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Ryan McNeill

Professor Dunavin

Intro to Media Culture

10 December 2020

Tony Soprano Ushers in the Golden Age

An anti-hero is a character who we root for, despite them displaying major and obvious

flaws, all while not possessing the characteristics of a traditional hero. Audiences have always

gravitated towards anti-heroes for several reasons: they do what they want, play by their own

rules, do not let anyone step over them, take care of themselves and are just plain cool. We know

we should not like characters like this and usually avoid these people in real life, but we can not

help ourselves from living vicariously through medias’ most enigmatic archetype. These

characters are often displayed as people who live wildly exciting lives and we want to be like,

but know we can not. We recognize them as abhorrent figures, but love how they do and say

everything we wish we had the guts to. Characters that fit this mold have historically been

regulated to secondary characters and b-stories in the background, while the rockwellian

protagonist saves the day. This was the case for most anti-heroes in movies and TV of the

previous century. Some movies saw anti-heroes as protagonists and it practically never happened

on television. That was until 1999. As the new millennium dawned, The Sopranos aired and

centered around one Tony Soprano, the greatest anti-hero of all time. Tony Soprano forever

changed the media's view and use of the anti-hero, was the first of many imitators and

replicators, and launched the golden age of television.

Tony Soprano being an anti-hero protagonist in a major TV drama was such a shock and

a shakeup to the industry, because this idea had only been fully explored in comedy. The concept
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had been fully explored in comedy, because an audience will forgive a character of anything if

they can make them laugh. That is why we did not hold grudges against Harold Lloyd’s

characters, Monty Python characters, Bugs Bunny, Peter Venkman, the cast of Seinfeld or

Archie Bunker; they made us laugh. No matter how despicable and destructive characters like

these are, a laugh makes you take it all a little less seriously, so they can get away with just about

anything and we love them all the same (Moloney). Archie Bunker was in a comedy, but a

heavily prejudiced bigot and closest thing to Tony. However, at the end of every 22 minute

dramedy that was an All in the Family episode, “Archie always finds redemption” (Nixon). This

was the case and problem with nearly all anti-heroes of TV and film in the 20th century: they had

big issues, but were always redeemed. For example Dirty Harry and the Man with No Name fit

the mold, but were so easy to root for as they faced overtly and actively malevolent villains. A

character like Charles Foster Kane is despicable, however Citizen Kane is “satirical of real

figures like William Randolph Hearst” and displays Kane in a remarkable character arc that

leaves the audience with a question (Kownacki). We see something similar with Alex from A

Clockwork Orange or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver, who we let get away with murder, because

we are in awe of their damaged mental state and how much they change so much during the

runtime. We excuse this villainy that manifests itself out of madness and a lack of mental health,

like with King of Comedy’s Rupert Pupkin. We stick with characters as they give into madness,

because we want to do the same sometimes. Practically every anti-hero has a major caveat as to

why they are not an absolutely terrible person, despite being the people we despise in reality. It is

so much easier for movies to trick an audience into rooting for a deplorable person for a couple

hours, unlike a TV show that has to pull off that difficult magic trick for years and over countless

hours.
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Shows before 1999 that featured anti-hero protagonists pale in comparison to what we

see today. They were often the formulaic procedural western where reckless “curmudgeon

cowboys play by their own rules, but ultimately face a much greater evil”, saves the day, and

protects the innocent (Mitton). The years dragged on, the novelty of TV wore off and the

medium was in an abysmal place by the late 90s. There were a handful of excellent comedies,

maybe a solid drama or two, but then an ocean deep drop off. TV was dominated by “LOPs”, a

term coined by NBC President Don Ohlenmeyer who preached “whoever had the Least

Offensive Programming would have the most successful show” (Kownacki). This was in a time

where shows like Friends, Mad About You and Law and Order ruled and were based in

repetition, safety, and painful monotony (Moloney). He was not necessarily wrong, but this led

to the amount of genuinely exciting, engaging, original quality programming on TV to be scarce

and practically an endangered species. In direct opposition to LOPs and wateleand of laugh

tracks stood David Chase. Chase created The Sopranos and introduced a new unfiltered, long

form narrative, compelling kind of television (Moloney). When the show debuted on HBO in

1999, Chase proved the archetype of the anti-hero could work in television and the successes of

the show and the character of Tony Soprano are still being reaped today.

