‘Sopranos’ Is Big, but Not Really That Big

What’s that? You haven’t been swept up in the feverish hoopla surrounding “The Sopranos,” the rapturously reviewed Home Box Office series?

Rest assured, you are not alone, though it may seem that way based on the media tidal wave greeting the start of the program’s second season--which, based on sheer volume, could easily be confused with the Second Coming.

For those who glean show business news from the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time, TV Guide, Entertainment Weekly or a host of other publications, “The Sopranos” has been difficult to escape--splashed across magazine covers and chronicled in exhaustive detail.

“Saturday Night Live” drove home this point by spoofing the critical response, quoting mock reviews raving “ ‘The Sopranos’ will one day replace oxygen as the thing we breathe in order to stay alive” and “I’m afraid to look away from the screen while it’s on for fear that it will disappear, and I’ll be forced to kill myself.”

In truth, the parody wasn’t far from reality. HBO even enlisted critics--including the New York Times’ Stephen Holden--to deliver on-camera testimonials about the program, which Holden described, in print as well as a promotional spot, as “the greatest work of American popular culture in the last 25 years.”

Holden didn’t return phone calls seeking comment as to the cheerleading role he seemed to play by appearing in that promotional piece. New York Times spokeswoman Nancy Nielsen said the paper is “aware of what Mr. Holden has done, and it is counter to our policy.”

This euphoric media response might be seen as a bit of an overreaction for a program whose audience Sunday--about 7.6 million viewers--mirrored averages this season for NBC’s “Veronica’s Closet” and Fox’s “World’s Wildest Police Videos.” While the rating was spectacular by HBO’s standards, more than twice as many people watched Fox’s “The X-Files” at 9 p.m. Sunday, and ABC’s quiz show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” surpassed “Sopranos” by a margin of 21 million viewers.

Yet by almost any measure, “The Sopranos”--a dark, sometimes comic, sometimes violent portrayal of a Mafia boss grappling with demands made upon him by his two “families”--has been an enormous success.

HBO’s rating exceeded anything shown on the pay channel since “Titanic,” and the show topped all competition--including “Millionaire”--in those homes that subscribe to HBO. The network anticipates a few million more viewers will catch repeats of the series, with each episode running four times a week.

Still, the overall performance only underscores that a majority of the public, at this point, hasn’t chosen to ante up for HBO in order to join the “Sopranos” parade. Though its circulation has grown, HBO can’t possibly reach the sweeping audience of a “Friends” or “ER,” handicapped in overall comparisons because only about a quarter of the U.S.’ 100 million homes currently subscribe to the channel.

In the case of “Sopranos,” then, its place in the spotlight has as much to do with who’s watching as how many. The TV press and those who work in the entertainment industry simply adore the show, heightening the sense within those circles that the series is an explosive cultural phenomenon.

Admittedly, even more widely seen hits aren’t what they used to be, playing to far less of the population percentage-wise than a few years ago. Thanks to new channels splintering the audience, just six current prime-time series regularly command 20% of TV sets in use when they are shown, whereas 35 programs reached that plateau in 1993.

With the bar lowered in terms of ratings expectations, programs don’t need to achieve true mass-market appeal to create a media frenzy, as demonstrated by the buzz “South Park” generated for little-seen Comedy Central.

Pay channels, in particular, don’t have to amass vast audiences the same way broadcast networks do. HBO fare--from Barbra Streisand concerts to boxing to “Sex and the City,” a sensation with women--can cater to smaller niches and engender loyalty within a specific group.

In fact, people don’t necessarily need to watch in great numbers. “The Larry Sanders Show,” for example, was never a major ratings draw, but the comedy’s regular Emmy nominations and popularity among critics and within Hollywood made it a valuable asset.

“The Sopranos” no doubt offers greater benefits in that regard, though HBO can’t firmly quantify how many people subscribe to the service because of any one program.

“You can’t even figure out which subscribers added [HBO] for some subset of programming on the network,” said Chairman Jeff Bewkes, who nevertheless concludes “Sopranos” has made a major contribution to people’s decision to buy--and keep--the pay channel.

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HBO reasons that such sweeping publicity (as well as industry awards, a major component of the channel’s marketing strategy) fuels a perception that discriminating viewers should subscribe. While there is ample anecdotal evidence of this, the only hard data HBO can cite is that fewer people have canceled the service since “Sopranos” went on the air.

Despite its vaunted publicity machinery, HBO executives are reluctant to take too much credit for “The Sopranos” public-relations deluge. The coverage, they say, grows rather out of genuine enthusiasm TV critics and reporters harbor for the series.

“This isn’t because of the marketing,” Bewkes said. “This is because of the show.”

Indeed, some critics appear to have a hard time grasping that “Sopranos” mania might not have infected everyone. During a press conference with the program’s cast in Pasadena Wednesday, many questions began with an assumption the stars were suddenly being overwhelmed whenever they set foot in public, which they generally insisted isn’t the case.

Series creator David Chase, however, did notice one significant change in his schedule leading up to this season’s debut.

“Just the time spent on the phone talking to journalists,” he said, “completely changed the shape of the day.”