At six seasons, 86 episodes and around an hour per episode, The Sopranos requires a decent chunk of time to watch. But what if you could do the whole thing in under 36 minutes?
That appears to be what’s offered by the show’s new TikTok account, created last week to mark the 25th anniversary since the very first episode was released in on Jan. 10, 1999.
As a possibly fun, probably controversial twist, the account is keeping the whole thing 25-themed — uploading a 25-second summary for each episode of The Sopranos, with a new one going up every hour or two. At the time of writing we’re a decent way into Season 2.
Here’s the first, highly abridged episode.
Full episodes of The Sopranos can be streamed on Max, and the TikTok account does encourage people to do that up top — but unsurprisingly, alongside the comments from people reminiscing about the show, there are also plenty of people grumbling that a 25-second summary probably isn’t the best way of watching one of most popular and critically acclaimed shows of all time.
It’s a similar move to Paramount’s 23-clip upload of the entire movie Mean Girls, uploaded on Oct. 3 to celebrate “Mean Girls Day” last year. As Mashable’s Elena Cavender noted, “For many, watching a movie in bite-sized videos or out of context on their FYP is sacrilegious, but this way of consuming media is not uncommon on TikTok. Pirated clips thrive on the platform. Accounts post movies and television shows in short sequential videos. They often don’t specify the movie or show in the caption to avoid being taken down due to copyright, relying on the algorithm to reach users. Once someone’s FYP serves them a clip they can either wait for more to appear or hunt down the rest of the program.”
Still, with tens of thousands of views for each Sopranos video, the official account is probably achieving what it set out to — putting The Sopranos in front of a new, younger audience who may not have heard of it before.