Sopranos creator David Chase is celebrating the 25th anniversary of his iconic show’s premier and lamenting the death of television’s exquisite Golden Age.
In an interview with the Sunday Times, the 78-year-old who changed television, but sadly not forever, said, “Yes, this is the 25th anniversary, so of course it’s a celebration. But perhaps we shouldn’t look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral.”
“That was a blip,” he told the Times with a sigh, referring to the Golden Age. “A 25-year blip. 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.”
Obviously, he is talking about the many treasures borne of the success of The Sopranos: The Wire, Justified, The Shield, Boardwalk Empire, Game of Thrones, Lost, 24, Battlestar Galactica (2003), Longmire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men…
TV is “going back to where [it] was,” he explained. The streamers are “going to have commercials.”
Chase is currently out trying to sell a show about a high-end hooker in witness protection. After three drafts and five meetings, he’s being told it’s too complex. “I’ve already been told to dumb it down.”
“As the human race goes on,” he continues, “we are more into multitasking. Your phone is just one symptom, but who can really focus? Your mother could be dying and you are by her hospital bed taking calls. We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus. And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.”
Chase believes HBO’s Succession is the last of its kind. “So, it is a funeral,” he says. “Something is dying.”
There’s no question Chase is correct that “something is dying,” and TV’s Golden Age is over. His reasoning, or the reasons he’s being told, make zero sense.
People are still watching those Golden Era shows. Over and over, millions watch the Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, etc. One of the most popular streaming shows of 2023 was Suits, which left the air five years ago. Suits (2011 to 2019) hails from that 25-year golden era. I’m not arguing Suits is a Mad Men or Wire. Still, from the few episodes I’ve seen, it’s Golden Age-ish — a sophisticated drama with a large cast of complicated and flawed characters dealing with complicated moral dilemmas.
If viewers and their iPhones were the problem here, these Golden Age shows would not remain so popular. The problem is that Hollywood is totally consumed by the cultish and tribal need to produce simplistic, virtuous, left-wing propaganda.
Over Christmas, my pretty wife and I rewatched The Wire for the fourth or fifth time. We are now deep into our third or fourth rewatch of The Shield. Hollywood isn’t refusing to make shows like those because people won’t watch them. This is especially ludicrous in a culture so atomized a few million viewers qualifies as a hit show. Please do name a show we’re all missing that’s every bit as compelling and addicting as Mad Men.
The reason Hollywood refuses to make those shows is because those stories were told without the creators judging. Judgment was left up to the viewer. In this fascist era, this is considered a sin. Why? Because The Sopranos, Mad Men, and all the rest all did the same thing: forced you to engage in critical thinking.
Over and over, these shows demanded your participation by refusing to do your thinking for you. Instead, you were presented with charismatic characters it was impossible not to be drawn to and whom you sympathized with. You even admired their refusal to conform. But then you were slapped in the face with their extremes and selfishness and asked, “What do you think of Tony Soprano now?”
After watching The Wire over and over, I still have no idea what to think about Omar or McNulty or those union guys in the second season desperately trying to hold on to their world and culture. It’s easy to judge some of their actions. But that’s different from judging a complicated human being.
Still, I admire McNulty’s inability to eat bullshit. I love Omar’s fearlessness and how he sticks to his code. I feel for those union guys as our wretched ruling elite sell them out. Above all, in this fascist era of political correctness, I revel in their unfiltered talk.
Turning Tony Soprano, Walter White, Jack Bauer, and Vic Mackey over in my head is an endless pleasure. They are the Charles Foster Kanes and Hamlets of our time, and that makes them timeless.
From what I see on TV today, which is no longer much (I found Succession overrated), that pleasure is gone. Critical thinking is gone. We’re told what to think. We’re told what to feel. This character is evil because he misgendered someone. This character is virtuous because he wears a dress. The thinking is done for us, and that’s deliberate. So what if it’s smug, tedious, forgettable, and fails? Critical thinking is a threat to the left, so it must be removed.
And that’s the death of the Golden Era.
Here’s my write-up for the 20th anniversary of The Sopranos. Those five years sure went fast. Man, I’ll be dead any day now.
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