The Contemporary Afterlives of Serial Drama: Considering New Audience Readings of “Old” Television

Abstract

In recent years several older, serialized TV dramas have experienced surges in popularity among young viewers. The 2020-21 online resurgence of The Sopranos (1999–2007) is perhaps the most compelling example of this. Using the data from a series of semi-structured interviews conducted with fans who watched the show for the first time in 2020-21, this study considers what draws audiences to “old shows” and how they adapt them to contemporary contexts of interpretation. I argue that there are specific considerations that we need to make when investigating contemporary audience receptions of old television. Ultimately, The Sopranos resurgence highlights a new type of “afterlife” for serial drama. Using Miller’s work on retextuality I conclude that it is important that we understand the resurgent versions of these TV shows as the new texts they are. They perform impactful types of cultural work, distinct from their original run.

In recent years several older, serialized TV dramas have experienced surges in popularity among young viewers. While highly serialized programs have never “historically fared well in rerun syndication” (Kompare 2005, 158), they seem to be lending themselves well to the unique contexts of streaming (Gilbert 2019). The 2020-22 online resurgence of The Sopranos (1999–2007) is perhaps the most compelling example of this. The show was labeled as the “Hottest Show of Lockdown” in both The Guardian (Kambasha 2020) and GQ Magazine (Unterberger 2020). Meanwhile, The New York Times ran a feature that asked, “why does it feel like every person in America is watching The Sopranos?” (Staley 2021). Several highly popular twitter fan pages (“socialist sopranos memes” 87.7K followers, “sopranos out of context” 120.5K followers and “Kevin Finnerty” 71.4K followers) also appeared in 2020. The show had new life breathed into it by audiences who were eager to adapt it to their contemporary contexts of interpretation. This then raises the question—how distinct are the successive lives of older shows in the contemporary televisual landscape? Moreover, what is the best way that we should approach them as scholars?

In 2019, Graeme Turner convincingly argued that there is a need for more “nuanced” and “accurate” research about audiences in the post-broadcast era (220). Turner (2021, 229) took specific issue with the over-use of terms like “binge watching” to describe a considerably diverse set of viewing practices. He asserts that it is a “crucial task” for television scholars to develop more specific understandings of the range of audience practises that exist. Simply put, scholars need to place more emphasis on “what is actually happening in domestic spaces as people watch television” (2019, 228). In the years since Turner’s call there has been some excellent scholarship that has taken up this task. More specific terms like “serial viewing” (Rubenking and Bracken 2021) have been introduced and there have been studies that track the shifting meaning of “binge watching” (Horeck 2021; Lüders and Sundet 2022) to help guide investigations into audience reception. There are many avenues and approaches that one might take to answer Turner’s call. In this article, I explore one specific dimension that could inform what is “actually happening” as “people watch television” (Turner 2021). Namely, I offer a discussion of the prominence of “older,” serialized TV shows in the contemporary televisual landscape. I consider what draws audiences to “old shows” and how they adapt them to new contexts of interpretation.

This article takes the 2020-22 resurgence of The Sopranos as a case study to outline the considerations that we need to make when investigating contemporary audience receptions of “old television.” I draw from the responses of semi-structured interviews conducted in Adelaide, Australia in which I talked with eleven self-identified fans of who watched the show for the first time in the 2020s. I argue that new contexts of interpretation serve as a conduit for current culture and politics in ways that are at odds with conventional understandings of the show. This article explores how watching The Sopranos in the 2020s acutely informs how participants understand the show’s exploration of themes like mental health, nostalgia, and gender. Ultimately, the case of The Sopranos’ resurgence highlights the possibility for TV shows to experience a new type of successive life. Unlike conventional re-runs, specific audience demographics are seeking out the show on streaming platforms due to its resonance with their shared contexts of interpretation.

