Sopranos’ Creator Complaints About “Dumbing Down” Prestige Television

I’ve never been interested in The Sopranos and that boils down to personal preference over any issue with the show. Watching a mobster having a strained family life and seeing a therapist is not something I care about since we’re talking about people who shake other people down for money, promote crime, shoot each other and anyone they consider a “problem”, and are generally evil to everyone, including itself at times. I don’t want to feel anything for these guys except happy when they reform or get locked away for a very long time. No matter how good a show it is, and apparently it is a good one, I just don’t care.

I have no qualms with the creator of the show, David Chase. He saw something that makes for good drama, went with it, and was rewarded for his hard work. No problems here. The question is whether or not he’s right when it comes to Hollywood wanting him to dumb down his work, something he discussed in a recent interview with The Sunday Times. That link is to the Wayback Machine because that’s the link Bounding Into Comics used when discussing the article for whatever reason they had and considering the piece is kind of old I’m not going to go crazy trying to reach the original version.

The interview (and we’ll ignore the unnecessary election talk at the end…no, writer Jonathan Dean, you DON’T have to ask every American you interview about politics and how Hollywood hates Trump because I doubt anyone in the UK cares!) goes over the trouble Chase had getting his mobster show on television the way he wanted it until HBO picked it up, and how “prestige” shows are in trouble because the studios and TV networks don’t want to make it. Much of his statements don’t surprise me, since Hollywood thinks we’re all stupid since that makes the demographics easier. I do have a few notes of my own, though.

David Chase is sitting at home in Los Angeles in front of blood-red walls. Sunlight streams through a window, so he stands up to close the blinds. Now suitably hugged by claret and darkness, he talks about The Sopranos, his violent, funny, caustic, moving and endlessly rewatchable crime drama, which first aired a quarter of a century ago (January 10, 1999, to be precise) and, over the course of six series and 86 episodes, changed TV permanently.

Yeah, making it okay to treat some horrible people as the hero even when they do horrible things. Or at least the protagonist. We’ll see a list of such shows and most of them fall into that area. I thought that nonsense went out with the 1940s.

In 1999 The Sopranos was a simple, brilliant twist on a well-trodden genre. Take the Italian-American mafia, beloved in The Godfather and Goodfellas, but turn their stories into a TV series that focuses, yes, on the murdering, but just as much on the Mob boss Tony Soprano’s family and his sessions with a therapist. Feelings were as important as “fuggedaboutit” — no wonder it is often labelled the best show in history, the one that ushered in the so-called golden age of TV.

Apparently we couldn’t do that without focusing the murdering and other crimes the mob does to the average citizen. It’s not like we could do such a show about doctors, maybe in a war story with people who saved lives rather than took them, and tried to deal with a harsh environment not of their own choosing. We could set it in a mobile army surgical hospital or something. What would we call that show?

However, as The Sopranos toasts its 25th birthday, its creator is in no mood to party. For reasons we will get to, Chase feels that everything he fought for to freshen up TV is hurtling back to where it was. “Yes, this is the 25th anniversary, so of course it’s a celebration,” he says, not sounding celebratory at all. “But perhaps we shouldn’t look at it like that. Maybe we should look at it like a funeral.” He means a funeral for the type of show that was synonymous with The Sopranos — The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men and so on.

Look, these are shows outside of my usual wheelhouse. My media library’s going to be limited.

I had to look up The Wire because I heard the name but not the plot. Apparently it’s about a bunch of drug dealers. Breaking Bad was about a guy who thought he was dying so he also made drugs to give money to his family–by selling death to other people and mixing it up with other bad guys. The show about advertising execs in the 1960s is the only example of a show without criminal at the center, and give how advertisers are treated on TV they were probably still not good people.

That’s my problem with what’s being listed here. The shows they’re using for examples are about horrible people we’re supposed to feel sorry or root for, which is usually what a protagonist is for. You can have a protagonist you want to see lose, but that works in a movie. In a series, they can’t lose or the series is over. I can’t think of any of these kinds of shows in recent years that weren’t about crime families, con artists, or crooked cops. I want to root for the good guys, not relate to the bad guys.

To get into what he means let us head back to the start — 1999, when The Sopranos was a breath of fresh air. Back then, TV was advert-driven and formulaic. However, thanks to the subscription service HBO, Chase was able to run uninterrupted episodes at an hour a piece. It allowed TV to feel as ambitious as cinema.

When Chase talks about making The Sopranos he mentions Elvis Costello and specifically his song Radio Radio. “I wanna bite the hand that feeds me/ I wanna bite that hand so badly/ I want to make them wish they’d never seen me” it goes, and while Costello was railing against commercial radio, Chase took his lyrics to inspire a fight against TV networks.

“It is exactly how I felt,” he says about Costello’s words. “And I succeeded too — I made them regret all their decades of stupidity and greed. Back then the networks were in an artistic pit. A @#$%#hole. The process was repulsive. In meetings these people would always ask to take out the one thing that made an episode worth doing. I should have quit.”

