It might seem inconcievable, but there was once a time when key plot details for television shows and popular movies did not surface online immediately after (and sometimes before) their release dates. That was at a time when the internet (and, more specifically, social media) were less ubiquitous than they are now — but that doesn’t mean that there wasn’t demand for spoilers, sometimes before an episode saw the light of day.
In a recent interview with Annabel Nugent for The Independent, actor Steve Schirripa recalled the secrecy that surrounded episode of The Sopranos by the time the series had reached its fifth season. That included filming multiple versions of one crucial scene, as well as issuing versions of epsiode scripts to cast members that included their scenes and nothing else.
“There was a leak on set because somebody was selling information,” Schirripa told The Independent. “We had some suspects…”
The entire interview — with Schirripa and his fellow Sopranos alumnus and Talking Sopranos co-host Michael Imperioli — is well worth reading, both for their memories of the on-set environment and their discussion of where some of those characters might find themselves in 2026. But the amount of secrecy that surrounded those later-season episodes also anticipates some of the ways that television creators have sought to minimize potential spoilers in the years since then.
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The groundbreaking series premiered on cable on January 10, 1999That has often taken the form of asking writing to refrain from mentioning plot details in their advance reviews of a given show. In his review of the second season of Paradise for the AV Club, Brian Tallarico writes that streaming service Hulu “asked critics not to even reveal what the show was about in pre-air reviews” around its debut season. Similarly, Alan Sepinwall described a similar approach taken around Pluribus: “This quest for secrecy extended to things revealed in the opening shot of the premiere.”
The Sopranos was not the first show to exercise caution about letting plot details slip out before an episode had aired. But, as with many things involving prestige television, it helped establish something of a template — though perhaps the more appropriate word here is “omerta.”
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