‘A recipe for blandness’: critic Peter Biskind on why quality television is in chronic decline | Television
On 10 January 1999, the first episode of a drama about a New Jersey gangster with panic attacks debuted on the US cable channel HBO. The Sopranos ran for six seasons, the final episode being broadcast on 10 June 2007. Across eight years and 86 episodes it came to represent a golden age of TV, when moral complexity, deep characterisation and unprecedented authenticity were common features of a bold new form of televisual storytelling.It’s this “peak era” that Peter Biskind, the cultural critic and film historian, both…