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The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy Tony was never a true sociopath

'Tony and Carmela are trying to do something impossible, to raise a bourgeois family and inhabit their respectable McMansion just as their non-criminal neighbours do these things.' (Credit: Allstar/HBO/Sportsphoto Ltd)

'Tony and Carmela are trying to do something impossible, to raise a bourgeois family and inhabit their respectable McMansion just as their non-criminal neighbours do these things.' (Credit: Allstar/HBO/Sportsphoto Ltd)


January 13, 2024   9 mins

Thinking back on The Sopranos over the years, I’ve granted a sort of holy status to the scene in “Second Opinion” (Season 3, Episode 7) where Carmela is bluntly lectured by an elderly psychiatrist. She’s expecting some gentle double-talk from kindly Dr Krakower, the soft encounter with tough reality a therapist is supposed to stage for the vulnerable patient. But Krakower merely, plainly, confronts Carmela with the undeniable evil to which she’s contributing as Tony’s wife. That scene always functioned as a touchstone for me, especially the deathless moment when Carmela is force-fed this cold lesson: “One thing you can never say, that you haven’t been told.”

I’ve loved that line since I first heard it on […checks Wikipedia…] April 8, 2001. I remember it as a catharsis, the one time in the whole series when the show’s moral standpoint was clearly stated. Finally, thanks to Dr Krakower, Carmela was getting the cold reality treatment. More importantly, we in the audience were getting the cold reality treatment too, and we relished it. That line is quoted all over the internet as a — if not the — defining moment of the whole series. Carmela needed to be told it so that she might finally leave her parasite, monster, murderer husband. We needed to be told so that we might keep a clean conscience as we watched this charismatic guy do his evil thing. Being told that simple message was like an art novice finding an accurate nose in an abstract painting — a reassurance, a hint of ordered sense amid the chaos.

Except we didn’t really need to be told. We only needed to be told we were being told, because a sturdy, steady moralism informs every major element of the show. But it does so casually, organically, by letting the moral content of everyday life have its say.

Tony and Carmela Soprano know what it means to be a good person because they have models and examples all around them. They know it from impulses within themselves and from individual people in their lives and from the roles they each play as parent and spouse and friend. They want to be such people, and this wanting drives the entire show, but — and this is the simple moral lesson of The Sopranos — they don’t want it badly enough.

As we pass the 25th anniversary of the show’s revolutionary appearance in our culture, it’s smart not to get too clever about what it says. The show’s deftness in delivering its moral lessons, in other words, is of a piece with the simplicity and familiarity of their content.

It feels strange for me to praise David Chase for his light touch. I’ve always thought The Sopranos a great, great show, but when debates have come up about the Greatest Show of All Time, I’ve generally been a Deadwood guy, with The Sopranos in a close second place. I love how Deadwood takes, and makes good on, the insane gamble of reaching for beauty itself. It could have been an embarrassment, but the earnest poetry of David Milch’s dialogue is consistently perfect — psychologically revealing and politically subtle and just delightful on the ear. Fairly quickly it stops seeming a weird indulgence and becomes part of the natural fabric of the show’s reality. And Milch is the more open-hearted auteur. The horror and sadness come to us raw in Deadwood. What happens in The Sopranos, by contrast, reaches us through a conspicuous lens of Freudian irony. Deadwood is often funny, but it is a drama, historical and, despite the poetic dialogue, realistic. The Sopranos is often dark and deeply tragic, but it is — in essence — a comedy.

By this I mean that a core feature of the show is that its main characters often don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and they don’t know they don’t know, while David Chase knows, and we in the audience know, and this discrepancy is a consistent comic presence. In Deadwood, Milch’s voice is audible in the decoration and elaborate grammar of the speech. In The Sopranos, Chase’s comic touch is felt, more totally and fundamentally, in what we see — Tony’s pinched face shot in grotesque closeup, Carmela’s stony profile conveying fake dignity, Silvio’s ridiculous mug surrealised in fisheye framing. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’ve held this issue of genre just slightly against The Sopranos when doing those rankings in my head. My standard seems to be that Milch is expressing an organic sensibility while Chase is deploying something that — when I look back on the series as a whole — seems a little like a gimmick.

