The Licence Behind David Chase's Six Seasons of New Jersey Gangsters
For years the American networks worked from a short list of rules: sympathetic characters, redemptive endings, patriotic values and mouths washed clean, all of it arranged to send viewers and their advertisers contentedly to bed. The break came in 1983, when HBO — until then a sport-and-movies cable network — decided to make original television drama.
What HBO commissioned were dramas and comedies in which characters were permitted to screw and swear and generally behave as people do; the Guardian's examples are Sex and the City and The Larry Sanders Show. Writer-director David Chase took that licence and spent six seasons on stories about a family of Italian-American gangsters in New Jersey — The Sopranos.
Seen as an industry story rather than an auteur one, the freedom arrived as a commissioning decision: a channel choosing material the network rulebook had kept off the air. Chase's part was what he built once the door was open.
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The old rulebook is a joy to read now: be sympathetic, be redeemed, be patriotic, and keep your mouth shut in case an advertiser is watching.
A licence to swear is a licence about behaviour, not ambition. Six seasons of gangster stories are a different achievement from the permission that made them possible — permissiveness explains what could be shown, not why any of it was worth watching.