Talk with Estela Ortiz and Oye Sherman about The Sopranos

When The Sopranos burst onto HBO in 1999, it didn’t just change the rules of television: it redefined the way we understand auteur drama on the small screen. Suddenly, the mafia was not an operatic backdrop of violence in the style of Coppola or Scorsese, but the intimate framework to talk about anxiety, therapy, dysfunctional families, and suburban alienation. Tony Soprano was neither a hero nor a villain, but a contradictory antihero who inaugurated the era of morally ambiguous characters. That mix of crime story and domestic psychoanalysis turned the series into the dark mirror of the American dream.

The phenomenon was twofold: on the one hand, it consolidated HBO’s commitment to the motto “It’s not TV, it’s HBO”, elevating television to the status of high culture; on the other, it proved that audiences were ready for long, dense, uncompromising stories. The Sopranos opened the door to everything that came after — from The Wire to Breaking Bad — and remains the totem against which the great contemporary fictions are measured.