The Sopranos

Vince Gilligan has said Breaking Bad would not have been made without The Sopranos, which proved that a television drama could keep a criminal, and an increasingly monstrous one, at its centre for years.

Lee Sung Jin has called The Sopranos his North Star: a story of ordinary people driven by rage and resentment, darkly funny, that refuses to make its leads either heroes or villains.

The Sopranos is built in conversation with The Godfather, and says so: its mobsters quote it endlessly and measure themselves against it, and David Chase has described the show as being about men living in the shadow of that film's myth.

David Chase has called Goodfellas his Koran. The show's ordinary, domestic, unglamorous gangsters come from Scorsese's film, and it cast more than two dozen of its actors, among them Lorraine Bracco, Michael Imperioli and Tony Sirico.

David Chase based Tony's mother Livia on his own mother and their difficult relationship.