The Sopranos was the Big Bang of our peak TV era. It was the right show in the right place at the right time.

When The Sopranos first aired, it looked like nothing ever seen on television. Friends, Touched by an Angel, Frasier and Everybody Loves Raymond were hits. ER was the gold standard in dramas, ground-breaking in its use of documentary-style camera angles and relatively realistic storytelling, free of the neat endings TV was known for. But The Sopranos obliterated ER’s lock on what a respected drama should look like. Tony’s saga was a subtle character study and a treatise on modern masculinity, told with novelistic detail and literary metaphors, punctuated by occasional bursts of brutal violence and raucous humour.

It couldn’t have worked, however, before 1999. By that time, cable was becoming more standard in US homes, and cable networks were thus beginning to explore original programming to supplement their schedules full of syndicated re-runs and movies. With video rental now rampant, a pay network like HBO particularly needed a way to lure viewers with something unique and worth paying for. The only way to do that was with a show that gave them something they couldn’t get on traditional broadcast networks: a series that looked like a movie, complete with R-rated elements like nudity, swearing and violence. The Sopranos universe provided that naturally; had the show ended up on one of the US broadcast networks, which are held to Federal Communications Commission standards, it would have felt ridiculously sanitised. Its shock value got people talking, which compelled those who overheard Sopranos praise at the watercooler to run home and subscribe to HBO to see what all the fuss was about.