‘The Sopranos’ 20 years on: David Chase got great drama off to a T

Just as day becomes night almost imperceptibly but nonetheless precisely, great cultural change can arrive almost unnoticed but nonetheless with a bang.

The first broadcast of one of, if not the, greatest television series of all time just 20 years ago was one such moment.

Today, The Sopranos is recognised as a landmark that redefined television drama but the creator of that series, David Chase, had to struggle to have his series broadcast.

Received wisdom, 20 years ago, recoiled from the casual, enjoyed brutality of the New Jersey mobsters but Chase persisted and was rewarded.

The studios and the TV critics were wrong — again — and Chase’s series was an immediate hit. It remains an enduring, all too relevant one.

Not only did Chase redraw the template for television drama, he marked out the ground for David Simon’s The Wire and David Milch’s Deadwood.

Audiences fed on period dramas, Glencora’s lisp and little more than television as recycled bubblegum embraced complex and ambiguous narratives and showed that television could match, if not surpass, cinema or literature as a platform for audacious, multilayered storytelling.

Today’s vast library of brilliant, idiosyncratic television is part of Chase’s legacy, one built on his determination not to play pretend.

But he gave us more than that — he described one of television’s, one of drama’s, one of literature’s and one of all of art’s most dangerous and complex character to a T.