This past Saturday was the tenth anniversary of one of the key dates in recent television history: the debut of The Sopranos on HBO. Early publicity for the show focused on the gimmick of a mob boss going to therapy, so much so that I originally tuned in expecting it to be a black comedy at best, a farce along the lines of the film Analyze This at worst.

But by the time the series ran its course in 2007, it had become recognized as something much more: one of the most honored shows in the history of the medium, the highest-rated cable series of all time at its peak, and something that proved viewers would come to crave something with the type of depth and complexity one associates with the best fiction. The television landscape looks a good deal different today than it did before The Sopranos entered the picture.

For starters, the series changed the reputation of HBO for good, making it a byword for quality on television in the same way PBS once was. It's easy to forget that for the first 20 years of its existence, HBO had almost a populist image, curious since subscribing to pay cable in the 1970s and '80s implied that you had a little money. Outside of a few outliers like The Larry Sanders Show, original programming on HBO had been synonymous with lowbrow comedies like 1st & 10, Def Comedy Jam, and an endless variety of sex documentaries. The best-known drama on HBO was the don't-drop-the-soap opera Oz. Sex and the City had debuted a few months earlier, but had yet to acquire much critical buzz.

But following The Sopranos, HBO became known as the channel of choice for quality drama, not just on cable, but on television period. The critical favorites came fast and furious in the ensuing five years: Curb Your Enthusiasm, Six Feet Under, The Wire, Deadwood, and the miniseries Band of Brothers. HBO's cachet has slipped a bit since then, but The Sopranos turned out to signal the beginning of the end for prestige dramas on the traditional broadcast networks. HBO and the rest of cable has dominated the TV-movie categories at the Emmys for going on 20 years, and slowly but surely, the same thing seems to be happening now with hour-long dramas. In 1999, the Emmy nominations for best drama included The Sopranos, two NBC shows (Law & Order and ER)and two ABC shows (The Practice and NYPD Blue). Last season, three of the six best drama nominees came from cable. Lost is the one network drama that still gets anything like the same critical praise as the best cable series, and it will have ended for good 18 months from now.

The Sopranos was not the first series to air fewer episodes in a season than is the norm on broadcast networks, but it did prove that a long off-season does not necessarily prevent a show from developing a fanatic cult. There turned out to be a limit to the patience of viewers: ratings for The Sopranos fell as the gaps between seasons became more irregular. But the cable model -- ten to thirteen new episodes at a time that can premiere at any time of year, even in the summer -- is one that seems to be on the verge of catching on with the broadcast networks. Cable-style scheduling has done wonders for Lost, which now airs without in-season reruns interrupting the current season.

Finally and most significantly, The Sopranos expanded the possibilities of what could be done with television. Tony Soprano was the sort of character that previously could only have been seen in a dense novel. Someone like him never could been imagined on a traditional commercial show, where the idea of an antihero was someone like George Clooney's character on ER. Characters like that could grow and change, but they were still at the mercy of the need to resolve plots every week. Movies provided a greater artistic freedom, but depth is again an issue: there's only so much you can come to know about even the greatest film characters in a mere two hours.

Over the course of its 86 episodes, The Sopranos sketched the entire universe of the northern New Jersey mob, interweaving dozens of key and minor characters as Dickens once did, while also delineating the compromises and betrayals of an extremely complicated marriage. Most startlingly of all, the program asked us to identify with, if not excuse, a lead character who killed people. The fifth episode of the series, in which Tony murdered a mob turncoat he bumped into while investigating potential colleges with his daughter, proved definitively that The Sopranos would not shy away from the reality of what its characters' lives were like. Several scenes from the show would rank among the most graphic and viscerally disturbing in TV history.

One sees talk these days that the golden era spawned by The Sopranos has now passed, but I suspect that has more to do with the struggles of HBO than with anything about the current environment that makes good television less likely to be produced. In fact, the influence of the show is still working its way through creative circles: Mad Men, created by Sopranos alum Matthew Weiner, does not have graphic language and violence, but Don Draper could not have existed without Tony Soprano. And ten years from now -- whatever form television is taking by then -- that influence is still likely to be enormous.

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