Welcome to the final edition of Sopranotember, where we look into the most groundbreaking show in television history and its most underappreciated aspects. If you are interested in reading what else was included, please sign up or subscribe. It would be really encouraging to see that from my readers.
An index of Sopranotember:
Great entertainment involves the diversity of the various opinions held by its fanbase. They tend to inspire good conversations and bring different meanings to the text. It also brings shallow indulgence. For every piece about Rick and Morty having a great episode during a season, there’s an internet piece that draws attention to their silliest fans, because they brag about how it made them feel smart or that they laughed at an anthropomorphic pickle. But that’s essentially the point; show that respect their audience, as if they’re indeed autonomous and mature, and they earn a legion of followers that will follow where the rabbit hole goes. Otherwise, it is felt nothing more than validation when it has animated a caged feeling.
David Chase had that goal in mind when he created The Sopranos. On the surface, it’s about a certain style of manliness, simulated through loyalty, lust, violence, and honor. After all, two of these things are practiced on paper to gain the other two values. But deeper, it’s about one person’s psyche, who happens to be on the mountain top of his career. It’s shaped by three families: one owned by his toxic mother, a criminal family that overlaps with the house that shares his blood, and the one he has actually made. It’s interrogated by psychotherapy, to which the man believes makes wusses out of everyone, but eventually succumbs to it as comfort.
Some have been unfair to Chase’s intentions, as they are less interested in digging further into the theories and instead latch on to a moronic and exclusive power fantasy. But it’s a bit reductive to point out bad Sopranos fans because it still adds to the many interpretations that keep a broader fanbase going. More than 20 years since it was first aired, the immense popularity of the show remains the same, even after it finished. Its meme potential remains high, holds a fan convention that can only exist for sci-fi and horror lovers. Streaming the show has much to do with this, adding more fans along the way. But it’s interesting now that the show is being brought to life by those who would’ve been toddlers during its time on television.
What millennials and zoomers see in The Sopranos are familiar frustrations. One of which is the sense of uncertainty following the 9/11 attacks, later ballooning to two global financial crises, featuring lower interest rates and high inflation, along with a pandemic. But there are emotional dilemmas faced by Meadow and AJ, both aware that their father’s a mob boss, that resonates as well. As we watch them grow, both express their parents’ emotional stamina in diverging directions. AJ would embody Tony’s depression, with little resilience thanks to Carmela’s coddling. Meadow will gain much of his charisma, but simultaneously mirrors Carmela’s tendency to underplay his worst tendencies and rely on him financially.
The most passionate fans from that cohort tend to take the perspective of conflict theory further into a sort of quasi-succession. The dirtbag left, a socialist contingent mainly found in online dredges, read the show’s events as a hurting consequence of capitalism, viewing the DiMeo Family as the embodiment of its flaws. Feminists observe how the female characters - either mob wives, or mistresses - navigate through its patriarchy without even trying to leave it from their hands. LGBTQ+ writers apply the Butlerian idea that gender is a performance when they attempt to reclaim it under their identity. There are more ways to express these ideas for The Sopranos: academic courses, which take their ideas into consideration to much depth, or meme accounts that churn out them out more accessibly. Some watch it for the first time, others much more.
Given its stature as one of the most influential TV dramas, click farms like Mel Magazine and Vulture not just devour the idea of younger people being exposed to a classic, but an affirmation of what The Sopranos should be seen as. Chase even went to praise such flourishing ideas. They acknowledge the constraints within the show way too much weight. That can be seen through characters like Charmaine Bucco, who doesn’t hide her disgust, whenever her chef husband accommodates the mob, who financially relied on Tony after her husband’s disappearance and later takes ownership of his body shop, making her more independent. Both women are free from the metaphorical chains there. Yet this lens sugarcoats the theme of decline, underlined in The Sopranos, and ignores why it was embedded in human nature.
A TV show about consumerism and postmodernity is not lost on conservatives, however, and they at least acknowledge the show’s complexities. They see the DiMeo family as a civilization in decline, with good times to be had in the past and the present. The Daily Wire’s Andrew Klavan recognizes the depth of its moral atmosphere that it went beyond good versus evil and not succumbing to relativist truth. (He compared it to the values upheld by John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, which would include honor and decency in an interview with Mark Steyn). Similarly, Paul Gottfried, a paleoconservative academic, writes that Carmela Soprano is the closest observer within the mafia, comparing her to Winifred Wagner, who was friends with Adolf Hitler because he was a fan of Richard Wagner. In his book Tory Boy, Ed West noted The Sopranos as an example of how therapy is used as a tool for repressive vanity among the worst of people1. West notes how the need for emotional restraint is the goal most conservatives seek, which has now evolved nowadays into outright apathy. (See for example, ‘facts don’t care about your feeling’s). At the series’ beginning, Tony yearns to the days where Gary Cooper’s stoicism was championed because he wasn’t capable of controlling it until he learns how to finesse it by taking therapy at his own advantage.
To misquote from Little Carmine Jr, conservatives nominally believe in the sacred and the profane, which involves the sanctity of religion and marriage. The destruction and bitter reconciliation between Tony and Carmela are driven by the mafia’s lack of self-preservation and its contradictions. The men can have as many mistresses as it wants, while the wives must feed their children to an excessive degree. Ed West, again in an essay for Unherd, wrote that this was the core of a ‘basic conservatism’, where right-wingers would call out the world for a lack of order while willfully forgetting that in their own families. It is a cause of the carelessness of religion and the declining image of Christianity.
Legacy befits The Sopranos and the point was that life isn’t all that simple and it wasn’t then. The show owes itself to The Godfather, which it frequently reference. The most poignant of which is a scene that involves AJ berating Tony for indulging at the part in The Godfather where Michael Corleone avenges Don Vito. The Godfather was about the next successor of the family, who would strip away everything that makes for his humanity for power. But back then, the American Dream was alive, and there was confidence in Michael taking the reins. The Sopranos began with no one wanting to be the boss of the DiMeo. The original DiMeo boss was (and still is) in prison for racketeering. Jackie Aprile, his acting boss, died of cancer, but no one wants the title. The people who want to have the reins was not only Tony or Junior, but Jackie’s brother Richie, released from prison being incredibly bitter, and his son Jackie Jr. In Season 3, Jackie Jr sees his father in a rose-colored lens that his demise happened because he lacks the dignity to be a boss.
Nobody owns The Sopranos because it doesn’t belong to anyone but David Chase. But it presumes Chase either isn’t in the picture or that he would be happy enough to allow these lenses to define it, while he serves as a passive storyteller throwing out the piece of the puzzle and solves it. It also presumes that The Sopranos is about as preachy as its ideologues and it’s why the show is the greatest piece of art in the 21st century.
Indeed, the new therapeutic culture seems to be embraced by the most violent, something chronicled in Theodore Dalrymple’s prison diaries in the Spectator, the hilarious weekly litany of Untermensch scum; men who justified their appalling actions using the vacant and pretend remorse of the therapy industry, blaming everyone but themselves and wallowing in self-pity. Indeed, this was the premise behind The Sopranos, the best television show of all time in which the mobster Tony Soprano explores his feelings of unease and guilt unease and guilt in therapy.
Pg 162-3 Tory Boy: Memoirs of the Last Conservative