The Contemporary Importance of “Old” TV and Retextuality

The contemporary importance of “old TV” is something that has often been studied through the prism of the rerun. Kompare (2005, 12) has emphasized the historical significance of re-runs. He argues that they were critical in shaping the “cultural, economic and legal terrains of American Television.” Broadcasted re-runs helped construct a shared history that was recognizable and, through repetition, regularly reinforced (Kompare 2005, 12). Of course, having old TV shows in large streaming libraries can evoke similar viewing pleasures to the network re-run. Both offer audiences the enjoyment of familiar, continuous entertainment—whether this is through SVOD “autoplay” functions (which will continuously play episodes without viewer input) or the flow of network programing. However, as Gilbert (2019) suggests, our understanding of the re-run has been somewhat disrupted by streaming media. Streaming brings with it different industrial logics that can mediate distinct types of audience engagement with old TV shows (Gilbert 2019). This opens-up new ways to think about how the contemporary importance of old television might have changed. For example, Lotz (2021, 889) has noted that SVOD platforms have allowed for an even more focused version of narrowcasting. Shows can have a more significant cultural impact within specific subcultures or taste communities. While Lotz was discussing the logic underpinning the production and targeting of new shows, it is also important to consider the potential for old TV to exist in this context. There is a heightened possibility that old shows can resonate with specific groups and take on distinctly different roles and meanings.

When we think about shows with successful post-broadcast lives we often think of old sitcoms. Reruns of shows like Friends (1994–2004), Seinfeld (1989–1998) and Frasier (1993–2004) have been financially lucrative for decades. With the introduction of streaming these shows are still just as popular. In late 2021, Netflix paid $500 million for the global streaming rights of Seinfeld (Chow 2021) while HBO paid $1 billion to stream The Big Bang Theory on HBO MAX (Alexander 2019). However, the resurgence of programs like The Sopranos standout as distinct to this. Unlike the aforementioned sitcoms, serialized programs historically have not been considered “optimal” televisual content for syndication (Gilbert 2019; Kompare 2002; 289). Nevertheless, as Gilbert argues:

Hour long dramas, serialised narratives, cult TV that ended before making a hundred episodes—this type of old television has become a desirable product in the context of online streaming (2019, 289).

The surge in popularity of older, serialized programs appears to be linked to specific cultural events and contexts. In the case of The Sopranos, its renewed popularity corresponds closely with the global pandemic. As such, the show presents a unique opportunity through which to investigate how contemporary cultural contexts can potentially transform the meaning of older texts for new viewers.

To frame my analysis of The Sopranos in the 2020s I will draw from Taylor Cole Miller’s recent work on “retextuality” (2021, 1). Miller (2021) considers the different ways that the classic sitcom Bewitched has been re-syndicated on both LOGOtv and FamilyNet. LOGOtv is a cable channel targeted to LGBTQIA+ viewers and frequently schedules episodes of Bewitched between episodes of RuPaul’s Drag Race and promotes it as a “camp classic” on their social media pages (Miller 2021, 2). Conversely, FamilyNet is a Christian network that aired Bewitched before a line-up of church programs that featured far right and anti-gay hosts. The stark difference in contexts of interpretation here led Miller to reflect on the completely different experience that viewers might have when watching the show:

Like words reshuffled in a sentence, the differing syntagmatic flows or utterances of one episode of a show between two separate exhibitions (Bewitched on LOGOtv vs. Bewitched on Family Net) create, for all intents and purposes, different texts, and retextuality allows us to acknowledge and dissect this difference (2021, 8).

Using Miller’s frame of retextuality, I argue that The Sopranos (in 2020) is also, for all intents and purposes, a different text to its original run. It facilitates a new experience that is specific to the cultural and televisual environment of the 2020s. Miller’s (2021, 12) work places emphasis on how production labor (syndicators, executive producers, programmers, and marketing departments) allowed for distinct Bewitched texts. I will expand on this to show how the audience’s unique personal contexts of interpretation in the post-broadcast era can also allow for this.

The Sopranos Resurgence in Australia

In 2020, there was a surfeit of popular press coverage surrounding The Sopranos reported surge in viewership numbers. Initially I was suspicious of this coverage—HBO is well known for leveraging positive press in its marketing efforts (Jaramillo 2002). It also happened that HBO had been ramping up to launch their new SVOD platform—HBO MAX. However, as the year went on, I could not help but notice a Sopranos resurgence in my day-to-day, Adelaide life. Images of the show started popping up around my suburb and a pub in the city was promoting its Friday “kick ons” with an edited image of Tony Soprano and Vito Jr posing for a photo. Online fan-made paratexts like memes and tweets largely helped drive this resurgence. They often fused the humor of the show with internet humor or current political issues. The most popular Twitter accounts like “the sopranos out of context” and “socialist sopranos memes” fostered fan communities and emphasized reading the show from a specific vantage point. Perhaps more intriguing was the connection being made between The Sopranos and the covid-19 pandemic. A pandemic that—while global—was experienced very differently depending on location. In this context, there was a heightened possibility for audience readings that were informed by both temporal and local contexts.

