THE SOPRANOS airs the fourth, or maybe the fifth, episode of its television season this Sunday. Or is it the sixth? It’s very hard to keep track. In any case, the show is still sailing along on an updraft of favorable publicity that is extraordinary even by the standards of television, where hallucinatory embellishment and repetition are basic communication strategies. The coverage and critical notices that swarmed over the show’s season premiere, when it debuted on the cable channel HBO four or five or six weeks ago, read more like advertising than journalism. And there’s no sign of a trailing off.
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The Sopranos is a certified cultural phenomenon, according to the public prints. Last week alone came a cover story in Newsweek, yet another feature in USA Today, a gushy valentine in GQ, and a lengthy chin-puller in the New Yorker, all of them written in tones of undying appreciation. I don’t know about you, but I think that unanimity on this scale, especially among the skeptical, fiercely independent minds that enliven our nation’s major newspapers and glossy magazines, should make everyone else suspicious. Aren’t there any people out there who don’t like The Sopranos?
As a matter of fact, there are such people, tons of them, and their existence is now one of the great unreported stories of American journalism. And I’m not just referring to people who’ve seen The Sopranos and didn’t think it was particularly worth watching, though I’m sure such viewers exist. I’m referring to people who don’t like The Sopranos — and who, for that matter, don’t dislike it, either — because they’ve never seen it.
Even as I write that sentence I can imagine hundreds of heads snapping upright in dozens of newsrooms, eyes blinking furiously, faces glancing at one another with looks of panic or disbelief or incomprehension, as though the floor had suddenly lurched upward. There are . . . people . . . who have never . . . seen The Sopranos?
Yes, yes, yes! Tons of them, as I say. Now, there’s a pretty good reason for this, and it has nothing to do, at least directly, with the chronic unhipness of the American people, or with the unconscionable influence of money in our political system, or even with the hidden machinations of the religious right. It’s much simpler: The Sopranos is on HBO, one of the many premium subscription channels offered by cable companies, and there are people who don’t pay the premium to subscribe to HBO. I did some checking. There are about 103 million American households that contain, for better or worse, a functioning television set. About two-thirds of those households get cable service, and about half of those cable-wired households — 35 million or so — pay the extra money to receive access to HBO in a package with other premium channels. That’s a lot of people, of course, and the programmers and marketers at HBO should be very happy with their success. I’m very happy for them, too.
But still. Put this the other way round: A very large majority of Americans don’t even have access to HBO and therefore, of course, to The Sopranos. It costs money to watch The Sopranos — an extra 200 dollars or more a year for people who already get cable, and much more than that for people who would have to initiate cable service and then add the premium channels to boot. Difficult as it is for some of us to believe, most people in the United States have chosen not to spend the extra money. What this means is that, relative to the universe of TV watchers, The Sopranos isn’t being seen by very many people. On any given night in prime time, 80 million Americans or more will be staring at the television in a futile attempt to obliterate the piled-up frustrations and petty resentments and failed dreams that constitute their pathetic little lives. Or maybe they’re just watching TV to pass the time. Whichever. The important point is, not many of them are watching The Sopranos, which on a typical Sunday will be seen by roughly 8 million viewers — or one out of ten of the total.
This makes it a great triumph for HBO, but only a middling success measured against the standards of network commercial television. For network TV, a smash superboffo megahit — excuse the technical terminology — would be Survivor, the sadistic reality show that will sometimes snag 40 million viewers or more. On its face, then, The Sopranos’s 8 million looks like small potatoes.
But what potatoes! Among the couch spuds will be (it’s safe to say) the entire combined editorial and business staffs of GQ, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and so on, and the staffs, excluding paperboys, of every sizable newspaper from the New York Times down to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And all of them (likewise safe to say) seem oblivious to the possibility that anyone else is not watching. They continue to write their stories about their particular entertainment obsession, all of which assume that The Sopranos is a mass phenomenon on the order of, say, the televised Olympics or a runaway hit movie like Titanic. But of course it isn’t.
The saturation coverage of The Sopranos is another instance of a cultural development that has become increasingly un-ignorable, though still stubbornly ignored. Along with the rest of the American elite — “the top one percent,” to borrow a useful figure of speech — the mainstream organs of opinion and news have detached themselves from the common life to a degree we haven’t seen in many years. It should go without saying that just about every subject television touches it renders idiotic — think of politics brought to you by Hardball, high finance brought to you by CNBC, even weather brought to you by the hysterics on the Weather Channel — but once upon a time you could say this in its defense: TV created a kind of shared experience for the country at large. We all trusted Walter Cronkite, we all laughed at Laugh-In, we all accepted Ed Sullivan’s taste. The wealthy and the working class, the banker and the baker: They all watched the same crap.
Not any more. The Sopranos is the entertainment equivalent of the gated community. The well-to-do now retreat to their own corner of the television world, with the obliviousness that has always been a hallmark of the rich and privileged. Tony Soprano may be fun to watch, he may even be great TV, but he’s no Ed Sullivan.
Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
