On 10 January 1999, the first episode of a drama about a New Jersey gangster with panic attacks debuted on the US cable channel HBO. The Sopranos ran for six seasons, the final episode being broadcast on 10 June 2007. Across eight years and 86 episodes it came to represent a golden age of TV, when moral complexity, deep characterisation and unprecedented authenticity were common features of a bold new form of televisual storytelling.
It’s this “peak era” that Peter Biskind, the cultural critic and film historian, both celebrates and to some extent mourns in his new book, Pandora’s Box: The Greed, Lust, and Lies That Broke Television. Biskind is best known for his eye-opening account of US cinema’s own peak era of the late 1960s and 70s: Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. That book became a word-of-mouth hit, partly for its wealth of lurid anecdotes about Hollywood figures, featuring epic misbehaviour with all the sex-and-drugs trappings of starry success.