This study was conducted in Adelaide, Australia with Adelaide-based research participants. While The Sopranos is an American program that explores the social and cultural issues of the United States, it has recently proven to be popular in Australia. Moreover, The Sopranos general online resurgence coincided with it becoming much more widely available in Australia. In 2020, the local platform Binge (initially priced cheaper than Australian Netflix) launched with The Sopranos proudly featured in its catalog. Before this, watching any HBO program legally in Australia had been a costly undertaking. Viewers were forced to pay up to $75 a month for Foxtel (a pay TV service) or purchase digital or physical copies of a show. Such cost barriers have often been linked with Australia’s disproportionately high rates of piracy (Vettoretto and Moore 2023). Binge’s launch came with a promotional campaign that leveraged the platform’s exclusive HBO distribution rights as a point of distinction from other local competitors. The discursive techniques of HBO marketing were very much replicated in this launch. Advertisements for the platform proclaimed that Binge had content from “the world’s best producers” and would then cut to an image of the HBO logo. Often, The Sopranos would feature as part of a montage of shows in these ads. For example, one ad cut from text that said “nothing gets on your screen unless its award worthy drama” to a close-up shot of Tony Soprano. In 2020 it was common to see images of Tony Soprano flash up on video billboards in and around Adelaide. In a pre-interview questionnaire, I asked the participants how and why they watched The Sopranos. All but one of the participants responded that they watched the show on Binge. There was an overwhelming consensus among the participants that the show’s perceived quality made it something that they had to watch and that they were prompted to do so by “peer-pressure” and seeing it “discussed online.” The newfound accessibility, promotion and online resurgence of The Sopranos are all important contexts that inform the show’s unique popularity in Australia during 2020 and by extension the responses given by the participants in this study.

Methods

This study begins from the assumption that television audiences are active decoders of meaning. Audiences are diverse and there are potentially limitless ways in which they could decode the same text. Moreover, the social and cultural circumstances of an audience member may play a significant role in shaping how they draw meaning from a text. In this sense, I am influenced by the work of Hall (1973) and Liebes and Katz (1993). The work of critical theorists like Hall (1973) makes room for alternate readings of texts and acknowledges the complexity of the process of encoding and decoding. Liebes and Katz (1993) emphasize the way we decode a text can be contingent on our cultural contexts of interpretation. As I will illustrate, the unique temporal and cultural circumstances inform how the participants decoded The Sopranos.

This article draws from the data of semi-structured interviews I conducted with eleven self-identified fans who watched the show for the first time between 2020 and 2021. The participants in this study were all “young” (18–26) and encountered the show more than a decade after its final episode was first screened. I asked the participants about the contexts in which they watched The Sopranos and the meaning they took from the show. For this research, semi-structured interviews were used for their capacity to generate rich qualitative data about audience perceptions and experiences. They gave me the freedom to follow up on interesting responses and tap into what Brinkmann (2014, 277) describes as the “knowledge producing potential of dialogs.” That is, the affordance to guide conversation and create a more casual, relaxed environment. All the participants in this study lived in the same city and were within the same age bracket. This meant that, broadly speaking, their experience of contexts (like lockdown or the media landscape) that might have shaped their interpretation of The Sopranos were consistent. Research participants were assigned pseudonyms in all research output.

The Sopranos During Lockdown

All the participants in this study watched The Sopranos for the first time during the covid-19 pandemic. For some of the participants, this context informed a reading of the show in which The Sopranos was expressly related to the pandemic. For example, Stephan likened the brooding and stressful atmosphere of The Sopranos to the “scary social climate” that he was experiencing in real life:

Some of the paranoia, like themes of paranoia that are explored, especially with Tony, the way it sort of ramps up, that’s like something that was kind of like “oh yeah” this is exactly how I was feeling during the pandemic.

