The Sopranos and the Elitism of Prestige TV

In that period in which the idiots of our media acted as if this was The Sopranos' world and the rest of us were just living in it--or simply looking at remembrances of that time--one could easily get a false impression as to just how "big" the phenomenon was. As a practical matter relatively few people even had access to the show in its original run--with one reason for that certainly worth mentioning. Even at the start of the period HBO meant an extra $50 or more on top of an already $25+ a month basic cable bill--in today's terms, something an extra $100 a month, and adjusted using the Consumer Price Index well over $1,000 a year, rather more than a household today spends to enjoy multiple premium streaming services combined (some $700 a year). If you were willing and able to lay out all that money for one channel you were relatively privileged, no more than a quarter of the country actually doing so circa 2000, and not much more than a third circa 2007--the rest of the country not even having the channel.

Meanwhile not all of those who had the channel bothered with the flagship show, perhaps a maximum of forty percent of them attending to it even when interest in it was at its peak (the ratings topped out at 13 million viewers or so, robust even by network standards, but far from record-crushing)--and this perhaps unsurprisingly because of what the show actually delivers. If we heard ceaselessly of those ecstatic over it, we heard less of those who were not, many of them perhaps not all that intrigued by a show about a mobster with a psychiatrist, or glancing at it and finding something that did not live up to the (impossible) expectations the hyperbolic The-Sopranos-will-replace-oxygen-as-the-thing-we-need-to-live praises raised. Indeed, I suspect, a great many persons found episodes and seasons of the show slow if not meandering, pretentious and opaque in an insistence on Show-don't-tell that came ahead of actually conveying anything for the writers, a propensity for style over substance and a general "insistence upon itself," and not feeling all that much need to stick with it, the game just not worth the candle. (I certainly didn't.) Those who did stick with it, I imagine, were not just the genuinely enthralled but those who felt like this was required viewing for people in their station in life because they cared what TV critics think, and dutifully took their word that this was a moment in cultural history meriting mention in the same breath as the plays of Shakespeare, or at least gabbed "around the water cooler" with people who thought so and didn't want to be left out of "the conversation."

In short, it was the "coastal elite" who gave themselves over to the phenomenon, and if access to the show widened somewhat later with an edited-for-basic-television cut of the episodes airing on channels on the cheaper basic cable that a significant majority of the country had, and Netflix made it unprecedentedly easy and cheap to see a show you previously missed on DVD, it remained very much a coastal elite phenomenon. But it was, of course, talked about as if it weren't, partly because we are in a culture so disproportionately attentive to the "upper middle class" as to make it seem the "human norm." Thus do the gulled imagine that the "average" American leads a life of auto-subtopian consumerist affluence, with college for the kids and retirement comfortably assured, and thus, reinforced by the extent to which (as Veblen was already spelling out in his day), media and marketing focuses on the supposed sensibility and tastes of the stratum, "everyone" watching The Sopranos, while overlooking those who don't to the extent that in many minds they do not even exist at all (the more easily and completely in as the people who get to be TV critics and make meaningful decisions about marketing are themselves from The Sopranos-watching crowd, and the insane claquing for this show so very loud). Indeed, remembering the Democratic presidential primary for the fraught, historic, election of 2008 it seems well to remember Hillary Clinton's campaign airing an ad that specifically played off of the closing scene of the Sopranos TV series. Much talked about at the time, little of the dialogue remarked that in its choice of cultural reference the ad spoke to that upmarket audience in exactly that way characteristic of a candidate, a campaign, a party representing above all the metropolitan professional and taking for granted the working people the party had so much betrayed--not least under the leadership of that very candidate's husband. Of course, fewer still thought of that when this had the most profound consequences when in 2016 said candidate got the nomination--and managed to lose an election that her supporters all took quite for granted as being "in the bag."