Of course I didn’t watch The Sopranos as a whole, from a backward distance of years. I watched it an episode at a time, right when the episodes came out. In researching this article, using the arduous method of re-watching episode after brilliant episode, I was able to reacquaint myself with my original perspective on the show. From this viewpoint, what later came to seem like a Freudian (or Lynchian) gimmick looks instead like what merely happens when you mix a lucrative business of criminal violence with the strictures and ambitions of regular middle-class life. You layer family emotion and bourgeois propriety over underworld murder and vice and things will get pretty Freudian on their own, pretty fast. And these conflicts are comically and dramatically fruitful not in spite of Chase’s moralism but because of it. That is, the show is funny and filled with tension because Tony and Carmela are trying to do something impossible: to raise a bourgeois family and inhabit their respectable McMansion more or less as their non-criminal neighbours do these things. They are haunted and judged by the very life they’re trying to live. It’s no wonder their psyches wear neurotic wounds like an old ship wears barnacles, abundantly and just below the surface.

And, our reverence for old Dr Krakower notwithstanding, this conflict is not just apparent but explicit from the beginning. In the first episode and throughout the first season, organised religion and Freudian psychoanalysis and conventional middle-class morality team up to make the same point from different directions, repeatedly. Tony confesses his yearning for innocence by fetishising a family of ducks — the first of several instances where he displaces unhelpful human emotions onto animals. Carmela and her weird priest friend stage a searing living-room confession in which she scourges herself for “allowing what I know is evil in my house, allowing my children… oh my God my sweet children… to be a part of it”. All this as Tony, during a college visit with his daughter Meadow, hunts down a mob snitch, a man with his own sweet young daughter living a peaceful life in verdant Maine, and murders him with his bare hands.

But Catholic Carmela is also a modern woman. She believes in the modern church of psychotherapy. In the pilot episode, when Tony confesses he’s seeing a therapist, Carmela beams with relief and gratitude. Even as she demurs that “psychology doesn’t address the soul”, she’s clearly granting this clinical endeavour a spiritual meaning beyond its Prozac remedy for his grumpy mood. Giddily she says: “This is a start.” What’s it a start to? Well, it’s a start to something that can’t really proceed, something that can’t even get started. It’s a start to honesty and transparency, a life in which what happens on the inside roughly matches what appears on the outside.

Still, Carmela’s reaction to Tony’s news is genuine and infectious. It’s perhaps the deepest moment of marital concord in the whole series, and, as such, it provides the measure of all of Carmela’s future disappointments. Somewhat cruelly, Tony’s therapy news carries the hope that her marriage can be like the other marriages in her subdivision. But Tony is not improved by therapy, brought into contact with a better version of himself over time, where, as both wife and psychoanalyst hope, his advancing self-awareness is finally incompatible with infidelity and killing. Instead, the pressures of therapeutic discussion make him more resourceful in his evasions, adding layers to his self-deception.

It’s tempting to read this depth of badness in Tony’s character and declare him a sociopath. Even within the show, Dr Kupferberg, psychoanalyst of Tony’s psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, warns her that she’s dealing with a sociopath. Sure, Tony checks several boxes for Anti-Social Personality Disorder, but much of what we see on the show contradicts the idea that he’s deeply, truly sociopathic. Were Tony a true sociopath, someone not just violent and manipulative but lacking empathy and remorse, then much of what he does would either make no sense or simply not happen. His comic displacements regarding animals, his guilty dreaming and brooding about killing Big Pussy, his sensitivity to his wife’s criticisms, his need to defend himself against them and his raging response when she hits a nerve, his consuming need to be loved by his disapproving shrink, his desire for her to know the other, better “Tony” that isn’t part of his bloody business life — all these betoken ample stores of moral yearning and intuition hiding inside Tony’s oversized person. Were he a true sociopath, he wouldn’t need to spend so much emotional energy trying to make sense of his life as a lying, violent thug of the bourgeoisie. To a true sociopath, it would already make sense.