Did they regret it? If so we didn’t get many shows like it. TNT would do a few shows like The Closer, that were actually about cops, or you’d get something like The Walking Dead that from what I can tell (I’m less interested in the zombie apocalypse than I am the mafia) tried to make the villains villainous.

Chase was in his fifties, angry, frustrated and depressed. He was a jobbing writer, but wanted to make movies. “I had written at least ten screenplays, though,” he says. “And none succeeded. It was apartheid. If you were a TV writer you couldn’t drink the water in pictures.” As an alternative to the big screen he started to write The Sopranos only for his pilot to be rejected too, by leading networks such as Fox.

You wanted a show with sex and violence and you went to the major networks? FCC rules aside that’s not what they produce. They make shows for people who had a hard work day to relax, not hard drama. It’s why drama shows were saved for Friday-Sunday, and even some of them were shows like Dallas. You could still have decent character drama, but that wasn’t the focus. The most normal you’d get is Grey’s Anatomy. They also aren’t going to show sex because nudity isn’t allowed on network TV even TNT doesn’t do that. You have to go to the stations like HBO or Starz, where they don’t care because they aren’t beholden to advertisers. Makes me wonder what Netflix and other streaming services do now that they’re using ad-sponsored tiers?

By this point HBO, Cinemax, and Showtime were making original series that were a bit edgier. Not Spartacus: Blood And Sand or Game Of Thrones level edgier, but edgy enough that this should have been your go-to. I forget if Starz was around at the time, and I won’t suggest AMC because they were still American Movie Classics at the time and he hates advertisements in his shows cutting his run time anyway. You shouldn’t expect Fox or CBS would give you open season on the type of show you wanted. You go to the people that make what you want to make. I’m a rank amateur and I know that. How does a professional not?

“I should have known that a real mafia wiseguy show would not happen on US TV,” he scoffs. “If you think your grandmother is risk-averse you should meet network people.” Why did these channels not commission The Sopranos?

“Well, I could’ve done an idiotic Mob show, a watered-down Godfather, but why would you cut its balls off yourself? On a network I could not do out-there Italian characters, and there was sex, violence and bad language. It was never going to happen.”

Chase shakes his head. Did anyone who had turned The Sopranos down ever apologise? “Never,” Chase says, shrugging. “That’s typical Hollywood. They never take responsibility, but load responsibility on to the talent and bury them in guilt for not ‘getting’ it.

I’m surprised he didn’t go to TV Land Disney Channel or something. They aren’t going to apologize because THAT’S NOT THE TYPE OF SHOWS THEY WANT TO MAKE AND THE FCC WOULDN’T LET THEM! I know they hate kids but the networks already take risks at night because most kids are in bed at the time, and they worked to ditch the “family hour” because heaven forbid kids and their parents watch a TV show together and bond as a family. Can’t have that. It might lead to more well adjusted people. The horror!

This is the thing that bugs me. Clearly there was an audience for a show like The Sopranos and I’m not going to make a case against it. Watch what you want. However, not everybody is going to be into that and there’s nothing wrong with that. Channels are going to cater to their audience and you went to networks that don’t cater to that type of show for the reasons I just stated. Look at the mobster shows that have aired on broadcast TV. They aren’t going to apologize for you going to the wrong people to push your show. Although Fox should apologize for its treatment of science fiction shows.

Then came HBO and its bold, adult TV. It is hard to overstate the impact the channel had. In 1997 it made the prison drama Oz and, free from the puritanical control of ad money, loaded up on the R-rated content — draw a straight line from that to Game of Thrones. Oz, though, was small fry compared with the impact of The Sopranos. Chase loved the lack of ads as much as being allowed to have his characters kill and curse. “I had the best job in Hollywood.” It was total freedom and for a while the small screen good times kept coming, with Netflix, Prime Video and Apple TV+.

Translation: “They were making the type of shows I like and want to make.”

Chase, however, thinks that era is over. Which brings us back to the funeral. “We’re going back to where I was,” he says. He takes a breath. “They’re going to have commercials.” He’s right, adverts are back — on Netflix and Prime Video. “And I’ve already been told to dumb it down.”

He talks about a show he has tried to make with the young screenwriter Hannah Fidell, about a high-end prostitute forced into witness protection. They are on their third draft and fifth meeting and have been told “the unfortunate truth” that it’s too complex. “Who is this all really for?” he groans. “I guess the stockholders?

Let’s see. Do we go with the “racism-victim adoptee” or “came from a race of skull faced people who lost his family” as the dumber option?

I haven’t seen it so I don’t know what they mean by “complex”, and he doesn’t elaborate. Considering “complex” has given us the Doctor’s “true” origin as the Timeless Child, Superman needing something more than “being raised by loving parents who instilled good moral values as his powers grew”, Barry Allen needing more motivation than “inspired by his comic book hero to become a crimefighter even before he shared said hero’s powers”, why Wolverine in the movies had a leather jacket, and someday I need to look up that origin for Jimmy Olsen wearing a bowtie”, I really don’t care about complex. Alternately, “complex” means giving the villain a sympathetic backstory, which is fine, but when the list includes Skeletor and Megatron the point is lost.

