In 2004, watching the good stuff wasn’t so easy

Waiting for the man. The guy with the thing. What Friday and Saturday, and, for that matter, Thursday nights of college had become about: where the party was, where the afterparty was, and, in this case, who was holding. It was nothing more nefarious or contraband than a videotape, actually, but one that, in May 2004, assumed the allure of something forbidden, like whatever Nicolas Cage was going on about in 8mm.

Back then, none of us had cable. But a buddy had a connect: His parents had HBO, an almost inconceivable virtue possession of the bourgeois, one necessitating a call to the cable company or possibly one of those plates screwed onto the roof, pointing at the stars. The penultimate episode of what we didn’t know then was the penultimate season of The Sopranos, which premiered just last Sunday, had been recorded and was being pirated across state lines for us to watch as we sat in a smoky room and drank and waited in anticipation.    

It sounds a bit unbelievable in retrospect, but this was the type of blackmarket suavity required, the lengths some of us had to go to watch the good stuff in the early aughts. Before we could have everything everywhere all at once thanks to streaming, before coeds could use their parents’ passwords and get whatever they wanted, be it a just-dropped episode of Industry or a masterful Columbo from more than 50 years ago, cued up just like that, you had to get creative. A friend of a friend maybe hosted a Sunday-night watch party that you could finagle your way into, but, to quote the moody man in the white bathrobe, “Fuck that.”

Today, we wonder why The Bear releases a full season at once, why we must be deprived of all of that week-to-week anticipation building as if it’s irksome, as if we can’t control ourselves and spread out our viewing. Ah, to have been so lucky. And even if you were able to nab a bootleg back then, your TV/VHS/DVD setup and its mishmash of cords could leave you feeling like Tony, after A.J. and his friends messed up the connection, struggling with the input, going to the fallback dad move of pulling out the remote batteries and putting them back in.

But all of that sweat could be worth it, as it was that night. “Long Term Parking” carves a distinct impression because it’s a Sopranos episode unlike any other. A show reliant on tangents, on slow burn, on broken arcs, on almost actively dissatisfying climaxes went, somehow, almost traditional. It brought suspense. The result was the most frantic, harrowing, and crushing the show ever got. Stoic and tortured, like Phil on Mulberry Street, like Tony on an autumnal patio with a cigar and cousin memories, anxious with what Christopher refers to as Adriana’s sense of “impending doom,” viewers were left trying to read the basil leaves on Silvio’s face (was that gas? He could just have gas, right?) and desperately parsing Tony’s words to Christopher’s fiancée: “See ya up there.”   

There’s a moment when watching this episode, before you know, or at least when you know but hope you don’t know (this was well before Twitter and all of its in-the-moment TV spoiling), when “Leaving California” hits, and there is a sweet flitting note of hope about Adriana driving away—suitcase on seat, drumming the steering wheel, Jersey finally in the rearview of her baby-blue Thunderbird. It’s a fuck it on her own terms, a breaking out and away. And it’s inspirational, almost, watching her knock down her ever-closing walls like the cheap wood of Carmela’s spec house.

But it’s fleeting, because of course it is. Sil pulls off the highway and into the woods and says that unprintable word, and, in the coldest moment in the show’s entire run, Adrianna and all of her warmth is gone. The credits, minutes later, leave you in a heartbroken haze, dazed, pregnant with appreciation and also sick in the stomach, listening to Shawn Smith’s mopey elegy, “Wrapped In My Memory,” and probably wearing the sort of “moon face” that Ade’s doctor warned was a side effect of her colitis medication. There was also, like any great Sopranos episode, doses of humor (Christopher’s off-the-cuff Springsteen quote), as well as a very smartly structured epiphany (Chrissy seeing that mook dad, with the beater ride, the brat kids, the cheap snacks—the flummoxes of everyday normalness). And even on a shitty TV, even with all that cigarette smoke in the air, even with all of that heavy lifting to see this, we knew we had just witnessed something earned, something great.

The fifth season of The Sopranos was released on DVD one year and one day after its finale. How did anyone follow such sinewy, mounting storylines, maintain vested interest in the narrative ambles over such a long span? Feech La Manna isn’t the kind of uncle you can just see once a year at Thanksgiving. Missing a single episode, a non-subscriber would have needed to get lucky and caught a rerun in a hotel, at a friend’s house, all the time trying to not let it be spoiled at a bar after mentioning they like the show. 

And in 2004, while DVD box sets for TV shows were certainly a thing (Shout! Factory’s beautifully packaged “yearbook edition” of Freaks And Geeks came out then, four years after that show’s series finale aired), binging—or at least binging on a budget, the way we think of it now—wasn’t. Netflix had fewer than two-and-a-half million subscribers to its DVD-by-mail service in 2004, a base that would balloon to more than six million in 2006, when, at least anecdotally, it felt like everyone was binging their way through Lost, The Wire, Battlestar Galactica, and the like, one shiny disc at a time. (In 2007, the company would kick off the streaming revolution that would eventually upend the TV and film industries. Today, Netflix has nearly 280 million subscribers, or around 85-percent of the population of the U.S.) 

Now, of course, like anybody else I dial up HBO Go, or Now, or Max, something, an app, whatever it is; I don’t even need to remember the name, because, like going anywhere, my phone knows the way. It is simply present, ready, in my pocket. If Sopranos takes one minute to load on a plane, or buffers interminably in a cabin in the remote woods of Wisconsin, it is taken as an affront to personage, free will, a denial of what I, what we all, deserve. In a comparatively clean and leafy life of stainless steel and endless streaming, everything works on demand—after the kids watch Snoopy or Milo and are in bed, or on drives, when I can drum my own steering wheel and look in the rearview, asking Spotify to play “Wrapped In My Memory.” And transported, indeed, I am.