The Sopranos

It’s 2021 and everyone’s glad that 2020 is over.  However, we still seem to be in lockdowns (and, worst of all, we’ve come out of the EU as if to exacerbate deliberately the economic effects of a pandemic).  If someone had said back in March that we’d be isolating and social distancing for a whole year, they’d have been told to do one.  The month-by-month slipping by of time under these circumstances is perhaps one of the worst things to look back on.  But that said, I’ve continued to embrace all things locked and down, and taken on a boxset that was definitively a big part of things way back at the start of all this.  Along with baking banana bread (didn’t do it), watching Tiger King (loved it) and clapping for carers (never did it as I would rather vote for parties that support essential workers instead of performatively applauding them in some hypocritical act of self-soothing), the government also mandated we should all re-watch The Sopranos.

Only I had never seen it.  I think, when it first emerged in 1999, I dismissed it as a programme for dads to watch.  I was a thirteen-year-old Surrey schoolboy, so I failed to see any real common ground or entertainment value in New Jersey mobsters and their mental health issues.  This means I got to spend the rest of my life telling people I had never seen it, holding out like a deluded antivaxxer.  But, in 2020, with more time forcibly on my hands and a lot of my favourite podcasters extolling the show’s virtues, I clicked download on my Sky Boxsets and settled in with high expectations.

Things, initially, appear to be quite dated.  At over twenty years old, the first season is indeed vintage.  The violence is fine, but the nineties décor of the Sopranos’ family home is quite hard to stomach.  I’m told this was the big splash that the programme made, the first in HBO’s run of revolutionising the boxset.  More blood, more boobs, more bad language.  I’m all for the constant risk of sudden nudity (see post on Industry), but the Sopranos’ contribution to this, throughout all six seasons, is a reliance on interstitial footage of the female staff of Bada Bing (still the best name ever for a mafia strip joint) jiggling their cleavage before we pan to a conversation among Tony and his brethren.  Yet, you can see the foundations for the expectations we now have of a seriously quality boxset.  And by the sixth series, it’s much easier to recognise these tropes.  In addition, with each season, the improvement in story-lining abounds.  At first, it seems to be a selection of things happening and we have none of the tight winding to a climactic final episode that the modern viewer expects.  A bit of this and a bit of that and, bada bing, the season ends.

In fact, some of the more action-based performances are slightly tentative.  Let’s be honest – this is just middle-aged men having a punch up, but I never fail to be impressed by the fisticuffs abilities of Silvio or Paulie when it comes to taking on any and all comers.  It’s often their sheer balls that outwit their opponents.  While the fight choreography doesn’t run rings around anything, the crime family do run rings around the cops.  It seems you can shoot your enemies willy nilly and the police won’t have a clue.  That said, there’s plenty of criminal-on-criminal abuse, making it clear that, as with Narcos and Top Boy, heading up an illegal organisation is a constant challenge, with a high churn rate of employees.

If anything, The Sopranos is a fairly affectionate lesson in how the mafia apparently works, with some Italian-American history thrown in.  I can’t remember if the show was accused in its day of glamorising organised crime (see earlier comments about middle-aged men fighting) but I can’t really see the appeal in how they run things.  There’s constant squabbling about who’s kicking up to whom on which dustmen routes, squeezing pals for higher percentages and then going for constant meals out at various Italian restaurants.  The death knell for me was when characters started to comment on how delicious certain gravy was.  In Britain, gravy does not go near pasta, so this was an abomination too far.

Away from the careers, it’s the adjacent families that always capture my interest more closely.  Tony Soprano himself, while an inexplicable lothario whose audible nose-breathing proves irresistible to almost any woman he comes across, is really your average put-upon breadwinner.  Outside of his day job and trials at work, dealing with his family is a source of even more compelling drama.  I love Carmela’s endless nagging, trying to hold moral high ground while constantly benefiting from dubious activities.  If not picking arguments with Tony, she’s passively aggressive or outright aggressive to daughter Summer and younger son AJ.  Both kids are brats whose impetuous parental arguments mirror their father’s own office politics back at the cosa nostra.  No wonder Tony resorts to therapy.

Indeed, it’s Tony’s time with Dr Melfi that helps to provide further exposition to his trials, but there’s a sense that nobody knows what to do with the therapist during some of the seasons.  I, for one, would have liked to see her branch out into overhauling Tony’s other health problems: smoking cigars, eating processed pork, never exercising outside of copulation, stressful occupation.  However, Dr Melfi gets to be badass in the final season, standing up for herself at long last.  In fact, the female characters add the greatest depth to proceedings overall.  From Tony’s mother, to his spoilt older sister Janice, via an array of mob wives of different shapes and sizes, the show makes it clear that they keep things ticking over.  Which brings me to Drea De Matteo’s stand-out turn as Adriana.  Having only ever seen her in Desperate Housewives, I was drawn in by her complexity as Christopher Moltisanti’s girlfriend.

If I were to analyse this, I would say Tony’s line of work is almost irrelevant, serving as just another lens on the American Dream.  Work hard enough and you can have it all, but what do you do with the all when you have it?  And how do you make sure you keep it?  What adds spice is The Sopranos’ position as an immigrants’ story.  While Tony’s associates are fiercely proud of their Italian heritage, they’re more conservative than the waspiest of Jersey’s residents, expressing outdated views about other minority groups, homosexuality, gender equality and all manner of social topics that continue to be hot buttons in 2021.  While I wasn’t always as gripped as I expected, I settled into a rhythm with my pals in the Soprano family, their whingeing accompanying many a WFH lunchbreak or the near-completion of a one thousand-piece Friends jigsaw I came back from Christmas at my folks’ with.  As the final scenes of the family meeting in the diner played out, I felt an additional tension around their prospects.  Despite it all, I wished them very well indeed.