When asked to expand on this in relation to the pandemic he stated:

When it very first started everyone was like “well I’m not going outside”—I lost my job and I had to move out of the place I was renting, and I moved back with mum. She lives in Victor Harbor, and I was quite isolated, so I was just at home writing my thesis, I don’t think I left home for like months. . .

Stephan explicitly links his pandemic and The Sopranos experience here. He was quick to connect the “ramping paranoia” of the later seasons to the world that was unfolding around him and suggested that shared feelings of prolonged “uncertainty” was what most strongly linked these two experiences. He later discussed how he and his mother had become obsessed with watching the news in the first few weeks of the pandemic, “I remember every conversation I was having with my mum was like ‘put on the news!’ We have to figure out what’s going on—it was a long time, like months.” This coupled with people “going nuts” and supermarket shelves being empty due to panic buying cultivated a general feeling of unease. He cited Tony’s storyline in season 6 as particularly relatable in this respect. In season 6, the longstanding tensions between Tony’s vocation and long-term family planning flare up dramatically. With the show coming to an end, the threat of Tony being assassinated or arrested felt like an inevitability. For Stephan, the feeling of “ramping paranoia” correlated with the uncertainty and anxiety he felt during lockdown. While Stephan was not outright rejecting the encoded meaning and context of the final season of The Sopranos, he was consciously allowing the pandemic to add a new layer of meaning to it. In this sense, Stephan’s lived experience of the pandemic illustrates how certain elements of The Sopranos (the cultivated feelings of stress and paranoia) might be made more potent for contemporary audiences.

While Stephan hinted at the relatability of The Sopranos during lockdown, Tom suggested the depressing atmosphere of the show could be cathartic. He was particularly drawn to the domestic drudgery of The Sopranos and the show’s many visual parallels with life in lockdown. He said that, for him, the show was not:

Like a paranoia film where you are constantly on edge—it’s actually just that you are so comfortable at this point you kind of keep trudging through.

Tom alluded to the ways that The Sopranos offered him a coping mechanism amid the monotony of lockdown:

I think one of the cool things about The Sopranos is a lot of the stuff is really banal and mundane. . . It’s about drudgery more than anything, guys driving around in cars, having a conversation with a capo in a car, like you are driving somewhere, you are sitting outside a deli, and I think that’s definitely what lockdown felt like—and it definitely is what a lot of daily life feels like. . .. I think that is what is really appealing about the show. It is those moments of opening up the fridge and just like eating 20 slices of gabagool cus you can’t be fucked making something to eat.

In this quote, Tom is talking about some of the recurrent imagery in the show that is used to highlight Tony’s series-long struggle with depression. Shots of Tony shuffling around in his dressing gown, eating too much and sleeping all day usually coincide with his “low points.” Perhaps the best example of one of these bouts is in the season 1 episode “Isabella” (1.2). There is an extended montage of Tony sleeping through the afternoon and shuffling around the kitchen in his white robe, eating deli meats. Underscoring this sequence is the melancholic song, “Tiny Tears” by Tindersticks. In a way, Tom highlighting the “drudgery” of everyday life connects Tony’s depression to his experience of lockdown. A lot of the domestic imagery associated with Tony is visually reminiscent of lockdown. When interpreted from the present moment, it seems as though a lot of the characters in The Sopranos are in their own self-imposed “lockdown.” In particular, the Soprano family (Tony, Carmela, Meadow and AJ) are usually shot in the house in the middle of a weekday. In the original context of the show, it is likely that we would understand Tony “eating twenty slices of gabagool” because he “can’t be fucked making anything else” as a manifestation of his depression. However, Tom’s connection between these types of domestic activities and lockdown gives them a sort of double meaning—they are both signifiers of Tony’s depression and of Tom’s personal pandemic experience. In the context of a pandemic, Tom reinterprets these sequences as “appealing.” This type of recurrent imagery in the show was now a site of relatability and catharsis. In the comments of Tom and Stephan, we can see the interaction between the participant’s own cultural position and their viewing of the show in ways that allowed the The Sopranos to offer them a viewing experience that reflected the specificities of the current moment. We can see the possibility for an older text (which had nothing to do with the pandemic) to be used allegorically by participants as means of working through the present experiences and anxieties associated with covid-19.

