How ‘The Sopranos’ defied the odds — and the rules of TV — to become a hit
nypost.com“The Sopranos” was the biggest TV show in the world. It didn’t have the largest audience — its ratings were still dwarfed by network hits like “ER” and “Friends” —but it had cultural cachet.
The dark, sometimes comic tale of a mob boss from New Jersey was omnipresent, discussed and debated everywhere from The New York Times to the “Tonight Show to every water cooler in the country.
It was so critically beloved that during its first year, “Saturday Night Live” didn’t parody the show itself but the review. “The Sopranos will one day replace oxygen as the thing we breathe in order to stay alive,” read a fake critical assessment.
But the series at the forefront of a golden age in television was chaos behind the scenes, with a depressed, vindictive creator; an alcoholic leading man with self-esteem issues; and a struggling cable company that invested its future in a show about, as star James Gandolfini once described it, “a bunch of fat guys from Jersey.”Nobody involved in “The Sopranos,” from creator David Chase to any of the actors, thought it would survive. “It just violated too many do’s and don’ts, even for pay cable,” writes Peter Biskind in his new book, “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV” (William Morrow).Chris Albrecht, the former chairman and CEO of HBO, once put it after watching the pilot, “A gangster with existential crises wading in the pool with ducks?
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