In Alex Gibney’s new documentary about the making of The Sopranos, series regular Michael Imperioli offers an interesting explanation for what made the show so different from anything that had come before it.
“Television, in the past, was always about making you feel good,” Imperioli explained.
He added that Sopranos creator David Chase was “all about the opposite” in his own approach to televisual storytelling.
You may be thinking to yourself, Hey, I don’t go in for the feel-good stuff! I like gritty cop dramas like Law & Order: SVU. Nothing wholesome about that!
According to Imperioli, however, TV cop shows exist as a sort of Trojan Horse for good vibes.
The Definition of Darkness
Yes, you might think the “feel good” label only applies to Ted Lasso, When Calls the Heart, and their ilk.
But Imperioli argues that conventionally structured broadcast shows about first responders offer their audiences warmth and familiarity through predictable, formulaic storylines.
“Cop shows, why are cop shows so great?” he asks in the Gibney doc.
“Because at the end of the day, the bad guy gets put in jail. There’s some kind of order to the universe. There’s some kind of justice.”
Imperioli believes that one reason audiences responded so well to The Sopranos was that the show was proudly capricious and chaotic.
But that unpredictability came not through Shymalan-esque twists (which provide a sort of comfortable familiarity of their own).
Rather, it was a result of crafting storylines that were chaotic in the same way as real life.
A gangster survives a clash with a powerful rival, only to be killed shortly thereafter in an argument about a horse.
A hot pursuit through a snowy forest fizzles out into anticlimax as the quarry disappears — and better yet, we never find out what happened to him.
It was a new kind of TV — one that had more in common with the French New Wave films of Goddard and Truffaut than with the comforting conventionality of pre-Golden Age TV.
Happy Wanderers and Grim Gangsters
Critics and casual TV fans have spent years debating whether or not The Sopranos is the greatest show of the 21st century, but few would question that it’s the most influential.
The series’ success put HBO on the map as a platform for bold original content, and it helped to create a television landscape in which innovation was prized as highly as big-name stars.
Shows like Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Dexter, The Wire, Lost, Orange Is the New Black, and The Americans likely would not have seen the light of day if Tony Soprano had never stepped into a therapist’s office.
It looked as though a new day had dawned, one in which TV audiences wanted to be challenged by shows that were every bit as bold and confrontational as the year’s best movies.
The End of an Era
But just as quickly as the so-called Second Golden Age began, it petered out, a phenomenon that David Chase observed earlier this year.
Don’t get us wrong, The Sopranos was not the first TV series to explore the darker side of the human experience, and the current TV landscape is not all flowers and sunshine.
But it often seems that every Succession is replaced by a dozen Fire Countries, another series (now a franchise, in fact) that’s not ostensibly upbeat but that traffics in tropes and formulas in a way that’s likely to offer subconscious comfort to viewers seeking familiar flavors.
Chase says he now regards the Second Golden Age as a fluke — “a 25-year blip” in which television briefly transcended its perceived limitations and momentarily reached the level of high art.
“And to be clear, I’m not talking only about The Sopranos, but a lot of other hugely talented people out there who I feel increasingly bad for,” he said in a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter.
The fact of the matter is, darkness is just not commercially viable — at least not in the somewhat staid milieu of contemporary TV.
If the dominance of Disney and Marvel flicks at the box office is any indication, Americans are generally more darkness-averse than ever these days.
But TV has been hit especially hard with the cudgel of toxic positivity.
Audiences might be willing to endure two hours of pessimism when they walk into an arthouse cinema, knowing what sort of gloom and doom lies in store.
But they don’t want to take an hour out of a busy Tuesday evening to have an existential crisis, especially when the kids still haven’t been put to bed.
And so, “laundry-folding TV,” the sort of content that can be enjoyed while completing chores or scrolling through TikTok, reigns supreme in 2024.
We can’t say we blame anyone for gravitating toward that type of content.
After all, the nightly news consistently offers enough horrors to drive anyone into the warm embrace of a Tracker rerun.
We just wish that we could all still make a little time, perhaps on Sunday nights, for panic attack-prone gangsters, chronically ill drug dealers, alcoholic ad men, and other walking reminders of the darkness that resides within each of us.
What do you think, TV fanatics? Is there a dearth of darkness in the modern television landscape?
Hit the comments section below to share your thoughts!