When critics reflect on the cultural turning points that led to prestige TV, two shows come to mind: The Sopranos and Yellowstone. David

Chase’s mob classic in 1999 set in motion what viewers call the prestige TV era. This period cultivated big-picture storytelling that pushed

the limits of the medium and the screen, bridging the gap between film and television. Nineteen years later, Taylor Sheridan’s Yellowstone

 

 

materialized, a grand neo-Western epic that insidiously took its place as the new form of prestige TV. With its sweeping cinematography across Montana, morally conflicted patriarch, and operatic family soap, Yellowstone proves that the Western, far from being a mid-20th-century anachronism, could be reformed into prestige television’s newest secret weapon.

 

 

Yellowstone adapts the Western for a new era, planting its cowboy values in the most recent debates over land, inheritance, and authority. John Dutton (Kevin Costner) brings cowboys to the 21st century. He is torn between tradition and encroaching modernity, just as Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) brings mobsters to suburban New Jersey kitchens. Yellowstone taps into the very DNA of prestige TV: antiheroes, moral ambiguity, and the mix of spectacle and intimacy. While The Sopranos rewrote the rulebook in 1999, Yellowstone rewrote it anew in 2018, once and for all proving that the Western was not dead, but alive. The Western is not a mere visual setting but a metaphorical landscape, on which questions of identity, progress, and survival are played out in both epic and astonishingly intimate ways. In this sense, Yellowstone is more a continuation than an anomaly of what The Sopranos started.

When The Sopranos first aired on HBO, it revolutionized television as an art form. It ended the era of formulaic procedural dramas in which characters rewound to the way things were at the end of each episode. Instead, audiences began watching serialized storytelling that demands investment, morally ambiguous heroes, and production quality on par with Hollywood franchises. Tony Soprano is television’s inaugural prestige TV antihero, paving the way for an era that would give viewers The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones. The show’s success proved that audiences are hungry for morally nuanced storytelling that challenges their sympathies and pushes TV to do better.

The brilliance of The Sopranos is in its blending of the mundane and the mythic. Tony is not just a mob boss; he is a husband, a father, and a man who has panic attacks and depression. By seating a mafia don on the couch, the show forces people to empathize with a monstrous and excruciatingly human figure. This paradox is a mark of prestige TV. Every flagship series that followed took the route of making its lead character both villain and victim, lovable and abhorrent.

The key to the success of prestige TV is its ability to reinterpret established genres and transform them into theme-based explorations of morality, identity, and power. The Sopranos is not just about mobsters. The show revolves around family, therapy, the tension between tradition and modernity, and the fear of clinging to power in an unstable world. The gangster genre was the vessel, but the show escaped it. Where The Sopranos makes suburban gangsters human, Yellowstone makes contemporary cowboys multidimensional.