Television Commentary: “The Sopranos” 20 Years Later — American Viciousness, Legitimized

By Matt Hanson

I find it a little disturbing how The Sopranos’ themes seem to have culminated in the election of our current President.

James Gandolfini as the unlikely sex symbol Tony Soprano. Photo: HBO.

Now that it’s been twenty years since The Sopranos first aired on HBO, there is the requisite new book explaining all of the show’s whys and wherefores, including the notorious and apparently still-controversial ending. Interviews with the author have popped up everywhere, along with think-pieces galore. For me at least, it feels a little strange to be rewatching the show all these years later. I’ve seen every episode at least once, some several times, and studied a few of them pretty closely. Some works of art become a kind of personal scrapbook (TV shows do this especially well for some reason) since they can remind you of where and how you were when you first saw them. Odd as it may sound, rewatching Tony gobbling his gabbagool, Christopher hoovering up lines of blow, and Paulie Walnuts clipping wise guys who got out of line offers a kind of Proustian experience. With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not sure if it’s a totally positive one.

I remember when the show first received some critical buzz, back when I was in college, though I didn’t start really watching it consistently until later. What struck me was how the culture seemed to go unaccountably gaga over Tony Soprano’s dark charisma, based on James Gandolfini’s masterful portrayal of the character’s complex negotiation between being a suburban dad and a lethal mob boss. The contrast didn’t seem that strange to me at first glance — my friends and I, all nerdy teenage suburbanites, had grown up greedily imbibing the tropes of the mob movies that The Sopranos so self-consciously invoked and played with.

What surprised me back then was how many magazines touted Tony as an unlikely sex symbol. Gandolfini was named one of People Magazine’s “Sexiest Men Alive” one year. I distinctly remember an academic journal dedicated to popular culture offering a detailed, almost breathless description of how Tony’s physicality made him accessible in unexpectedly seductive ways. It was mighty interesting to discover that Tony’s raw power turned otherwise critical and disinterested academics on so much. Tossing all that postmodern criticism about gender and race aside with a flick of his meaty, bejeweled paw; Tony’s alpha hedonism jolted the blushing sophomore that lives in all of us brainy types. That added an extra prurient kick to watching the exploits of the Soprano crew week after week, especially when I was just starting to encounter the textual labyrinth of academia.

Whether or not we want to admit it, Americans have always had an ambiguous relationship to our Puritanical cultural inheritance — we want to condemn the devil within, but we secretly love him at the same time. This applies to sexuality, certainly (just look at our hypocritical movie rating system), but this contradiction really manifests itself in our attitudes toward the pursuit of wealth and success. We tell ourselves pretty stories about the value of stoicism and the Protestant ethic, but admire (sometimes tacitly, sometimes less so) the rugged independence of the wild man, the outlaw, the gangster. Americans dig the hustler and thrill to the panache of those who make bank, flout the law with impunity, and don’t have to wait in line to get the best tables at classy restaurants where they can eat for free.

In a Darwinian economic system becoming more brutally zero-sum, we may pretend to disapprove of the well-heeled crooks parading through our public life, but many people (usually on the right) still admire their glamour and want to emulate how they beat the system. The fact that it’s often the very same people cheerleading this behavior who end up paying the price for all that rule-breaking is one of the most mind-boggling facts of American political life. It’s another disheartening example of how Americans love self-proclaimed winners and treat losing less like a temporary setback and more like a fall from grace.

This moral tension between Tony’s palpable charisma and his possible criminal psychosis became more pronounced in the show’s later seasons, which I watched ever more avidly amid the post-graduation confusion about joining the so-called real world. Every few episodes one of the members of the Soprano crew would do something that tested the boundaries of the traditional mafia codes of conduct, such as Ralphie impulsively killing the pregnant stripper outside the Bada Bing or the discovery of Vito Spatafore’s outré sexual tastes. But in the end, what tended to keep these wise guys alive was being able to earn and then kick that money up to the boss. The more lucre somebody could bring in, regardless of the way it was gotten, the greater the chance that their more questionable actions were overlooked. Tony’s angst over his actions was often soothed by the fact that, ultimately, it was just business. The Sopranos became a cultural phenomenon partly because the show was engagingly blunt about its vision of how the world really worked.

The crew in “The Sopranos.” Photo: HBO.

During the moral schizophrenia of the Bush years, official White House discourse perpetually prevaricated, shrugged, or said “aw shucks” about the uglier realities of torture, war, environmental disaster, and economic exploitation. The Sopranos came off as refreshingly unsentimental about the world’s corruption and the existential questioning it caused. It didn’t pussyfoot around the uglier aspects of grabbing and keeping power, which is really another way to say money, and lots of it. And our heroes were up to a little bit of everything in order to fill that weekly envelope: selling junk stocks, embezzling via shell companies, ripping off unions and contractors, becoming involved with political corruption, shady real estate deals, problems with the Feds, etc. Sound like anybody you know of?

Considering how emotionally invested viewers became in these characters, it is more than a little disturbing how the show’s themes seem to have culminated in the election of our current President. It’s not hard to picture Donald Trump ambling into the back of the Bada Bing strip club for a discreet sit-down with the captains from Tony’s crew. He might well have helped himself to one of the working girls afterwards. The show never shied away from poking fun at the characters’ crudeness and amusing malapropisms (“he might be trying to spread dysentery in the ranks”) but that was clearly a way for showrunner David Chase to show what dumbasses these guys really were. It reminded us that we were in on the joke, even if his characters weren’t.

