The Sopranos at 25: A Show You Not Only Watched But Lived
Here’s a fun fact. If you’re driving home and you’re one minute, forty-six seconds from it, if you pull out your phone, open YouTube, and play the opening credits to The Sopranos, you will pull up to your house at the exact same time Tony Soprano pulls up to his in the opening credits to the show.
All that being said, hopefully, you don’t do that because texting while driving is bad. But hypothetically speaking, it’s random ideas like that that can go through people’s minds who have experienced The Sopranos. No, I did not just watch the show, I experienced it. That’s the keyword in all of this.
As of today, 10th January 2024, The Sopranos is now 25 years old. Premiering on this day two and a half decades ago. That’s an entirely different era than where we are now. Bill Clinton was at the end of his second term; 9/11 had yet to happen. The Godfather was released a little over a quarter century earlier. But this new take on mob life was on the horizon, and the cultural impact of it would still be felt to this day.
The Sopranos, on paper, is a comedy. A mob boss and his visits to a therapist. Tony Soprano, iconically played by James Gandolfini, is a man who rises to the top of a New Jersey crime organization. He has people killed, and he also gets his hands dirty too. But we’ve seen all that before.
We wanted to know the things that could really make us connect with him, and David Chase and his writing staff over the years gave them to us. What were Tony’s issues with his mother all about? How does a crime boss handle a son who becomes suicidal? What are his thoughts on death? Is he capable of love and being loved?
None of these questions ever truly get answered, and that’s okay, because that’s life, right? Sometimes there isn’t an answer to it all. That’s why The Sopranos had the kind of audience it did between 1999 and 2007. All the tropes of mob life are there in the show. Money, drugs, murder, FBI informants, having a loved one whacked. Yet, all those tropes are kind of in the background.
There are plenty of great mob movies that glorify the lifestyle for two or more hours and then show us the downfall of it all. The Sopranos gave us a bird’s-eye view of gangsters going through their cliched lifestyles and then showing us their private moments. The silent moments of feeling the weight of their lives. Their aspirations, like how Christopher Moltisanti wanted to write movies, but he also had a battle with drugs.
A show about organized crime also dove deep into existentialism. I mean, how many times did Tony have some sort of gripe in any of his therapy sessions about life that we all felt on a deeper level? The saying “you can’t write this stuff” isn’t true in terms of The Sopranos because most of the dialogue in this show is utterly flooring, and a human being actually wrote this.
The legacy of the show also has to do with its ending and how it left people in the dark, literally, for a few moments too long. With the quick cut to black in the middle of a dinner scene where the Soprano family is out for a nice, wholesome family meal, we sense the tension in the air that, at any moment, Tony could get whacked.
Some may love it; others who found it lackluster may need to go back through that last season and listen to some of the dialogue between Tony and other characters on the show. Death is a looming topic in the final season, but it’s in there quite subtly. There’s mention of how, when we are taken out of this world, maybe it’s nothing more than a simple cut to black.
The Sopranos helped reshape what television was going to be in the new millennium. Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad, has gone on record saying, “Without Tony Soprano, there would be no Walter White.” Warner Bros. Discovery has many promos on their streaming platform, Max, promoting the anniversary.
The Sopranos officially has a TikTok page now that is releasing bonus footage from the show for the 25th anniversary. Alamo Drafthouses will be hosting events that air the original pilot episode. Season one is available for a limited time on Max’s YouTube channel, and let us not forget that the full season is streaming on Max.
Long after this celebration is over, The Sopranos is still going to keep going. It’s a tale of American life. There have been shows like it since, but none have ever topped it. The replay value of it is incredible.
People in their mid-thirties whose parents tuned in every Sunday night while they were busy studying for a 10th-grade math exam have now found the show. Who knows what level the show will be at come time for the fiftieth anniversary? Either way, The Sopranos is not just a show you watched all the way through; it’s a show you lived through.
What are your thoughts on The Sopranos? Have you watched the show? Let us know in the comments below.