"The Sopranos" @ 20

During my final winter break from college, walking around a recently New Year's Eve'd Times Square, I looked up and saw a giant billboard for a new show about to debut on HBO: The Sopranos.

The billboard featured, if memory serves, several men and women (plus a couple of children) standing around and looking menacing. I didn't recognize any of the actors in this new series except for two -- the guy who beat up that girl in True Romance, and the wife from Goodfellas. I had no idea what the show was about but, from the looks of it (including the gun substituting for the "r" in title), I guessed it wasn't about opera singers. I also figured that I'd never watch this show (heck, I didn't even have HBO at the time) and it would probably get cancelled quickly. The Sopranos, as advertised, looked dumb and hammy. Who cared? 

How wrong I was. It turned out to be a groundbreaking, brilliant show -- a dark satire about American life wrapped up in a traditional mafia drama. A middle aged man, under pressure at work and home, goes to therapy to get cured of his recurrent panic attacks and tries to understand his life and existential dread. The fact that this man is also a mafia boss and killer only made it more compelling. 

And how appropriate that the show began in 1999 -- The Sopranos brought television, and really American culture, into the 21st century. It was post-modernist, destructive, and it re-invented the serial TV drama with cinematic storytelling and production values. Today, most of TV looks like The Sopranos (dark, profane, violent, extremely funny, nonlinear plots) but, back then, NYPD Blue and ER were considered edgy TV. The Sopranos, pun fully intended, whacked that idea.

The Sopranos was set in New Jersey and created, at least in its time, a sort of "Jersey Chic" (before Jersey Shore would have that honor). NYC was the place where mobsters and their family and friends would go to do business, have fun, and commit various crimes before going back to their suburban homes and lives. In the opening credits, Tony Soprano drives through the Holland Tunnel and we see the city fade away in his side-view mirror -- this is a show that exists nexts to and in the shadow of NYC. In that way, The Sopranos was and wasn't a NYC show.

HBO is currently re-airing the show and you can also find it on HBO Go and On Demand. It's worth re-watching and this handy guide can help direct you to its best episodes.