I’m watching a great new TV show. But I can’t talk about it

The good news is I’ve just found this amazing new series to binge-watch. The bad news is that I can’t talk to anyone about it because it’s The Sopranos.

I’m not quite sure what made us take the plunge. Maybe we wanted something less bloody after the wall-to-wall coverage of the This Morning saga, which saw Machine Gun Schofield brought down in a hail of unattributable quotes and schadenfreude. But it’s so good. You really should watch it, except, of course, you probably already have.

So my wife and I are therefore devoting hours of our lives to bingeing on something that we cannot discuss with anyone because it turns out that we are the last people on Earth who had not already seen it.

Part of the joy of great TV is talking about it with others, but this time conversational gambits are pretty limited. There are only two responses to, “We’ve just started watching The Sopranos.” The first is, “Again?” and the second is, “You’ve never seen The Sopranos?”. Tiresomely, the second almost always follows the first despite the fact that it was rendered unnecessary by the previous answer. (The same thing happens at Pret A Manger when you reply in the negative to the question, “Taking away?”. The follow-up is invariably, “Eating in?”, which leaves you wondering about the other options that still need to be ruled out. Is there a Schrödinger’s Super Club sandwich that can be simultaneously consumed both on and off the premises?)

The incredulous “You’ve never seen The Sopranos?” reply comes with a fully loaded moral judgment which openly marks you down as a poor cultural sherpa. Bada Bing! Our social cachet is sleeping with the fishes.

So we are denied the simple human pleasure of telling friends that “we’ve just found this amazing new series”, with its delightful subtext “which you won’t know about because you are not as cool as us”. We don’t get points for finding a series made outside the G20, nor can we claim to be watching the original foreign-language version with subtitles for those who don’t speak “Joisey”. We are merely signalling that at a time when there was only one great show on TV, we weren’t watching it.

Perhaps our sense of separation is a foretaste of life when everyone is wearing the virtual and augmented reality headsets being built by Apple and experiencing their entertainment in personalised isolation.

There are people who wear these gaps in their culture as a badge of defiance, a sign of their higher aesthetic. They boast drearily about how they’ve “never watched The Wire” or “thought The West Wing unrealistic” (really, you think?). But that’s hard to carry off when you are known to have enjoyed Ted Lasso. (Only series one, obviously, because, you know, it really went downhill after that.)

I’m not really clear why I didn’t watch The Sopranos. It may be the spawn’s fault. Series one came to the UK in the year the boy was born and during that first-child haze when our only reliable TV experiences were the Teletubbies and 7am Sunday reruns of Match of the Day.

In our new state of exhaustion perhaps it was on too late, or we kept forgetting to programme the video, or maybe the painstaking character development was just a bit too slow to keep me from falling asleep on the sofa. Having missed the first wave, we never got around to catching up. The boy, all innocence, caught us watching it the other day and dropped into the whole “How come you haven’t seen it?” shtick, to which the only possible reply was, “I don’t know, how come it took you 18 months to sleep through the night?”

It could be worse. Instead of being the last person to evangelise The Sopranos, I could have been the first to rave about Glee during the five early episodes, when it apparently wasn’t too bad. Worse, I could still be trying to persuade people that Schitt’s Creek really is worth sticking with because there’s a good joke in series three. I may be late to the party, but at least my taste remains unimpeachable.

Anyway, in a few weeks we will have finished the series, erased our secret shame and moved on to something really cutting edge. I’ve heard good things about Breaking Bad.

Follow Robert on Twitter @robertshrimsley and email him at [email protected]

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