Before we talk about Band of Brothers, Game of Thrones, and the embiggening of television, there’s a relic from the past I need you to see. Earlier this month, the Twitter/X account “Nostalgia From Your Childhood” posted a video from before the 21st Century. It features one middle class American man ushering in the new […]

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Before we talk about Band of Brothers, Game of Thrones, and the embiggening of television, there’s a relic from the past I need you to see.

Earlier this month, the Twitter/X account “Nostalgia From Your Childhood” posted a video from before the 21st Century. It features one middle class American man ushering in the new millennium by showing his friends a bit of cutting edge entertainment technology that he bought for the reasonable price of $5,000. Give it a look below:

There, in all its standard definition glory, is what an expensive television set looked like on New Year’s Eve 1999. Heavy as boulders and providing about as crisp an image, the TVs of 1999 were far from the paper-thin 4K models that we’ve come to appreciate today. It’s no wonder then that the medium was considered comfortably inferior to its movie counterpart.

By the end of the 20th century, things were actually starting to look up for the small screen entertainment format that started as a way to sell soap. By that time, network procedurals like NYPD Blue and HBO dramas like Oz were delivering a level of storytelling sophistication that home viewers were unaccustomed to. Then, in January 1999 (just 11 months before that guy found his $5,000 TV), The Sopranos premiered and jumpstarted what came to be known as the era of “Prestige TV.”

The Sopranos was a game-changer for t