The Sopranos introduced new series format and HBO to wider world

Pick of the day: The Sopranos, 10.55am, BoxSets.

James Gandolfini in his role as Tony Soprano, head of the New Jersey crime family portrayed in HBO's The Sopranos now showing on BoxSets. Photo: AP

Pick of the day: The Sopranos, 10.55am, BoxSets.

Here’s your chance to catch the full first season of The Sopranos, the revolutionary series from David Chase that, arguably more than any other, changed the way the world saw the medium of television. Arriving early in 1999 on cable network HBO, it now represents the time when people started saying that TV was better than the movies.

Anybody who has invested empathy in this dark, dramatic and often mystifying show centred on the fictional character and unruly family of New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) knows The Sopranos is one of the most influential American shows, still affecting the way that drama is conceived and written.

Through the years I missed episodes, but that hardly mattered. For me the experience was like reading a great novel about the human condition that became more intimate and compelling with every page, even if occasional chapters were missing.

The show juxtaposes the angst of middle-class family life with the psychopathology of the mob family, the latter bringing the former into a kind of wonderful, and often comic, dramatic relief. We had never really seen anything like it.

And as American TV critic Alan Sepinwall has pointed out, Chase’s refusal to be all things to all people was another key part of what made this show so revolutionary.

“For 50 years, TV had operated under a big tent philosophy: you tried to rope as many people into the tent as possible, and once they were in you gave them the same thing they wanted over and over until they got bored,” he wrote.

As he suggests, The Sopranos had wide appeal but we watched it for different reasons, and Chase never seemed interested in pleasing all of us at the same time — something that’s also true of the great contemporary dramas such as Game of Thrones or Westworld.

So go ahead and treat yourself to several hours of TV history.