Twenty years ago, Tony Soprano walked into his shrink’s office. He was angry. He was anxious. But more than anything else, he was depressed.
“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he said glumly. “I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
For him, sure.
For us, though, things were just getting started.
Because The Sopranos would go on to change television—the way stories were told and the sort of people those stories were about. It raised big questions, and left us to debate the answers. Does a story have to have a hero? Does it even have to have an ending? Those weren’t things TV audiences were regularly thinking about before The Sopranos debuted.
