There was nothing on television like “The Sopranos” in 1954.

In fact, there was nothing in the movies like “The Sopranos.”

In further fact, if you were to go back in time with a recording of “The Sopranos” (and some 1954-compatible way of playing it), there’s a chance you’d be arrested in much of the United States.

It was risque to even imply sex and violence, and communities had laws about what constituted obscenity. On TV, married couples had separate beds. There was never any blood coming from a gunshot wound in a Western or crime film. 

And the most scandalous utterance in film, even into the early 1960s, was Rhett Butler’s final statement in “Gone With the Wind”: “Frankly. my dear, I don’t give a damn.”

Contrast that with “The Sopranos.” 

Tony Soprano, a New Jersey mob boss, has his office in a strip club called the Bada Bing. He gets his way through beating and killing people. His vocabulary is chockablock with scatological and carnal synonyms. 

Between Clark Gable and James Gandolfini was the Hays Code. It was Hollywood’s self-censorship effort to avoid government getting involved. Up until the late 1960s, it was a strict guide to how a movie and, later, TV show maker could portray elements of real life that make some people uncomfortable.

And there were people who were uncomfortable even with what was being put out. In 1964, because movies were pretty safe places to let kids go by themselves, my parents had no problem allowing me to see “Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It’s a classic (and about the only Kubrick film I actually enjoy, but that’s not important here).

When I told some of the kids in my neighborhood about it, they were scandalized. The local Catholic newspaper had condemned the movie – most likely because George C. Scott’s character starts the movie in bed with a woman who answers his phone.

Efforts to crack the Hays Code finally succeeded in the late 1960s. 

Three years after seeing “Dr. Strangelove,” my 8-year-old brother and I went to the Town Theatre in Glen Cove to see what we thought – because of the advertising – was a comedy. 

When we came out of seeing “Bonnie and Clyde,” both my brother and I were afraid to tell our parents what we had seen, which had culminated with the piercing of the title characters’ bodies with what seemed like hundreds of bullets. (NOTE: Maybe there should have been a spoiler alert there, but that also is something people in 1954 wouldn’t know about.)

My family apparently wasn’t the only one that felt a little misled. And yet, films with more explicit violence and sex were extremely popular amid the turmoil of the era.

So the motion picture industry developed a rating system to replace the Hays Code. It ranged from G, movies that had nothing anyone could reasonably object to, to X, movies with very graphic sex and violence that theaters would not allow under age 17 to see. The X rating, now synonymous with pornography and bloody films, evolved to NC-17.

In 1954, movies were an important component of local television. They filled afternoon slots, weekend slots, late slots.

But because TV is so easily accessible to families, many of the movies that broke through the various taboos were doomed to be either not airable or edited to distraction. 

That’s where cable television came in. Certain premium channels – HBO, Showtime and Starz among them – showed the movies uncut. Then they started developing shows of their own, such as “The Sopranos,” many of them just as compelling as any movie. 

My parents, after a little hesitance because of its depiction of Italian-Americans, came to embrace “The Sopranos.” Although my Dad was always dismissive of anything with “bad language,” both my parents always looked forward to good entertainment. 

That’s the bottom – whether you see it or not – line.