The initial idea of The Sopranos is “What if a mob boss went to therapy?”
We open with Tony Soprano meeting with Dr. Melfi for the first time,
"Melfi.
What part of the boot you from, hon?"
"Doctor Melfi."
and David Chase’s show sets us a simple question: can Tony be cured?
With Dr. Melfi, this outsider with a special window into Tony’s psyche,
we then spend six seasons trying to figure out if this patient can be helped.
"Let's talk about that."
"What?"
"Rage."
"Why?"
"Depression is rage turned inward."
Ten years after The Sopranos ended and nearly 20 after its premiere,
Tony remains one of the most iconic TV characters ever.
He ushered in the age of the antihero in a show
that’s given credit for ushering in the Golden Era of TV.
We don’t want to be Tony, but we can’t stop watching him.
The show hooks us with a back and forth
between humanizing him and making us feel for him,
and then reminding us again that his violence is inexcusable
and he might be a textbook sociopath.
“You're not a truthful person.
You're not respectful of women.
You're not really respectful of people."
"I don't love people."
"Maybe you love them, I don't know.
You take what you want from them by force or the threat of force.”
We want to know if he can reconcile his two faces and his two families,
and if digging deeper into root causes from childhood really leads to anything.
“This psychiatry shit.
Apparently what you’re feeling is not what you’re feeling,
and what you’re not feeling is your real agenda.”
So is there hope for someone like Tony Soprano,
or is there such as thing as a lost cause?
“Do you feel like Frankenstein?
A thing, lacking humanity, lacking human feelings?”
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Tony and his crew idolize the version of the mob they see
in classic films like The Godfather and Goodfellas.
"I've been gone a long time.
Let me hear it."
“‘Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.’”
These films are grand, sweeping epics where even murder
and betrayal look beautiful.
And Tony’s New Jersey life looks common and ugly in comparison.
When the crew tries to watch The Godfather II, the disc doesn’t work.
This symbolizes the disconnect between their mob nostalgia and their reality.
“You know what scene I love most?
‘It was you, Fredo.’”
Paulie refers to Fredo Corleone betraying his brother in The Godfather II,
"I know it was you, Fredo."
not knowing that Big Pussy is working for the FBI at that point.
And the scene where Tony’s shot at holding a bottle of orange juice
echoes the scene in The Godfather when Don Corleone is shot buying oranges.
So The Sopranos gives us self-aware nods to these iconic films,
but the show intentionally de-glamorizes them.
"He made me an offer I couldn't refuse."
And the point is not just that the glory days are long gone --
it's that they never existed to begin with.
They are just a fiction given to us by some very beautiful movies.
“You know the hey-dey, the golden age or whatever of the mob?
That’s gone.
And that’s never coming back.”
The show also undermines our expectations of who a Mafia Boss is.
"What do we mean when we say leadership?
Huh?"
Tony’s no Michael Corleone --
he’s more of a George Costanza,
"I was at the pool!"
often seen in his bathrobe,
unable to escape the senseless irritations and maddening minutiae of suburban boredom.
“Come on, I'm a fat [bleep] crook from New Jersey.”
Tony doesn’t even meet his own criteria of an aspirational male hero.
“Whatever happened to Gary Cooper?
The strong, silent type.”
He’s sensitive, temperamental, and prone to tantrums.
He feels emotionally weak.
“I got the world by the balls, and I can't stop feeling like I'm a [bleep] loser.”
And his crew members are inept.
Christopher is a wild card.
“I got home too late last night.
I didn’t want to wake the man up.”
“Did you get up early this morning and call?
He’s always in his office by six.”
“I was nauseous this morning.
My mother told me I shouldn’t even come in today.”
He doubts that his son AJ has what it takes.
“In my business, forget it.
He’d never make it.”
And Paulie and Silvio can be bumbling and reckless.
"I can feel it itching me already!"
Tony’s life may lack the glamour of the Corleones’,
but his arc does echo Michael’s in The Godfather Part II.
"You've got no idea what it's like to be number one.
Every decision you make affects every facet of every other [bleep] thing.
It's too much to deal with, almost.
And in the end, you're completely alone with it all."
Michael claims all along he’s doing everything for his family.
"Don't ever take sides with anyone against the family again.
Ever."
Yet he ends up alone, having killed or driven away all of the members of his family.
Over time, Tony also shocks us by killing off ever-closer members
of both his mob family and his extended blood family.
In season two, he's physically sick before he kills Big Pussy.
Killing his best friend turned informant on a boat suggests that
Tony’s emotionally at sea.
It also recalls the setting of Fredo’s murder.
Tony goes on to order Adriana’s death, shoots his cousin Tony Blundetto,
and even kills Christopher, who’s been arguably closer than a son to him.
Like Michael, Tony justifies his line of work with the idea
that he’s doing all this for his family.
“Everything this family has comes from the work I do.”
"Alright, Tony.
That's enough."
But as much as he does love Carmela and the kids,
he rarely puts their emotional needs first.
And obviously he puts them at risk with this business.
Godfather II ends with the melancholy image of Michael in tragic isolation,
having sacrificed his family for his successful business.
Tony likewise moves more and more toward this cold emptiness.
He shows no remorse for killing Christopher.
When he dreams about confessing his crimes to Dr. Melfi,
at first he performs fake grief.
“This is pain like I’m not used to.”
But then he tells her how he really feels.
“The biggest blunder of my career is now gone.”
Michael Corleone’s pain is filtered through cinematic beauty.
