Nothing is new
In a book I just read, Television Rewired: The Rise of the Auteur Series (2019), Martha P. Nochimson makes the following claim:
“Until The Sopranos, television had never had any kind of narrative told from the gangster’s point of view.” (p. 64)
There is enough going on in this quote that I felt it could serve as the basis for an article.
The first thing to note is the conflation of American television with all of television. Is the claim meant for the entirety of television history or just American? This is a recurring issue among those discussing television, to make claims specifically about American television but phrasing it as if it was about television as a whole, in a way that is not done when it comes to film history.
The second thing to note about the claim is that it is not true, not even about American television. Before The Sopranos, there were for example The Story of Pretty Boy Floyd, which aired on ABC on May 7, 1974, The Gangster Chronicles on NBC in 1981, and The Last Don, written by Mario Puzo no less, on CBS in 1997, the name three examples, one TV-film and two series, from American television of narratives told from the gangster’s point of view and made before The Sopranos.
The third thing to note is that even if it had been true, how would you know? Nobody has seen and documented all narratives that have been made for television so you can almost never say when something was done for the first time because most of television has been forgotten and is not accessible any longer.
And what is the relevance? By having established that The Sopranos was not the first, have I then diminished its quality and importance? Has the acting and the writing been lessened by this correction? Presumably not. It is irrelevant whether it was the first, especially since it was not. But it must be important for Nochimson as she makes this point more than once and it is an important part of her argument, even though it is not true.
But as this is not an article about the history of television, or a book review, I will not mention the book any more. I will just add that for some reason, writings about The Sopranos are particularly prone to contain bold claims about it being the first of this and that. It has been said to be the first series with a title sequence, the first with an ongoing story arc, the first with a morally dubious main character, and other similar claims, all inaccurate. The Sopranos brings out the most amnesiac of writers.
But film and television scholars and critics often take a paradigm-shifts approach to film history, the "everything was like this, then X happened and after that everything was different"-approach, with X being a certain film or series, or a movement or wave, or a certain filmmaker. This is hardly ever true, in the sense that whatever is claimed to be new and different was not that new, or new at all. Film history, as the history of any art form is an evolving, more organic, development, and that thing you think is new was part of something larger, already happening, rather than something sudden that can be attributed to one specific starting point in time, like a film. No film is “the first film of the French New Wave."
Following the lead of scholars and critics, students inevitably take this approach too and write their essays about how this or that was the first, even if I tell them early in the course that they should not. It also includes them musing about more or less any film I have shown them that “it must have been ahead of its time.” It happens of course that a film is ahead of its time, but it is rare and they are not necessarily the ones that are remembered today. One of the most famous films of 1941 is The Maltese Falcon, said to be “the first film noir,” but I think the almost forgotten I Wake Up Screaming, from the same year, is more interesting both as a film in general and as a film noir, and, unlike The Maltese Falcon, ahead of its time.
Things also tend to happen simultaneously around the world. It is for example often said that the wave of docu-dramas or semi-documentaries that emerged from Hollywood after World War 2 was due to the influence of Italian neorealism. But The House on 92nd Street (1945), claimed to be the first, opened in New York two weeks before Rome, Open City (1945) opened in Rome. You cannot be influenced by something that has not happened yet. (Whether these two films were the firsts is another discussion but it is enough for now to acknowledge that they are seen as being the firsts.)
There have been some paradigm shifts, but not because of a single film/series, movement, or filmmaker. I would suggest at least three: the switch to feature-length films in the early/mid-1910s, the switch to sound in the late 1920s, and the switch to digital about two decades ago. These are also debatable, as sound had been around before and the majority of films continued to be short films, such as industry films, documentaries, education films, cartoons, music videos and so on. (Thanks to Corey Creekmur for feedback on this.) But the feature-length films, something longer than, say, 70 minutes, became the central point of reference for cinemas and for cinema discussions in the second half of the 1910s, and films with sounds were considerably more rare before 1928 whereas after 1928 films without sounds were considerably more rare.
You may disagree about these switches, and they are interesting to discuss. But what is not interesting are claims about any given film or series being the first of anything, unless it is a specific technical thing, like a new lens. If it is something to do with style, theme, or storytelling it was probably not new, and it does not matter whether it was or not.