HBO gives Ben Schwartz, a bunch of other famous folks their very own Sopranos nicknames
Today marks 20 years since the first airing of “The Sopranos,” a prestige cable premiere that also marked the start of a whole new era in dramatic, novelistic TV. To celebrate David Chase’s opus—and also a million or so eventual arguments about ducks, villain protagonists, and whether you should ever stop believin’—the HBO Twitter account decided to get a little bit silly this morning, handing out “Sopranos nicknames” to a bunch of famous people, friends of the network, and also, weirdly, TV shows and other online brands.
The end result—as any attempt by a brand to act like an actual human being inevitably must be—was pretty hit or miss, in so far as we did not really need to see Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey get any nickname other than “Ol’ Ban The Nazis, Jack”. Still, there were some highlights, most notably an acknowledgement of a major pop culture contribution from A.V. Club favorite Ben Schwartz:
Sure, we might have gone with “Leo Blueturtle,” “Solo Bolo,” or the ever-popular “Fast Blue Rat,” but still: Pretty good! (Lin-Manuel Miranda, who riffed on his brief appearance in the original series with his own request, seemed to agree.) They also managed to work in some Bob’s Burgers and Good Places references, which we dig, even if the red-headed social media menace known as Wendy’s then had to come by to let us know that this particular fun game was now officially as dead as [insert your favorite dead Sopranos character here]: