In the fullness of time, perhaps so, but in the lousy here and now The Sopranos retains a deep, admonitory hoofprint and, forgive the word, relevance. Interviewed by the authors for a long postmortem (it reads like an extended commentary track), David Chase takes the Marcus Aurelius long view of the transience of human endeavor, denying that The Sopranos will have any legacy, destined to join the stardust that yawns ahead.
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The show made stars of its mostly little-known cast, racked up ratings and Emmy Awards, built the DVD market for Quality TV and the inevitable lavish boxed set, provided a launchpad for writer-producer-directors Terence Winter (who went on to do Boardwalk Empire) and Matthew Weiner (mastermind of Mad Men and The Romanoffs), raised the television recap to a state of exalted exegesis, and fertilized a small library of Soprano studies ( The Sopranos: Born Under a Bad Sign, The Sopranos and Philosophy, Tony Soprano on Management), whose latest thumper is The Sopranos Sessions, a 20th-anniversary tribute to the series, written by noted deep-sea-diving television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, and bearing the heft of a family Bible, if your family likes to gather around the hearth and share fond reflections of how and when Big Pussy got whacked. It became its own flexing organism and powerhouse. The Sopranos soon moved beyond mere invocation and sly homage. Created by David Chase, whose previous TV credits ( The Rockford Files, I’ll Fly Away, Northern Exposure) gave little hint of the depth charges he would detonate here, The Sopranos ushered itself from inception into the gangster saga’s royal line of succession that originated with Scarface and The Public Enemy and was raised to opera morte with The Godfather movies-an early meeting of Tony’s crew at the Bada Bing strip club was bathed in sacristy shadow and painterly light in homage to Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose name is invoked in the same episode-and Goodfellas, whose cast included future Sopranos fixtures Michael Imperioli (as Tony’s rash nephew Christopher), Tony Sirico (the natty-dressing, malapropistic Paulie “Walnuts”), Frank Vincent (gang boss Phil Leotardo), and Lorraine Bracco (Tony’s shrink, Dr. The on-screen couplings, rubouts, beatdowns, and Jungian dreamwalks of Gandolfini’s sumo mafioso on HBO’s The Sopranos would climax 85 episodes later in an enigmatic cut to black, whose meaning remains a topic of grassy-knoll interpretation and metaphysical debate-was it finally lights out for Tony (the hit man cometh) or was the shock edit an arbitrary em dash to nowhere, like ending a novel in mid-sentence? The irresolution of Tony’s fate keeps him alive as legend, his final, expressionless glance an inscrutable tease. It was our deceptively genial introduction to Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), mobster, suburban dad, cheating husband, henpecked son, sullen brooder, and volatile bruiser who was larger than life at the start and grew ever larger, until his beasty breathing could be heard across the room, like a Minotaur biding its time.
What joyous delight he took in their playful splashing. Once upon a crime, a mound of a man lumbered outside in a bathrobe to feed a family of ducks in his backyard pool. Illustration by Jimmy Turrell reference photograph by Matt Carr/Getty Images. Tony Soprano’s shadow looms large over 21st-century America.
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