The Women¶
You can never say you weren't told. Dr. Krakower to Carmela
The show is better on women than its reputation suggests and worse than its defenders claim. Both, with specifics.
The five positions¶
The series maps a fairly complete taxonomy of what's available to women in this world.
Carmela — the beneficiary. Knows everything, partitions it, and negotiates with herself for twenty years. The show's hardest moral case, and the one it's least willing to let off.
Dr. Melfi — the professional. The only woman with independent standing and expertise. Also the only one who is ever offered Tony's power and refuses it — at real cost, and without reward.
Livia — the survivor turned weapon. A woman of an earlier generation with no options at all, who converted powerlessness into a form of power that requires her never to say anything actionable.
Adriana — the collateral. No power, no appetite for any of it, and the least culpable person in the story. Killed for a threat she never wanted to be.
Meadow — the inheritor. Given every advantage, and uses them to build better justifications than her father could.
Plus Janice, who is Livia with a spiritual vocabulary, and Charmaine Bucco, who sees it all clearly and is ignored.
What the show does well¶
It refuses to make Carmela innocent. The Dr. Krakower scene in "Second Opinion" (S3E33) is the most morally direct thing in the series: an older psychiatrist tells her, for free, in about four minutes, that she is living on blood money, that she must take her children and leave, and that she can never again claim she wasn't told. He refuses payment.
She goes home. Four more seasons happen.
That scene is a permanent refutation of any reading in which Carmela is a victim of circumstance, and Chase put it in the show himself.
It takes the material costs seriously. Carmela's obsession with getting assets in her own name is not a moral crisis, it's due diligence, and the show treats it with total seriousness. Her position is genuinely constrained by era, class, religion, and a complete lack of independent income.
It does not reward virtue. Melfi says no and is worse off. Adriana is the most decent person in the show and dies worst. Charmaine is right about everything and loses her marriage over it.
Livia is one of the great characters in American fiction, and she's an old woman in a housecoat.
What it doesn't do well¶
The Bada Bing. For roughly two and a half seasons the club is background: naked women moving through the frame while men talk, unremarked and unnamed. The show eventually confronts this in "University" (S3E32), which kills Tracee and forces the audience to notice what it had been enjoying as set dressing — and Tony's objection to her murder is that it happened at his workplace.
That's a genuine reckoning. It's also one episode, in season three, after a lot of scenery.
The mistresses are a type. Gloria, Irina, Valentina, Svetlana — the show is aware they're all versions of Livia, and says so through Melfi. Awareness is not the same as range, and several of them exist mainly to be a problem Tony has.
Interiority is unevenly distributed. Carmela and Melfi get real inner lives. Janice gets a great comic engine and less psychology. Adriana gets terror, brilliantly played, but her arc is largely a thing done to her. Meadow's conversion happens partly off-screen.
The honest summary¶
The Sopranos is a show about a specific, real, and violently patriarchal subculture, and it depicts the position of women in it accurately: constrained, compensated, and complicit in proportion to what they're paid.
The strongest defense is that it never once suggests this is acceptable — the Krakower scene, "University," and Adriana's death are all the show insisting that the audience notice.
The strongest criticism is that the camera spends a lot of hours in a strip club before it gets around to that, and that a series which gave Tony 86 hours of psychological detail gave Carmela considerably fewer for a moral situation just as complicated.
Both things are true, and the show is large enough to hold them.