Fourteen years after The Sopranos ended its six-season run with a famously abrupt blackout—and eight years after its indelible star, James Gandolfini, died of an infinitely more tragic heart attack—HBO’s transformational mob family masterpiece lives on. In part, of course, we can thank internet streaming services that guarantee video immortality—but it’s also because creator David Chase injected the series into our cultural bloodstream. As countless critics have noted, the richly textured, complex work—centered as it was on a nuanced antihero—redefined high-quality television. Pushing creative and moral boundaries along with audience expectations, it influenced a raft of prestige TV that followed in its wake—including Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire, Deadwood, and Game of Thrones (some of which involved writers and directors who worked on The Sopranos). And the series is now ingrained in the lexicon. It has largely supplanted The Godfather as the go-to mafia reference; Donald Trump’s brazenly transactional tenure in the White House earned him plenty of unfavorable comparisons to Tony Soprano. A book by Deborrah Himsel, Leadership Sopranos Style: How to Become a More Effective Boss, holds up the fictional New Jersey mob boss as a model manager, if you overlook a few cold-blooded murders.

Now The Sopranos gained a whole new kind of currency with the release in October 2021 of a prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, starring James’s son, Michael Gandolfini, as a young Tony coming of age in the titular city during the racially charged summer of 1967. Written by Chase and Lawrence Konner and directed by Alan Taylor, the film explores the social and familial forces that helped shape a sensitive, impressionable youth into the angst-ridden mobster who riveted audiences from 1999 to 2007. 

And what was it, exactly, that made The Sopranos can’t-miss TV during those years? For one thing, it was unlike anything that came before. “Pre-Sopranos TV was widely dismissed as a medium for programs that didn’t ask the viewer to think about anything except what was coming on next, and preferred lovable characters who didn’t change and had no inner life,” write critics Matt Zoller Seitz of New York magazine and Alan Sepinwall of Rolling Stone—both of whom covered the show for the Newark Star-Ledger—in their 2019 book, The Sopranos Sessions. The networks imposed rigid standards and rules when it came to language, story lines, sex, violence, race, and other content—controversial subject matter was anathema, and nobody wanted to rock the boat, or, heaven forbid, alienate the sponsors. 

The Sopranos said goodbye to all that. Granted, it wasn’t the first series to push the envelope. There was All in the Family, with its humanized bigot, Archie Bunker; the morally complex Hill Street Blues; and other unconventional fare, such as Twin Peaks and the prison series Oz. But as Seitz and Sepinwall point out, The Sopranos was the first show to break all the rules “and still become a massive, enduring hit”—one widely used as a template. Many of the series’ most innovative features have become routine conventions of the small screen—antiheroic or even downright villainous central characters, serialized narrative arcs instead of discrete episodes, and the recognition that in real life there are moral gray areas and unresolved plots.

For the uninitiated—those who aren’t “made” viewers, so to speak—Chase’s saga follows Tony Soprano, the bearish boss of North Jersey’s DiMeo crime family and patriarch of his own upper-middle-class household, and how he balances (or doesn’t) an often-violent “professional” life with the dynamics of his family. That would be Tony’s long-suffering, compartmentalizing wife, Carmela (Oz alum Edie Falco), and two adolescent kids—Ivy League–bound daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and perpetually confused son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler). Also in the mix are Tony’s raging sister Janice (Aida Turturro) and troublesome elders—nightmarish mother Livia (Nancy Marchand) and Corrado “Junior” Soprano (Dominic Chianese), Tony’s shrewd and suspicious mafioso uncle. These characters interweave with Tony’s criminal crew, including his hotheaded “nephew” Christopher (Michael Imperioli) and guys with names like Paulie Walnuts, Big Pussy and Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri, as well as enemy mobsters, FBI agents, and Tony’s tag team of high-maintenance mistresses. Under constant stress from all of these and tormented by demons from his childhood, Tony has panic attacks and lands in psychotherapy, under the care of Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco).

That’s the general outline, but The Sopranos is so much more—it contains multitudes. Times of London critic Ben McIntyre told the BBC in 2007 that the series “covered all the great elements of drama like Shakespeare—Tony Soprano really is King Lear. The show’s themes are the great themes of literature.” The Sopranos, McIntyre noted, depicted “fathers fighting sons, kings controlling kingdoms, treachery, loyalty, love, guilt, revenge… everything, really,” adding that it was about “a bad man with good in him, trying to understand how he works.” McIntyre didn’t stop there. He also compared The Sopranos to the works of Charles Dickens, likening the show to a “huge, sprawling novel” with “small cameo parts that pull you along through it.”

