In the age of streaming, I tend to save up episodes until the season finale has touched down before I start watching. However, I make an exception for new shows on HBO. When it was on, Sunday night episodes of Succession, for one, both brightened up (and darkened) entire weeks for me. I subscribed to the channel specifically for the release of Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg’s follow up to Band of Brothers, The Pacific. Game of Thrones premiered not long after and seized the king of television crown for years.

(WarnerMedia Discovery / HBO)

Really, until its showrunners decided to rush the last season, their eyes set on a lucrative new Star Wars trilogy deal (which fell through, by the way—picture a sly, cartoon coyote salivating and rubbing his hands together before an ill-timed baby grand flattens him—entirely of his own doing—and the Roadrunner scampers away… time will tell if their upcoming Netflix series will be well received) everyone was talking about Game of Thrones. It got people who weren’t really into television, really into television. Is cultural phenomenon too strong a descriptor for it?

Television has had heavyweights in the past, mostly in the era of “there’s nothing else on TV” (boy, put that phrase on the endangered list) where you hung out with your family in the evening and watched TV. What else could you do? The internet was for nerds. Books were for nerds too.

Event television of the scripted variety consisted of Superbowls and royal weddings. The Sopranos was *the* show before Game of Thrones and its popularity was built up by word-of-mouth and not social media. Both shows have similar TV ratings (around 12 million viewers at their peak), with Game of Thrones having the leg up due to streaming, piracy, and appeal the world over in swords and dragons. Some have argued that if The Sopranos had come out at a similar time in the last decade, it would have benefitted in the same way. But that’s not really a given. Some of HBO’s greatest recent shows—critical darlings—have just gotten by with relatively tiny audiences. I loved watching The Sopranos and recognize its impact on the golden age of TV, but if it came out today, I would find it a hard sell on premise and plot alone. There’s always something flashier, more immediate. Breaking Bad is a superhero show compared to The Sopranos.

There are too many high-CGI-budget productions that hog the attention-spans of the average television viewer. There are people who subscribe to Disney+ because of their love of Marvel and Star Wars (no judgment, Andor is well worth it) but its slate of Avengers-lite shows are all they watch. Not to go full gate-keeper here, but would these folks be television fans or simply Marvel fans? Don’t say both. You’re not allowed to say both. I’m glad they have an “in” to this medium that I love so much and I just hope they discover everything else that is out there.

And then came the streaming model of dropping the entire season online at once, but now it’s a crapshoot trying to guess which platform will do this. Prime Video flips back and forth from show to show, while AppleTV+ and Hulu do weekly releases. It’s too simplistic to argue which method is the correct one because it’s on a case-by-case basis for me. There are above-average shows I’ve quickly knocked out in which, after all was said and done, I was glad I only spent a weekend watching rather than invest months into.

At the same time, if The Sopranos, with its same incredible writing and performances (RIP James Gandolfini), debuted for the first time ever right this minute and was dumped onto a streaming service, I don’t know that I have faith in today’s audiences to herald it as one of the greatest shows of all time. It may generate buzz online, then be forgotten within a month, lost in the churn of the glorified web-series mill.