There was a time, just a few years ago, when a movie actor could not take a TV job without it seeming like an admission of failure. Doing so was embarrassing, a sign of desperation—not merely because TV fame was chintzier, and the Hollywood status lower, but also because no one thought that TV acting itself could be much good. There were beloved TV stars, of course, but they were performers, not actors, lacking gravitas. It was a littler screen and a littler art.

James Gandolfini changed all that.

Many other people have revisited the powerful effect that “The Sopranos” had on television. David Chase’s grand, nasty mob opera inverted all sorts of expectations about serial storytelling, about what the audience was willing to tolerate, and about the wingspan of an ambitious television show. It became a monster hit and an obsession for the media, which duly celebrated Chase, the model of the modern showrunner. None of that would have worked, however, had Chase not cast James Gandolfini, a barely known actor, as his anti-hero. At thirty-seven, Gandolfini had appeared in a handful of movies, but he was basically an unknown. On television, he became iconic.

With his broad face, angry smirk, and those glinting, observant eyes, Gandolfini had a way of holding himself like a Colossus while letting you know that he felt like a miniature. Early on, he ate up space, spreading his legs in the therapy room, with a swagger that got the audience hot for him, inspiring trend pieces on Tony as a sex symbol—but he was even more fearless as the show proceeded, shedding that charm and becoming a golem before our eyes. Gandolfini forced us to sympathize in the middle of disgust. He had a lot of space to build the role—six seasons—and he fully inhabited every corner from the beginning, sometimes as a great comedian, sometimes as a self-pitying monster, but always as a radical and new sort of character for television, one who punished the audience for loving him.

The Gandolfini scene that made me a full convert came late in Season 1, during the episode in which Tony finds out that Meadow’s soccer coach has been molesting girls. He puts a hit out on the coach, but Artie begs him to stop, and under the influence of his therapy with Dr. Melfi, Tony calls off the hit man—and falls apart. When he stumbles into the house, he’s laughing, high on pills and liquor, and it’s terrifying. Gandolfini slams into a table. He twirls Carmela in a dance, sings a snatch of James Brown, then stumbles like a dancing bear. He crash-lands on the sofa, then rolls onto the floor. Meadow watches from above, seeing a side of her father she was never supposed to know. It’s funny and horrifying and disgusting and sweet, and because of the radical freedom with which Gandolfini swings his body up against his home, the scene feels, like so many scenes he did during the series, as if anything could happen.

As Tony lies on the floor, Carmela leans down to check on him. She finds the pills. He pulls her down, to tell her something. “I didn’t hurt nobody,” he moans, looking half blind—and when he says it, it’s a confused brag, a confession. Then he reaches to stroke her face, and it becomes a seduction.

Gandolfini’s death at fifty-one is a major loss, to his family and friends more than anyone else. But for the rest of us, he leaves a legacy bigger than Tony Soprano. It’s rare for one performance to change the world, but once Gandolfini cleared the way, nobody could be under any illusion about what a television actor was capable of.

Read David Remnick’s postscript on James Gandolfini.