And if Tony were a true sociopath, his relations with his children would be very different. The show actually gives us a parent whose ways resemble those of a sociopath, his mother, and as a parent he is nothing like her. She was systematically cruel, distant, manipulative and neglectful toward her children, while Tony delights in his children, whose love for him is unguarded by any wariness about a sociopathic father’s underhanded cruelty. He’s pretty lazy as a dad, but he’s eager to satisfy the emotional claims his kids make on him. And, were he a true sociopath, he would likely resent and undermine Meadow’s achievements in school, so far beyond his own, but he happily funds and facilitates them.

The dissonance between the easy affection with which he raises his kids and the thuggery of how he makes his money is key to the show’s pathos. His relationship with his kids has much lower stakes as a clashing of archetypes if he’s already poisoned it with sociopathic abuse. Their moral vulnerability, their dwindling store of innocence in that McMansion, is much less forceful as a moral counterpoint if they’re already victims of pathological parenting. And when, as young adults, they do finally and fully ally themselves with his enterprise, when their filial love no longer functions as counterpoint and just flows into the swill of his corruption, that is a grim declaration itself, a dark change in the show’s moral atmosphere. But this story arc never happens if Tony’s fathering is sociopathic. Tony’s sisters fled their savage mother. Tony’s kids stick around.

A similar weakness dogs the claim that The Sopranos is a conventional satire of marriage and family and suburban life. If The Sopranos is a satire, then the energy behind its defining dramas is unaccountable. The psychic pressure behind its Freudian comedy disappears. The show makes no emotional sense. Alas, for many people, this interpretation is irresistible. It’s a pleasing revival of one of the dull clichés that populate the minds of Western critics and intellectuals, among whom it’s been fashionable to mock the middle classes for as long as there’s been middle classes. An article in British GQ, for example, claims that the show’s portrait of Tony and Carmela is a satire of marriage as such, and that this satire is all the more potent for how reductive it is. “As we watch… Carmela… turn blind eye after blind eye – each further betrayal from Tony papered over by another piece of expensive jewellery — we understand each flame-out is only partly about emotion and more about racketeering.” Carmela is not just salved by the gifts. She stages her tantrums to get them. She’s not sad and angry. She’s negotiating. The piece goes on: “It’s a bleak worldview from Chase, but one he sticks to: we’re all just out for what we can get, any emotion to be traded on, any betrayal a tactical advantage.”

On the one hand, the “we’re all” phrasing here is unusually crude, and as part of a claim about how actual people really are, it is straightforwardly bizarre. But, on the other, it’s usefully clear in laying out the basic structure of the satire interpretation. The notional distance between Tony and Carmela’s corrupted marriage and us is merely that: notional. In reality, “we’re all” supposedly on the make. But the gaps of perception and self-understanding that Chase so richly exploits do not exist if the background archetype, the suburban family, is also an object of satire or mockery. It’s only gripping and funny, sad and appalling, because we know what they’re trying to be — and because, like them, deep down, we know they must fail in this effort. If Tony and Carmela could reassure themselves “we’re all” the same, there would be no psychic conflicts for them to manage, no basis for the show’s surreal framing. The Sopranos would not be a Freudian comedy. And I’m sorry, but The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy.

In all this, I’m arguing against no less an authority than David Chase, sort of. In a 2021 article in The New York Times Magazine, he’s quoted as ratifying the view that the show is a parable of American decline, of which Carmela and Tony’s suburban home and subdivision are symptoms. But almost all of the larger America portrayed in The Sopranos is on screen because Tony’s crew and other Mafiosi have set themselves on some part of it, as parasites. The America we see in The Sopranos we largely see through the eyes of mobsters. Is Paulie Walnuts really a reliable diagnostician of our civic health? And much of what the article tries to portray as decline is merely evidence of change. The scene in which Paulie tries and fails to extort a Starbucks-like coffee franchise for protection money is extremely funny, and it certainly sketches a novel challenge for Mafia methods, but what this says about American decline is pretty ambiguous. This understanding of the Sopranos as a parable of decline is intellectually appealing in its pessimism, but in its details it can’t decide if the decline it’s talking about is an American thing, or just a mob thing.

