His great depression
Therapy-seeking mobster Tony Soprano feels all the things we feel, but he’s part of a history-making TV show
“No man can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude without finally getting bewildered as to which may be true.” — a quote from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” that Tony Soprano reads while waiting for his daughter as she interviews at Bowdoin College
“The Sopranos” made its debut on HBO on Jan. 10, 1999.
After an opening theme montage that now feels iconic, with a man (who we will shortly learn is Tony Soprano, the troubled prince of a New Jersey crime family) driving through the Lincoln Tunnel and emerging in New Jersey in Weehawken along the New Jersey turnpike, then through what appears to be a working-class city as a remixed version of the Alabama 3’s “Woke Up This Morning” — a song inspired by a British woman who stabbed her violent alcoholic husband to death — plays. The visual montage ends with a car pulling into the driveway of a suburban McMansion (actually located in the wealthy borough of North Caldwell in Essex County, one of the richest neighborhoods in the country).
For the first three seasons, this opening montage featured a quick shot of the Twin Towers visible in Soprano’s rear-view mirror. For the fourth season, shot after the 2001 terror attacks, this shot was replaced with a generic image of the New York skyline.
Rewatching that first episode for the first time in 25 years, one might be struck by that shot — it serves as a reminder that “The Sopranos” is an artifact from the last century; from a “Before” that was markedly different from the “After” we all inhabit. That is one of the banal miracles of our technology; we routinely and thoughtlessly travel through time to watch a fictional mobster played by an actor who died young more than a decade ago.
James Gandolfini, who plays Soprano, was 37 years old in that first season. He was born about 20 miles away from that North Caldwell McMansion he pretended to live in. He was 51 when he died. I am just beginning to rewatch his arc play out over six seasons. I will do this at my leisure, over several platforms. I’m rewatching the first season’s first episode — that goes by the utilitarian title “Pilot” — on an iPad, pausing it at will to transcribe some of the dialogue.
“The Sopranos” started out as an idea for a movie. The show’s creator, David Chase, had been working in TV for nearly 20 years when he got the idea — he has been a producer/writer on shows
like “The Rockford Files” and “Northern Exposure” but, like a lot of people who work in television, what he really wanted to do was make movies.
But at some point, his agent talked him into pitching his idea about a mobster in therapy as a series. And, by 1995, Chase had a developmental deal with production company Brillstein-Grey. He wrote “Pilot,” and it was a shopped around. Fox passed, but, in 1997, HBO was interested enough to finance the shooting of “Pilot.” Chase directed it and presented it to HBO, who sat on it for a few months.
This frustrated Chase, who thought about asking the network for enough money to shoot an additional 45 minutes. He thought he might turn “Pilot” into a feature film and move on. But in December 1997, HBO decided to go forward with the series and ordered 12 more episodes. Most sources suggest Chase was not overly optimistic that his show about a mobbed-up Hamlet would last more than a single season.
Nobody could have predicted that “The Sopranos” would end up as one of those handful of TV shows that must always be mentioned when people talk about the best television of all time.
I did not start watching the series right away.
But when I was researching this piece, I went back to see what I’d written about it. In 2000, I’d written this:
When it comes to television, I’ve never been an early adopter. “Seinfeld” was into its third season before I watched an episode, its fourth before I became a regular viewer … So it’s not too surprising that I didn’t catch HBO’s “The Sopranos” until the first season was almost over.
Still, once apprehended, excellence is difficult to ignore. It wasn’t hard to see that “The Sopranos” was one of the best television shows ever — maybe even the best television show ever. There was a depth to the characterizations, a naturalness to the acting, and above all a kind of wistful wit and intelligence that informed every aspect of the show.
We, the audience, were taken in as co-conspirators — this might not be the way real wiseguys work and live, but it was nice to imagine that they were more or less like us. That they worried about where their daughters would go to college, about whether their careers had stalled, about the (possibly imagined) cooling of spousal affections.
“The Sopranos” is a mob drama that isn’t really about the mob — it is about American hopes and aspirations, about the myth of social mobility and the intrigues of mothers and uncles. At its center is Tony Soprano, a suburban Hamlet who’d somehow survived his 30s to claim his crown. He sees a psychiatrist and takes antidepressants. He’s worried about the loyalty of his employees. He’s not sure what to make of his manipulative sister’s return to the family fold. He is afraid his kids might be ashamed of him.
What makes “The Sopranos” so deeply fascinating is that it is a human-scale drama and Tony is a relatable monster, someone we can not only imagine existing but who we might believe we recognize. Shakespeare’s great trick was showing that we are more or less alike, that the Prince of Denmark still worries about the same sort of petty issues that plague us all. Tony not only has a criminal enterprise to run, he’s got to worry about workplace relationships and family, and his own state of mind.