Reinterpreting Nostalgia

Scholars have often identified The Sopranos as being critical of over-indulging in feelings of nostalgia (Beare 2019; Geraldine 2012; Ricci 2014). But, for the participants of this study, this critique felt much less pronounced and became complicated by their individual contexts of interpretation. Some participants reported that watching The Sopranos in the 2020s helped facilitate feelings of nostalgia for the pop-culture and fashion of the late 1990s/early 2000s.

During its recent resurgence what was originally the show’s “present” has been transformed into a site of nostalgia for viewers. All the participants in this study were in their early to mid-20s meaning that they were born between 1994 and 2000. As such, they were all children during the time that The Sopranos originally aired. Many of the participants looked back at symbols of 2000s “youth culture” with fondness. For the most part, this was their youth culture—something they experienced directly or perhaps via older siblings. When asked whether the show made them feel nostalgic, a few participants responded quite enthusiastically. For Stuart, it was the “little things”—like the scene of AJ and Tony playing Mario Kart that evoked such feelings:

It’s weird I guess, because I feel nostalgic for the 2000s, but obviously back then I was very young, so the nostalgia is mostly for very little things, like when they played Mario Kart. . . You know, AJ is into those bands people used to think were kind of cool.

Several other participants’ experiences of nostalgia were also tethered to specific pop culture artifacts that featured in the show. For example, AJ Soprano’s taste in music was mentioned by multiple participants. Stephan stated that AJ’s (now iconic) wardrobe of nu-metal band t-shirts “100percent” gave him a strong sense of nostalgia. Darcy went on to reflect that he “had the exact same Metallica tee” as AJ when he was a kid. Other participants described specific items of clothing in the show as having a similar effect. For Selina, there was a clear comparison to be made between the “look” of one of her favorite childhood pop stars, Fergie, and The Sopranos character Adriana:

Some of the fashion, you know, Adriana’s very like—Adriana reminds me so much of Fergie—you know, a lot of the earrings and the mini-skirts and the shoes.

For Selina, The Sopranos was harking back to a time that she experienced and was a way to help access her broader childhood memories. As such, we can see The Sopranos being used as a site of childhood nostalgia—something that is particular to the participants’ personal contexts of interpretation.

Overwhelmingly, the participants who experienced nostalgia upon watching The Sopranos framed it as a positive experience. Nostalgia was a source of viewing pleasure and an “extra” thing they could gleam from watching the show. Callum reflected on watching scenes in AJ’s room:

So much of the stuff in AJ’s room I was like oh! I had friends or like older brothers who had that stuff and it’s a huge sense of nostalgia. The music as well and the fashion, so I think that is definitely an added bonus that has drawn me into the series—this sort of nostalgia and sort of remembering and just things they talk about.

Callum goes onto note that this was a reason why watching older shows was something he “liked to do.” For him, it was a pleasure to “go back to watching series’ that were maybe made in different eras to enjoy that sort of time.” Callum positively characterizes this feeling of nostalgia—it is an “added bonus” to his experience of watching the show. Moreover, Tom fondly noted that the show’s constant reference to gangster films made him feel nostalgic because:

My dad was super into gangster films, my cousin was super into mob films. . . I’ve got this like brutally encyclopaedic knowledge which I never asked anyone for, but I have anyway. So that kind of stuff—they’re my favourite bits of the show. . . when they’re like referring to that stuff.

For Tom, the show’s gangster references helped facilitate warm childhood memories of watching these films with his family. It is this nostalgic connection that helps make these some of Tom’s “favorite bits” of the show. Meanwhile, Alannah noted that the clothing and “general vibe” of the show made her feel nostalgic. Like some of the others she enjoyed this nostalgic experience stating that:

It makes me feel nostalgic for a time when things felt a little bit like. . . simpler, even though they have complications. It just seemed like a good stage of history to be in but maybe that’s because I was born in 96′ and I’m like everything was better before the millennium.

The way Alannah describes the 1990s and early 2000s as a “simpler time” (albeit still complicated) and as a “good stage of history” is of particular significance here. In these responses we can see the possibility that—when viewed in different contexts of interpretation—The Sopranos perpetuates an idealized version of the late 1990s. Alannah’s response goes beyond simply identifying pop-cultural artifacts from her childhood. Rather, she can be understood as engaging in a form of mediated nostalgia in which the past is becoming idealized as a “good stage of history” in which “everything was better.”

