The Sopranos

What holds it together at the level of craft is a refusal of the network template. The editing is exacting and music driven, shot lengths and sizes vary where a procedural would flatten them into coverage. Cinematographer Alik Sakharov has described Chase's approach to the pilot as a strong skeleton and a poetic scenario rather than a script directed on the page, and you can see the result in how the image is asked to carry meaning rather than decorate it. The camera treats a suburban kitchen and a strip club back office with the same watchful patience.

The show's method, as Chase describes his own writers' room, starts from season wide touchstones, thematic focuses from which the episode strands branch. That produces a series that can hold an unresolved comic bottle episode and a genuinely dangerous act of violence within the same register without either curdling into camp. The tension in its best sequences is allowed to stay unresolved. It does not always pay off, it accumulates.

At the center is James Gandolfini, whose Tony is built out of granular physical specificity. The eyes do an unusual amount of the work in reaction shots, and they are what keep the character from reading as performed. Around him, Chase and his directors assemble a supporting bench deep enough that the show can leave Tony entirely for stretches and lose no charge. Edie Falco's Carmela is the counterweight the whole structure needs, a performance of moral bookkeeping done in real time. Steven Van Zandt's Silvio plays deadpan against the volatility everywhere else.

The original case for the show was that it had to convince you a crime boss's home life was relatable, and that without meeting that challenge it would be little more than a gangster picture crossed with a sitcom. It meets it. Tony reads as an Everyman, which is the hard part and the reason the whole thing works. The duck metaphor of the pilot is the tenderest thing in the first season, and arguably nothing later matches it for directness. The show spends six seasons complicating rather than repeating that opening tenderness.

You do not need me to tell you this changed television. What is worth saying is that the reasons it changed television are legible in the craft from the first hour: the therapy frame, the editing rhythm, the willingness to be funny and frightening in the same breath. It rewards close watching because it was made by people watching closely.

Here is where I want to argue with the show, because it deserves the argument.

The most useful dissent I have encountered comes from critic Edwin Turner, who reads the series as ultimately an exercise in style and tone rather than plot and character development. His charge is specific: the themes swell to obvious, concrete conclusions rather than deepening, thickening like plaster. Watched in a compressed run, he says, the seams show. Characters appear from nowhere. Storylines vanish. Key turns get explicated through clunky exposition. And he names something the finale's celebration papers over: these people spend most of their time fighting, bullying, and doing violence, and sustained exposure to that is depressing in a way the show rarely admits about itself.

I think that critique is half right and worth holding onto. The seams are real, a decades-long serialized structure built from season touchstones will drop threads. But I would push back on the idea that this is style over character. The thing that survives rewatch, according to the critics who have gone through it episode by episode, is precisely the reservoir of emotion Chase's team tapped despite writing about reprehensible sociopaths. That is a character achievement, not a stylistic one. Turner reads accumulation as failure to deepen. I read it as the design. The plaster thickening is the point.

And then there is the ending. 'Made in America,' Holsten's, the family in the booth, Journey on the jukebox, a man in a Members Only jacket walking toward the bathroom, Meadow fighting to parallel park, and then the cut to black mid-song. The most rigorous shot by shot reading treats that black screen as Tony's own final point of view: he is shot in the head and never hears it happen, which makes the ending not ambiguous but withheld. Turner puts it more bluntly, that Tony dies and any reading in which he lives is wish fulfillment. I find both persuasive and I want to note what neither quite reckons with. At air, the black screen was widely experienced as a cable malfunction. Millions sat in genuine uncertainty. The finale is unambiguous in its construction and ambiguous in its reception, and both facts are true at once. Chase built a death you have to assemble yourself, then let you sit in the confusion of the assembly. That is either the boldest thing on television or a trick, depending on the morning.

The episodes I would send anyone to first are the ones that establish the terms. Season one's 'College,' where Tony strangles a former informant during a campus tour with Meadow, is the corrective that kept the show from going soft, the moment it committed to Tony being genuinely dangerous rather than a cuddly antihero. Season three's 'Pine Barrens,' directed by Steve Buscemi, is the fan favorite for good reason: Christopher and Paulie chasing an unkillable Russian through the snow, tension that refuses to resolve and gets funnier the longer it doesn't. And late, the pool sequence in 'The Second Coming,' where A.J. ties a cinder block to himself and Tony has to dive in, is where, as critic Alan Sepinwall puts it, the misery Tony has visited on the world comes back at him with full force.

What Chase wanted, having spent decades on episodic work he loathed, was to be a cinematic auteur in the European mode. The Sopranos began life as a feature about a suburban gangster in therapy before a manager pointed him at HBO. You can feel the feature it might have been inside the series it became. That tension between the movie in his head and the television he actually made is, I think, the real subject underneath all the others.