SCAN MAGAZINE
WHAT EVER HAPPENED TO THE STRONG SILENT TYPE?
FALL 2023
Remembering the Golden Age of TV It’s Sunday evening. You just finished cleaning the house and preparing for the next grueling work week at your desk job. You choose not to cook but instead order a pizza to be delivered. You make sure to order it early because it has to be here before 9 PM, because, well, that’s when “The Sopranos” comes on. It’s 8:57. You grab a slice of pizza, fill up a glass and plop yourself onto the couch. Grab the remote, flip through the channels till you hit HBO. Hear the familiar opening lyrics of “Woke Up This Morning” by Alabama 3. This is what you and the entire nation have been waiting for all week, even if it’s a newer experience. Afterall, TV wasn’t always an event that you’d look forward to like it was a big Hollywood movie. This was new. This is different. This is the Golden Age. The Golden Age of Television or as many critics call it, Prestige Television, can be defined as a period in cable television where multiple critically and commercially successful shows were running concurrently. This period is usually labeled as beginning in the late 90s with The Sopranos, peaking in the mid-2000s with shows like “Mad Men,” “The Wire” and “Breaking Bad” premiering and ending in the late 2000s.
“Mad Men,” “The Sopranos,” “The Wire,” “Breaking Bad.” These are some of the biggest and most influential cable television shows in history. But why this period? What made these shows so special? The characters? The writers and directors behind them? For us to find out we’d have to go back to the beginning. Before the Golden Age of television, TV was mainly dominated by three free-to-air broadcast networks, which they called the Big Three: ABC, CBS and NBC. But during the 1980s and 1990s, many cable television networks were created and began to become
