Welcome to ’99 Rewind, our celebration of 25th anniversaries of the films, TV, and music from 1999. To kick things off, time to get yourself a gun as we look back at The Sopranos.

In 1999, TV was ready to grow up. While compelling series had been produced for the small screen for decades, the medium was largely seen by both the industry and critics as inferior to film. To be sure, unlike movies, TV had the power to engage with audiences on a much more personal level: By bringing memorable characters directly into our homes, where they’d pay weekly visits for years at a time, classic series like Hill Street Blues, Cheers, and ER created deep emotional connections with their audiences.

However, in the age when broadcast TV still reigned supreme, the demands of 22-episode seasons and limited budgets did sometimes mean that the storytelling could struggle on a week-by-week basis, and the production quality wasn’t always equal to what you might see at the local multiplex. You could feel a desire within the world of television to raise the game in the 1990s, whether it was NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street bringing deep nuance to the world of crime procedurals, or The X-Files experimenting with black-and-white episodes and long one-shots.

The Sopranos wasn’t the first HBO drama to push toward greatness, but it became the first one to transform not just how cable television was seen by the general public, but television at large. And it feels exceptionally apt as a portrait of what 1999 represents as a year — the turn of the century coinciding with major cultural moments that brought about true upheaval. That’s exactly what The Sopranos did, unlike any show before it or since.

There’s a quantifiable way of measuring this, and it comes from looking at the Emmy Awards. The Sopranos was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series at the Emmys every year it was eligible, beginning with Season 1. It didn’t receive the trophy during its early run, as it happened to coincide with the heyday of The West Wing, which won the top prize for four consecutive years. But after creator Aaron Sorkin left the NBC political drama, it lost enough shine for The Sopranos to make history with Season 5 as the first cable series to win in this category.

That first win represents a major tipping point for television as a whole: Since The Sopranos’ victory in 2004, only two more broadcast dramas to date have won the Outstanding Drama Emmy: Lost in 2005 (a year where The Sopranos was not eligible) and 24 in 2006 (when only the first half of The Sopranos Season 6 was considered).

Since the final season of Sopranos won in 2007, no broadcast drama has won in this category, and broadcast dramas in general now struggle to be nominated. (NBC’s This Is Us Season 5 managed to sneak in in 2021, a rare exception.) At a certain point post-Sopranos, all TV networks wanted to be HBO, which is to say they wanted to not be TV on some level. It’s not hard to figure out why: Only recently has TV been praised for its virtues above the world of film. Prior to that point, the industry’s inferiority complex was massive — though even the most snooty cinephile, back in the day, would deign to admit that they liked The Sopranos.