After a bean-ball incident against the St. Louis Cardinals on September 18, 2015, Chicago Cubs manager Joe Maddon compared the Cardinals (longtime hated rivals of the Cubs) to gangsters: “I don’t know who put out the hit. I don’t know if Tony Soprano was in the dugout, but I didn’t see him in there. But we’re not going to put up with that.” References to the gangsters of the HBO series The Sopranos do in fact abound in contemporary American culture, making clear that, by the time the series ended its run in 2007, it had supplanted the Godfather saga as the best-known gangster narrative in American popular culture. This prominence of course is not surprising, given the almost universal critical acclaim received by the series, including the declaration by Stephen Holden in the New York Times (after only the first season of the series) that the show might just be “the greatest work of American popular culture of the last quarter century.”
The debut of The Sopranos in January 1999 helped to usher in one of the most interesting years in American cultural history. Much of the year, of course, was dominated by anticipation of the coming end of the millennium—even if, strictly speaking, the twentieth century and the millennium in which it was situated did not technically end until the end of 2000. This anticipation, meanwhile, included both the obligatory revving up for the Apocalypse among certain religious sects, though in this case the new age of computers introduced a novel element to apocalyptic anxiety with the so-called Y2K scare.
The much-anticipated Star Wars: Episode I—The Phantom Menace was the top film at the box office in 1999. The undistinguished American Beauty would win the Oscar for Best Picture of the year, though a number of more interesting films were released during 1999, including Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, Magnolia, and Three Kings, not to mention game-changing genre films such as The Matrix and The Blair Witch Project. In television, the game-show spectacle Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? premiered in August 1999 and became the sensation of the coming television season. For many, however, the X-Files episode “Millennium,” broadcast on November 28 but set at the coming of the new year, was the highlight of the season, punctuated by a first kiss between Mulder and Scully at the stroke of midnight on December 31, 1999. Afterward, Mulder looks around and notes that “the world didn’t end,” referring both to the coming of the new millennium and to the long-anticipated kiss.
That kiss might have changed The X-Files forever, but numerous commentators have suggested that The Sopranos changed television forever, bringing new standards of quality and sophistication to a medium that, in the view of many, was sorely lacking in such standards. Indeed, The Sopranos was almost certainly the single most important series in the rise of what came to be known as “quality TV,” part of a wave of programs from HBO that led Robert J. Thompson to argue that the term “HBO-style series” had, by 2007, “trumped” the term “quality TV” as a descriptor for “high artistic achievement in the medium” (xviii).
This volume seeks to delineate some of the key reasons why The Sopranos is so important in television history, while also exploring some of the most important ways in which The Sopranos resonates with American cultural history as a whole. Running from 1999 to 2007, The Sopranos is set in the world of that period and engages with a number of contemporary events, ranging from the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky scandal, to the 9/11 bombings and subsequent war on terror, to Native American protests over the celebration of Columbus Day. But this involvement with specific current events is relatively superficial and incidental. The Sopranos is less interested in a vivid depiction of the way specific events in the larger world affect the day-to-day lives of its characters than it is in placing these lives within a much bigger historical narrative, and within the context of much bigger and more fundamental issues.
The Sopranos deals in a realistic way with a number of serious, life-or-death issues within the experiences of its characters, but perhaps the central reason that the series has such a sense of gravity and importance is that it addresses so many issues that have been fundamental to the march of modern history—and on a number of different levels. The series, for example, is crucially informed by the struggle between tradition and modernity that has perhaps been the central struggle of the entire modern era of history. On a more local scale, it engages in dialogues with the entire history of gangsterism in America, as well as with the entire history of the representation of gangsterism in American popular culture. Meanwhile, the business of organized crime is set in dialogue with American business as a whole, providing one of popular culture’s most trenchant and detailed interrogations of the role of capitalism in American history, even if it provides no answers to the questions it poses and suggests no real alternatives to the capitalist system that it questions. The series is also highly conscious of the fraught history of race relations in the United States, focusing on the Italian American immigrant experience as a component of America’s multiracial and multicultural society.
It is, of course, not surprising that a work of popular culture such as The Sopranos should deal with such important and fundamental issues. After all, as Richard Slotkin has noted, film narratives describing the immigrant experience in America, while becoming more and more prominent since the 1970s, have been dominated by the gangster genre, which has initiated a “cult of the Mafia” in which organized crime becomes a locus for the attempted preservation of Old World values presumably lost in the transition to America:
These films invest the gangster heritage of Italian, Jewish, and Irish immigrants with nostalgia for a lost world of close and extended family ties and with immigrant-group solidarity in the face of poverty, displacement, and discrimination. (634)
Further, Slotkin notes that “the lament for the loss or corruption of the immigrant patriarchy in these films parallels, in both mood and ideological function,” a similar lament that can be found in certain Westerns (639).
Slotkin here is thinking especially of the Godfather films, though his description of the central role played by nostalgia might apply equally well to The Sopranos—except for the fact that everything in the latter is given an extra hyper-ironic twist by the fundamentally postmodern nature of the series, which tends to undermine its own nostalgia. It is certainly the case that The Sopranos places all of the themes and issues with which it deals within the context of a specific nostalgic narrative of recent American history, but in this case a nostalgia for the Old World of Italy is doubled with a nostalgia for bygone days in America itself. In this narrative, Italy certainly functions as a bastion of traditional values and virtues that have now been lost. However (as is often the case in the American popular mind as a whole), the 1950s are seen as a sort of past Golden Age in which all aspects of life (including organized crime) were simpler and better. The subsequent half-century is then seen as a period of unmitigated decline, in which every aspect of life became more complicated and less functional, and things generally fell apart. To this extent, The Sopranos is a rather cynical account of the failure of the American dream—and even of the longer-term failure of the Enlightenment ideal of continual progress toward a better (and eventually ideal) human society. At the same time, the series posits very little in the way of a genuine historical narrative prior to the 1950s, noting specific events (such as the large-scale arrival of Italian immigrants in the United States in the early years of the twentieth century) without placing them within any coherent model of historical change, other than to gesture repeatedly toward an absolutely anterior past when the traditional patriarchal structure of an essentially feudal Italy was still in place.