These types of responses that positively understand the nostalgic experience facilitated by The Sopranos take on additional significance if we try and reconcile them with conventional understandings of the show. An indulgence in mediated nostalgia is what makes for the dangerously delusional “gangster” identities represented in the show (Beare 2019). Lee (2004) has made similar arguments that, in the show, nostalgia can cynically fuel toxic masculinity and violence. Many other scholars (Geraldine 2012; Kocela 2005; Ricci 2014) understand that a central theme of the show is this critique of nostalgia. In fact, the show’s critique is very much reminiscent of Lizardi’s (2014, 23) work on mediated nostalgia in which they claim that “the desire [for an idealized past] transforms into something more problematic, fetishistic or obsessive.” Of course, viewers having nostalgia for a show set during their past is to be expected. The participants age group means that it was originally broadcast during their childhood, and it is natural that they will likely feel something when they see pop-cultural artifacts from their past. But what stands out is the enjoyment they get from this and how—at times—it so closely resembles Tony’s view of the past that is itself problematized by the show. Interestingly, the participants did not fully acknowledge this connection between their experience and Tony’s. As such, we can see a tension that is unique to these contemporary readings of The Sopranos. For some participants, an extratextual experience of nostalgia is in opposition to the show’s critique of nostalgia.

In this sense, we can understand there is the possibility for The Sopranos to facilitate a distinct type of nostalgia for “new” viewers of the show. Participants would latch onto certain pop-cultural artifacts and places to reminisce about their childhood experiences in the 2000s. The Sopranos’ critique of this type of nostalgia itself also became obscured by new contexts of interpretation. The show takes aim at Tony’s nostalgia and appreciation for the 1950s and 1960s. But, for most of the participants this critique was somewhat obscured in 2020. Younger audiences are not likely to be as literate in 1950s and 1960s cultural references as the show’s original audiences. This was even explicitly stated by Stuart who said that while the 2000s were nostalgic for him:

A lot of the other stuff is sort of—a lot of the other stuff kind of goes over my head because I’m like “I don’t remember that.” Especially all of the nostalgia they have in the show—it’s like I don’t know what it was like in the 60s.

Both the age and temporal position of the viewer can combine here to bring distinct transformational possibilities. It might simply be that an experience of mediated nostalgia could erode the show’s exploration of nostalgia. If participants are enjoying the past in the same way Tony is, there is the possibility for The Sopranos to perpetuate an idealized version of the past to new viewers in ways that are oppositional to its original critique. As Pattie (2002) argues, The Sopranos use of intertextuality is not references for the sake of references. They are deliberate and create distinct meaning—pop-culture is leveraged to give us more insight into characters or to comment on the state of the storyworld. If the audience don’t “get” these references, that meaning could be lost. Perhaps though, a more exciting possibility exists. The participants’ unique contexts of interpretation and experience of 2000s nostalgia could do the opposite and create a more involved, double layered understanding of this feeling that was not previously possible. Either way, we can see that the viewers’ temporal context of interpretation has the potential to considerably alter how they engage with prominent themes of a show like The Sopranos.

The Sopranos Without Tony?

In some cases, the unique temporal positioning of the participants offered the capacity for disruptive readings of the show. For many participants, there was a deliberate refusal to interpret Tony Soprano as the primary identificatory figure in the show. Rather, characters like Dr. Melfi and Adriana were recognized by the participants as prisms through which to view the show’s themes and messaging. For some, reading the show through these characters afforded them an opportunity to not only connect the show with their own lived experience, but also with contemporary post #metoo gender politics.

Reflecting on their experience viewing The Sopranos for the first time in 2020 to 2021, some participants noted that the show had recently become grouped with male-centric films like American Beauty (1998) and Fight Club (1999) in online spaces. During the show’s original run, The Sopranos’ willingness to critically deconstruct masculinity was often viewed as distinct compared to other male-centric texts (De Stefano 2011; Johnson 2007; Lee 2004). Unlike other “crisis of masculinity” works, The Sopranos was understood as open to feminist solutions that might help ease male suffering. But it is still worth nothing that the show shares esthetic similarities with these types of texts. At the core of its narrative is a troubled, heterosexual, white middle-aged man. Moreover, Tony is frequently involved in grotesque displays of violence. As such, the participants expressed a general worry that The Sopranos was open to being read as an endorsement of a stereotypical “male fantasy.” Alannah described The Sopranos as:

Like a Fight Club situation where it depends on the audience, and it depends on like the way that you look at it. . . Because like Fight Club and American Psycho—Like white dudes will watch it and be like yeah, this is fucking sick—that’s me man. And its like you don’t want to be these people! You gotta look at it in a way—you gotta look at it through the lens of like cynicism and you have to criticise it yourself because [the critique] it is not overt in my opinion.

