The Sopranos was a long running award winning HBO television series. It aired on HBO from January 1999 to June 2007. The series followed the story of a character named Tony Soprano played by James Gandolfini. He was a mob boss and a family man. The plot often shifted between his personal life and his exciting crime riddled business life.
Throughout the seven year series, Tony sits through several sessions with his psychiatrist. The doctor is named Jennifer Melfi, and she is played by Lorraine Bracco. Much of the subtextual tension in the show revolves around Tony’s dual life as an ordinary good man and a murderous mobster.
The show’s creators want the audience to grapple with their affection for Tony the seemingly good guy in one scene and Tony the killer in other scenes. One of the main roles of the psychiatry sessions is that it gives Tony, himself, a place to grapple with those issues. Doctor Melfi is also required to deal with her notions of good and evil as she counsels Mr. Soprano. In some of the later episodes of the show, they even have a love affair.
Besides Tony’s doctor, the other characters who play a prominent role in his life are his immediate family. The Sopranos are composed of his wife Carmela, who is played by Edie Falco, his daughter Meadow, and his son Anthony Junior. Although Tony tutors his nephew Christopher into becoming a fellow mobster, when his own children get older near the end of the series, he does not seem to want the same fate for them. Meadow is a great student, and her hardest decision is whether to pursue law or medicine. In contrast, Anthony Junior, who is called AJ, seems to accomplish nothing. He neither excels at school nor work. Although AJ engages in some minor criminal activity, his father never inducts him into the mob family. The series ends inconclusively regarding AJ’s future.
Besides Tony’s blood family, the other most important part of his life is his mob family. Throughout the series, Tony is forced to make a lot of stressful decisions regarding his mob family. He must run it as a business and make cut throat financial decisions. Furthermore, he is forced to occasionally kill very close friends when they turn out to be rats or spies for the FBI. The FBI is, incidentally, always lurking in the background and trying to infiltrate the family.
If you are looking for a show that has both action and drama, The Sopranos is a great choice. Even now, years after its original air date, the show still retains a level of creativity and an entertainment value that is hard to match.
