This was published 3 months ago
Opinion
Why The Sopranos is the show that changed everything
Bill Wyman
ColumnistAre you a fan of The Sopranos? If you are, here’s a trivia question: What was the very first scene of the show? Ponder that, and I’ll give you the answer in a moment or two.
The Sopranos, of course, was the HBO drama series that many say changed television forever. It told the story of Tony Soprano, a local mob boss in northern New Jersey. The twist: He was having panic attacks, and had sought refuge, reluctantly, with a psychiatrist. And the series went on, we saw the shrink, with increasing discomfort, try to address his issues professionally.
The Sopranos seemed to be about men, but it was actually about women.Credit: Reuters
Along the way we learnt about Soprano’s life – or lives, really, because he had the one at home, and then the one that involved his business, which was low-level racketeering and occasionally murder.
The show debuted 25 years ago this month. I was an editor at the online magazine Slate at the time, and I stayed up with one of my writers to watch the show and post an account of it very late that evening. It was the early days of internet publishing and was a pretty cutting-edge thing to do at the time.
Hard to forget that dynamic opening song, and the now indelible images of Soprano driving home to Jersey and ending up at his suburban mini-mansion.
The pockmarked landscape of New Jersey was an important part of the show’s zen: this wasn’t Manhattan with its flamboyant mafioso bosses. These were workaday goons – mob middle management.
Edie Falco and James Gandolfini as Carmela and Tony in The Sopranos.
Tony was a psychopath, yet the late James Gandolfini made him somehow compelling. But the true star was the series’ creator, David Chase.
His mastery of the narrative arcs; the internal logic of his oddball characters; the bloody, often absurdist whackings; the occasional intervention of hapless fate; the bleak humour – these all came together in the series and made it a phenomenon. A few years in, the show was beating all but the very highest-rated broadcast television shows, which was quite an achievement for a pricey premium cable service.
The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Six Feet Under started making all sorts of money for HBO – and then DVD sales started rolling in. (The network’s annual post-Emmys party in Los Angeles was beyond decadent.)
But The Sopranos’ popularity made it a watershed and introduced a new era of TV. In this new world, one creator – the Hollywood term is “showrunner” – was allowed to architect a sweeping dramatic vision and tell it over many, many hours of TV.
After it came The Wire, a very tough but deeply humanist view of urban crime in Baltimore. There was also Deadwood, a grimy and profane period piece about a gold rush town, which limned the birth of American capitalism in a terrifying mix of mud, sweat, urine, semen and blood.
Here we are 25 years later. TV was once famously called a “vast wasteland”. Now there’s too much good stuff on TV for one person to keep up with.
There’s one aspect of The Sopranos that doesn’t get talked about much. The Godfather, of course, was the mother of all mob stories. Do you remember the first line of that film? “I believe in America,” a minor figure tells Marlon Brando.
Indeed, this was a movie about America, in all its corrupt and murderous glory, and the message is driven home throughout the film. (In the infamous “drop the gun, take the cannoli” scene, for example, you can see the Statue of Liberty in the distance.)
The Sopranos had a different theme. To a large extent, it was about women. You think being a mob boss is stressful? Tony had bigger problems: an unhappy wife, a sullen daughter, a mistrustful shrink, a carping sister, a murderous mother, any number of disruptive goomahs (as Tony’s myriad mistresses were called).
Seen in this light, Tony is actually a character we’ve seen before: There was the seminal ’50s TV sitcom The Honeymooners, starring Jackie Gleason. His catchphrase, as he feigned slugging his long-suffering wife: “One of these days, Alice: Bang, zoom, to the moon!” Then came another landmark in TV, All in the Family, with Archie Bunker raging at his wife, whom he called “dingbat”.
Like Tony Soprano, these were heavy, brutish, baleful men, beset by women and family. But here’s the thing. That image isn’t just a TV cliche: it’s a human archetype. The Disney version forgot to mention it, but the Greek god Hercules – properly Herakles – was a big angry guy as well, who, in the original myth, killed all his own kids.
David Chase didn’t hide this theme. That first scene of The Sopranos? It was a portrait of an apprehensive Tony, sitting in his shrink’s waiting room, shot from between the legs of a bronze statue of a nude woman.
Eight and a half years later, in the show’s infamous last scene, we learn that Tony will never be able to live a calm life. There will always be criminal threats around him. But Chase made another thing clear too, to make his purgatory complete: his family would always be there as well.
Bill Wyman is a former arts editor and assistant managing editor of National Public Radio in Washington. He teaches at the University of Sydney.
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