David Chase may have dreamed up The Sopranos in nostalgic irritation about how much suburban New Jersey had changed since he was a kid, but in constructing it as an extended work of television art, and in giving that work a rich and complex inner life that made intimate sense to his audience, he drew on a very different set of dramatic resources. He counterposed the violence and elaborate scheming in one family with the absence of these things in the families they lived among. And he set that contrast to work. And it did work, as no other television show has worked, in no small part because it was based on differences between kinds of people that really exist.


Matt Feeney is a writer based in California and the author of Little Platoons: A defense of family in a competitive age


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Tony Taylor
Tony Taylor
10 months ago

One of my favourite scenes – one of those scenes which makes The Sopranos so good – is when Carmela picks up the phone to hear that Jackie Jr has been shot by drug dealers, but we know it was Vito on Tony’s orders, and Tony is in the background looking concerned, but Anthony is looking at Tony and we wonder what he is thinking and Tony just says “You see.”

Cal RW
Cal RW
10 months ago

One of my favorite scenes from the Sopranos is when Patsi and Burt (minor members of Tony’s mob) go into a coffee shop and threaten the manager with extortion insisting on protection money. The manager explains he does not have discretionary funds. Patsi tells the manager that if he doesn’t pay up he will get a brick through the window or roughed up. The manager then explains that the corporation owns 10,000 of these coffee shops and counts every fu*king coffee bean in the store. He says, “if I give you a penny I’m getting fired and you have to start again. Even if you hurt me or the store, the corporation doesn’t give a sh*t.” Defeated, Patsi and Burt walk out muttering, “It’s over for the little guy.”

2 plus 2 equals 4
2 plus 2 equals 4
10 months ago
Reply to  Cal RW

Brilliant writing in that episode.

Just on a note of accuracy, the author of the article above misattributes that scene to Paulie.

L Easterbrook
L Easterbrook
10 months ago

I just commented on that before seeing yours. Glad someone else caught that

Howard S.
Howard S.
10 months ago
Reply to  Cal RW

A reply from the States: the real mobsters these days are the guys starting wars around the world to put billions of dollars into their own pockets. The little guy coming around for his twenty dollars once a month is chicken feed.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago
Reply to  Howard S.

They are very different. One is a parasite like a tapeworm. The Neo-Con warmongering corrupt politicians who do this evil for pay – they are predators, and we are their prey. Much like the book on covid by the Breggins:

COVID-19 and the Global Predators: We Are the Prey Paperback – September 30, 2021”
It is looking, via the race replacement, Most wealth and power in the hands of the 0.001%, their wars, their pandemics, their destruction of the Middle Class and skilled Tradesmen, (London less than half Native British) the open USA Border, the same in Europe – they in fact own us. We are the sheep, they are the mutton eaters.

I did not like the Sopranos – evil rats – but what they are is a sign the government is corrupt. A proper FBI – if it took time off from being the Deep State Secrete Police/Political Enforcers – would clean those trash up.

A Reno
A Reno
9 months ago
Reply to  Howard S.

Exactly, the top-notch murderers are in Washington DC along with their bankrollers on Wall Street. Compared to them Tony and the guys are Boy Scouts.

Fred Oakley
Fred Oakley
10 months ago

One of the most pithy articles I’ve read on The Sopranos.

To suggest it’s writing is gimmicky is one of the most arrogant things I’ve ever seen some unknown second rate author write.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago
Reply to  Fred Oakley

His praise of that totally silly show ‘Deadwood’ though…
Having lived all over the remote parts of the North West and know the people still on the frontier, such as it still was 40 years ago – he is some city guy who thinks putting on a costume and saying ‘aint’ for ‘is not’ makes authenticity. It does not. The show is some urban middle class directors pantomime of the frontier life 150 years ago.

2 plus 2 equals 4
2 plus 2 equals 4
10 months ago

I’ve watched the Sopranos all the way through maybe 4 times. Every time I’ve hated Carmela a bit more.

