David Chase calls The Sopranos' 25th anniversary a "funeral" for the golden age of TV

David Chase has suggested that fans of his work should consider of a “funeral” for the so called golden age of TV, saying in that “We’re going back to where we were” when he first started making TV. (Which is to say, a “shithole,” per a different part of the interview.) “Something is dying,” he added, in case you weren’t clear on the general vibe of where Chase was going with all this.

The series creator made these pronouncements as the world of the January 10, 1999 release of of , which swiftly helped elevate HBO from a movie channel with a handful of interesting TV projects kicking around in between airings of on its schedule into the home base for a whole new generation of prestige TV.

Chase is careful not to take credit for this transformation, acknowledging that the “25 year blip” of quality he’s mourning in these recent interviews encompasses “a lot of other hugely talented people out there who I feel increasingly bad for.” Chase points, in part, to modern attention spans for the shift in current TV making trends.

“We are more into multitasking. We seem to be confused and audiences can’t keep their minds on things, so we can’t make anything that makes too much sense, takes our attention and requires an audience to focus. And as for streaming executives? It is getting worse. We’re going back to where we were.” He also noted that he recently tried to get a project about a high end escort made, and was “told to dumb it down,” which is one of the most David Chase ish sentences imaginable.

We would respectfully suggest to Chase—who, it’s probably worth noting, has struggled to ever find a second project that connected with audiences the way ’ elevated mob drama managed to (including a tepid response to 2021's disappointing —that the problem he’s bemoaning might have less to do with quality than volume: There’s just TV being made now, at a significant level, than there was 25 years ago, and so it’s easier for quality shows like , , or to slip through the cracks.

(The interviewer brings up at one point, actually, but Chase pushes back because the series had been green lit all the way back in 2017.) Still, if we’re going to get doomsaying from an aging TV veteran, we could do a lot worse than Chase’s eternally caustic tongue; he notes at one point, of the TV execs of yesteryear, who turned the medium into “an artistic pit,” that, “I made them regret all their decades of stupidity and greed,” which is the sort of fire and brimstone pronouncement we can’t help but enjoy.

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