The Sopranos: "How the F🤬 Did This Show Get To Be 25 Years Old?
A fresh look at why 'The Sopranos is more relevant than ever.
In the late 1990s, scriptwriter David Chase seemed to know what he didn’t like about making commercial television, where dramatic programming was broken up into short segments to sell products unrelated to the story being told. It was always a strange way to make little movies, and David Chase didn’t like it. He seemed to be constantly running into the bullshit that ruined the production of shows like Twin Peaks too early.1People had been trying to convince Chase for years to write a show with a character like his mother, who suffered from the psychological condition Borderline Personality Disorder. From his descriptions, Chase’s mother was an agent of chaos, but that was still his mother. You’re supposed to love your mother i” is direct Tony Soprano dialogue from one of the earliest episodes.
Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) is a mental illness that causes intense mood swings, unstable relationships, and a distorted sense of self. People with BPD often fear being abandoned, act impulsively, and may have episodes of anger, sadness, or anxiety that can last for hours or days. These behaviors often stem from a mix of genetics, brain function, and difficult experiences like childhood trauma.
Like so many great cinematic stories, The Sopranos was born of personal pain, translated through the lens of art. But would it sell, and would it show? Was it enough to build a compelling story? The problem with a character who serves as an instigator, causing chaos in everyone’s lives, is that they are not normally a leading character. Sure, it’s been pulled off in stories like As Good As It Gets and Californication. But an old woman who rarely leaves the house and sows chaos is not an imminent enough threat to sustain a TV show. The average television viewer struggles to develop sympathy for that kind of protagonist, which means they can only be a supporting character. The value of paying attention to serial drama over multiple seasons of episodic content is that the protagonist’s emotional journey is morally compelling and resonates with a diverse range of people who hold unique perspectives shaped by their individual experiences. It’s something global that hits local, and that’s just how effective fiction works inside the human mind when we work over stories with the magnifying glasses of our hearts. Humans can’t root for the enemy for long before we either grow bored or become the monsters in our own stories. But what if she were a powerful man’s mother? What if she were the mother of a leader of organized crime? What if she poured poison in his ear for forty years? What if she undermined his wife and bequeathed misery to his children? What if she got between him and his Uncle in their crime business? Now, we’re cooking with gas from Vesuvio’s stove. What would this kind of negative force and influence do to a modern businessman who quickly turns to violence when a situation involving money isn’t going his way? What kind of father would that man be? Would he attend his children’s school recitals? PTA? Is he a “Man of the Community?” Rotary Club member? A civic paragon? The first-time viewer in 1999 was unaware of these questions and their implications for America twenty-five years later.
The first words spoken in the show that would change the way cinematic serial dramas manifested on our home screens are so unassuming that they could have been misread in the script as non-dialogue.
“Mr. Soprano?”
Tony Soprano was an autocrat, and we immediately rooted for his salvation. A mobster in therapy was on the American mind in the late 1990s. The Robert De /Billy Crystal film Analyze This is always brought up in the context of The Sopranos’ first season. The film was directly spoken about in dialogue in Season Two, and it was a dismissive comment along the lines of “That’s a fucking movie. This is real life.” 3Rooting for an autocrat in America is a dangerous poison when injected into our culture’s psyche. Consider how hard it was for the American ethos to avoid having a king. Many people don’t understand that the American Revolutionary War was a civil war against their king and was one of the few in human history in which the peasants won. But as the KING sings in Hamilton, “You’ll be back” has always been the danger for Americans. The most dangerous idea to Americans is that a strong man should make the big decisions for us all by threatening the use of lethal legal force. The idea of such a golem is compellingly alluring to many Americans who want more than a figurehead; they want a father who knows best. The problem is that most fathers are full of shit and barely getting by in life. Fathers are often worse than mothers, but Tony Soprano’s problem was the opposite. Tony wanted a wise and caring mother, but he was born to a snake that consumed her children by squeezing their hearts slowly over decades until they burst and ran away. But Tony stayed, and for this, he was punished without mercy. This is all subtext when we meet the man sitting in Dr. Melfi’s office in the first scene of the Pilot episode, staring up at the statue of a nurturing naked woman with either horns or the sprout of wings. The desire for a strongman/woman is a sweet assassin of the American Dream that we are people united under a Common Law that trumps the divine right of small, temporary kings. The Sopranos is a survival story filled with smaller stories that all end in death when the story arcs land. The Sopranos is concerned with how honor and commitment can twist violently when trauma is constantly applied over time through high-intensity situations. Tony Soprano's character lived a tragic, high-intensity, wealthy life, but not a good one. There is a ray of hope in The Sopranos: Tony died smiling, with his family at his side. This point of view depends on how you interpret the final scene of the final episode. There are Sopranos fans who demand the story continue and those of us who understand the function of breaking the fourth wall in the final moment in order to fuse the viewer with the protagonist during the most important moment of their life, which is the final one.4As New Critics, once we draw a frame around a story, we can map and measure it with our minds. We can begin to understand the narrative pressures applied to the characters on screen and the pressures they place on each other when the stakes are highest. Including the prequel film The Many Saints of Newark, viewers have access to 90 hours of an intense moral journey that loops through tragedy after horror into brief periods of potential redemption that all end in the absence of light in the center of the heart of The Sopranos, which was always going to be a story about how what you love is the only thing that can break your heart. Watching The Sopranos at the end of America’s most recent flirtation with the strongman delusion is a modern experience despite the show’s twenty-five-year age. The moral revelation of The Sopranos remains the same and will age well over time, like Shakespeare.
When parents poison the root, children bear the poisoned fruit.
