"An engaging and lucid account of the influential cultural status that HBO's "The Sopranos" achieved by allowing diverse artistic and commercial interests to profitably converge in the postnetwork era. The book is distinctive in detailing not just how fans and critics animated the series, but also how HBO and the producers carefully crafted an epic narrative that would lead to a profitable ancillary afterlife. Dana Polan proves that close, careful narrative analysis can provide prescient insights about television's increasingly sophisticated practices to which broader cultural and industrial accounts are blind."--John Thornton Caldwell, author of "Production Culture: Industrial Reflexivity and Critical Practice in Film and Television"