Tragically, some people don’t realize how the joke they think they are playing on the mainstream elites has been on them all along. Now, in certain circles at least, being crude and functionally illiterate (not to mention corrupt and venal) is the very mark of authenticity, especially for a President. For some it’s evidence of his ballsiness (what the Soprano crew would call stugots) and a way of gleefully pissing off the libtards, to boot. Trump offers an entirely different way of being politically incorrect—not just because he uses inappropriateness to jeer at the powers that be, but because his boorishness helped get him elected in the first place. Many in the media have fretted over how the bar is set extra low for Trump because he isn’t your average politician. True enough, but it goes even deeper than that — Trump gets away with more overt crassness than anyone in his position should because we’ve been conditioned not to expect anything more from people like him. It’s just the way his type is supposed to act. After all, good manners are for losers and wimps.

Of course, there are many distinctions to be made between David Chase’s fictional creation and the President of the United States. But the fact is, Tony’s family troubles are still interesting to us all these years later, and not just because the show was so well-written and well-acted, which it certainly was. Evidently, we are living in a reality that has been distorted by television so profoundly that a reality TV star can ascend to the highest office in the land with little more than brashness, attitude, and a charisma that may not appeal to everyone, but is a big hit with his demographic. Whether or not people can tell the difference between reality and fiction is disturbingly up for debate. Trump offers a worldview even less nuanced than that of the mob movies which helped to pave the way for a public that accepts him as more legitimate than he actually is. Hopefully, rewatching The Sopranos will remind us of the real-life price we pay for endlessly watching TV and rooting for the bad guys to win.


Matt Hanson is a critic for The Arts Fuse living outside Boston. His writing has appeared in The Millions, 3QuarksDaily, and Flak Magazine (RIP), where he was a staff writer. He blogs about movies and culture for LoveMoneyClothes. His poetry chapbook was published by Rhinologic Press.

4 Comments

  1. Harvey Blume on February 13, 2019 at 6:53 pm

    I take your many points.

    It’s true Trump would equal or surpass Tony for rub-outs and crassness. No problem there. But I don’t see him going to a therapist to discuss his mudder [sic] and especially not the ducks (or was it geese?) he longed to see in his pool.

    That opening episode of the series was what got people hooked on the show: a low life Godfather with issues and dreams who has to see a therapist.

    Worth noting too: the name itself — Sopranos — was suggestive, undermining or at least promoting doubts about these tough guys.

    I’ve started re-watching and can remember what I liked so much, but that doesn’t give me impetus to see it all the way through, again. I won’t.

    Part of the reason is that the media changes it brought about have caught up and may be swamping it: so much to stream, so little time. ((There are movies, though, I’ve seen many times over.)

    Let me add that when The Sopranos debuted, on HBO, it was matched in a way by Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which was stretching network television at the same time.

    Truth is some of the episodes of Buffy stay with me no less than episodes of The Sopranos.

  2. Matt Hanson on February 13, 2019 at 8:21 pm

    That’s true- I don’t see DJT as a very reflective type. Though I do buy the argument that he uses the media for therapy, since my theory on him is that he knows deep down (or not even that deep down) that he is just a rich kid who got lucky. He needs people to validate him and tell him what a genius he is.

    Tony, for all his evil and obnoxiousness, had a sense of humanity and emotionality that Gandolfini was able to give him because he was a great actor. That’s what kept Tony interesting, and people watching for so long.

    But I think they are both symptoms of a greater American problem…

    • Harvey Blume on February 14, 2019 at 6:03 pm

      Let me just throw in for good measure that for all his nasty and adulterous ways Tony never lifts a finger to Carmela. Given his propensity to violence in other areas that’s significant. And when speaking of merging fact and fiction I think of Tony’s mother, Livia, who is dying of cancer on the show, and looks it, and is played by Nancy Marchand, who was in fact dying of cancer.

      Many fine things about this breakthrough series, including its humor — Livia, for example, putting out a hit on her son.

      I think we agree that Tony’s family is more complex than Trump’s — a clan of boorish sanctimonious thieves who make the Sopranos and their ilk look good.

      I’m sorry once again that Gandolfini is gone. . .

      I’m remembering a classicist who was asked about how the Roman Empire worked. He said, if you want to know, just watch The Sopranos.

      • Matt Hanson on February 15, 2019 at 6:09 pm

        Well, that’s not entirely true. At the end of season 4 (which, to be fair, we just watched last night) when Carmela admits to her longtime erotic obsession with Furio, Tony sure looks like he’s about to hit her. He doesn’t, but he does punch the wall a few inches from where she’s standing a bunch of times. Tony comes pretty close to assaulting Melfi a few times, as well.

        I think there are dramatic contexts in the show where it is logical for him to feel that way, given the kind of person he is (his manhood is being challenged, his mother’s love for him- as you mention- being called into question) but it also shows how Tony’s inability to deal with his own insecurities manifests itself in brute physical lashing out when challenged or frustrated.

        It’s not uncommon for a lot of guys to act that way, especially those who haven’t learned how to deal with rejection and feel humiliated, embarrassed, and self-hating when they don’t get what they want. I really hope that this is a healing moment in the culture, when male snit fits and entitlement are shown up big time. Men need to get the message to be better- I’m sure I’m not the only one who has been anxiously evaluating my past behavior.

        Come to think of it, there’s somebody who’s in the public eye a lot who resembles Tony in this way pretty closely…

        I’ve always wanted to say this: people who voted for DJT thought they were getting Robert DeNiro- a tough, no-nonsense hardass who will knock some heads together and get stuff done- but they what they really got was Joe Pesci (you think I’m funny, huh, what am I a clown? huh?)….

Leave a Comment





Recent Posts