Indeed, almost all the show’s characters are fleshed out. Tony as boss is by turns monstrous and murderous, reasonable and pragmatic; off the job, we see him engaged in feverish extramarital sex, then having a tender heart-to-heart with his wife or kids, or baring his childhood pain to his shrink. Almost everyone else also comes off as a multidimensional human, even those who make brief appearances—a psychopathic capo here, a crooked cop there. Though graphically violent on occasion, with many moments of high drama, The Sopranos has also been described—by Gandolfini, among others—as essentially a dark comedy. The scripts are generously leavened with humor high, low, broad, and subtle. The characters bicker and banter, sometimes over Seinfeldian minutiae; there’s irony and incongruity, mangled literary references, and mobster malapropisms. Even some of the more gruesome moments—Christopher crossing himself while disposing of a dismembered mobster’s head, for example—are so over-the-top you may be provoked to laugh.

The years since The Sopranos finale have brought heightened awareness when it comes to issues of race and gender. And the series has drawn understandable criticism. As The Many Saints of Newark explores, Tony and his pals spent their formative years in the racially incendiary crucible of Newark, and their exodus to the suburbs was part of the great “white flight” from the city. The mobsters’ racism is often on display as they fling casual slurs or try to pin their crimes on African Americans. 

Meanwhile, Italian American groups have criticized The Sopranos for promoting ethnic stereotypes. “So you hear The Sopranos is a quality show, you turn it on to check it out, and it’s the same old thing again—Italian Americans stealing, hitting, shooting, cheating, killing,” Nicolas Addeo, chairman of a group called Speranza, which advocated for positive ethnic, religious, and racial representations on-screen, told the Star-Ledger in 1999. “This show is not meant to represent the Italian American experience,” Imperioli countered to the same paper. “It’s about a specific group of people, a specific time and place.”

Certainly, women have their travails in The Sopranos, operating in an old-world patriarchal subculture. Over the course of the series, female characters are used, abused, deceived, and savagely murdered. There are some fierce, assertive (and, at times, manipulative) women, though even the most impressive, Dr. Melfi, is brutally raped. But The Sopranos remains popular among women viewers. “The Sopranos was a work of art that understood the messy, unlikable truth of women in this insular world,” writes Vice critic Christina Newland. “That truth is rarely, if ever, empowering. But even at their most self-defeating or amoral, these women are allowed to be many paradoxical things. Their characterizations and the depth of writing allows them to be both maternal and fearsome, bafflingly remote yet empathetic.” 

In any event, a whole new crop of viewers has generated Sopranos buzz. According to WarnerMedia, HBO’s parent company, the show’s popularity skyrocketed in 2020 during the pandemic. Noted Sepinwall to GQ at the time: “A lot of people [are] using the quarantine as an opportunity to finally watch or rewatch different shows they’ve had on their list for a while. But this is definitely one of the high ones, just because of its importance in TV and pop cultural history.”

And while millennial and Gen Z audiences may be watching The Sopranos for the first time in 2021, Sepinwall says they’re reacting to the series much as he did as a critic more than two decades ago: “They’re actually saying, ‘This is still one of the greatest—if not the greatest—shows ever made.’” 

Here are selected images from LIFE’s new special issue The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Everything. Available here

LIFE: The Sopranos

AF archive/Alamy

The early episode in which Tony (James Gandolfini) took daughter Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) on a college tour established that The Sopranos was a show about much more than organized crime.

Anthony Neste/© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

The Season Three episode in which Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli, left) and Paulie “Walnuts” Gaultieri (Tony Sirico) were lost in the Pine Barrens is among the series’ most beloved.

Barry Wetcher/© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

Tony’s sessions with Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), such as this one from Season Three, could run the gamut of emotions.

© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

Tony and wife Carmela (Edie Falco) had a joint therapy session in Season Three.

HBO/Hulton/Getty Images

Tony and crew members Bobby Baccalieri (Steven Schirripa) and Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zandt) met with nemesis Phil Leotardo (Frank Vincent) in Season 6.

© HBO/Courtesy Everett Collection

After the death of James Gandolfini in 2013, the actor was memorialized at Holsten’s Ice Cream Parlor in Bloomfield., N.J.

