It is truly impossible to imagine a world that doesn’t have The Sopranos in it. Twenty-five years old this week, David Chase’s mob drama is so seminal – so entirely integral to the way in which we consume television – that it stands as a permanent waypoint in the history of entertainment. The birth of The Sopranos marked the moment when television started taking audiences seriously, the moment when creators started treating TV shows like novels, the moment when cinema was forced to start ceding its superiority to what had previously been a lesser medium. Put simply, life before The Sopranos was vastly different to life after it.
And so something special had to be done to mark the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. But what? A full-blown cast reunion, along the lines of the ones given to Friends and Harry Potter? An academically thorough retelling of the story of The Sopranos, from creation to legacy, published as a beautiful hardback? Maybe even a handful of key episodes released into cinemas, to allow audiences to fully appreciate the cinematic scope of the storytelling?
Reader, none of that has happened. But don’t be dismayed, because HBO has started to put The Sopranos onto TikTok instead. That’s something, right?
If you happen to follow the official Sopranos account on TikTok, you will have noticed that Warner Bros has started to upload every episode to the platform. Not in full, you understand. This isn’t like when some enterprising young buck broke the Mel Gibson film What Women Want into a million pieces and released them online one by one. No, because here each episode is represented by a single 25-second edit.
The first episode’s TikTok, for example, acts as a trailer for the entire series. We see Tony Soprano enter therapy for the first time, and give select cuts from his speech about being in something from the ground floor. We meet his mother, and see Dr Melfi react to his depiction of her. We see the ducks. We see Uncle Junior. We hear Anthony Jr say “So what, no fucking ziti now?” and everyone around him go “Aaaaay.” This one, at least, makes some amount of sense.
Other episodes don’t fare as well. The season one episode Boca, you’ll remember, revolves around Uncle Junior starting to come around to the idea of killing Tony, as revenge for telling everyone that he enjoys cunnilingus. But weirdly enough a lot of the episode’s nuance gets lost in the 25-second TikTok edit. What we’re left with, more or less, are all the insults. Carmella sniggering “That’s not what I heard,” after Junior says “I don’t go down enough.” Tony saying that he can smell fish. That’s it.
Worse is to come with the season two episode D-Girl; the one guest-starring Jon Favreau and Alicia Witt, in which Christopher’s head starts to turn away from the family business towards the glamour of Hollywood. That’s just a 25-second compilation of Michael Imperioli saying the word “script” a lot.
What’s so bizarre about these clips is that this isn’t just a quick click-grab. These episodes have really been condensed with as much care as can be afforded in situations like these. Instead of random scenes, they really work hard to get to the essence of each episode. The Italian episode, Commendatori, manages to encapsulate the feel of the whole thing with two clips in which Paulie’s enthusiasm for visiting the old country palpably sours.
But the question remains: why? What is the purpose of taking one of the most sophisticated examples of serialised storytelling we have ever been shown, and boiling it down so that 94% of it never gets seen? Who is it for? At time of writing, the TikTok experiment is just about to reach the end of season two, so who knows how it’ll deal with the rest of the show. How will season five’s Long Term Parking be able to capture the long, drawn-out dread leading up to Adriana’s murder? How will season six’s The Ride be able to show us the full artistry behind Christopher’s Fred Neil-soundtracked heroin relapse? How much, if any, of the latter TikToks will include shots of trees rustling in the wind? Because it wouldn’t really be The Sopranos unless there were a lot. What a genuinely bizarre social media gimmick this is.
Or is it? Because I have to admit that if sifting through the existing Sopranos TikToks and speculating about TikToks still to come has made me want to do anything, it’s to go back and start watching every episode in full all over again. So who is this for? I have a horrible feeling that it’s for me.
