getting a couple of seasons in that it is just about as great as television gets.
Ever since “The Sopranos” brought me back into cable, I’ve been viewing TV with a fervor for its best shows. I may have turned off my cable again, but that was only because streaming TV serves me needs even better. And 20 years after “The Sopranos” ushered in this new TV boon, I am happy to report that it remains a masterpiece. If you haven’t seen it yet, all I can say is do so.
Book: “Girl to City: A Memor” by Amy Rigby – Okay, yeah, full disclosure that acclaimed cult singer-songwriter Rigby mentions my name in her book when quoting what I wrote about an early band she played and sang in. But since she’s been getting rave reviews from many on her wonderfully written and evocative memoir that frequently rate her work even better than the contemporaneous books by far-more-well-known female musical talents like Debbie Harry and Liz Phair, I won’t feel at all guilty about plugging a longtime friend’s tale of how a teenage Elton John fan moved to New York City in the mid-’70s and grew into a supremely talented musical artist and now author.
Movie: “The Irishman” – I wrote a recent column in praise of Martin Scorsese just before his latest release came out in both theaters and on Netflix. But of course, for all that’s been said about it, this three-hour-plus tale is simply more excellence from a master with a dream cast to boot: Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino (in his first Scorsese film) and Joe Pesci in am impressive subtle yet potent performance.
Rob Patterson is a music and entertainment writer in Austin, Texas. Email orca@prismnet.com.
From The Progressive Populist, May 15, 2020
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