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?