But with Tony, an ugly emotional truth is presented in
mundane, unflattering images that refuse to give us nostalgia, glamour or romance
we expected from mob stories before The Sopranos.
The central paradox of Tony Soprano is that this big, bad mafia boss has a sensitive psyche.
“Like [bleep] King Midas in reverse here.
Everything I touch turns to shit.
I'm not a husband to my wife.
I'm not a father to my kids.
I'm not a friend to my friends.
I'm nothin.'”
In his profession, Tony is expected to bury his feelings,
or have no feelings at all.
And he’s embarrassed about seeing a therapist, taking medication,
and having panic attacks.
But for the viewer, Tony’s mental health struggles humanize him.
We realize he's grappling with deep feelings he can’t always explain.
And he’s plagued by self-loathing.
“I wished it was me in there.”
“Giving the beating or taking it?”
Tony resents happy-go-lucky people who don’t bear his psychic burden.
“I see some guy walking down the street with a clear head.
You know the type, he’s always [bleep] whistling like the happy [bleep] wanderer.
And I just want to go up to him and I just want to rip his throat open.
I want to [bleep] grab them and pummel them right there,
for no reason.”
His complicated dreams show us an active subconscious,
a side of him that even he can’t access most of the time.
Crucially, Tony’s family history to some extent explains away his violence in our eyes.
Tony’s mother, Livia, is an devious, nihilistic person.
“I say what your mother has at the very least is
what we call borderline personality disorder.”
She’s almost like the devil on Tony’s shoulder,
pressing him to give into his unhappiness and dissatisfaction.
"Oh, poor you!"
She manipulates Tony’s uncle Junior into ordering a hit on her own son.
"You try to get me whacked?"
"She doesn't understand you."
"She smiled!
Look at the look on her face!"
After seeing just how dysfunctional this relationship is,
we want to give Tony a pass sometimes.
“What kinda person can I be, where his own mother wants him dead?”
And then there’s the history of mental illness in Tony’s family line.
"I remember hearing about my great-great-great-grandfather.
he drove a mule cart over a mountain road.
Probably was a panic attack."
This is pretty much confirmed when AJ starts having panic attacks just like Tony,
and Tony’s father before him.
Tony’s guilt for passing on these genes represents a deeper self-hatred.
He’s afraid that his children will inherit the worst parts of him.
“When you blame your genes, you’re really blaming yourself.”
We don’t see AJ and Meadow become killers,
but we do see both of them suffer from depression and a sense of hopelessness.
“My rotten [bleep] putrid genes have infected my kid’s soul.
That’s my gift to my son.”
So with all of this throughout the show we make a lot of excuses for Tony.
If he can’t fully change for the better,
maybe he's just inherited too heavy of a burden.
And he can't get himself out from under it.
The first time we get to see Tony for the unapologetic killer he is
is in the season one episode “College.”
Tony takes Meadow to visit colleges and happens to recognize
a former mafia soldier turned informant,
who’s since joined the Witness Protection Program.
We’re kind of shocked when Tony kills the guy,
because we’ve been watching him play the doting father for most of the episode.
The shift from good dad to coldblooded killer is jarring.
“Are you in the mafia?”
“Am I in the what?”
David Chase actually had to convince HBO executives that this plot point was necessary.
“Chris Albrecht said, ‘you have four episodes there,
you’ve created one of the most compelling protagonists in American television,
and you’re just gonna flush him down the toilet by having him kill that guy.’”
This episode caused a sea change in TV.
We're used to seeing stuff like this all the time now, but in that moment
The Sopranos made murderous antiheroes fair game.
And we have to wonder if we’d ever have gotten Breaking Bad
without this episode of The Sopranos.
"A guy opens his door and gets shot and you think that of me?
No.
I am the one who knocks!"
As the show goes on, Tony’s ruthlessness and his love for his family duke it out all.
“In the end your friends are gonna let you down.
Family: they're the only ones you can depend on.”
Early on, we get fewer killings with more time between them.
So we have the space to wonder if he's feeling doubt or regret .
But it becomes increasingly clear that violence isn't the exception for Tony.
It's the rule.
But by the end, ruthless Tony is the one who wins that battle for his soul.
The show started with that question of whether therapy
would do anything for Tony,
and we get a clear answer -- it's no.
“Apparently, the talking cure actually helps them become better criminals.”
In season six, Melfi realizes that if anything,
her therapy sessions are enabling Tony.
She’s allowing him to perform the right moral emotions,
so he can go on behaving exactly the same without
having to worry about any guilt.
“Yochelson says they sharpen their skills as conmen on their therapists.
Crocodile tears, what have you.”
Melfi’s conclusion makes us think back to all the times
Tony tried to manipulate or seduce her and then stormed out.
But we also can’t forget how he opened his mind and his past to her --
"A coward's way out, you know what they call it."
""I think whoever said that didn't understand depression.
But you do."
And at least at times, he really did want to heal.
So if Melfi’s had it with him, where does that leave us?
Tony does have breakthroughs, and he develops deeper self-knowledge,
but in the end, not much comes of it.
“All this [bleep] self-knowledge, what the [bleep] has it gotten me?”
The abrupt cut to black in the series finale denies us
the moment we've been waiting for for Tony --
the peace, the realization, the catharsis pulling it all together.
But instead of becoming a new, better person, Tony is just the deeply confused,
contradictory patient we met in season one --
only now he has the vocabulary to describe what’s wrong with him.
“Obviously I’m prone to depression -- a certain bleak attitude about the world.”
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