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More than 13 years ago, America’s television screens inexplicably cut to black — The Sopranos was finished, just like that.
Twitter was barely a thing on June 10, 2007, the day the episode, “Made in America,” aired. About a quarter of the country still used dial-up internet. And yet, here we are in 2020, where you’d be hard-pressed to find a show more ubiquitous online than The Sopranos.
Spend a day on Twitter and try to not see a Sopranos reference. It’s everywhere. Ever-ree-where. Politics, the pandemic, fashion, all made Sopranos memes.
James Gandolfini, the late actor who brilliantly played Tony Soprano, would’ve been 59 Friday. We figured what better time to examine why, exactly, The Sopranos has been reborn via (truly wonderful and hilarious) memes.
Sopranos memes are clearly having a moment in 2020, but it’s not like the show ever went away. Its cultural footprint is massive.
The landmark HBO crime drama debuted in ’99 and sparked the prestige era of TV, a golden age still going strong two decades later. But with excess time to kill in quarantine, many longtime fans have been turning to The Sopranos for a comfort rewatch. And some people who had never seen the series are using this strange, uncertain time to catch up on the beloved show.
It’s perfect timing, because there’s something distinctly 2020 about The Sopranos. If you took the show at a surface level, sure the accents are funny, the murders are grisly, the plot is gripping. But at its core it’s a deeply bleak show. Nearly everyone’s morality is fungible and most act only in their self interest. Violence and creeping ruin haunts most of the episodes. Overconfident people with loads of power seem, at times, impossibly dumb. Hell, even the lead character is depressed, doesn’t want to admit that fact, and laments missing a time in America that’s long gone and probably wasn’t all that great to begin with.
Yet through that morass, The Sopranos also managed to be, at times, hilarious. If anything resonates in 2020, it’s wringing a laugh out of a depressing, stupid world that seems to lack any sense of order.
“What fuckin Virus?”
“The Coronavirus Christopher, the fuckin Coronavirus”
“Hooo, no more coronas? The Fuck are you talkin about T?” pic.twitter.com/rhxXTmWtFR
— Kee🗽 (@Kee_Bully19) March 15, 2020
It’s hard not to draw parallels between Tony’s chaotic, anxiety-filled reality and our own. And that sense of relatability, coupled with the fact that fans never really got a chance to properly meme The Sopranos when it aired, could explain why the show is receiving overwhelming appreciation online.
Though it’s been more than 20 years since The Sopranos’ pilot aired, it’s worth noting that the show also remains super relevant in today’s pop culture. Back in February, the popular NBC drama, This Is Us, made a classic Sopranos reference when a character was in a therapy session. And Hulu’s adaptation of High Fidelity showed The Sopranos some serious love by making multiple references throughout its first season. Talking Sopranos, a re-watch podcast hosted by Michael Imperioli (Christopher Moltisanti) and Steve Schirripa (Bobby Baccalieri) also debuted in April of this year. And naturally someone had to imagine how Tony Soprano and the gang would have handled this pandemic.
Another reason Sopranos memes are flourishing in 2020 is because the “sopranos out of context” Twitter account has really been putting in work. The account gives fans a heavy dose of nostalgia by regularly tweeting screenshots from the show. And because those screenshots can be easily shared and quote tweeted, the meme-making process is super convenient. The @oocsopranos account runner even created a master list of every scene that’s been tweeted to help fans find the memorable quote they’re looking to meme.
Part of the reason The Sopranos has lived on is it’s just really good television. It’s more accessible than ever and simple to screenshot since HBO’s vault of shows migrated online.
It has the perfect combo of being immovable from the public consciousness and imminently meme-able in a way only matched by The Simpsons. The show has become a language of its own online. It’s weirdly relatable and applicable to everyday American life for a show about a murderous gangster.
Even in the first episode of the show, Tony says something to his therapist about feeling kind of lost that feels just about right for things today.
“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that. I know. But lately I’ve been getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
In response, his therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Braco) tells him: “Many Americas, I think, feel that way.”
And if that isn’t 2020…