The characterization of potential “bad” fans as “white dudes” stands out here. Alannah identifies that watching the show uncritically is an indulgence that is only afforded to certain audience demographics. Only “white dudes” can place themselves in the power fantasy of The Sopranos. As outlined by Havas (2022), recent “quality feminist television” has been much clearer about its gender politics. Moreover, Alannah’s concerns about white men “misunderstanding” the show as a “power fantasy” is reflective of contemporary anxieties—take the sustained reporting about how the film Joker (2019) could incite violence from white men.

As such, the approach taken to watching The Sopranos in 2020-2021 (especially by feminine identifying participants) was disruptive to the dominant readings of the show. While participants did acknowledge that Tony was presented as the show’s main point of identification, none of them were interested in understanding the show through him. For example, Jessica was more concerned with how her favorite characters “handled” a figure like Tony than Tony himself:

I like Melfi because she is intelligent, and I think the way she handles Tony is great. He is a difficult person to be around and to have a conversation with and to be able to get someone like that to open up—you have to be very patient and yeah—so I like that.

Later in the interview Jessica discussed how Melfi’s handling of Tony was a particular point of identification for her:

Sometimes Tony does stuff and I’m just like “urgh.” My dad is a depressed person, he’s got really bad clinical depression so like I can see similarities and he just doesn’t talk about it, and he finds it very hard.

She expanded on this by saying:

I can definitely see a lot of similarities there—even in the clip where Meadow’s just like “Dad you’re being racist” and he’s like “what, I didn’t say anything.” I’ve had those moments with my Dad where I have had to call him out for things exactly like that—Because I work at the pub right, I get a load of middle aged, like I would say 40s to 50s or even older men, who will like hit on me or flirt with me—they’re just gross basically and it’s shit—watching The Sopranos they [the men] seem like the kind of guy who would come to the pub and make some comment.

In these ways, Jessica’s lived experience informs how she read the show and resists some of its implicit logic. Instead of identifying with Tony, she identified most with characters who had to manage him. Shifting focus away from Tony’s perspective considerably alters how she understands the events of the narrative. It becomes about how characters (in this case characters who are women) are forced to navigate volatile and dominating masculine personalities. While Jessica’s interpretations were explicitly informed by her own lived experience (of working in a pub, of her interactions with her own father), it should also be noted that social mores have changed quite a bit since The Sopranos was first screened in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Post #metoo, there is less tolerance for men’s poor behavior toward women and we can see this come through in Jessica’s comments. These contemporary contexts of interpretation result in different elements of the show being emphasized that were less visible to mass audiences during the show’s original run.

Moreover, a significant amount of feminine identifying participants cited Adriana as the central identificatory figure for them in the show. Adriana has perhaps one of the most tragic arcs in the program. For most of the series, she is known as Christopher’s long-term girlfriend and eventual fiancé. Their relationship is tumultuous, and Adriana is frequently shown to be the victim of domestic violence. For Kaveny (2007) Adriana’s sincerity and naivety is what makes her eventual downfall so “heartbreaking” as “in the end, it is Adriana’s love for her family that proves to be her undoing.” Adriana is forced by the FBI into life as a low-level informant. Eventually she is offered the opportunity to join the witness protection program but refuses to leave without Christopher. When she comes clean to him, Christopher ultimately betrays her. He gives her up to Tony and she is later killed by Tony’s consigliere, Silvio. Adriana was by far the most popular character amongst the feminine identifying participants of this study. Participants were quick to remark that they liked her charisma, humor, and loud clothing. More than anything though, they found parts of her experience relatable to their own experience. Alannah stated:

I especially relate to Adriana sometimes, like when I was watching it [The Sopranos] I was like I’ve been in a similar relationship to the relationship her and Christopher have. I always liked a lot of her decisions and stuff and a lot of her fear and her vulnerabilities but also like her naivety, I really relate to that, and I think it’s a really nice juxtaposition considering her demeanour—she’s always done up and she’s always wearing like really strong animal prints and things like that but she’s quite soft inside. And I think she kind of like wears it as a bit of a costume.

