Emmy winners prove great TV is still alive and kicking

With respect to The Sopranos creator David Chase and one of the greatest showrunners of all time: egg on your face.

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of iconic HBO TV series The Sopranos, every episode is available to stream on Foxtel On Demand.

In a recent interview, The Sopranos creator David Chase essentially sounded the death knell for television. Expressing his disdain for the perceived “dumbing down” of TV, Chase pointed fingers at streaming services, contending that they prioritised shows catering to distracted audiences scrolling absent-mindedly on their phones.

Well, with respect to one of the greatest showrunners of all time: egg on your face.

If the 2023 Primetime Emmy Awards – hosted on Tuesday AEDT after being postponed from the scheduled September date due to the Hollywood actors and writers strikes – proved anything, it’s that audiences hunger for intelligent, complex, adult dramas.

One need look no further than the HBO drama Succession, the biggest winner of the night, whose fourth and final season all but swept the major drama categories.

Jesse Armstrong’s wordy, cerebral, elegant show about the fraught family dynamics in a media business empire was in no way background noise. It was the definition of event television – the kind of show that forced you to avoid social media should you come across spoilers. Its drip-fed release called for each episode to be viewed with lights dimmed, subtitles turned on, and phones on Do Not Disturb mode. And it wasn’t alone.

Lorraine Bracco and Michael Imperioli speak onstage during the 75th Primetime Emmy Awards at Peacock Theater on January 15, 2024 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

Cast your mind back to December 2022 when conversation was dominated by impassioned guessing about who was going to end up in a body bag in the second season of Mike White’s The White Lotus.

The deaths were beside the point of the show. In the same way that The Sopranos nestled brilliantly nuanced observations about a complicated antihero’s personality crisis into an audience-pleasing mob drama, White used a murder-mystery set-up to Trojan horse his prickly, cynical ideas on desire, power and the way we use sex to hurt each other.

Then there’s The Bear. The FX series, about Carmy (Jeremy Allen White), a former rising star of the New York culinary scene who inherits a sandwich shop in Chicago after the suicide of his older brother, may have swept the comedy categories with six wins but it was anything but feel-good. If anything, it was feel-bad. Or more specifically, feel-anxious. Not only did The Bear beautifully and convincingly capture the exhaustion and tension of working in a kitchen, it plumbed the depths of grief.

It also, it’s worth mentioning, had some of the best dramatic acting of the year, with the showstopping, star-studded Christmas episode “Fishes” — which saw Jamie Lee Curtis give her finest performance in years as the family Matriarch, Donna, who was all false lashes, red talons, and drunken wails.

It was fitting, then, that this Emmys ceremony commemorated the 25th anniversary of The Sopranos. When cast members Michael Imperioli and Lorraine Bracco reunited in a re-creation of Dr Melfi’s psychiatry office, with a framed photograph of James Gandolfini, one couldn’t help but think that this is The Sopranos’ legacy: championing intelligent, modestly scaled dramas with tight narratives and well-cast actors.