The sopranos

Thursday

Christopher Bray

How The Sopranos changed TV for ever

‘Too many characters, too many plot lines, characters who weren’t very good at their jobs, and their personal lives were a mess.’ Thus the memo to the creatives behind Hill Street Blues. ‘It was like a blueprint for what made every show successful since The Sopranos,’ Kevin Spacey giggles to Peter Biskind. ‘If the NBC executives had had their way, the road from then to now would never have been paved.’ As the quondamlead of one of that road’s biggest stones, House of Cards, Spacey can perhaps be excused his post hoc moment. Still, his big point stands. There was TV before The Sopranos and TV after The Sopranos, and

Thursday

James Delingpole

Delivers in spades: The Many Saints of Newark reviewed

So how exactly did Tony Soprano become a New Jersey mob boss? It’s 1967 and young Anthony is struggling to find meaning and purpose in his life. Luckily, his doting uncle Dickie Moltisanti (Alessandro Nivola) offers the love and support his feckless parents are incapable of giving. Unluckily, Moltisanti is not quite the role model he’d like to be. Dickie complains about this on a visit to his uncle, Aldo ‘Hollywood Dick’ Moltisanti (Ray Liotta), who is languishing in jail for having killed a made man. Why is it, he wants to know, that even though he does conspicuously good works — bringing Aldo jazz records; coaching a baseball team

Thursday

Tanya Gold

Why The Sopranos remains the greatest gangster drama of all time

The Sopranos is called the greatest television show in history. It is the tale of Anthony ‘Tony’ Soprano, a middle-aged man in psychotherapy who also happens to run a New Jersey crime family. Anthony means ‘priceless’; the choice of name is surely deliberate. The Sopranos is complex — all masterpieces are — but it is fundamentally about greed: for money; for sex (the crew inhabit the Bada Bing! lap-dancing club, where breasts are landscape); for alcohol; for power; for the base drug of food. In the first episode Tony, who is played by James Gandolfini as a human devil, all need and charm (he is defiantly sexy with his fat

Thursday

Robert Jackman

The unstoppable rise of television-rewatch podcasts

Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying an ever-growing slice of the podcast market: the television-rewatch podcast. The format is simple: take any much-loved yet expired television series (the kind usually prefaced by words like ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen…’) and scan the cast list until you find some former stars willing to work for an affordable rate. Record them giving an audio commentary on each episode and, bingo, you’ve got yourself dozens of hours of podcasts — and a massive fan base waiting to be converted to listeners. Add a few external factors — say,