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If you have seen the show, you can see the opening right now. The rear-view mirror. Tony Soprano in the car. The cigar. The New Jersey Turnpike dissolving into suburban streets. The hum of "Woke Up This Morning" rolling him home. It runs for about ninety seconds. It contains no plot information, no hook, no reason to stay except the feeling it creates and the fact that you could do nothing but watch it. You might remember your parents watching it if you were too young the first time around. The song on heavy rotation in the car when your dad picked you up from school. Words like "gabagool" and "oogatz" floating around at dinner parties. If you remember it the first time, you know how far the apple has fallen from the tree.
A modern streaming platform would cut that opening sequence. Netflix auto-skips opening credits. The data says viewers skip them. Ninety seconds of atmosphere with no narrative payoff is exactly the kind of creative decision that engagement metrics would flag as inefficient. The first thing you experience about the greatest television drama ever made is, paradoxically, the first thing the system it created would eliminate.
The Sopranos premiered on HBO on January 10, 1999. It was created by David Chase, a frustrated filmmaker who had spent decades writing for network television and hated it. He originally conceived it as a feature film about a mob boss in therapy, having problems with his mother. He wanted Robert De Niro for the lead. De Niro was already committed to Analyse This, a comedy with an almost identical premise that would premiere eight weeks later.
David Chase
Chase drew the remaining characters from his own life: Livia Soprano was based on his mother, Dr Melfi on his own psychiatrist, Tony's panic attacks on his own clinical depression. He pitched the script to Fox. They passed. He took it to HBO, which at that point had never produced a hit original drama. They greenlit a pilot because they had nothing to lose and no data to tell them otherwise.
What they got was something that had never existed in the medium before. The Sopranos is set in northern New Jersey, among people who are objectively terrible: violent, unfaithful, manipulative, self-pitying, and often astonishingly petty. And you cannot stop watching them because every single one is rendered with such unflinching, unsparing honesty that something in you recognises the human being underneath the choices. The writers never moralised. They never paused the drama to instruct the audience. They never arranged a scene to make a point about society.
A pyramid since time immemorial
The characters were simply there, inhabiting their own lives with the full weight of their own flawed logic, and you were permitted to observe. They did not care about you. They did not know you were watching. That was the point. That was why 13 million people watched every week. That was why nothing since has felt the same, because almost everything made since has been designed with the audience's comfort, politics, or engagement metrics in mind, and The Sopranos was designed with absolutely none of those things in mind. It was designed to be true.
Most people's favourite episode is "Pine Barrens," the one where Paulie and Christopher get lost in the woods. It is brilliant, funny, and endlessly quotable.
“He was an interior decorator. He killed 16 Czechoslovakians.”
“His house looked like shit.”
When you grow up, you realise the best episode is "Whitecaps," the one where Tony's marriage disintegrates in a series of scenes so raw and precisely observed that they feel like surveillance footage of a real relationship collapsing. No algorithm would produce "Whitecaps." It doesn't test well. It is devastating, slow, and offers the audience nothing but the truth about what happens when two people who have built a life together can no longer sustain the lie on which it was built. An engagement metric would have flagged it. A focus group would have softened it. Chase aired it because HBO let him, and HBO let him because nobody was measuring whether the audience found it comfortable.
The first season cost roughly $2 million per episode. By the final season, $6-7 million. Total cost: approximately $456 million in today's money. Amazon spent $1 billion on a single season of The Rings of Power. The Sopranos cost a fraction and was made with near-total creative autonomy.
HBO's business model was the quiet architecture beneath everything. A subscription channel. You paid for the network; you did not pay per show. No completion rates. No algorithms. No data-driven greenlight. A small number of executives making judgment calls, and a model that tolerated creative risk because no individual show had to justify itself through metrics. The Sopranos drew 13 million weekly viewers at its peak and drove a 50% spike in new HBO subscriptions around the second season premiere.
Having the best use of a Frank Sinatra song in the history of visual media was surely a contributing factor, if unverifiable. The show was so authentic that the FBI confirmed, via a Vanity Fair oral history, that real mobsters discussed it on wiretapped calls. Terence Winter recalled: "They would listen to the wiretaps from that weekend, and it was Mob guys talking about The Sopranos." Real wiseguys were convinced the show had someone on the inside.
Total global content spending hit $210 billion in 2024. Netflix spends $17 billion annually. Amazon, $20 billion. Disney $28 billion. There has never been more money in television. FX CEO John Landgraf counted 210 scripted originals in 2009. The number peaked at 600 in 2022, fell 14% to 516 in 2023, and dropped a further 31% in early 2024. Landgraf pinpointed the inflexion: "Pre-WGA strike, Netflix changed their Wall Street metric from global subscribers to profit." When the goal was subscribers, platforms spent to attract. When the goal became profit, they spent to optimise. The content did not improve. It became more efficient.
The writers' strike of 2023 exposed the mechanics. 148 days. $5 billion in losses. Writer pay had fallen 14% since 2018 despite the explosion in spending. Full writers' rooms replaced by mini rooms: fewer writers, shorter employment, less development. Streamers refused to share viewing data with the creators of the content. This is the pattern of every industry that scales through measurement: the creative labour that generates the value is the first cost the efficiency model identifies for reduction. In pharmaceutical research, the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent has fallen roughly 80-fold in inflation-adjusted terms.
In journalism, Gawker installed giant screens to display real-time traffic data. BuzzFeed built a $1.5 billion empire on viral metrics. BuzzFeed News shut down in 2023. The pivot to video saw publishers fire writers and replace journalism with content because Facebook's data said video performed better. The data was inflated. The writers were already gone. The Boston Globe's Spotlight investigation into the Catholic Church took months of work with no guarantee of outcome; a click-metrics dashboard would have killed it in week two. When the incentive structure no longer tolerates the unpredictable, what else do we lose that we never see?
David Chase, at The Sopranos' 25th anniversary, called the era of prestige television "a 25-year blip." He said the Succession finale was its last dying gasp.
On June 10, 2007, 11.9 million people watched the final episode. Tony sits in a diner with his family. "Don't Stop Believin'" on the jukebox. His daughter walks toward the door. The screen cuts to black. Ten seconds of silence. Across America, viewers thought their cable signal had cut out. Matthew Weiner, a writer and executive producer on the show's final three seasons who later created Mad Men, described it as the Punk Rocker smashing the guitar at the end of the gig. Chase gave the audience nothing, yet gave them something they have been discussing for 18 years. The most celebrated creative decision in the history of television was the one most hostile to every form of measurement the industry now relies on.
The Sopranos depicted the last generation that could make the Mob work, because the world was going digital while the Mob ran on analogue. The show was made under the last conditions that could produce it, because the industry was going digital, and the work runs on trust. Both the content and the conditions existed in the same window. When the screen cut to black, so did the era. Everything after it was measured, optimised, and illuminated by data.
The darkness was the freedom.
See you on the next one.
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