By Jonathan Klotz
| Published
The Sopranos ushered in the Golden Age of Television and helped turn HBO into a prestige television powerhouse, but no one would have guessed that one of the show’s second-string stars would go on to make history. Steven Van Zandt, the legendary New Jersey musician who rose to fame playing for Bruce Springsteen, made his acting debut as Silvio Dante, manager of the Bada Bing and one of Tony’s most loyal Captains. Years after the ground-breaking series went off the air, Van Zandt took on the role of Frank Tagliano in Lilyhammer, the first streaming series available on Netflix.
Big Fish In A Small Pond
House of Cards debuted in 2013 as the very first Netflix Original Series, but in 2012, Lilyhammer made its debut as a joint production with Norway’s NRK1. The series features Van Zandt’s Tagliano, turned into a rat for personal reasons and forced into the witness protection agency, living in Lillehammer, the one place he assumes the New York mob will never look for him. It doesn’t take long for Tagliano, now going by the name Giovanni Henriksen, nicknamed “Johnny,” to befriend a young woman and her son, solve the local wolf problem, and start establishing himself as the new boss.
Echoing Silvio’s role on The Sopranos, Johnny starts up a nightclub as his base of operations, The Flamingo, and quickly shows why he was called “The Fixer” back in New York by turning the local motorcycle crew from rivals into allies. Johnny’s unique talents made him a very large fish in a small Norwegian pond, but he was still a fish out of water, and in Scandinavia, crime is handled very differently than in New York. By the end of Lilyhammer Season 1, he’s embraced his new life, and it was clear that the series mix of crime drama and black comedy was a hit for Netflix, with fans eagerly awaiting Season 2.
The New Age Of Entertainment
Lilyhammer was an unexpected hit on Netflix, not because of Steven Van Zandt or the quality of the series itself, but because it was pioneering streaming, which, until then, was treated like syndication back in the day and home to reruns of procedurals and sitcoms. Back then, the series faced an uphill battle for acceptance and was regarded as being inherently worse than a “normal” show because it was only available on streaming. Today that sounds like an insane take to have, with a large chunk of the best shows from the last decade existing only as digital media.
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It’s a tribute to the talented, creative mind of Van Zandt, who not only starred in the series but co-created it, worked on scripts, and even directed some of the episodes that he could go from Hall of Fame rock guitarist to an actor bringing his vision to life on what would soon become the largest stage in history. More people today use streaming than cable or even broadcast television, and Lilyhammer is not only the missing link between mediums but one of the most important shows in the history of Netflix. For anyone who watches The Sopranos on an annual basis, it’s worth checking out the absurdist comedy of Van Zandt’s criminally underrated series.
Lilyhammer is still available to stream only on Netflix.