A brilliant character, fantastically written and there are no superlatives which do justice to Edie Falco’s performance. But Carmela is utterly loathsome. Not THE monster in the show, but certainly A monster.

She knows what good is and she knows what evil Tony and “the life” are. But she’s chosen evil over good and not, ultimately, because she’s scared or trapped. But because of her own greed, ambition and vanity. She may not be the one strangling snitches but she is complicit in every crime.

My favourite Carmela moment is probably in the final season when she is shut out of a meeting between some of the guys and Angie Bonpensiero, who has rebuilt her life after Big p***y’s death, is running a successful business, and now has “money on the street.”

The look on Edie Falco’s face is sublime. Such a talented actress.

Judy Englander
Judy Englander
10 months ago

I agree. You see in the sharp relief only good tv can deliver how she sells her soul for the glitter of a diamond necklace.

Dermot O'Sullivan
Dermot O'Sullivan
10 months ago

‘I tried to get out but they sucked me back in!’

L Easterbrook
L Easterbrook
10 months ago

Correction: Paulie does not try to extort the coffee chain cafe. It is Patsy and Burt

Phillip F
Phillip F
10 months ago

Like the author, the Dr. Krakower scene has remained the hub of my Sopranos viewing experience. I think it is because psychiatrists often wonder what type of patient—a Nazi, a psychopath, a molester—they might be incapable of treating. It is a somewhat self-congratulatory discussion. (I am a psychiatrist and I’ve been there. The usual answer is to imagine being able to talk with anybody.) The clarifying moment in the Krakower scene for me is that the doctor not only confronts Carmela with the truth, he refuses to accept her “blood money” payment. He will not collude in denying the reality of the money’s origins. This refusal is not only a harder call for the psychiatrist, it is a harder call for the viewer because we, indulging the rights of disbelief-suspenders, want to go along for the fun vicious ride and get to be mobsters with clean hands. Our collusion is exposed.

On a different note, I loved the phrase “Deadwood guy”. Not just because I am one, but because it reminds me what a pleasure it is to have these remarkable series to choose among.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
10 months ago
Reply to  Phillip F

I have also noticed a high correlation between those who like Deadwood and those who like the Sopranos. I liked both. But I’m a Deadwood guy, myself. 😉

Allison Barrows
Allison Barrows
10 months ago

Not impossible at all. Some of us grew up with families like the Sopranos, living in upper-middle class neighborhoods, golfing at the country club, sending their kids to private schools – but everyone knew what the dads and their brothers and cousins were. One such guy’s brother owned a swimming pool company. Another had a vending machine business. Tony and Carmela even look like my friend’s mom and dad. He, by the way, was in “maintenance and disposal”.
And no matter how much money they had or how big their houses were, an old lady all in black would be cooking in the kitchen and an old guy in a wifebeater undershirt would be sitting on a crappy folding chair in the driveway smoking a cigar. Carmela’s parents, who were grateful their last name didn’t end with a vowel, would have been scandalized.

Melissa Knox
Melissa Knox
10 months ago

Tony does strike me as a sociopath. Sociopaths can be most charming–Tony is, too. And ruthless. He’s his mother’s son. Yes, a parable of America’s decline from the point of view of the gangster–see Robert Warshow’s The Gangster as Tragic Hero. Not a Freudian comedy. It’s too damn real. Don’t forget, crime rates went down in NJ on nights when the show aired–the mob was home, glued to the set
melissaknox.substack.com

John Hope
John Hope
10 months ago

I’ve always appreciated the brilliance of Chase using the Jewish Dr. Krakower as the reflection of the foundation of Western morality based in the Old Testament. Positioning him as an Old Testament prophet Krakower tells Carmela (and the audience) that’s she’s just as guilty as Tony her only option is to leave now. He goes so far as to say that he won’t accept her “blood money.” Stark contrast to Dr. Memphis’s moral relativism.

