Features/Sopranos: 25 years of Sopranos: Mafia pop culture history

25 years ago, when the Federal Chancellor was called Schröder and in New York there were two more towers scratching the cloud cover, for many people horizons were just lines in the landscape. The end of the view, so to speak – nice to look at when the sun is shining, less so when it’s raining. A supposedly particularly old service industry was considered horizontal, but certainly not an entertainment format. Until January 10, 1999.

On this winter day, far away from the constant crises of today, Tony Soprano drives past the World Trade Center to the psychotherapist Dr. Melfi and not only breaks a taboo of organized crime, he also writes a piece of pop culture history. Four months before Robert de Niro reveals to Billy Crystal his erectile dysfunction in “Purely a Matter of Nerve,” the new television cinema is being built in the neighboring state of New Jersey.

Plagued by panic attacks, the fictional mafia boss sits down on his shrink’s couch for a whopping eighty-six times and fifty-five minutes and adds fresh perspectives to the maximally male mobster genre. After all, on “The Sopranos” there are weak and gay, eccentric and stuffy, empathetic and unscrupulous, poor and rich, nice and nasty mafiosi, but practically no police officers.

And HBO not only stages them in more complex ways than was conceivable on screen at the time; the cable channel also does it with a narrative depth that previously seemed unthinkable. Almost 80 hours spread over six seasons of watching the same cast grapple with dirty business – we already knew that from “Dallas” and “Denver”.

But these were endless series called “long-arc drama”. Soap operas in which the staff and setting, i.e. JR and Alexis, shake up the same oil industry season after season. With rare exceptions, the 565 episodes of both formats were self-contained chapters of turbo-capitalist villainy, while Tony Soprano’s family gang tormented themselves and others from cliffhanger to cliffhanger through the shabby garbage disposal business in the New York suburbs.

However, for the big networks like Fox or ABC, David Chase’s TV version of a “Godfather” in the mid-life crisis, from hair loss to profile neurosis to marital stress, was too complex for common viewing habits. Instead, HBO took a risk – and redefined the term “quality television”. Thanks to the “Sopranos,” ongoing fiction is always considered horizontal when it spins the big wheel of multi-faceted characters. And James Gandolfini’s title character gathers dozens of them around him.

Tony’s equally classy and self-confident wife Carmela (Edie Falco), for example, their teenagers Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and AJ (Robert Iler), his capos Chris (Michael Imperioli) or Paulie (Tony Sirico) and of course the most original character, since Mervyn LeRoy launched the profession with “Little Caesar” in 1931: Silvio Dante, literally embodied by Bruce Springsteen’s regular guitarist Steven van Zandt in his first speaking role.

They were all allowed to do what Bobby Ewing and Alexis Carrington were denied throughout the series’ lives: develop. From good to bad to mediocre and back again or vice versa, the main thing is that it is so variable that no individual part is the same as another and still fits into the structure. With this quality concept, HBO has hoarded 21 Emmys and five Golden Globes and has reliably catapulted its “Sopranos” to number one among the best series of all time.

In a listing, Rolling Stone recently relegated “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad” to second to third place, and “Twin Peaks” and “Game of Thrones” even to the middle of the pack. Which is remarkable because “The Sopranos” has aged rather poorly aesthetically. Setting, editing, tempo and sound – all of this is closer to “These Drombuschs” than, say: “Orange is the New Black” (37th place) or “Homeland” (89th place). Epigones who hardly seem imaginable without the preparatory work of the Sopranos.

The German comparison is by no means meant to sound disrespectful. Minus a brittle 80s dreariness, Robert Stromberger and his middle-class clan around the resolute Vera Drombusch (Witta Pohl) had created a monument of horizontal storytelling that was often underestimated – only that it was more of a series than a series and therefore falls off Tony Soprano’s grid in a similar way to the marriage craze South American telenovelas or the longest-running TV series of all: “Coronation Street”.

There, too, the repetitive cast, mostly biologically selected in 11,000 episodes since 1960, revolves around the lives of exceptionally ordinary Brits, analogous to the German “Lindenstraße”. Theatrical cliffhangers serve more as a stabilization than as a horizontal dramaturgy. However, anyone who remembers the final demise of the Sopranos will notice how little the pioneer of the new television cared about impact for impact’s sake.

After an endless series of fateful low blows, Tony and Carmela Soprano enter a restaurant with children and nothing happens. Except for the palpable fear of the washed-up ex-godfather, which seeks confirmation in every gesture and every look from every guest. And finds. A stroke of genius that was based primarily on brilliant scriptwriting and finally elevated authors to the rank of well-known directors.

The fact that hardly anyone could see the series in this country also has to do with fear. Quota fear. Because the viewership of the opening season remained six figures, ZDF didn’t bury the rest until Sunday night, then they buried it in the cemetery of public cowardice, right next to “KDD – Criminal Permanent Service” or “In the Face of Crime”, “Breaking Bad” and “Six Feet Under«. But since the faintheartedness of German program editors is known to be the surest sign of horizontal quality, it became clear by March 2000 at the latest how brilliant The Sopranos are. And how exemplary for everything that came after.

»The Sopranos«, all seasons, available with a Sky subscription or for purchase on Amazon Prime, Apple TV and Magenta