The HBO Revolution
On 10 January 1999, The Sopranos began. Fewer than four million people watched the first episode. And yet almost everything in today’s drama starts from this one show.
What was new about it? Its creator David Chase put it most precisely — “This was uncharted territory. The man carrying the entire network on his back suddenly garrottes someone with piano wire. Nobody had done that.” The protagonist does genuinely bad things, and the audience keeps watching him anyway. It was possible only on a channel with no advertisers.
The record holds it too. The show took 111 Emmy nominations and 21 wins, and its 2004 win for Outstanding Drama Series was the first for a cable channel. It won again in 2007. That was the moment television was taken into the mainstream of awards.
And there is one more thing this band should set down. The Wire — five years spent writing Baltimore’s streets, its drugs, its schools and its newspaper, a show often called the greatest ever made — never won an Emmy. It was nominated twice, both times for writing. The standing of this show, written by the former newspaper reporter David Simon, was built not by awards but by its viewers, over twenty years. Two shows from the same channel, kept by history along opposite roads.
Six Feet Under wrote about death itself, through the family that runs a funeral home. In those few years, the range of what television could hold widened all at once.