'The Sopranos' and me

Today was a bad day at work because some of my colleagues got laid off. They are awesome. If you work in journalism, please let me know if you have any openings at your publication.

After a few months of canceling plans so I could watch another episode, I finished The Sopranos. The title of Best TV Show Everrr gets thrown around, and Sopranos is often mentioned. Whether you think Breaking Bad or The Wire is actually better, I don’t care because this is now my favorite show of all time.

I don’t see how anyone could dislike this show. It appeals to everyone, from the stupid soy boys who cream over the mafia lifestyle and misinterpret everything to true TV analysts constantly searching for meaning. You can enjoy it on a surface Woo! Evil people are getting shot! zone or a deeper Wow, toxic masculinity really is inescapable level.

I remember trying to watch an episode while I was in college and forgetting to finish it, but it took a Sopranos-themed birthday party last year to get me into the show. I dressed as Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, because I owned a blazer. I remember sitting on the couch as the show played on the TV and ignoring my friends to just dive into the Sopranos universe.

I already want to rewatch it to find all of the easter eggs. Two of the actors, Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, have a rewatch podcast that I want to listen to. I’ve also obviously sunk myself into the Sopranos subreddit, plus my Twitter and Facebook algorithms figured out I’m a fan. People can really quote the show. Replies to threads are just commenters sharing quotes back and forth. I remember watching a documentary as a kid on these kids that would compete in Quran memorization contests and am imagining something similar for Sopranos episodes. If anyone knows a Sopranos trivia night in New York, let me know so I can live a version of that.

I’m going to talk about different parts of the show. There are spoilers throughout, but I mark where you’ll see any revealings of major plot points. I hope my analysis sparks interest in the show for those who haven’t seen it and commentary from those who have.

The Sopranos is all about personal relationships and character development. We watch the majority of characters grow and change throughout the show’s six seasons, and I think the best growth comes from Bobby Baccalieri, who we first see as Uncle Jun’s b*tchboy that gets dunked on for being fat (which is funny because we see him playing basketball and losing weight at the end of the show). Bobby is one of very few men that actually love their wives, and seeing Janice manipulate him was icky. I liked seeing him grow more confident as the show continued, but his death on the train sets was super sad.

I loved the arcs for Paulie and Silvio, although I wish we had more Sil time in the later seasons like we got with Paulie. At first, the two seemed pretty interchangeable to me. Paulie serves as great comic relief, and I love watching how angry he gets at the smallest things like, the cat in the last season. Silvio was the true strong, silent type as Tony’s consiglieri.

Artie is such an interesting character as someone who can never catch a break and is way too wrapped into mafia stuff to avoid drama but not involved enough to benefit from it. The worst civilian mafia screwover might be the guy who owned the sporting goods store who gambled all of his money away.

Vito’s character journey was odd but fun to watch a semi-accurate view of New Hampshire (pancakes, natural beauty, volunteer firefighters). Even when a character like him looks like he can leave the mafia and be redeemed, he still shows how horrible of a person he is.

Despite his irrational moves in the wake of Carmine’s death, I loved Johnny Sac and his adoration of his rubenesque wife, the only true love in the show. I hated watching New York gossip about his emotions after his daughter’s wedding and his eventual death. The cigarette!

Christopher is such a frustrating character that I ultimately hated, because how do you hurt a beauty like Ade? I liked seeing someone with as much mental strife as Tony deal with his problems in a different (worse) way. I enjoyed his affairs with the Hollywood girl and Julianna Margulies’ character.

The single-season stunners were funny although their plotlines grew stale, like Richie Aprile, Ralphie, Jackie Jr., and the Bevilacqua kid. Jackie Jr. angered me so much, but his thing with Meadow gleaned insight into what early relationships are like with mafia people.

I love Dr. Melfi. Her scenes with Tony are some of my favorites. Did you know some stupid dudes fast forward through the Melfi scenes because they don’t think they’re important to the plot? In a way, they’re right because Tony ultimately goes in circles. But I cannot imagine leaving out the ways she tries to help him. The r*pe scene in the garage made me terribly sad.

Janice and Livia are two of my least favorite characters on television, especially Livia. She is such a bitter woman but I think a lot of us have met (or been related to) witches like her. Janice’s lip tattoo on her boob is so distracting.

Meadow’s arc was slightly frustrating in how she found herself eventually fitting into the boxes her family laid out for her, but I liked seeing how she made sense of the world around her. Remember those weird scenes with her freshman year roommate?

