FX’s 7-Part Action Drama Is The Sopranos On Wheels

The Sopranos pioneered a whole new way of making TV. It singlehandedly changed the medium and kicked off the Golden Age of Television, and its influence can still be felt to this day in any crime show with a dark sense of humor, or any family drama where the dad’s line of work is less-than-reputable. The Sopranos proved that dramas could be even funnier than comedies. It proved that something made for the small screen could look just as good as something made for the big screen.

After The Sopranos, we started to see more TV shows embrace a moral complexity. For decades, network executives had operated under the assumption that a series’ protagonist had to be likable in order to get viewers to tune back in to see them again the following week. But the global popularity of Tony Soprano proved that TV protagonists didn’t have to be likable; they just had to be interesting. We saw Tony murder people in cold blood, but we also saw that he loved his kids — he contained multitudes — and that led to a wave of similarly complicated antiheroes: Walter White, Omar Little, Don Draper, Jax Teller.

Just about every TV show made after The Sopranos was influenced by The Sopranos in some way or another, just like every movie made after Citizen Kane. But some shows have borrowed more directly from HBO’s landmark series: Breaking Bad is a neo-western Sopranos, Boardwalk Empire is a Prohibition-era Sopranos, and Sons of Anarchy is a biker version of The Sopranos, swapping out the New Jersey mafia for a California biker gang.

Just Like The Sopranos, Sons Of Anarchy Reimagines Hamlet In A Modern Setting

Created by Kurt Sutter, Sons of Anarchy arrived on the post-Sopranos wave of dark, gritty, action-packed dramas about family men in a dangerous line of work. In The Shield, the central husband and father was a corrupt cop. In Breaking Bad, he was a drug lord. And in Sons of Anarchy, he’s one of the highest-ranking members of an outlaw motorcycle club. The club runs guns and drugs to fund their operations, but they have an understanding with local law enforcement, because they act as a vigilante squad keeping the town safe.

These bikers in California are a lot like Tony and his crew in New Jersey, flagrantly committing crimes and doling out their own brand of street justice. But the connection goes deeper than that. Sons of Anarchy isn’t just The Sopranos with motorcycles; they’re both a modernized update of William Shakespeare’s Hamlet.

In The Sopranos’ first season, just like in Hamlet, the king dies suddenly, an uncle rises up to seize the throne, and the grieving son feels that he’s the rightful heir. Sons of Anarchy is even more overt in its Shakespearean elements, with clear parallels to every major character from the play: Jax is Hamlet, Clay is Claudius, Gemma is Gertrude, Tara is Ophelia, and John Teller haunts his son much in the same way that Hamlet’s father does.

Why The Sopranos’ Formula Will Never Get Old

More than two-and-a-half decades later, we’re still seeing TV producers copy the Sopranos formula and put their own stamp on the crime family genre. And we’ll probably keep seeing TV shows trying to emulate The Sopranos, because that formula has universal appeal — it works for a reason.

Sopranos creator David Chase struck gold combining universally relatable family drama with the violent tropes of pulp fiction. Audiences love those genre conventions, but the family situations ground them in the real world. We’ve seen plenty of shows try to replicate that balance of crime drama and family drama: Breaking Bad made the wife an accomplice, Ozark made the kids accomplices, Peaky Blinders put the Sopranos in flatcaps and brought them to period Birmingham, and, of course, Sons of Anarchy put them on motorcycles.