The Sopranos
Story Stream
Always Rooting for the Antihero February 21, 2024
In the mid-1960s, network TV was suddenly awash in what scholars would later call “supernatural sitcoms.” My Favorite Martian featured an anthropologist from Mars who crash-lands in Los Angeles and hides out at a newspaper reporter’s apartment while ...
Masculinity, Motherhood, and American Moxie February 05, 2024
When New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano finds himself in the office of psychologist Jennifer Melfi in the pilot episode of The Sopranos (1999), she asks him a number of questions. About his family, his work, and the panic attack that landed him, agains...
The Sopranos Is a Freudian Comedy January 15, 2024
Thinking back on The Sopranos over the years, I’ve granted a sort of holy status to the scene in “Second Opinion” (Season 3, Episode 7) where Carmela is bluntly lectured by an elderly psychiatrist. She’s expecting some gentle double-talk from kindly ...
‘The Sopranos' Is the Ultimate TV Series About America January 08, 2024
“The Sopranos” debuted 25 years ago, but what makes it a masterpiece is how much older its themes are.In 1827, Goethe wrote a poem that begins, “America, you have it better.”The German genius ended with the wish that America’s children, when they too...
