The Sopranos 1999

What puzzles me the most is why I rate this show an 8/10, but no season is greater than a 7/10.

I think it's because of its unending depth. You can analyze it literally, metaphorically, philosophically, emotionally, inter-personally, culturally, existentially, and psychologically and you'll never get a right or wrong answer. I love Breaking Bad, but you can't do that with Breaking Bad. Perhaps with The Wire you could, not still not as much as The Sopranos.

98% of the show is about people and their lives and their interaction with themselves, each other, and society. Wikipedia lists the genres as "Crime Drama", "Serial Drama", "Psychological Drama", and "Black Comedy". All of those seem a bit overdone as on the surface is a simple "Drama", but they are missing the actual genre, because at its core it's a "Tragedy".

And it's a Tragedy for every character. Even Carmela screws people over, has zero family patience, ignores Tony's criminal indiscretions, and manipulates her way through life. Meadow, too, talks a big ethical game but the moment her dad gets arrested, she pulls out the race card saying Italian-Americans are unfairly treated (knowing full well that her father is a full-on criminal).

At first glance, Melfi may be the odd one out, but I don't think so. She lives vicariously through Tony. Even after urging from her own therapist and Tony making both overt sexual advances and physically threatening her safety, she is willing to sit with him alone in a room, session after session. And maybe she's helping him on some level. She says she is but the show filled with unreliable narrators so we have to be the judge, and I don't see much change in Tony. He remains a mean brute, willing to take whatever he wants, steamroll anyone in his way, and show minimal remorse. I get the whole Doctor-Patient confidentiality thing, but surely he crossed the line, and she never reported him, ethically, or unethically.

And that's the big reason why the show gets rated "Great" but each season is only "Good". There are no characters working for the betterment of society, or really anyone else except themselves. And even then, that's a stretch, as they treat themselves poorly with extravagant indulgence in everything - rich food, steady booze, illegal drugs, tobacco, purchased sex, physical abuse, and cowardice in trying to change. Tony may go to therapy to solve his panic attacks, but one they're solved, he stays there for validation, which Melfi unintentionally provides.

With the The Wire, people are trying to cut through the corruption, crime, and dysfunction - to only limited success, but they’re trying -whereas in The Soprano's, they not only revel in it, but they create it, and they pay the price through being shot, paralyzed, brain-damaged, stabbed, eye-gouged, curb-stomped, garroted, sodomized, put in coma's, institutionalized, accidentally shot, suicide, run over, betrayed, hit with flails, suffocated, choked, ear mutilations, blunt force trauma, strangled, hit with sap, falling out of trees, bludgeoning, getting thrown out of windows, mock executions, brick to heads, fatal car accidents, head ran over by car, overdosing, asphyxiation, beaten with phones/pool cues/fists/movie awards/bats/geomatic equipment/golf clubs, suffering lung cancer, fatal heart attack from constipation, and getting sprayed in the eyes with roach killer.

I found myself constantly wondering if Tony Soprano or Walter White is more of a sociopath. Walter cooked meth for thousands and thousands of people and messed their life up, but it's guys like Tony who enable it, and keep the dark side of humanity thriving. Tony rises to the occasion, killing who needs to be killed as if they're pawns in a chess match. He uses people for money, sex, support, comfort, friendship, and rarely, if ever, shows reciprocating kindness. Plain and simple, he's a taker, not a giver. And if he does give it's with strings attached, or else he's just a d:asterisk_symbol::asterisk_symbol:k later on as he thinks you owe him.

A word to new viewers, it's slow AF, and remember, it's a Drama, not a Thriller or Mystery. It's hard to argue that this show is not the deepest that has ever aired on TV, and because of it, it'll always be right at the top of the greatest shows of all time. And James Gandolfini's acting - WOW.

The Sopranos was the first massively successful American cable drama that aspired to levels of sophistication (and violence) only seen in movies. It was not the first sophisticated American TV drama and it wasn’t the first drama to bring movie-style violence to television. But it was the first one of these shows to be successful at this – the first runaway hit of these types of shows – and it established HBO’s “It’s not TV…” brand like nothing else before it. So it is unquestionably the most influential dramatic show of its era, but the question remains, is it any good?

The first season’s digital video has dated horribly – making you wonder what decade it was made in – though that improves with the second season. The content dates it somewhat too, given that, only a few years later, HBO would debut a number of other shows with far greater levels of realism and sophistication, making The Sopranos appear to pale by comparison.

But I think that’s unfair to the show. Those later masterpieces wouldn’t have been green-lit without the success of The Sopranos and they benefited from watching the first few seasons of The Sopranos and learning valuable lessons about serialized drama: what works, what doesn’t work – hell, what’s even possible.

At the heart of the show is perhaps the greatest performance in TV history (to date anyway), especially given Gandolfini’s personality in real life. And he is ably supported by Falco, who is pretty near as great. Some of the other, Italian, actors are shockingly weak (early on, anyway) but, on the whole, it’s the great acting that keeps you involved even when the show gets a little hard to believe, as it often does given how frequently they all get away with various criminal activities pretty near all the time. (Though, again, given previous TV standards, the show still manages a great deal of realism relative to the stuff that came before.)

But even though there is that lack of realism at times with the level of violence, there’s a ridiculous amount of realism in the show’s rather incredible sense of place, a sense of place achieved by perhaps no other TV drama prior to its existence – though there have been a few comedies that might have created some kind of illusion of place slightly similar. (And equaled in its sense of place by only a few shows that I have seen.)

And, at times, it’s incredibly funny.

One problem with the show – and a problem with many “new” TV shows, such as Battlestar Galatica – is that it still didn’t move beyond the self-contained episode, where pretty much everything that happens in the episode has no bearing on anything else in the show. The best example of this is the episode when Christopher relapses and tries to kill Tony. Later on, it’s like it never, ever happened. Ever. And that’s absurd and below the otherwise excellent standards of the show.

One thing I have no reservations about is the series’ “dream episodes,” the one when Tony decides Pussy is a rat and particularly “The Test Dream.” I never thought someone would handle dreams on TV better than Twin Peaks but this show does it exceptionally well – Tony’s dreams are like mine, only with mobsters, therapists and Annette Benning. And even when the dreams are a lot less surreal – like when Tony is shot – they are still imbued with a great deal more weight and meaning than most dreams in movies. Really, I think the show set the standard for dreams in contemporary TV and film. It’s just brilliant at these moments.

Another thing they handle rather brilliantly is Christopher’s Hollywood aspirations. They pull in some rather big fish and those fish play up their own selves very well. And it’s something that they do over the course of a number of seasons, seemingly holding it back to use whenever they need a little extra awkwardness and humiliation (for Christopher). It’s a neat change of pace.

And it avoids clichés a lot of the time in how it’s filmed. An example is the death of Phil’s brother, where it seems like Sil is getting wine in the face or something and we have no idea what is going on. That’s just one of numerous examples where they handle something differently than they could have and it just makes the show more interesting.

One final thing: that second last episode was probably unbelievably tense when it aired. Unfortunately, like the entire planet, I already new the ending so it wasn’t as tense for me. But even knowing the ending, it was still a nice change of pace for the show. It really felt like, for a moment, No One Is Safe. And, if I haven’t made this known to you already, I am on the “The ending is fantastic” side of the fence.

On the whole, the show is an incredible achievement. There was nothing like it ever before and it’s still relatively unparalleled in some aspects – as a portrait of an individual family I can only think of Six Feet Under as its equal as as a portrait of the mob I can’t think of its equal, at least in TV.