I first started thinking about this after Orange Is the New Black’s exemplary fourth season debuted in June. Orange Is the New Black’s most obvious innovation is its distribution model We’re a long way from when Orange is the New Black was just the doomed romance of Piper and Alex. However, there’s one TV series out there that already occupies that level of cultural prominence, and people just aren’t talking about it as the natural heir to the 'changed everything about TV drama' throne. (The last American TV drama to truly shake up the industry pre- Sopranos was 1981 cop drama Hill Street Blues, for instance.) If another Sopranos is on the way, it might arrive in the next few years, not right now. These events tend to run in cycles of about 20 years. The question, often, is where is the next Sopranos, the next show that will upend everything you know about television? There was a lot of fumbling around, a lot of trial and error, and many false starts before the Sopranos model took root and helped birth the so-called 'golden age of television.' And it also wasn’t as if The Sopranos arrived out of nowhere it was hugely indebted to TV shows that preceded it, most notably its fellow '90s babies Twin Peaks, The X-Files, and Oz.īut we live in 2016, not 1999, in a world where The Sopranos’ influence is everywhere, to the degree that copying the show has become a bit rote, a bit cliché. It was eventually true, but it took a few years - and in some cases, the bulk of The Sopranos’ run - to play out.

And it won award after award after award.Įxcept … that’s not really true. The show’s offbeat storytelling rhythms and antiheroic main character spread across the vast televisual landscape.

Other TV networks immediately started trying to copy it. When The Sopranos debuted on HBO in 1999, its impact was seismic.

Black jack the orange vox