A.J. made me sad. He initially made me laugh then frustrated me as he continued to screw up and be selfish. I felt for him by the end, and his nihilism feels very topical despite the show being made 20 years ago. Him and Blanca not working out made sense but also made me sad. At least A.J. is better than his father in that he is a true loverboy.

Carmela and Furio’s flirtationship was the stuff of legends. I loved watching her stop by his house or dance with him at that party. Furio was such an awesome character and I wish we saw more of him. Carmela deserved better from the show, but she also kept some of the systems in line that oppressed her. That one therapist really gave her the keys to her kingdom and she didn’t take them.

Tony is one of the best characters on television. He ushered in the era of the antihero, and modern TV wouldn’t ascend to its golden age without him. Gandolfini’s performance is so good that he feels like Tony. Tony’s charisma and strange morality keeps us rooting for him despite the atrocities he commits. I love him.

Although not very graphic while it’s actually happening, sex is central to the show. Not just always seeing random boob at The Bing, but how sex is currency to these dudes. The goomah culture makes so many more women seem like objects even when their characters are so fleshed out.

Adriana La Cerva is an absolute bombshell and probably the hottest girl in the show, but she has the exact same face as my friend Deviroux so I keep it in my pants. The Italian mob boss lady was probably the coolest lady (and extremely beautiful, why don’t people talk about her more?) and proved how Tony’s attracted to women with power (like Melfi and to a lesser extent Svetlana) but never knows how to do anything about it.

Tony’s bagged some serious babes. Gloria Trillo may be at the top of the list aside from her untimely demise. I also was taken by the Vegas girl Tony did peyote with, and she was played by Sarah Shahi, who is a vision as Carmen in The L-Word. Julianna Margulies with long, curly hair was also a slay.

Women constantly lose in this show. The only winner would maybe be Angie Bonpinsero, but that took a lot of time (and money from Tony) before she could be a stressed business owner. I’m not sure if I would consider Meadow a woman that loses but she does fall in line with a more successful version of the type of woman that exists around her.

Patriarch portrayals in media have become more interesting to me since I stopped talking to my dad, and looking at Tony through this lens is fascinating. Although my family is wildly different than the Soprano family, I saw general archetypes that played out in my life and probably others.

On a surface level, the husband at work, mom at home, older sister, younger brother pattern follows my upbringing. Although Meadow Soprano and I are a lot different, I related to her brand of trying to learn about the world while simultaneously coming from a spoiled place. She’s a confident overacheiver who loves her family but thinks she can have it all.

Ben is a lot more successful in pretty much every facet compared to A.J. Soprano, but the ways where A.J. and Meadow bond/clash are like us. A.J. also butts heads a lot more with his parents and challenges them to think differently, worrying them the same way Ben confused my parents.

Carmela and my mom are probably the least alike, as Carmela is a lot more evil than my mom. Plus, my mom is better at asserting her independence, which has fully blossomed since her divorce, something Carmela never had the option to do. Whether due to her Catholicism, self-perception, or fear of Tony, Carmela’s individual growth has a very low ceiling. The way Carmela and Tony disagreed about parenting strategies reminds me of my parents.

My parents watched the Sopranos while my mom was breastfeeding me. I think my dad falls under an unfortunate cliche of male Sopranos watchers that takes the show all wrong. Tony and the mafia lifestyle looks fun at times, but I wouldn’t say the show glorifies the mafia. Men with low media comprehension skills see the male dominance and abundance of sex, drugs, and money and aspire to it.

Tony lives a double life in the show in his attempt to keep appearances, the stable family structure with oodles of (hot) side pieces behind the scenes. Not that I think my dad watched the show and thought I could be like that, but I think a lot of men receive messages that as long as they have money and an ounce of charisma, they can do whatever they want.

Tony is operated by shame, obligation, and a lust for power. I think a lot of cheating husbands build a lot of resentment and find a way to victimize themselves into making poor decisions. There are lots of other similarities I don’t need to go into detail over, but just know that I spent a lot of time especially in the first few seasons seeing my dad’s behavior.

It was interesting seeing how Tony tried, I think to the best of his ability, to be a good dad for Meadow. I saw similarities in their dynamic with how mine used to be, mostly easy aside from moments of Meadow trying to assert herself. Things started to turn the more Tony mistreated Carmela, which checks out. So many girls grow up wanting approval from their dads that can sometimes come at the cost of their moms.