Fafa Fafa
Fafa Fafa
10 months ago
Reply to  John Hope

I actually saw it as a cheap shot, to make the psychiatrist Jewish, make him to be the font of wisdom, and counterpose it to the corruptness and hypocrisy of a white christian (pretty much the only social identity group that can be portrayed in disparaging ways), who is not only labeled by the psychiatrist as an enabler (yes, he is allowed to do labeling, from the towering height of his timeless morality), but is also revealed by herself to be a bigot (of course, what else…) when she says something about “you people”.

That was pretty much the only scene that I did not like much in The Sopranos. I did not watch it when it came out, maybe back then I would have appreciated that “brilliance” myself, but I watched it maybe 5 years ago, by then suffering from an ever-increasing defensiveness due to the unstoppable advance of wokesterism in America.

One more point: in real life it is considered unprofessional if a psychiatrist “bluntly lectures” a client, labels her coldly, and says things like “I won’t take your blood money”. That psychiatrist would not be viewed as a positive character by his peers or his professional board, for instance. I know, I know, it is a movie. And in movies psychiatrists are often portrayed acting unprofessionally, e.g. having sex with their clients, revealing confidential information, etc, and yet the behavior may be put in a positive or sympathetic light in order to advance the plot. It’s all fine, it is all fiction, I won’t get worked up about the Heisenberg compensator either. I just presented this so as to put the topic into a larger context.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago
Reply to  Fafa Fafa

Excellent, and fun, point. I could not enjoy the show because I wanted someone to kill them all too much, and it did not happen.

D Walsh
D Walsh
10 months ago
Reply to  John Hope

I think its a bit deeper than that

Chase clearly understands the Tribe, Hash and his trouble with the rappers ect

Stephen Kristan
Stephen Kristan
10 months ago

Wow, what an article and what impassioned commentary from readers! (That’s nonsarcastic.)
I tried watching the series but couldn’t get through the first season. I couldn’t stomach the show. Every male Italo-American character (even Tony’s porcine little son) was the same character, using the same hideous sub-grammatical New Joisey, Italo-American intonation, displaying the same moral opacity, grovelling in the same way to please the power masters. It was almost physically painful to hear these endlessly venal knuckle-draggers and monotone morons deese, dem, and dose’n their ways through their relentlessly conscience-free days and nights. They were hardly human. If I were Italo-American I would have sued HBO, or whatever, for defamation of a demographic. (Not seriously. I’m a free-speecher… just ranting.)
But given the encomia expressed in this article and among the admiring commentators, I feel drawn to take another look.

Samantha Stevens
Samantha Stevens
10 months ago

You’re not from Jersey, are you? 😉 Those aren’t stereotypes. That’s Jersey. Ever seen Chris Christie’s clan? Remember Frank Sinatra was from Hoboken, NJ.

Michael McElwee
Michael McElwee
10 months ago

“Was it a duck?”

Samantha Stevens
Samantha Stevens
10 months ago

It’s funny, I never thought of Tony’s crimes as so different from other professions where people do violent or awful things and then go home at night and try to live another life, even if the motives are different. In the mind of a mafioso, there are rules that people agree to when they participate, and if you break them, you pay the price you agree upon. In Tony’s mind, this makes his “work” legitimate. Even if he knows deep inside that murder and extortion are morally wrong, those are the rules of the business.
Is this so different than what a soldier must confront emotionally? A correction officer? A police officer? I know these are professions on the right side of the law. But I am sure these professionals must grapple with what the rules of their professions require at times. How about those who make their fortunes on the backs of the poor? And for the record, I have the utmost respect for police – I could never do what they do.
I have always thought The Sopranos was brilliant in the way it insinuated many people have a veneer of legitimacy and tell themselves they are normal, upstanding citizens when they make choices all the time that, while seem reasonable to them, would seem inhumane to others.
It’s Tony’s humanity at times that makes him fascinating – the way he is infuriated when a stoned Christopher sits on Adriana’s dog and suffocates it. The way he loves his children. Then the brutality with which he can turn on someone in a second when he feels they violated a boundary.
The worst moments of the show for me are when Ralphie murders the young girl he had gotten pregnant. Even Tony hates him for that. And the murder of Adriana. Christopher is a despicable character – spoiled and vicious. And Lydia – she a masterpiece villain.
I could talk about The Sopranos forever. If, like I am, you are from the Jersey area, and you know certain Italians, these characters are not so unusual to you. The line between criminal and honest man isn’t always easy to define.
Luckily for me, I am but a poor HS teacher so I sleep well at night knowing I am underpaid, overworked, and doing my best to help kids. No moral dilemmas for me.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago

***Moral Relativism Alert!!!***

YES, what the characters in the show do is diametrically opposite to the ones you list, rough men who stand by ready to do violence on our behalf so we may sleep at night.

