What is Making Me Happy: The Sopranos

Following the model of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour and, to a lesser extent, the Make Me Smart daily podcast, I want to remind myself that there are things that bring me joy. These posts are meant to be quick hits that identify and/or recommend things—usually artistic or cultural, sometimes culinary—that are making me happy in a given week. I am making this quick format a regular Friday/Saturday feature, except that the end of the semester crunch for most of my classes broke this schedule before it even began.

This week: The Sopranos

I am perpetually late to television shows and can count on one hand the number of shows that I would consider myself a devotee of by the time that the Sopranos went off the air in 2007. Most of those are cartoons.

My viewing patterns changed somewhat in grad school, when Mad Men became appointment viewing by about season 3. While I’m still not particularly fluent in TV, I have in the years since ridden a few of the more recent trends (e.g. Succession) and backfilled my cultural consciousness of a decent number of shows (e.g. The Wire). On a recent whim I started watching The Sopranos.

For the five people who haven’t watched The Sopranos, James Gandolfini plays Tony, an Italian-American mobster living in New Jersey who has recently been suffering from panic attacks that lead him to seek help with a psychiatrist. The first season unfolds through these therapy appointments where Tony minces words to avoid revealing any crimes to his therapist Jennifer Melfi (played by Lorraine Bracco), while the action on the scene dramatizes what actually happened. This is an effective device and Tony has many real issues that self-consciously take on an aura of cool because of the mobster content—as the various characters frequently mention while bringing up other media portrayals of their work.

Tony has ordinary sorts of family stress, including raising children (played by Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler) with his wife (Edie Falco) who he is frequently unfaithful to and his relationship with a disapproving mother (Nancy Marchand). But Tony also has workplace stress that is exacerbated by that line of work being organized crime, and one of the main arcs of Season One is a brewing clash with his uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) over the direction of the family. However, what elevated this season of television for me was the way in which these therapy appointments forced Tony to grapple with topics like his own masculinity, first to let himself be vulnerable with a woman and then when people begin to find out that he was going to therapy, leave alone that he was going to therapy with a woman.

Spoiler alert: it doesn’t go well.

The Sopranos is populated by awful people with few, if any, redeeming characteristics, but it is compelling television. Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano is a brooding, storming, menacing anchor at the center of the screen. You get the impression that he’s not the biggest, strongest, smartest, or fastest person, but he nevertheless carries himself with such barely-restrained violence that he is not someone to mess with. And yet, Tony can only carry a show so far without its surrounding cast. I particularly appreciated the two central women in Tony’s life. Bracco’s Dr. Jennifer Melfi offers a vision of placid, delicate, almost naive competence who is simultaneously horrified and aroused by Tony Soprano. Falco’s Carmela is more complicated. She appears to have genuine affection for her husband and the father of her children, but she is also clear-eyed about his infidelity, once acknowledging that she almost appreciated that he took his dalliances elsewhere while she raised the children, even as it puts strains on their relationship.

I still prefer Mad Men and The Wire to The Sopranos, and not merely because I saw them first. In terms of prestige TV, there are aspects of the filming of The Sopranos that feel to me just a bit immature (in part owing to when it was created—home entertainment centers with DVD players are a big deal!) and some of peripheral characters seem like flat caricatures of mobsters, but as an ur-text of the anti-hero genre in live-action television I am finding The Sopranos compulsively watchable.