First off, Tony Soprano is a mob boss. Tony Soprano is a murder. Tony Soprano is an

adulterer. He is a racist, a sexist and, if you have not put it together yet, not a great guy. He is a

mafioso with all these terrible qualities, yet audiences followed and loved him for 8 years and 7

of Television’s finest seasons (Jordan). What differentiated him from other anti-heroes is that

Tony cannot be framed as a good guy. We are partial to him because we experience the story

through his perspective, but he was not redeemed like others. He is just as bad, if not worse than

the people he is pitted against and never becomes a more virtuous person. So why does the
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audience continue to side with him? There are several reasons for this. One is that Tony is “not a

monster every week for the entire hour” (Simon). You are just as likely to see him kill someone

as he is to spend quality time with his family. He consistently shows he has some morals and

cares deeply about others, but just as consistently acts sociopathically and destroys lives with no

regard for human life. We sympathize with him, because we see him be a real human being.

Tony Soprano was the first character who did not feel contrived or manufactured. Tony was real.

He was complex and complicated just like any other actual person. The audience got to see him

be a complex person with so much going on, that we were able to relate to him. We may not be a

crime boss, but “we have to balance work and family just like him” (Whitty). Everytime Tony

goes to his therapist Dr. Melfi, we relate to him as people who have issues, but just do not know

how to fix them. We see him express the same frustrations anyone in the 21st century and living

in Bush’s America was going through. Everyone deals with the same family issues that the

Sopranos do as well. Someone like Michael Corelone may have been a great anti-hero, but lacks

that humanity we see when Tony goes to get the paper and take out the trash. A major factor of

making Tony human is the fact that the show presents the most realistic depiction of a family on

television up to this point (Simon). From their ups, downs, arguments and asking “What’s for

dinner?”, this family is just like any other. Another reason we care about Tony is the fact that he

can be very funny. The Sopranos is an extremely realistic show, because, just like real life, there

is no great drama without comedy and vise versa. Tony makes the audience laugh at least once a

week and for a few seconds, it makes you forget about the guy with his throat slit in the trunk of

his car.

Tony was a Shakespearean character on television. He was anything, but one note. He

was so far from what we are, yet so relatable. He was so evil, but so lovable. He was someone
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that belonged in our world and felt like a person everyone knew. One theory for why we love an

anti-hero like this is that we want them to be better (Stapinski). We can see ourselves in Tony,

because we are real people, just as three dimensional as Tony is. This leads us to root for his

success however we all have different definitions of success. Following Tony also became

extremely enjoyable for the same reasons we follow most anti-heroes: they lead much more

exciting lives than we do. Crime movies and shows are always more interesting and enjoyable to

watch, because we all wish to be part of that world (Sommers). Everyone wants to be a part of a

world where life is just infinitely more captivating. That is what The Sopranos provides and

Tony gets to have the most fun and receives the most reward. Lastly we gravitate towards Tony

Soprano, because he makes us question ourselves. The utter villainy he displays week after week

and we keep walking away loving him for the sake of entertainment “should make any sane

person question themselves” (Jordan). Do we strictly watch for entertainment and recognize the

fantasy of the show? Do we watch to see the anti-hero get better? Do we watch to see the anti-

hero do the things and have the lifestyle we all want? There is no clear answer and the answer

varies person to person and character to character. The point is that an anti-hero brings these

questions up and provides for a programming that sticks with people long after they leave the

couch.

All of these magnificent qualities that made Tony Soprano so intriguing helped make the

show one of the most popular and acclaimed of all time, with its complexity in storytelling and

deeply human characters. The show was so popular that during its run, The Sopranos was

consistently one of the highest rated shows on TV, despite not being on network TV; something

remarkable for this era (Devons). It was also after the show’s debut, HBO subscriptions started

to rise by nearly 25% every year (Pruner). The successful model for a realistic, no holds barred
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show centering around an anti-hero became the new phenomenon in TV and spawned many

imitators. Even shows that did not directly follow the mold of The Sopranos still took great

influence from and would not be possible without them. For example, The Wire came out a few

years after The Sopranos and was very different, but would never be made if it was pitched ten

years prior (Biskind). Diving into the drug trade and narcotics department of Baltimore could

have easily been another run of the mill cop show that grandparents everywhere fall asleep

watching. However, taking influence from The Sopranos and HBO giving showrunner David

Simon full creative freedom led to another one of the greatest shows ever. Why is it one of the

greatest shows ever? The Wire is an ensemble cast full of anti-heroes. There are literally dozens

of fascinating storylines happening every season revolving around realistic, complicated

characters. Stringer Bell as a business minded drug dealer who ruins communities or Omar Little

as a shotgun wielding drug thief, are “just the tip of the iceberg with The Wire’s anti-heroes”

(Whitty). These two characters are extremely different from Tony Soprano, but follow a similar

mold. They are characters we love, because we secretly want to walk in their shoes for a day. We

see Stringer and Omar face big problems, see their humanity regularly, see real life hit them

upside the head, but the fact that that does not stop them from doing what they want to do is why

we find them so compelling. The Wire delivered five brilliant seasons of dirty cops and good

hearted criminals that posed those important psychological questions that make a show so great.

