The Sopranos

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About

The Sopranos is an American crime drama television series, which aired on HBO between 1999 and 2007. Regarded as one of the greatest television shows of time, the series is also credited with popularizing serialized television, as opposed to episodic television.

History

Original Series

The pilot for The Sopranos aired on HBO on January 10th, 1999. The series ran for six seasons on the network, with the finale airing on June 10th, 2007.^[1]

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Video Game

On November 7th, 2006, the video game The Sopranos: Road to Respect was released for the PlayStation 2. On the review aggregator website Metacritic,^[2] the game received generally unfavorable reviews and a score of 42 out of 100.

Prequel Film

In 2018, HBO announced that they would produce a prequel film, written by series creator David Chase, entitled The Many Saints of Neward. The film is scheduled to be released on March 12th, 2021.^[3]

Reception

The television series received universal acclaim from Metacritic,^[4] which deemed the series a "must watch." On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, ^[5] the series holds a 92% average rating. Throughout the course of the series, The Sopranos won more than 20 Emmy awards, including two for Outstanding Drama Series.^[6]

Ay, Tone

"Ay, Tone" (abbreviation for "Hey, Tony") refers to a series of memes that mimic the speech patterns and slang of fictional television character Paulie Gualtieri from the HBO gangster series The Sopranos. These memes frequently begin with "Ay, Tone," a phrase frequently uttered by Paulie on the series and include an image of Paulie photoshopped into the image. The meme has frequently been used in anti-semitic memes, which generally feature jokes about Holocaust denial.

Series finale

The final episode of the series, titled Made in America, aired on June 10, 2007, and concludes with one of the most notoriously controversial endings in television history. In the final scene, Tony Soprano, who was widely expected to die at the end of the series, visits a local diner for dinner with family members while the song "Don't Stop Believing" by Journey plays, after the main conflict of the final seasons has been ostensibly resolved. An unidentified man is shown entering the restaurant, shortly before Tony is shown looking up, at which point the scene, song and series all abruptly cut to black. It has been popularly theorized that this was meant to represent Tony being fatally shot by the unidentified entrant, but no official confirmation has ever been given either way.

The ambiguous ending quickly inspired mass-commentary, analysis and parodies, including the historic Family Guy episode Lois Kills Stewie, and has since become one of the most widely remembered things about the Sopranos series within mainstream popular culture.