Themes¶
Lately I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. Tony, the first therapy session — the show's thesis, stated in the first ten minutes
The show tells you in the first ten minutes¶
Most series conceal their subject. The Sopranos announces it before the first act break.
A man sits in a psychiatrist's office and says he feels he arrived too late — that whatever was good is finished, and he got the end of it.
He means the Mafia. He also means his family, his country, his marriage, and his own life, and the next 86 episodes are a demonstration that he's right about all of them and that the decline is substantially his own doing.
Absolution without change¶
The central mechanism, and the reason therapy is the right frame.
Tony goes into treatment wanting a specific thing: to feel better without being different. He wants the symptoms managed. He wants to be told that his mother did this to him, that his father did it to her, and that he is therefore a man to whom things happened.
Melfi offers him insight instead — and insight is useless to him, because acting on it would require dismantling the only life he knows how to have.
So he does what the season-six study describes: he takes the vocabulary and discards the substance. By season four he can articulate his own pathology fluently. By season six he can use therapeutic language to manipulate. He has become better at describing himself and no better at being himself, which is a specific and modern kind of failure.
That's the show's most durable idea, and it's what makes it feel contemporary twenty-five years on: it's about a culture that has learned to talk about its problems as a substitute for solving them.
Decline¶
Every institution in the show is past its peak, and everyone in it knows.
The Mafia is a dying business. Its earners are old, its rackets are being replaced by legitimate finance, its secrecy is destroyed by RICO, and its members are informing at a rate that makes the old code a fiction. Paulie and Junior talk constantly about how it used to be.
The family — the actual family — is in the same condition. The kids are American in ways their parents can't follow. The Sunday dinners are performances of something that has stopped being true.
The country is doing it too. The show runs from 1999 to 2007, straight through the dot-com collapse, 9/11, and the Iraq war, and it registers all of it obliquely: the towers vanishing from the title sequence, the FBI reassigned to counterterrorism, A.J. having a political awakening nobody wants to hear about.
The suburb is the show's image for all of it. A huge house in North Caldwell, paid for by violence, containing a family that doesn't talk. See America in Decline.
"It's all a big nothing"¶
Livia's line, delivered to her grandson at a funeral, and the show's nihilist pole.
The series is genuinely undecided about whether she's right. It offers religion and finds it transactional. It offers therapy and finds it corruptible. It offers family and shows what the family does to people. It offers a near-death experience in season six — a real one, with a light and a house on a hill — and then has Tony convert it into four episodes of gratitude and nothing else.
What it never does is refute her. A.J. inherits the line and it breaks him. Tony hears it and keeps eating.
Family as a word that does two jobs¶
The pun is in the title and the show never lets it go.
Every atrocity is committed in the name of family. Tony's justification for everything — the murders, the theft, the lying — is that he provides. And the series methodically demonstrates that the two families are the same institution: both run on loyalty tests, silence, inherited grievance, and the threat of exclusion.
The most efficient statement of this is Christopher: a boy whose father died, raised by Tony to be a version of Tony, promoted past his competence, and eventually suffocated by the man who raised him, at a crash site, for practical reasons.
Inheritance¶
The show's bleakest structural idea, and the one it commits to fully.
Nothing gets fixed; it gets passed down. Livia's nihilism goes to Tony and then to A.J., along with the panic attacks. Johnny Boy's business goes to Tony. Tony's rationalizations go to Meadow, who upgrades them with a Columbia degree and a law career defending men like her father.
The one person who breaks the chain is Vito, briefly, in New Hampshire — and he comes back, because he can't imagine being anyone else.
What the show refuses¶
Three things it never does, all deliberate:
It never punishes. There's no arrest, no reckoning, no karmic accounting. Bad people prosper and decent people die at random, which is the show's actual moral position.
It never explains. Dreams go unexplained. Plot threads vanish. A Russian walks into the woods and is never mentioned again.
It never resolves. Including at the end, most famously. See Reading the Ending.
Chase's most consistent statement across twenty-five years is that he was not making a show that would reassure anyone, and the ending is the last and largest instance of a policy he'd been running since episode one.