Debuting only three years later, The Wire showed the influence of The Sopranos already taking

effect in extremely positive fashion (Sommers). This positive trend in TV would explode in the

late 2000s and we saw the number of anti-heroes on our idiot boxes explode.

The braintrust behind AMC saw The Sopranos and threw copious amounts of money into

a few shows that were gambles on anti-heroes saving the network (Kownacki). One of those
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shows was Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men. Mad Men came on the air only a month after The

Sopranos finale and was another massive display of anti-heroism. Don Draper fronted the show

and had similarities to Tony Soprano in terms of their thinking. Both share selectively heartless

mentalities who have little regard for other people’s well being. They are both sexist adulterers

who seek to screw over people in order to achieve the highest possible power they can. While

Mad Men featured the ever charismatic and debonair Jon Hamn in the lead, another AMC show

debuted just a year later followed the same mold. As far as the widely regarded creme de la

creme of modern anti-heroes, Breaking Bad followed the journey of Walter White, a mild

mannered chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin. Often criticized as too much of a copy of Tony

Soprano, White presented us with an anti-hero of staggering similarity as he led the highest rated

shows in the history of basic cable (Alter). The complicated family life and regular display of

family life that we saw with Tony got turned up to eleven with Walter. They share similar lives

of crime that creates enormous stress and further complications with their family life. They both

show ruthlessness and sociopathic tendencies in their pursuits, often to detrimental levels. While

Tony is this abhorrent figure at the start of the show, Breaking Bad shows Walter as a normal

guy who turns into a monster over five seasons. This makes it easier for us to root for Walter as

we see him start as a helpless sympathetic figure who has somewhat of a right to do the things he

does. While it may be easier for us to root for Walter White, it is much less impressive than Tony

Soprano receiving the love of millions of viewers year after year despite showing little to no

reason why such love should be garnered.

AMC gave us these two behemoths of TV shows with brilliantly written anti-heroes that

“launched the golden age of TV” from about 2008 to about 2016 (Biskind). In the wake of The

Sopranos finale, TV had more creative freedom than ever. What followed was an onslaught of
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TV shows with anti-heroic protagonists rooted in the model that Tony Soprano set forth. We saw

show after show put out quality programming with audiences rooting for practical characters

with less than legal occupations and nefarious intentions, but an ounce of good we identify with

and makes us love them. There was a new explosion of crime shows with vile, backstabbing and

destructive protagonists we follow and care about like they are family. Board Empire’s Nucky

Thompson, Peaky Blinders’ Shelby Family and the Sons of Anarchy gang have provided

audiences with more anti-heroic ensemble casts who let audiences live vicariously through anti-

heroes to get a taste for that exciting lifestyle. Hit shows like Better Call Saul and Fargo feature

similar methods of deeply troubled protagonists who give you no reason to root for them except

for the fact that we want to live out their role in our lives (Simon).

Shows that debut today are almost guaranteed to have an anti-heroic character

somewhere in a major role. The protagonist may not be one, but the casts are never free of them

like they were guaranteed to be pre-Tony Soprano. This leads to more interesting storytelling,

possibilities, and overall intriguing programming now that shows are more comfortable with this

archetype in even the smallest role. This also leads to several shows putting characters through

an anti-hero phase to test the waters (Alter). Shows are now able to see how audiences react to a

character perceived as a hero get a little edge and darkness to them. While, they also try to take a

villain and make the audience sympathize with them. It is an experiment that comes with varying

results, but often produces very compelling programming. We saw this occur with Lost’s

Sawyer, Lost’s Locke, The Walking Dead’s Negan and practically every Game of Thrones

character. It does not have to be a permanent change, but allows the audience to see the humanity

in a character if they are going stale. Putting a character through an anti-hero phase guarantees a
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new point of view on them and allows for us to recognize a deeper fold to their minds that was

not there before.

