Italian-American Identity¶
He's got the Italian-American thing going.
The show generated real, organized objection from Italian-American groups, and it also contains the most sustained examination of Italian-American identity in American popular fiction. Both are true.
The objection¶
The complaint was straightforward and had a long history behind it: Italian-Americans are one of the most persistently stereotyped groups in American media, essentially always as criminals, and The Sopranos was the biggest such depiction in a generation.
Groups including the National Italian American Foundation, UNICO National, and the Order Sons of Italy in America objected publicly. There were protests, campaigns to withhold sponsorship, and at least one attempt to block filming permits. Some public officials and academics joined in.
Their statistical point was sound: a tiny fraction of Italian-Americans have any connection to organized crime, and an enormous fraction of Italian-American characters on screen do.
Chase's response was consistent — that he was writing about a specific criminal subculture, not a people; that the show is deeply Italian-American in texture and made largely by Italian-Americans; and that it is far more critical of these men than admiring.
Both arguments have merit. The show's defense is stronger on artistic grounds and weaker on aggregate-representation grounds, and that tension never fully resolves.
"Christopher"¶
Chase's direct answer, and the most disliked episode of the series on broadcast.
"Christopher" (S4E42), written by Michael Imperioli, is set around Columbus Day. Native American activists protest a parade. The crew is outraged. Silvio becomes the unlikely spokesman for Italian-American pride. Meanwhile a Native American character points out what Columbus actually did, and a professor explains that Italians were themselves treated as non-white on arrival.
The episode is a whole hour of Italian-American characters arguing about Italian-American representation — and it deliberately gives the crew's grievance no dignity. Silvio can't articulate why the parade matters. Tony is bored by all of it. Nobody wins.
It was widely disliked at the time as a lecture that stopped the story. On rewatch it plays better than its reputation, precisely because it refuses to resolve.
What the show is actually about, ethnically¶
Underneath the argument, the show's real subject is third-generation dilution.
These men are two or three generations from Italy. They have never been there. They can't speak the language. Their sense of Italian identity is assembled from food, funerals, a handful of phrases, and the movies.
The show puts this on screen constantly:
- Furio, imported from Naples, is treated with reverence as the authentic article — a walking correction to their own diluted version of themselves.
- "Commendatori" (S2E17) sends Tony, Paulie, and Christopher to Naples, where they discover the old country doesn't work the way the mythology said, the food is unfamiliar, and the actual boss is a woman. Paulie, who has been telling everyone about his heritage for years, is miserable and orders macaroni and gravy.
- The pronunciations — gabagool, manigott, mutzadell — are genuine Southern Italian dialect forms worn down by a century in New Jersey. The show gets this exactly right, and it's a linguistic fossil record.
- Christopher's entire sense of himself comes from The Godfather, an American film.
The identity these men defend so aggressively is a construction, several generations removed from anything actual, and the show is affectionate and merciless about that at once.
Assimilation as the real story¶
Meanwhile the family is completing the assimilation the men resist.
Meadow goes to Columbia and then law school. A.J. has no discernible ethnic identity at all — he's a suburban American teenager. Carmela's aspirations are about class, not culture: the house, the schools, the spec property.
By the finale the Sopranos are, functionally, an affluent New Jersey family whose money came from somewhere unmentionable — which is a description that fits a great many American families and is, on one reading, the show's actual point.
The honest assessment¶
The criticism is legitimate: the show is one more enormous, culture-defining Italian-American crime story in a century of them, and its existence made the stereotype more entrenched, not less.
The defense is also legitimate: within its frame, it is the most searching thing ever made about how this particular ethnic identity is constructed, performed, and mostly imagined — and it never once suggests these men are admirable.
The show can't be both the problem and the correction. It managed to be both anyway.