Maybe some Bible – Christ and the Centurion, or Christ and asked on Tax – ‘Whose head is on the coin – then render to Caesar that which is his and God that which is his)

and most of all Romans 13

Submission to Governing Authorities13 Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God.Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended.For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, ”

Those who defend the law are not those who break the law.

Postmodernism has taken the thinking of this day – that you get upvotes, Situational Ethics, Moral relativity is so ingrained in our sick society people no longer grasp anything.

The Sopranos show this – I just wanted them dead when I watched the sorry show, so did not enjoy it.

Samantha Stevens
Samantha Stevens
10 months ago

I actually agree with you. In Tony’s everyday mind, he isn’t the bad guy. But in the deep recesses of his mind, he knows he is. People cross lines from being the good guy to the bad guy without acknowledging it all the time. People excuse transgressions they make based on warped codes of conduct they invent in certain circumstances. But, as you state, morality is unchanging. Tony reveals that gray area so many people live. The bad guy isn’t always what you expect.

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago

P.S. I do realize corrupt Government exists, and then they are the Sopranos. I would lump the CIA, NSA, FBI, MI5, Woke police chiefs, the majority of Uniparty Congress and Parliament – corrupt politicians…. as those.

But the footman, the solider, the cop, the prison warden – no, they are as us, under God’s approval.

Samantha Stevens
Samantha Stevens
10 months ago

Everywhere we look people seem to think the ends justifies the means because their “morality” is the right morality. As if there is such a thing as personal morality.

George K
George K
10 months ago

The more I watched sopranos the more I got an impression that’s basically how the world normally works. I recognize Sopranos in every daily news. It’s Dr Krakower who isn’t normal

Simon Boudewijn
Simon Boudewijn
10 months ago
Reply to  George K

‘Birds of a feather flock together’

Maybe find a better set of friends. They are not how my normal world works. Postmodernism is working to make your cynical post true, but still – the majority remain moral.

Tyler Durden
Tyler Durden
10 months ago

The screenwriters surrounded Tony with genuine sociopaths or psychopaths so he could be maintained as a compromised hero. Yet he also became the template for the figure of the TV antihero who dominated those later blockbuster series from The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad.
The wider cultural point was that the Italian mafia were starting to retire themselves from the criminal landscape by that point in the 90s. While Scorcese’s violent portrayals remained popular (Goodfellas and Casino), the real doubt had been introduced by Coppola embodied by Pacino’s Michael Corleone. There it’s worth returning to the 3rd Godfather instalment which gives an interesting view on the Mob 1990s rather than Scorcese’s 60s, 70s and 80s.

Howard S.
Howard S.
10 months ago

Thank you for an excellent and insightful analysis of Tony’s and Carmela’s demons, which are legion. One further point I’d like to mention is the juxtaposition (love that word, used to get me extra credit in high school English essays) between Carmela’s session with the Jewish psychiatrist and her meeting with the Catholic priest, a black African (the Church does bring in African priests and nuns here in the States when there is a shortage), not her usual white, slightly effeminate confessor. You have already pointed out what the Freudian, 20th Century doctor, representing our Judeo-Christian society, tells her directly what to do – pack up yourself and the kids, and leave the man and his evil behind. Won’t even accept payment for the session, because he knows, and she does also, where that money came from. It is the African priest, representing the primitive, prehistoric nature of religion and by extension maybe organized religion itself, who advises Carmela to compartmentalize her relationship with her mobster husband: separate the violent criminal from the good provider, the violent, cold-blooded killer from the emotional rock she and her children lean on for support. Carmela has no real desire to leave the very comfortable lifestyle she is living, thanks to her husband, and the priest gives her permission, if you will, to continue this lifestyle, regardless of where the means for that lifestyle came from. Which probably included generous donations to the Church too, but that’s a topic for a different thread.

