HBOThe New Jersey sellers were surprised at the high bid, but it’s far from the most stunning sale of early-aughts TV memorabilia.
The famous booth from The Sopranos final episode, which aired on 10 June 2007, has recently been sold on eBay. According to the website, the iconic piece of TV memorabilia went for $82,600 (£64,755) after 238 bids.
The sellers of the booth, Chris Carley and Ronald Stark, who own the Bloomfield, New Jersey ice cream shop Holsten’s which was featured in the show, announced that their time as the owners of the iconic booth was over. “The time has come. All good things sometimes need an upgrade. The famous [Sopranos] booth is getting a much needed face-lift,” Carley and Stark wrote on Facebook and Instagram.
“Please understand that we don’t want to do this. But the integrity of the booths [is] now compromised. They have been repaired many times and this furniture is over 60 years old.”
While it wasn’t an easy choice for the owners to make, those who loved being able to stop by and sit in the booth seemed even more emotional. Co-owner Chris Carley tells BBC Culture that all of the shop’s booths have been in the store since 1976, and that getting rid of any of them, let alone “the booth”, would have been tough. On Facebook, Sopranos fans expressed their sadness and confusion over the decision, some even writing that they won’t be patronising the ice cream shop any longer.
Carley says he was “totally surprised at the final price,” and that he “never imagined it to go that high.”
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The high bids, and the emotion behind the sale, might be surprising to some, but Bobby Livingston, executive vice president for RR Auction, which sells memorabilia from television, tells BBC Culture it makes sense. “The Sopranos is one of those iconic television programmes that defines the popular culture of the 2000s. Millions of us lived and died with that family every week for almost 10 years of episodes,” he says.
“When such an important prop comes up for auction, bidder emotions run high”, Livingston adds, “because they’re so connected to what happened in this diner booth, even when it’s unclear what the resolution even was.” What is certainly clear, on the other hand, is that fans are still deeply invested in The Sopranos.
AlamyTV memorabilia that sold for up to hundreds of thousands
The Sopranos is certainly not the only show that has sold off memorabilia to high bidders. Classic TV memorabilia has long drawn high-paying collectors, and in 2023, the bar used in the beloved sitcom Cheers sold at a Dallas auction for $675,000 (£529,773). Other items from classic shows were auctioned off at the event, too, including Batman and Robin’s costumes that were worn by Adam West and Burt Ward in the 1960s series – these went for a staggering $615,000 (£482,683). And Johnny Carson’s set, where he hosted the Tonight Show from 1962 to 1992 sold for $275,000 (£215,866).
But newer shows – those that ran in the 1990s and 2000s, many alongside the Sopranos – have also sold memorabilia to high bidders. Scripts from two 1998 episodes of Friends set in the UK were rescued from a bin and sold for £22,000. Breaking Bad began in 2008 shortly after the Sopranos concluded, and fans of the drug-dealer drama recall the significance of Walter White’s Leaves of Grass book, which led to his lies being uncovered; in 2013, the year of the show’s finale, that invaluable piece of TV memorabilia sold for $65,500 (£51,418) on the auction site ScreenBid. Even Walter White’s underwear – which he’s seen wearing in one memorable scene – managed to secure a bid of $10,000 (£7,850)
Livingston says that, no matter the item, fans, and especially collectors, “want to have items and artefacts that their Hollywood heroes touched. It’s a thrilling, tactile experience for them to own something from a set.”
Angela Andaloro, a culture critic and TV writer for People Magazine who interviews some of Hollywood’s biggest stars, agrees. She says that, while few shows will ever be quite as memorable as The Sopranos, owning an item from a series you adored “can make you feel like you’re part of something special as a fan”.
“That’s especially the case for shows that are no longer on the air, with iconic actors that are no longer living. It’s like a little bit of lightning in a bottle,” she says. “It still holds the spark of the talent that brought it to life.”
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