Now you could make the prostitute sympathetic with reasons why she became a prostitute. Reba McEntire did it in a song I could cover in Sing Me A Story and other shows and TV movies have tackled the subject. I still wouldn’t be interested, but I’m not the audience here. I don’t think it’s the stockholders so much as the advertisers. Look at Chase’s topics. They’re very adult and involve a lot of violence that they couldn’t get away with on screen without the FCC and Bureau Of Standards And Practices and various media groups having a meltdown. Also not happy about that stuff? Advertisers who may not want their products related to graphic violence. (I mean, she’s in witness protection for a reason and who knows what attitudes she’s bringing to her new home and identity since we don’t know more about the show beyond the base premise.)

“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.”

Okay, the “mother dying” thing is an odd one, but he’s not completely wrong about the multitasking. There are people who “watch” TV while also doing things on their phones. I don’t get it. During the commercials or a boring part, maybe, or if you see something on the show or movie and want to know more. They could find a way to work with that, but instead Hollywood is so on board with it that they made Sesame Street a half hour shorter and more quick and flashy, like they think the whole audience came out of the womb with ADD. Granted, that was after being taken over by HBO and the Hollywood machine thinks we’re all stupid.

The thing is there is a counterpoint to that way of thinking: anime. You know, that think Netflix thinks would be superior in live-action, DEI laiden, and with terrible writing by people who have no idea why the “silly cartoon” they’re adapting is so beloved. They have plenty of stories with complex characters, even stories that focus on horrible people. I’d rather watch Gokusen than The Sopranos. That’s about a yakuza mob daughter of high standing who decides to become a tough teacher in the hopes of leading delinquent kids AWAY from crime in a school system that gave up on them. And it looks like a very fun show from the handful of episodes I’ve managed to catch, with good characters that I actually want to root for. Japan even made a live-action version if you want to start there. Cowboy BeBop is one of my favorite shows, about a group of broken people who come together for a time. They don’t end the series “fixed” or “a family”. They just spend time together before drifting apart in the finale with a better sense of themselves. Netflix even made a live-action version that is crap and fails at understanding why the anime worked, so avoid that. It’s too violent for me, but I listen to Literature Devil on YouTube’s Morning Nonsense stream and he often goes into the character development of Berzerk, a post-apocalypse story with a lot of killing and gore, but great character development and personal drama. I don’t know if anyone made a live-action of that, but I’m not sure you’d want that unless you like underground movie style gore and forced copulation because the world of that manga and anime is not pretty at all.

It’s not that hard to do. It’s just Hollywood will always take the easy way out and advertisers and media groups are very wary about things, while Hollywood has to be forced to make anything that isn’t dark and depressing.

It is a timely point — there is a real concern among TV execs that, given a choice between their phones and the TV, viewers will choose the former. Hence Chase’s mention of dumbing down. The thinking is that if viewers can follow something very simple and look at their phone at the same time, they will be happy. It is TV that allows for the use of a second screen — something unthinkable when watching The Sopranos. And if anyone brings up Succession as a counter to Chase, remember that that show started six years ago. “So, it is a funeral,” Chase says. “Something is dying.”

“Should she be watching that”? “I watched it when I was her age.” “So…no.”

So why not work with that? Make a show that’s interactive with an app somehow (probably easier with science fiction or fantasy) or some other interactive element? Maybe you have to go to a website that the show mentions and you work with the show even if it isn’t playing live. I don’t know how you pull it off; it’s just a suggestion off the top of my head. However, I think you can still get people invested if you do it right. Maybe stop with the binge model and give people a reason to come back each week and discuss it with everyone. Maybe don’t make something so @#$%#$% depressing that you need something more pleasant, fun, or uplifting as a counterbalance. Maybe fight the hyperactive ADD/ADHD by presenting the story in a way that holds their attention. Being stuck in the old ways isn’t working but learn how to do the new ways right. Sesame Street embraced a false idea that kids are born with attention issues and end up feeding those issues in a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I can tell about The Sopranos and the other shows Chase and Dean have brought up, levity is a limited asset. Some people don’t want to be bogged down in darkness.

Please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying anything negative against these so-called “prestige” shows, as Bounding Into Comics labeled them in their review of the interview. There’s totally a place for that and that audience deserves their show. Hollywood needs to stop treating their audience as brainless idiots who only want mindless entertainment when they’re not angerly preaching about the latest cause du jour. There’s room for smart television. You just have to go about it the right way, and in this age of the internet plenty of options exist. Crowdfund the thing if you have to, or find investors who believe in your show enough to get it on certain services or premium networks that will give your show a chance, but be prepared to fight for what you need to fight for and accept you aren’t going to get everything you want. Give it some thought and create wisely. It’s a new world with new opportunities if you know how to innovate.