Looking back at the success of his series The Sopranos on its 25th anniversary, creator David Chase suggested that the golden age of TV is coming to an end and streaming platforms are to blame.
In an interview with the British newspaper The Times, the writer and director described the 25th anniversary of the landmark HBO series as something of "a funeral" for prestige TV. "We’re going back to where I was," he said, highlighting Amazon Prime Video's recent decision to introduce commercials for subscribers unless they pay an additional $3 a month. "They’re going to have commercials.”
Chase, who also served as a writer and producer on the series I'll Fly Away and Northern Exposure, said he recently pitched a project only to be told he needed to "dumb it down" by executives. The series he's pitched is about an escort who needs to go into witness protection, but he's been informed it's too complex. "Who is this all really for? I guess the stockholders?" he said.
"We are more into multitasking," he continued. "We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus. And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were."
He said that the era of television following the success of The Sopranos—a show which he has repeatedly said owes a lot to David Lynch's 1990 series Twin Peaks—as "a blip," or at least a 25-year blip. "To be clear, I’m not talking only about The Sopranos, but a lot of other hugely talented people out there who I feel increasingly bad for," he added. HBO's Succession was pointed to as an example of a complex and ambitious TV series, but Chase said it was greenlit in 2017. "So, it is a funeral," he said. "Something is dying."
While Chase has showed appreciation for countless quality shows that were heavily inspired by The Sopranos, he didn't think much of the climate back in the late '90s, either. "Back then the networks were in an artistic pit. A shithole," he said. "The process was repulsive. In meetings these people would always ask to take out the one thing that made an episode worth doing. I should have quit. ... I should have known that a real mafia wiseguy show would not happen on US TV. If you think your grandmother is risk adverse, you should meet network people."
While there's been plenty of critically acclaimed and artistically accomplished TV series in recent memory—Succession, The Curse, Atlanta, and plenty of others—he's not the only artist to suggest that streaming platforms aren't willing to take a risk on something more ambitious. In an interview with Variety last year, Canadian director David Cronenberg said he pitched a project to Netflix and Prime Video but they turned it down, which he suggested was because they're "still very conservative."