ESBP/Star Max/FilmMagic/Getty Images

Michael Gandolfini, son of James, played young Tony Soprano in the 2021 movie ‘The Many Saints of Newark.’

Jose Perez/Bauer-Griffin/GC Images/Getty Images

David Chase, creator and producer of the “The Sopranos,” posed on the set in New York City.

Diane Bondareff/AP/Shutterstock

The post The Sopranos: The Show That Changed Television appeared first on LIFE.

One photographer in particular, Vernon Merritt III, might attest to the validity of such an assertion about pigs, if only because he once found himself taking pictures of one of the most famous pigs ever to oink its way through a photo shoot and, if nothing else, came away impressed by the creature’s willingness to please.

The story of Merritt’s portrait session with Arnold of Green Acres fame is succinctly told in the book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw (Bulfinch Press, 1998). Returning to the States after he was wounded (“shot through the coccyx,” as he put it) while covering the war in Vietnam as a freelancer, Merritt was hired as a staff photographer at LIFE in 1968. Asked specifically about his 1970 photo shoot with the pig, Merritt jokingly acknowledges in What They Saw that, as an Alabama native, he might have been tapped for the assignment because of his own “special understanding of the porcine nature.”

We rented the pig, and he came with his handler, and the pig would do anything you wanted the pig to do. The handler would click one of those little clickers, and every time he did, he’d give the pig a little something to eat. The pig was overwhelmingly cooperative.

“Overwhelmingly cooperative.” How often does one hear that phrase applied to celebrities, human or otherwise, these days? We’re just sayin’. . . .

A pig that played Arnold on the TV show, “Green Acres,” 1970.

Vernon Merritt III The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Art of Photographing Arnold, the Pig from `Green Acres’ appeared first on LIFE.

Consider the relevance and the cultural reach of the latter. Gomez, Morticia, Uncle Fester, Lurch and the rest have been around, in various incarnations, for eight decades. Created in the 1930s by the legendary cartoonist, Charles Addams, the endearingly macabre family and assorted friends, neighbors and things have appeared in magazines (most notably The New Yorker), books, movies, on Broadway and, of course in a short-lived but fondly remembered 1960s TV series. A later, not-terrible animated series ran for a few seasons as a Saturday morning cartoon in the mid-Seventies.

Here, LIFE.com takes a look back at the auditions for the show; some of the actors and actresses who ended up in the cast; and a number of others (largely unidentified in LIFE’s archives) who didn’t get cast.

In an article titled, “TV’s Year of the Monster,” meanwhile, in the Aug. 21, 1964, issue of LIFE, the magazine referenced The Addams Family as well as Bewitched and The Munsters in its preview of the networks’ fall lineups:

They’ve come alive, the whole creepy, crawly Charles Addams family! And what’s more . . . Mr. Addams’ ghoulish people will be but a small part of the monster population explosion at prime evening time.
Cowboys, surgeons and hillbillies have had their day. Now it’s the Year of the Ghouls, and the new fall season, which will burst upon us next month like a spray of lightning over Frankenstein’s castle, will be strictly from beyond the grave. Only let parents have no qualms it will be played solely for guffaws.

Finally, it’s worth noting that while Charles Addams himself was often depicted as a perverse and perhaps even sinister character straight out of one of his own cartoons, that persona was largely for show. As one of his obituaries pointed out when he died in 1988, at the age of 76, “a colleague at The New Yorker once described Addams as ‘an urbane, relaxed, congenial man of great civility. He doesn’t eat babies.'”

“He doesn’t eat babies.” What higher praise for any man?

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.

The cast of ABC’s “The Addams Family,” 1964.

Don Cravens The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

An unidentified actor auditioned for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin (Gomez) with various actresses who auditioned for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actress auditioning for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Scene during auditions for “The Addams Family” TV show, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

These girls auditioned for the role of Wednesday Friday Addams—including Lisa Loring, at left, who was eventually cast.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A makeup artist with an actor (possibly Jackie Coogan) who auditioned for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A would-be Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin (right) with an actor who auditioned for the role of Lurch.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actors who tried out for the part of Lurch, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ted Cassidy was cast as Lurch—and his hand was also occasionally seen onscreen as Thing.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with Ken Weatherwax (left), who was cast as Pugsley.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Boys who tried out for part of Pugsley—including Ken Weatherwax, at right, who was cast in the role.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actor auditioning for the role of Uncle Fester, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

John Astin with an actress auditioning for the role of Morticia, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Unidentified actresses who tried out for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An actress who tried out for the role of Morticia Addams, 1964.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An actress who tried out for the part of Grandmama Addams. (Blossom Rock eventually won the role.)

