I made my way through the series, and finished in about a month.” “There was never a better time to finally give The Sopranos the attention it deserved.
My classes were all writing intensive so I found myself with a lot of free time,” he said. “I was a server at the time, so I now didn’t have a job, due to the pandemic. “Watching these ‘classic’ shows has been a welcome escape from the chaos in the world,” Yonah said.Īdam, a recent college graduate, described a similar experience. We’ve had so much more time to ourselves these last 18 months that we managed to get through all of those incredible series.”Īnd despite their often dark themes and pessimistic view of the world - or perhaps because of them? - these shows amounted, in a sense, to “comfort” watches for many.
“When people talk about the best TV shows, there are a few that are always mentioned - Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, The Americans. Yonah and his girlfriend Maya, both of whom are around 30, started to watch The Sopranos because there was “much more time to get into long-form television that we just never got around to watching before the creation of HBO Max,” Yonah told me, echoing the sentiments of many peers who responded via Twitter. I asked around a little, and that desire to “catch up” certainly matched people’s experiences. Even if you never watched The Sopranos, you know about it. It is, in this regard, a bit like Citizen Kane or Lawrence of Arabia.
The series is an 86-episode hour-long drama about mobsters, everyone has heard of it, and if you hadn’t already watched it, you probably intended to at some point. The Sopranos, widely recognized as one of the seminal works of TV’s so-called modern “golden age,” was a natural fit. Faced with lockdowns of varying severity and unknown length, it was natural to take up a TV-watching project as a coping mechanism, to escape the feeling that time itself had ground to a halt. Simultaneously, a whole lot of people suddenly found themselves stuck at home. In April 2020, presumably as an attempt to direct eyeballs toward its streaming services (at the time called HBO Go and HBO Now), HBO announced that it would make a few of its greatest hits - including The Sopranos - free to everyone, subscriber or not, for a limited time. The reasons for that surge are, on their face, kind of obvious. Meanwhile, many of those viewers, at least anecdotally, seemed to be on the younger side after all, even the oldest millennials were Meadow Soprano’s age, just finishing high school when the show premiered. In May 2020, WarnerMedia, which owns HBO, the cable network on which The Sopranos premiered in 1999, announced that since the start of the pandemic a few months earlier, viewership of the show on its streaming service had risen by 179 percent, outpaced only by the considerably more recent Westworld and Game of Thrones. His untimely death shocked the world, especially ‘The Sopranos’ fans.Since the summer of 2020 - for well over a year now - entertainment reporters have been probing what seems like the great question of our time: Why is everyone watching The Sopranos? And more specifically, why are most of those people so young?
Six men dragged the actor to the hospital, where doctors attempted to save him for around forty minutes.
Michael discovered his father in cardiac arrest in their hotel room three hours later. He also had two orders of fried prawns in a row.Īccording to sources, Gandolfini ordered only fried food.
Gandolfini started with two rounds of Pina Coladas, plus two shots of rum on the side. Just a few hours before his death, James Gandolfini sat down for supper with his son, Michael, who was thirteen years old at the time.
In 2013, while on a trip to Italy with his son Michael, ‘The Sopranos’ lead actor died of a heart attack. Gandolfini would frequently punch himself in the face during arguments out of frustration. Gandolfini’s ex-wife Marcy Wudarski alleged that the actor was having an issue with drugs and alcohol throughout the course of their marriage.
The role was not just impacting Gandolfini physically but also causing problems in his personal life.