“Hey, I got no arc either. I was born, grew up, spent a few years in the army, a few more in the can and here I am. A half a wise guy. So what?” – Paulie Gualtieri
As an author, and one who has dabbled a bit in fiction, I’ve sometimes thought about what it would be like to write a TV series or movie. What frightens me about the prospect is the lack of control. When it’s just you creating a story, you are unconstrained. But when what you put to paper has to be performed by other human beings and take on a manifestation in physical reality, a great deal rests on fate. You are constrained by budgets, the capabilities of the actors cast, their chemistry, and a thousand other details.
While the author of a written work can go back and change any part of the story, once a producer has chosen a lead actor or the site of a shoot, there is no going back. A great novel is the product of an author’s mind; the font of the words on the page or the design of the cover contributes little to the appreciation of the work of art. This is a fundamentally different endeavor from one that depends on not only the writers, but the actors, the people working on the props and the set, including the lighting and sound guys, and even factors such as the weather. There’s only so much a creator can control. The unpredictability of how all these things will fit together means that producing a great work is even more up to fate than would be suggested by imagining the difficulty of making each relevant decision individually.
In TV and movies, then, greatness is a collective effort. And regardless of how much we attribute its creation to David Chase, there should be widespread agreement that The Sopranos (1999-2007) was the greatest TV show of all time. James Gandolfini may deserve just as much credit, if not more – he somehow made Tony Soprano a figure who was just as believable and compelling whether he was yelling at his wife, getting sentimental over ducks in his pool, or choking someone to death. Yet the true greatness of The Sopranos is a product of the combination of the actors, the writing, the scenery, and even the exact point in American history at which the story was told.
Here, I am going to explain why The Sopranos was so compelling. There will be spoilers, so if you haven’t seen the show, I would go watch it and then come back to this article. It will still be here. The series can only be experienced without spoilers once, and I would recommend not losing that opportunity, even if it is to more quickly read what I think is a very insightful article on the show.
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I used to think The Wire was the greatest television show ever made, but I’ve lately come to think that distinction belongs to The Sopranos.
David Simon (in)famously described The Wire as “a political tract masquerading as a cop show,” and I suspect that fact was a large part of why critics, and I myself, admired it so much. Its politics aligned almost perfectly with the attitudes of the educated elite at the time: skepticism of policing, standardized testing, markets, institutional accountability, and practically every attempt to measure or punish failure.
But many of those political judgments have aged like milk. It turns out that policing, deterrence, and incarcerating repeat offenders really can reduce violent crime and make our cities livable. Standardized testing, while imperfect, can reveal achievement gaps and impose accountability on institutions that would otherwise conceal failure.
The Wire remains a great work of television, but what the critics saw as profound institutional pessimism now seems more ideological and historically contingent than I once recognized. The Sopranos, by contrast, doesn't beat its viewers over their heads with a fashionable theory of public policy. Its subjects of self-deception, appetite, resentment, family, mortality, and the near-impossibility of genuine change are timeless.
Good essay. Watched an episode of Mad Men recently and found myself thinking that no prestige drama has matched The Sopranos for characterological depth. Carmela and Christopher feel like fully realized human beings in a way e.g. Skyler White or Pete Campbell never quite do.