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Aug. 21, 1964 issue

LIFE Magazine

Aug. 21, 1964 issue

LIFE Magazine

The post ‘Addams Family’ Hopefuls: Photos From Auditions for a Classic TV Show appeared first on LIFE.

Here LIFE looked back at some Americans, famous and not, who liked to watch.

Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.

Radio Corporation of America (RCA) executives watched a brand new invention called television at their New York offices before introducing the product to the public, 1939.

Carl Mydans The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Russell Finch, a writer, enjoyed the latest invention of the day, a portable television, while taking a bath, 1948.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Men gathered to watch TV through a store window in Pennsylvania in 1948.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A boy watched TV in an appliance store window in 1948.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Sisters at St. Vincent’s Hospital in Erie, Penn., watched a program on a new local TV station, 1949.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Watching a Western, 1950

Alfred Eisenstaedt The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A group of swimmers at an indoor pool watched the Russian ambassador to the United Nations, Jacob Malik, filibustering in the UN Security Council in 1950.

George Skadding The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Grade school kids in Minneapolis watched a video “classroom lesson” on TV while the city’s public schools were on strike in 1951.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A rapt audience in a Chicago bar watched the 1952 World Series between the Dodgers and Yankees. (The Yankees won.)

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Six-year-old girls used a “Winky Dink” drawing kit on their home TV screen as they watch the kids’ program, Winky Dink and You, 1953. The show, which aired for four years in the 1950s, has been cited as “the first interactive TV show,” especially in light of its “magic drawing screen” a piece of plastic that stuck to the TV screen, and on which viewers could trace the action on the screen.

Walter Sanders The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A performing chimpanzee named Zippy watched TV in 1955.

Michael Rougier The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An adopted Korean war orphan, Kang Koo Ri, watched television in his new home in Los Angeles in 1956.

Allan Grant The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Milwaukee fans watched the 1957 World Series, when their Braves beat the Yankees in seven games.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A railroad worker’s family watched TV in a trailer at a camp for Southern Pacific employees in Utah in 1957.

Frank Scherschel The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

An awe-struck baseball watched the Braves win the World Series in Milwaukee in 1957.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A traveling businessman watched TV in a hotel room in 1958.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Tenant farmer Thomas B. Knox and his family watched Ed Sullivan and ventriloquist Rickie Layne on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1958.

Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Picketing workers watched TV in a tent outside the gates of a U.S. Steel plant in Gary, Indiana, during a strike in 1959.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Vice President Richard Nixon and his wife, Pat, watched the 1960 GOP convention in Chicago from their hotel suite.

Hank Walker The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The Kim Sisters—a Korean-born singing trio who had some success in the U.S. in the 1960s —watched television in Chicago in 1960.

Robert W. Kelley The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Eventual VP candidate Lyndon Johnson watched TV during the 1960 Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles.

Thomas D. McAvoy The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A “Three-Eyed TV Monster” created by Ulises Sanabria permitted simultaneous two- and three-screen viewing, 1961.

Francis Miller The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Astronaut Scott Carpenter’s wife, Rene, and son, Marc, watched his 1962 orbital flight on TV. Carpenter’s was NASA’s second manned orbital flight, after John Glenn’s, and lasted nearly five hours.

Ralph Morse The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Die-hard New York Giants fans watched the 1962 NFL championship game against the Packers outside a Connecticut motel, beyond the range of the NYC-area TV blackout, December 1962. Green Bay won, 16-7.

John Loengard The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A crowd watched John F. Kennedy address the nation during the Cuban Missile Crisis, October 1962.

Ralph Crane The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Frank Sinatra watched his son, Frank Jr., 21, emcee a TV show, 1964.

John Dominis The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Different CATV (Community Antenna Television) stations available to subscribers in Elmira, New York, in 1966.

Arthur Schatz The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Actress Diahann Carroll and journalist David Frost watched themselves on separate talk shows. Carroll and Frost were engaged for a while, but never married.

Bill Ray The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Classic Photos of People Watching TV appeared first on LIFE.