Disclaimer: I have never watched The Sopranos.
Was I the only one who found the standing ovation for the Sopranos during last night’s Emmy awards to be a little ridiculous? Time and time again the insider Hollywood media has touted the Sopranos, but on balance is it right to put Sopranos in the same pantheon as mass-culture phenoms like All In The Family, Seinfeld, Cosby, Hill Street Blues, etc.? Did any of those shows get the spotlight after their last year like a premium cable show did last night?
I don’t think so.
Yes. The ovation was deserved. Watch the show. It’s on A&E. Email me. I lend you the DVD’s of season one.
Your post needs some Kryptonite applied to it. Sounds like: “I never saw President Bush on TV. Am I the only one who finds it absurd that so many people make fun of his problems with English, smirks, lies, and manipulation?”
I’m not disputing whether it’s a good show or not. All indication is that it is. But was it a cultural touchstone like those other programs?
Actually, yeah, it kinda was. Its appearance was the moment that it became fashionable to write smart scripted dramas again. We went through a very long glut of the smartest writing on TV being highly unappreciated. The Sopranos helped change that.
It was also a milestone in that it was telling adult stories without the ridiculous cultural obstacles of network television. It treated television with the seriousness of cinema.
I don’t know about the ovations the other shows got. But then again, the Emmies are, utterly, irrelevant in terms of how they recognize achievement in the medium. There’s absolutely no good reason that Andre Braugher had to wait until after he left Homicide before he got his long-deserved Best Actor trophy.
No, its not. They’ve never done anything like that for any other TV and as good as Soprano’s was, it wasn’t the Greatest Show Ever in the History of Television. I might give it a top 10 status, but it was a bit of overkill to me. And I really hated that they gave him the writing award for the last episode instead of the car wreck episode where Tony offed Christopher– a much better episode in my opinion.
The show deserved it. It may not be a social or cultural landmark the way All in the Family was, but it’s definitely a masterpiece of episodic television, which All in the Family isn’t.
“It treated television with the seriousness of cinema.”
Exactly. Someone somewhere once called it the best gangster movie ever made. The ranking is arguable (everyone knows the best gangster movie ever made is The Godfather, Part II, hands down) but the importance of a cinematic sensibility to The Soprano’s cultural impact isn’t.
but it’s definitely a masterpiece of episodic television, which All in the Family isn’t
You gotta be kidding me. Please watch All In The Family.
Spider J nailed it. The Sopranos transformed the TV industry and broadened the creative opportunities for the actors, writers, directors, and TV executives who were sitting in the Shrine Auditorium. No wonder they stood.
Oliver, if you roll back the clock to All In The Family, Cosby, Hill Street Blues, and to a lesser extent Seinfeld, you’re talking about an era when three networks dominated the TV sets of all viewers. Today the audience is fragmented across four major (and two minor) broadcast networks, hundreds of cable networks, YouTube, and millions of blogs.
The Sopranos ovation says less about the relative merits of the programs than it does about our changed media landscape.
Remember that the TV industry feels under attack today–not only from changing audience habits, but the right wing cultural nabobs. They need to try harder to assert their importance.
Oliver, I might just have been watching All in the Family before you were born. Allow me, however, to be more specific. All in the Family is a great show because of its willingness to tackle social and cultural taboos from an unexpected perspective. It was, however, a situation comedy. It was not an episodic television show, as I dumbly defined it, in the sense that it sustained on-going storylines from show to show over multiple seasons. While there were occasional “special” series that carried storylines over multiple shows there was hardly any effort to follow character growth and development for longer than 30 minutes. Hell, Edith’s entry into menopause lasts exactly one show and is then never mentioned again. Which is not to say the show couldn’t draw a powerful emotional punch. It could. But The Sopranos represents an entirely different genre of television that, without wanting to argue that one is better than another, I tend to prefer.
If I may be so bold, may I suggest you actually *watch* the show and *then* cast your judgment.
Me? I’ve never eaten cookie dough ice cream yet it can’t possibly taste as good as mint ice cream.