Alannah highlights Adriana’s “naivety” and “decision making” as points of relatability. Unlike most of the other characters, she generally tries to do right by people. It is exceedingly rare for a character’s decision making in The Sopranos to be guided by empathy rather than selfishness. Alannah is not saying that she likes Adriana’s decision making because she makes good decisions, but rather she finds the reasoning behind them to be relatable—especially for someone (like herself) who has been in “similar relationships.” Jessica also expressed a fondness for Adriana:

I love Adriana! I find Adriana relatable in some respects. . . She seems to be a lot more innocent than what someone like Carmela or any of the other wives do. And she just seems like very young and naïve to me—she’s kind of dragged into this—or, you know, she’s grown up in this environment. And she happened to fall in love with this guy who treats her like shit! And you know, I can relate because I’ve fallen in love with guys who have treated me like shit. And I stuck around even though they’re horrible people. So I can relate to that.

When read through the lens of Adriana, the narrative and themes of The Sopranos take on a much more cautionary and tragic tone. Generally, The Sopranos avoids making any absolute moral judgments about its characters. According to creator David Chase, the core conceit of the show is that “American life has gotten so savage and selfish that even a mob guy couldn’t take it anymore. . . He’s in therapy because what he sees upsets him so much, what he sees everyday” (Bogdanovich 2002). As a result, the show is careful not to completely condemn its main cast of mobsters—rather preferring construct them as complicated multifaceted individuals who are navigating a selfish society. But, as was alluded to in Chase’s quote, Tony’s experiences are still very much foregrounded as the most important. It is his psychological problems and distress that matters the most. Rather than—in the case of Adriana—a young woman who is subject to abuse. Reading the show through male characters like Tony works to centre men’s experiences on screen. However, the way that television represents gendered issues has changed significantly since The Sopranos was first screened. There is far less false equivalency and less sympathy for men’s bad behavior toward women in today’s television than there was during the late 1990s and early 2000s. But, if we use Adriana to access the show, our understanding of gender takes on a much different tone compared to understanding Tony as our main point of identification. From this perspective, the show can come across as a much more critical exploration of abusive relationships. For participants like Jessica and Alannah, the show was much more about how a “naïve,” “selfless” and “innocent” character like Adriana could navigate the “selfish” society alluded to by David chase.

Conclusion

Through an analysis of interview responses, I have demonstrated how watching The Sopranos in the 2020s allows for distinctive interpretations of the text. Participants were quick to project their own lived experience onto The Sopranos and read it in a fundamentally new way. For some The Sopranos was transformed into a cathartic tool to help them cope with the ongoing pandemic and associated stresses of lockdown. This demonstrates how an interaction between the participant’s own cultural position and viewing of the show allows an older text to be used allegorically to work through present experiences. Moreover, watching The Sopranos from a contemporary vantage point also opened unique avenues of nostalgia for some participants. They characterized this experience positively—the show allowed them to “enjoy” the 2000s and reminisce over their childhood and the “simpler” times of that era. In some cases, this was eerily like Tony’s on-screen experience with nostalgia, and we can see that this 2020 reading complicated the show’s critique of idealizing the past. Moreover, other participants’ experience of the show was mediated through contemporary, post-#metoo gender politics. As such, these new contexts of interpretation are transformational to the show’s meaning. In line with Miller’s (2021) work on retextuality, we should consider the 2020s version of The Sopranos as a distinct text. In this case, this text is facilitated by new contexts of interpretation that are available to viewers watching in the present moment.

Throughout this article, I have outlined a broad approach to investigating the resurgence of older serialized TV shows like The Sopranos. It is important that we understand the resurgent versions of these TV shows as the new texts they are. They perform unique types of cultural work, distinct from their original run. To do this is to reveal the rich, untapped veins of meaning that resurgent texts might take on in new settings. There is plenty of room for future research here—the particularities of how these shows engage with new cultural contexts mean that no resurgence is ever the same. Understanding the specific potentials afforded by new contexts of interpretation can allow us to discover new meanings and cultural work in these texts.