Season 1 (1999)¶
At a glance¶
- Episodes
- 13
- Aired
- January 10 – April 4, 1999
- Avg. viewers
- 3.46 million
- Emmys
- Outstanding Writing (Chase, "College"); Edie Falco, Lead Actress
- Golden Globe
- Best Drama Series
Lately I'm getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over. Tony, in the first therapy session
The season that had to establish a premise nobody had tried: a mob boss in therapy, a family drama and a crime drama running through the same man, and an audience asked to like someone the show never lets off the hook.
Episodes¶
| # | Title | Directed by | Written by | Air date |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Sopranos | David Chase | David Chase | Jan 10, 1999 |
| 2 | 46 Long | Dan Attias | David Chase | Jan 17, 1999 |
| 3 | Denial, Anger, Acceptance | Nick Gomez | Mark Saraceni | Jan 24, 1999 |
| 4 | Meadowlands | John Patterson | Jason Cahill | Jan 31, 1999 |
| 5 | College | Allen Coulter | James Manos Jr. & David Chase | Feb 7, 1999 |
| 6 | Pax Soprana | Alan Taylor | Frank Renzulli | Feb 14, 1999 |
| 7 | Down Neck | Lorraine Senna | Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess | Feb 21, 1999 |
| 8 | The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti | Tim Van Patten | Frank Renzulli & David Chase | Feb 28, 1999 |
| 9 | Boca | Andy Wolk | Jason Cahill, Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess | Mar 7, 1999 |
| 10 | A Hit Is a Hit | Matthew Penn | Joe Bosso & Frank Renzulli | Mar 14, 1999 |
| 11 | Nobody Knows Anything | Henry J. Bronchtein | Frank Renzulli | Mar 21, 1999 |
| 12 | Isabella | Allen Coulter | Robin Green & Mitchell Burgess | Mar 28, 1999 |
| 13 | I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano | John Patterson | David Chase | Apr 4, 1999 |
The season¶
The premise arrives fully formed. Tony Soprano collapses at a family barbecue and starts seeing a psychiatrist. He is a capo in the DiMeo family, acting under his uncle Junior while boss Jackie Aprile is dying of cancer. His mother Livia is being moved into a retirement community against her will and has decided to make everyone pay for it.
Two wars run in parallel. The external one is over succession: Junior gets the title, Tony keeps the earners, and the arrangement holds until it doesn't. The internal one is with Livia, who cannot be beaten because she never says anything actionable. She feeds Junior's paranoia in a series of conversations that are, individually, entirely deniable.
The hit. Junior orders Tony killed. Tony survives. And in "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano," Melfi's questions finally force him to say out loud what he has spent thirteen episodes refusing to think: his mother helped arrange it. He goes to the nursing home to kill her, and she's being wheeled out with what looks like a stroke, smiling.
"College"¶
The fifth episode is the one that made the show, and it nearly didn't air as written.
Tony drives Meadow to look at colleges in Maine. In the car she asks him directly whether he's in the Mafia — the first time anyone in his family says it aloud — and he gives her a partial, careful truth. It's the warmest father-daughter material in the series.
He also spots Fabian "Febby" Petrulio, a former associate who turned witness and is living under an assumed name. Between campus visits, Tony finds him and garrotes him.
HBO executives objected. Their argument was straightforward: a protagonist who commits a cold-blooded, premeditated murder in episode five will lose the audience. Chase's counter-argument was the opposite — that the audience would lose respect for Tony if he let a rat walk, and that the show's honesty depended on it.
Chase won. The episode won the Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Writing, TV Guide later ranked it #2 on its 100 Greatest Episodes of All Time, and both Time and Entertainment Weekly have called it the best episode of the series.
The whole antihero era of American television — The Shield, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Dexter — descends from that argument being won.
Meanwhile, back in New Jersey, Carmela and Father Phil share wine, communion, and a near-miss that she will be confessing to for years.
Also notable¶
"Down Neck" (S1E7) — the first extended flashback, establishing Johnny Boy, young Livia, and where Tony's panic attacks come from. The template for the show's use of memory.
"Isabella" (S1E12) — Tony, heavily medicated, hallucinates an Italian woman nursing a baby next door. One of the show's clearest statements about what he's actually missing, and the episode immediately preceding the hit.
"Nobody Knows Anything" (S1E11) — Big Pussy is suspected of wearing a wire. Planted here, paid off a whole season later.
Reception¶
Immediate and near-universal acclaim. It won the Golden Globe for Best Drama Series, the writing Emmy for "College," and Edie Falco's first Emmy for Lead Actress.
The audience was still small — a 3.46M average, tiny against what the show became — because HBO in 1999 was a fraction of the size it would be by 2002. What the season produced instead was the thing that mattered more: the critical consensus that television could do this.