The Sopranos is, at its core, a show about race. Italian heritage and the Italian-Americanness of it all are central motivations for how the main characters behave and align themselves. The machismo, the hazing, the loyalty…all of this comes from how Italians worked their way up from minority status into whiteness since they started immigrating to the U.S. We watch characters align, date, and kill people of different cultural and racial backgrounds. But our leads never fully stray from their kind, showing an apprehension to a changing world.

From the gang’s dealings with the Orthodox hotel owners in the second episode, New Jersey and New York’s Jews are often tied with our main Italian-American characters. I started recording every time we were introduced to a new Jewish character or Judaism was mentioned in any way.

Italians and Jews are a lot alike. Lots of hair, food, and emotions. As said in season 3, Italians are Jews with good food. Both groups came into Ellis Island around the same times and dealt with horrible living conditions before eventually carving out their own power. Both groups have different relations to whiteness (especially Ashkenazi Jews) that have changed vastly over the past century. Italians and Jews have been the butt of jokes throughout history but now have stereotypes associated with secret organizations (mafia for the Italians, media/banks for Jews).

Both ethnicities found themselves in similar positions throughout the show but clearly tried separating from each other whenever they could. Hesh has special privileges as if he is in the mafia but isn’t entirely, plus he’s subject to jokes, criticism, and suspicion due to his Jewishness.

Most of the Jews we meet are either love interests or powerful people. As for power, there are a lot of Jewish lawyers and therapists guiding our lead characters towards safety and clarity. Assemblyman Zellman does a lot of favors for Tony and keeps the mafia in a lot of power.

As for love interests, the three I am thinking of are Jon Favreau’s assistant (Christopher), realtor Julianna Skiff played by Julianna Margulies (Tony, Christopher), and student Noah Tannenbaum (for Meadow). The assistant, whose name I’m forgetting, has a nice little affair with Christopher and he is wowed by both her worldliness and Jewishness (I love my redhead Jews). Julianna Skiff provides one of my favorite foreplay scenes in TV (sign here, and here, and here). Noah’s controversy to Tony is not just in his Jewishness but in his Blackness, which puts Tony in quite a racist stir. He ultimately drops Meadow, and I think this shuts her off from dating a non-Italian ever again.

To most of the lead characters, Jews are people they can lean on but also fear. They rely on a lot of antisemitic lines of thinking in how they use Jewish characters, which isn’t unlike how they handle other minorities. I do think they value the Jewish characters more than any of the other non-Italians but ultimately see them as an obstacle to their successes.

So I knew about the ending beforehand just because it’s a huge cultural moment. I actually remember my dad showing me a Pittsburgh Pirates parody video of the ending when it came out. All I knew was that it ended in a cut to black and Tony, Carmela, and A.J. were sitting at a diner (whose booth was just auctioned for $82k).

When I first watched it, I knew what was happening. It’s a very paranoid scene. The song choice is strange and you can just feel the fear building up. Meadow’s struggle parking was comical. Then, Don’t Stop! and the screen cuts to black. I can imagine that watching this live must have been a trip.

Upon first watching, I didn’t assume anything happened. It just seems like a moment of silence to represent the ever-present paranoia in Tony’s life, that every person walking through the door could be a threat, when in reality it was just Meadow joining them for dinner. The silence to me showed that Tony will never escape the constant horrors of his life, that his therapy and inner-work is futile and will never work. He’s doomed to a life of misery.

But after reading interviews with David Chase, Tony did die. This makes sense to me based on Phil Leotardo’s death, Paulie and Hesh’s separate gloomy final shots, and the callback to Bobby and Tony on the boat talking about how there’s silence after death. I do think the Members Only jacket guy killed Tony, representing Eugene’s revenge after his suicide in S6E1 “Members Only.” I think he was aligned with New York in some way as some sort of score to settle after Phil’s death.

I’m happy we did not see the death unfold because I don’t need to see the family’s devastation from such a ghastly, public event. I really liked the final scene and think it was well done. Did you know David Chase only directed the pilot and the final episode? I think this was his last mystery to leave his dutiful audience, and I’m thankful that the theories will swirl forever.

If you haven’t seen The Sopranos, you’re missing out on prestige TV. If you have, please reply to me with your opinions on the show. I am always down to talk about it and am so satisfied with how it all tied up.