Less than making the protagonist an anti-hero or having a main character be one or

putting one through a phase or even having one at all allows for another development in post-

Tony Soprano TV. Shows today are now allowed to have complicated characters at all. “Gone

are the days of the white hat and black hat”, and thank the sky for it (Biskind). Generic

protagonists are absent from any show worth our time in the current landscape. A show does not

need to have a homicidal protagonist in the seedy underbelly of the crime world to be interesting,

but are now at least allowed to have mildly complex leads. Shows like True Detective show

characters with good intentions, but many of them such as Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle

are far from following a basic character structure (Moloney). We also see this in Bill Hader’s

Barry where he is far from a bad guy, but he simply has some issues to work through and is not a

simple psychological examination.

As mentioned, comedy follows different rules than drama when dealing with anti-heroes,

however The Sopranos still had a significant impact on comedy shows. The most acclaimed

show and highest piece of art ever put on television had a terrible person as the lead, so this

opened up for comedy shows to make their leads as bad as they could possibly be. This is the

freedom of getting away with anything because of the laughs getting widened even greater

(Whitty). This led to Community’s Pierce Hawthorne, Eastbound and Down’s Kenny Powers,

Silicon Valley’s Erlich Bachman, the Offices’ Brent and Scott respectively and, most notably, the

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia gang. The gang causes nothing but pain to everyone they

encounter and the catholic priest they turn into a crackhead is just the beginning. They often do

things far worse than what Tony Soprano does in many episodes, they never learn from their
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mistakes or make any attempt to be better, but the laugh count is just too high for us to hate

them. Tony Soprano has improved television across the board, because he even allowed comedy

shows to be comfortable with their leads being as obnoxious and havoc wreaking as many real

people are. Comedy is where anti-heroism is easiest and the last twenty years have seen this

archetype used to the fullest and funniest degree.

The Sopranos’s effects on TV are visible, but the show was such a major cultural

movement that it was bound to affect cinema as well. Quite simply, no one was making a Joker

or Maleficent movie in the 90s. Everyone would sit back and say that there is no point in

watching the baddie if they are not going to fight the hero. However we now find ideas like that

so fascinating, because we have had twenty years of loving the sinners and analyzing their

psyche (Jordan). Audiences have become smarter from following Tony Soprano, are more open

to new ideas and see the complicated minds of the villains are usually the most compelling. The

movie industry occasionally saw anti-heroic protagonists, but now it has become a regular thing.

We now regularly get movies with characters like Joker’s Arthur Fleck as mentioned, There Will

be Blood’s Daniel Plainview, Drive’s Driver and Nightcrawler’s Lou Bloom. Even when movies

need to write villains today, they understand how formulaic and predictable villains can be, and

write them like anti-heroes. Look to X-men’s Magneto, Black Panther’s Killmonger,

Avengers:Infinity War’s Thanos or Whiplash’s Terrence Fletcher. All of them are written as

people who may do some terrible things, but always remind the audience of the good ideas they

have, good qualities they possess and how far they are from just being the black cowboy hat of

the week.

TV dramas were not just allowed to have anti-heroes as the main character after The

Sopranos; they were allowed to be great. The gateways opened up by David Chase are
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remarkable for how major a role he played in the maturation of television. He put real people on

the idiot box, making that very nickname inappropriate. He put real life on TV and presented it

as messy, complicated, controversial and difficult as it really was. When the show resembles real

life so much, we can relate, sit down and watch an analysis of reality disguised as entertainment.

Tony Soprano led to media being comfortable and maximizing their potential by making their

leads as bad and messed up as they possibly can be. This is done, because the networks realized

that if the show is actually good, people will watch regardless of how insufferable the lead may

be at times. Anti-heroes lead to personal questions about what we believe, what we want and

how we want to get it. This archetype has been so successful because it hits so many nerves and

poses so many good questions. Posing these questions to ourselves and really thinking about our

sympathy for the bad guy is a healthy exercise for our own mental state. We become genuinely

smart people by following anti-heroes and seeing the maximum number of perspectives because

that allows us to appreciate the diverse reality of the human person. This allows us to look at

people in our world with more understanding. Ridding TV of generic, simple characters makes

us realize how complex everyone in our lives really are and how much is going on behind the

curtain. This archetype changed the game for all storytelling in the new millennium and ushered

in TV’s golden age. The late great James Gandolfini brought Tony Soprano to life in a

masterclass of a performance that displayed a true, elaborate and multifaceted anti-hero that

made audiences everywhere happy that they tuned in.

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