Jeff Cunningham
Jeff Cunningham
10 months ago

I thought the invention of the one-legged Russian woman was genius. The ongoing fight between her and Toni’s sister was priceless.

Charles Stanhope
Charles Stanhope
10 months ago

I happened to be in Rome when James Gandolfini died there in 2013.
It was said that someone stole his Rolex watch as his corpse was being transported from his hotel to the mortuary.

Is nothing sacred?

William Edward Henry Appleby
William Edward Henry Appleby
10 months ago

Quite fitting

William Edward Henry Appleby
William Edward Henry Appleby
10 months ago

Long ago, I shared a cab during the rain one afternoon in Manhattan with a stunning young woman who told me she was Italian-American. I brought up the Sopranos and said how great it was, hoping this might lead into some flirtatious conversation, but she was super angry at the stereotypical way it portrayed Italian-Americans. I told her all my Northern Italian friends loved it too because they associate Italian-Americans with Sicily and Southern Italy, which they look down upon as backward and criminally minded. That killed any hope of flirtation, but it did shut her up.

Samantha Stevens
Samantha Stevens
10 months ago

We are all forgetting the other thing The Sopranos does to the viewer – makes you crave really good Italian food. The wine, the pasta on the show. There is no better food on earth than Italian food, and it’s a major character in every episode.

Ross Jolliffe
Ross Jolliffe
10 months ago

An interesting observation and one I had not thought about. You may have opened-up a new front: what were the characters actually disclosing as they fetishised over great-big pasta sauces?

A Reno
A Reno
9 months ago

Although there were some great one-liners in The Sopranos that I found hilarious the fact remains that the entire series was, as Camille Paglia once said, “an ethnic minstrel show, “rife with offensive cliches about Italian-Americans that would never be tolerated were they about Jews or blacks.” In essence, it was the Italian American version of Norman Lear’s unintentionally racist “Good Times,” the 1970s series starring Jimmie Walker. Although some of the jokes were funny in Good Times and The Sopranos one has to see that both shows were built on the shoulders of “Amos and Andy.”
I watched every season of the series so I was not offended per se. I looked at the series as a comedic satire rather than a serious drama. Many of the jokes by the cast members and the malapropisms were brilliant. My beef was with the accuracy of the portrayal of the characters which in my opinion weren’t even close to being realistic. They were overblown inauthentic caricatures of gangsters exaggerated to the point of absurdity. If you compare the acting and writing in the Sorpanos to that of Scorcese’s Goodfellas I think you can see the difference in what I’m saying. The characters in Goodfellas were comedic at times but not to the point of creating a grotesque effect that took away from the drama. The screenplay and the actors were more realistic hence the drama came out for me with Goodfellas whereas David Chase missed big time.
The praise heaped upon The Sopranos is akin to the accolades given to the Beatles as the best musical group ever. I liked some Beatle songs and I liked aspects of The Sopranos but they were both far from the greatest of all time.

David Rosenberg
David Rosenberg
9 months ago

Whether or not Tony is a sociopath, he and his gang daily ruin or eliminate the lives of ordinary people. Unlike the protagonists of Deadwood, the leading figure of this series and those who support him, profit from him and seek his approval, are malicious. His popularity among the general population of the most prosperous society in the modern world, along with its ostensibly self-aware cultural critics, says something quite dispiriting about that population and those critics, to which the writer of the series and its broadcaster has unselfconsciously appealed. Essentially this is no different from movies and TV series about serial murderers. The issue is that these subjects have been persistently selected for our cultural attention, not whether the treatment of them is ironic vs satirical. Because I eagerly awaited each episode of the series when originally aired, I returned to it just this month hoping to recapture some of that pleasure. It’s terrible. The people are just terrible. I am now 82. That I was captivated by such crap and that your writers still are, requires more thoughtful consideration than this article provides.