When David Chase premiered The Sopranos on HBO in 1999, little did he imagine that his series would be the starting gun for a new Golden Age of Series. He surprised by the rhythm, by the genre, by the language, by the way he put an immoral man like Tony Soprano, immortalized by the late James Gandolfini, at the center. Now that the 25th anniversary of his work is being celebrated, the screenwriter has taken the opportunity to denounce the current state of television: series, instead of being designed for intelligent viewers, must be “dumbed down” to get the green light.
In an interview with The Times, the creator lamented that television has abandoned the era of quality to return to the old days, where the search for plots that require attention was not a priority for the managers of free-to-air channels. “Now they will have ads,” he said of the streaming platforms, “and I have been advised to dumb it down,” he said of the project he is developing.
It refers to a series that he is preparing with Hannah Fidell, creator of the miniseries A teacher and director of series such as Pam and Tommy. It centers on a luxury prostitute who becomes a protected witness. From the process of writing it, she has come away chastened: she has found that she is asked for less intelligent scripts so that the public can follow her more easily or while they do other things.
“As the human race advances, we are more accustomed to multitasking. The cell phone is just a symptom, but who can concentrate? Your mother may be dying and you are at the bedside in the hospital taking calls,” she criticized the new drift. Consequently, screenwriters cannot write things that make “too much sense” or that “require audience concentration.”
So, in his opinion, the last quarter of a century has been an exception in the history of television fiction: series like his, The Wire or Mad Men would not be commissioned by their respective channels today because they are intelligent and above all They ask the viewer to focus all their attention on each sequence. “We are returning to the place where he was,” he has predicted in reference to his career before The Sopranos, when he wrote for The Rockford Cases.
And, according to him, working through conventional channels was “a nest of shit” that forced the scriptwriters to go through a “repulsive process”: “In the meetings those people [the managers] always asked you to remove that something that made that the episode was worth it.”
