If there's one thing I'm sure most TV critics can agree on, it's that The Sopranos is the most groundbreaking television series of all time. It's a hodgepodge of different genres. It's a crime drama series on one hand, and yet it's also comedy gold. It could be really gritty and violent one moment, and in the next you have an insanely hilarious scene with some of the funniest dialogue ever written in TV history (Gotta love Uncle Junior).
The Sopranos also touches the viewer on a cerebral level. Apart from the many clever asides to philosophy, psychology, and pop culture, it compels the viewer to ruminate on the moral choices (and accompanying consequences) each character makes throughout the course of the series as well as the underlying reasons behind why. The main character, Tony Soprano, is a deeply complex individual who suffers from an anxiety disorder (often passing out from panic attacks) and sees a therapist to cope with his issues (in later seasons, we see that it's really validation he's seeking). Having a mob boss see a shrink as one of the central themes of the storyline would have been unfathomable in the 70s and 80s at the peak of the Gangster/Crime genre.
This is what makes The Sopranos really stand out for me - its self-deprecating narrative. David Chase never attempted to glorify the "Mobster lifestyle" the way 'The Godfather' or 'The Goodfellas', for example, did. This wasn't your typical Mafia dramatization about sophisticated men with boyish good looks in impeccably tailored suits with slicked-back hair shrewdly bringing down rival mob families in cinematic fashion.
No. This was a series about a bunch of petty buffoons from dysfunctional families dressed in tracksuits & bowling shirts more often than in suits hiring either desperate drug dealers from slums to carry out messy and oftentimes botched hits for them, or getting low-rank soldiers decked in hooded sweatshirts & baseball caps and otherwise non-descript background characters to unceremoniously whack 'Made Men’ and big-time Mob bosses. This series was about these same buffoons being constantly nagged at by their wives for being incompetent, lazy and oafish husbands and fathers.
And this was what made The Sopranos so special. Despite it being absurdly violent and comical, it was relatable at a fundamentally personal level. Crippling depression, perpetual gossip and talking behind each others’ backs, crude humour, betrayal, deeply flawed & broken personalities, extreme pettiness - all the ugliness inherent in modern society, distilled through the lens of a brainy Mobster series.
