The Sopranos ushered in the so-called Golden Age of Television™ — when small-screen storytelling and art began to catch up with, and in some cases surpass, film.
But the series’ creator, David Chase, seems to think that the 25th anniversary of his landmark show marks the end of the much-hyped golden age of television, despite evidence to the contrary.
“Yes, it’s a 25th anniversary, so of course it’s a celebration,” Chase recently told The Sunday Times. “But maybe we shouldn’t look at it that way. Maybe we should look at it as a funeral.”
Chase went on to call the era of television that brought us acclaimed modern classics like The Wire, Breaking Bad and Mad Men a “25-year crash.” The writer and director, who started out in network television before moving to HBO, where he didn’t have the pressure of advertising dollars, claims that television is ‘back where I was’.
“Back then, the networks were in an arthouse. A fucking shithole,” Chase recalls. “The process was disgusting. In meetings, these people were always asking to remove the one thing that made an episode worth doing. I should have quit.”
With The Sopranos, Chase thought he had made the networks “regret their decades of stupidity and greed,” but now, he says, streaming services will have ads, too.
“And I was told to make it simpler,” the 78-year-old prognosticator added, referring to a show he tried to make with A Teacher writer and creator Hannah Fidell about a high-end prostitute forced into witness protection. Chase said they were told the “unfortunate truth” that their treatment was too complicated.
“Who is all this really for?” he continued. “I guess the shareholders?”
Chase also blamed “multitasking” and widespread smartphone addiction. “We seem to be confused and the audience can’t focus on things,” he said, “so we can’t create anything that’s too logical, that grabs our attention, that requires the audience to focus.”
“Then it’s a funeral,” Chase concluded. “Something is dying.”
Chase has a point. But then again, the 25-year golden age of television was really a white era—white antiheroes actually got away with murder. There are still great shows now, but the protagonists look different and so the stories are different, while the storytelling is still often of a high standard. Otherwise, why would movie stars flock to the small screen?
Of course, The Sopranos wasn’t competing with reality TV when it first premiered on January 10, 1999. Or social media, or smartphones, or any of the myriad things that distract us and reduce what’s left of our attention spans. At the time, the 24-hour news cycle was still a novelty, and distraction viewing—consuming mindless content as an escape from the harsh complexities of the real world—wasn’t a necessity.
So maybe the golden age of television is dead. But at least we still have The Gilded Age. And thank God for that—and, as usual—for Christine Baranski.
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