Like a lot of us, Tony feels like he missed it. In that first episode, which opens with him visiting his therapist Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) for the first time after suffering a panic attack, he lays it out. (Though he tells Melfi he’s in “waste management,” it’s clear she knows who she’s dealing with from the very beginning.)
“It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” Tony says. “I came too late for that and I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
He’s saying what a lot of us feel — that our industry, maybe our country, is exhausted. It’s harder these days, harder to earn, harder to keep pace. Respect for old institutions is crumbling (no one respects “omerta” — the mafia code of silence — any more). The young don’t defer to their their elders and are unwilling to wait in line for what they want. Whatever romance was attached to the outlaw way of life has been bled away.
Whether Tony’s nostalgia is empty is beside the point. Maybe there never was a Golden Age — this is not the Golden Age. The mobsters in “The Sopranos” have the same pedestrian concerns as civilians — they have monthly notes to meet and aging parents to care for. They have children who they might want to discourage from following them into the family trade. They even have dreams of making new lives for themselves, of writing movies. None of it is what Tony thought it would be.
“What happened to Gary Cooper? The strong, silent type?” he asks. “That was an American. He wasn’t in touch with his feelings. He just did what he had to do.”
Tony tells Melfi he has been depressed since a family of ducks left his backyard pool. His panic attack came on after he watched the ducks fly away. Melfi leads him to the realization that it’s not really the ducks he’s afraid of losing.
“I’m afraid I’m gonna lose my family,” Tony says. “Like I lost the ducks.”
“The Sopranos” is largely about Tony’s attempts to build a wall between his professional and personal life, between the routine criminality he directs for a living and the family for whom he means to protect and provide. Tony wants to be — and believes he can be — “a good man,” which he would define as someone who handles his responsibilities to his family and insulates them from the corruption he manages. His fiefdom was thrust upon him, and even if he wanted to, it would have been unmanly to resist his destiny. His crimes are justified because he commits them in service to a noble cause — to take care of his family.
But the family is corrupted — how could it not be, considering Tony’s work family is rife with members of his extended family, that his position is inherited, and the uncles and cousins and nephews are constantly in his kitchen and on his back deck? As much as Tony tries to compartmentalize, as often and hard as he plays his beleaguered family man card (down the road he’ll ask Melfi, “Why does everything gotta be so hard? … I do the right thing by my family. Doesn’t that count for anything?”), the truth is that everyone knows the source of their lifestyle.
While Tony’s wife, Carmela (the great Edie Falco), will occasionally attempt to expiate the guilt she feels at living a Mafia housewife lifestyle, she never comes close to leaving Tony. She threatens it, but she’s bought off when he agrees to build her a spec house to sell. She knows very well what he does — “You’re going to hell when you die” she hisses in “Pilot” — but she also, uh, loves him? He is the father of her children, overachieving spoiled Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) and sulking feckless Anthony Junior (Robert Iler).
At the beginning of the series, Meadow seems a conscientious objector to her father’s business, but when she goes off to Columbia University she immediately takes up with a fledgling gangster, Jackie Aprile Jr. (Jason Cerbone), son of one of Tony’s old cronies. (Tellingly, Tony tried to dissuade Jackie Jr. away from a life in the mob.)
After breaking up with Meadow, Jackie rips off a mob-protected poker game and Tony does nothing to prevent him from being killed. While Meadow surmises the truth, she publicly accepts the cover story that Jackie was murdered by drug dealers. By the end of the series, Meadow has convinced herself that Tony is the victim of federal persecution and that he’s operating in a tradition of “conflict resolution” that goes back to the Old Country, to the slums of “Mezzogiorno, where all higher authority was corrupt.”
A.J. is a problem from the beginning — smoking dope at his confirmation, crashing his mother’s car, being expelled from high school for cheating, flunking out of community college, getting fired from his McJob at Blockbuster. Toward the end of the series, he starts to pull himself together and decides to join the Army. He begins physically training for it, but Carmela — fearful that he might be sent to Iraq or Afghanistan — convinces Tony to buy A.J. a BMW and secure him a job at a film production company so he’ll stay home.
By now everyone should be aware of the ambivalent “fade-to-black” ending of the show, and the questions about whether Tony survived. (Chase seemed to confirm Tony’s murder but then put out a statement saying he never said Tony was dead and that the music playing under the scene, Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin,’” was “on the nose.”) I’m not sure the ending really matters much; the point is that by the end of the series, Tony has descended into full monstrousness and dragged his family down with him.
“Families don’t get touched,” he tells Carmela as they sit in that booth in Holsten’s. He never told a bigger lie.