America in Decline¶
I came in at the end. The best is over.
The show ran from January 1999 to June 2007 — from the peak of the dot-com boom to the eve of the financial crisis — and it is, throughout, about a country that suspects its best years are behind it.
The business is dying¶
The Mafia in this show is a failing industry, and the series is unusually specific about why.
RICO has made the traditional structure a liability rather than a shield. Informants are everywhere — Big Pussy, Adriana, Eugene, Ray Curto, Carlo — to the point where omertà is a story the men tell about the past. The rackets themselves are obsolete: unions are weaker, construction is regulated, and the real money has moved to finance the crew can't access.
What's left is small: HUD fraud, phone cards, an esplanade contract, stolen airline tickets. Season four is thirteen episodes of men complaining that there's no money in it any more, and it's the most accurate thing the show does about the business.
Meanwhile the old men — Junior, Paulie, Hesh — narrate a golden age none of the younger men will ever see.
The suburb¶
The show's central image, and its most quietly damning.
Tony's house in North Caldwell is enormous, expensive, and completely characterless. The furniture is bad in a specific, aspirational way. The pool is beautiful and nobody swims in it. There's a three-car garage and a wine cellar and no one is happy inside any of it.
The title sequence is the argument: a drive from the industrial city where the money is made to the lawn where it's spent, past everything that made it possible.
Chase grew up in North Caldwell, and the show's view of suburban New Jersey is neither affectionate nor satirical. It's just accurate, which is worse.
9/11¶
The show handled it obliquely, which was the right call and an unusual one.
The World Trade Center was removed from the title sequence after the third season. The FBI's counterterrorism reassignment becomes a running thread — Agent Harris goes from watching Tony to trading information with him, and by the finale the two are functionally cooperating.
There's no episode about it. Characters mention it the way people actually did: in passing, in arguments, as a fact about the world rather than an event to be processed. A.J.'s political awakening in season six is entirely post-9/11, and the household finds it embarrassing.
Money, and what it can't buy¶
The show is precise about class in a way American television rarely is.
The crew has money and no status. They can buy houses in good towns and cannot get their children into the right circles without effort. Carmela's campaign to get Meadow a college recommendation, and her lunch with a neighbor who patronizes her, are about exactly this.
Charmaine Bucco used to clean Carmela's house, and hasn't forgotten. Carmela has.
And in season four, when the money tightens, the whole edifice wobbles — because the family's identity is entirely a function of consumption.
The last shot as a state of the nation¶
Whichever reading you take of the ending, the setting is worth noticing: an ordinary diner, an ordinary family, ordinary food, a jukebox playing a 1981 arena-rock song about holding on.
"Don't Stop Believin'" is a song about faith without content — believing in believing. It's the most American possible soundtrack to a family sitting in a booth waiting for something.
And the episode is called "Made in America."
The show's actual politics¶
It has none, in the party sense, and it's cynical about everyone: the FBI are careerists, the politicians are bought, the priests are compromised, the doctors are venal, and the therapists are fascinated by their own proximity to evil.
What it does have is a thesis about legitimacy: that the distinction between organized crime and ordinary American business is one of paperwork and continuity rather than kind. Tony says a version of this constantly and is mostly self-serving about it — and the show keeps declining to prove him wrong.