To complicate matters still further, the series shows considerable skepticism toward both of its nostalgic models of historical decline. This undermining of its fundamental historical narrative is part of a general resistance to final interpretation that is a key to the vaunted complexity of The Sopranos, a complexity that is itself crucial to the widespread acclaim of the series as a watershed event in television (and pop cultural) history. This complexity arises partly from the extremely complicated structure of the program itself and partly from its extensive interaction with its historical and cultural context. For example, the series’ resistance to final interpretations is an important indicator of the postmodern nature of the series, on which numerous commentators have remarked. Indeed, it is our contention throughout the current study that The Sopranos can best be understood as a paradigmatic work of postmodernist culture, an identification that not only brings into focus many aspects of the series, but also helps to clarify the historical position of the series as an indicator of the status of culture within the global expansion of capitalism at the beginning of the twenty-first century.
This phase of capitalist globalization has been widely described as “late capitalism,” and it should be pointed out here that our understanding of postmodernism is very much in accord with the seminal theorization of postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism” developed by Fredric Jameson more than a quarter of a century ago, but more relevant (and accurate) today than ever. For Jameson, postmodernism is the culture of a historical climate in which the process of capitalist modernization is nearly complete, a suggestion that is very much in line with the vision of things coming to an end that lies at the heart of The Sopranos. Moreover, Jameson’s description of the characteristics of postmodernist culture (Postmodern) illuminates The Sopranos in a number of other important ways as well.
Of course, one might argue that television itself is largely a postmodern phenomenon. Perry Anderson, amid a strong endorsement of Jameson’s understanding of postmodernism, has argued that, in the historical evolution of postmodernism, television was “the development that changed everything. . . . If there is any single technological watershed of the postmodern, it lies here” (87, 88). And Anderson is hardly alone in identifying television as the quintessential postmodern medium. As M. Keith Booker puts it, “The medium of television is, in fact, not only inextricable from the broader cultural phenomenon of postmodernism, but largely constitutive of that phenomenon” (Strange TV, 2). Meanwhile, Steven Connor notes that TV and video, as examples of technology-driven mass culture, “seem structurally to embody a surpassing of the modernist narrative of the individual artist struggling to transform a particular physical medium” (182). He then points to TV’s capacity for “fragmentation and interruption,” which combines with “the growing habit of channel-jumping” and “the intensifying absorption of TV in its own forms and history” to bring us to “a view of TV as constituting the postmodern psycho-cultural condition—a world of simulations detached from reference to the real, which circulate and exchange in ceaseless, centreless flow” (191).
In short, the obvious participation of American commercial television programming in the system of consumer capitalism would seem to be the perfect illustration of the complicity between postmodernism and late capitalism emphasized by theorists such as Jameson. In addition, one might note that the particular history of television, a phenomenon that originated as an important cultural force in the years after World War II and then rose to become the world’s dominant medium by the end of the 1960s, closely parallels (and is in fact an important part of) the history of late capitalism.
Our analysis of The Sopranos begins with a discussion of the place of the series in television history and of the way in which its postmodern, novelistic complexity not only marked the beginning of a new level of maturity for television as a genre, but pointed the way forward for a number of similarly mature programs to come. In addition, The Sopranos, as a series broadcast on a pay cable channel that nevertheless became such a central work of contemporary popular culture, participated in (and helped to propel forward) a number of crucial changes in the economic and technological structure of the American culture industry.
These changes were themselves elements of the ongoing growth of postmodernism as a global cultural dominant. In the second chapter, we explain our understanding of the phenomenon of postmodernism as it relates to The Sopranos. Chapter 3 then extends this analysis to discuss in more detail the vision of history (which is at least partly a lack of a vision of history) that informs The Sopranos, providing an understanding of that vision as an element of the postmodernity of the series. Among other things, this chapter notes the strong element of sentimentality and nostalgia that underlies the historical vision of the characters of the series, most of whom tend to feel that things were surely better back in the 1950s and that now things are in such a state of decline that history may well be in its final stages, about to enter a period of final, apocalyptic termination—a termination that is, of course, most vividly marked in The Sopranos by the famous sudden cut-to-black that ends the series itself.
Chapter 4 concludes this initial establishment of the position of The Sopranos within the cultural and historical context of postmodernism by noting the engagement of the series with late (global, consumer) capitalism itself. In particular, the characters of The Sopranos self-consciously live in a world in which everything has been reduced to the status of a commodity and in which everything and everyone has a price. Organized crime in the series is neither a romantic gesture of independence from the workaday world nor a defiant declaration of countercultural politics. It is, instead, a business like everything else, its status as such making organized crime a microcosm of contemporary capitalism as a whole, rather than an alternative to it.
Subsequent chapters deal in turn with the treatment of specific themes and issues in The Sopranos, within the framework laid out in these initial chapters. Chapter 5 addresses the relationship between the series and the gangster film tradition with which it engages in so much overt dialogue, looking in particular at the way in which films such as the Godfather sequence and Goodfellas are acknowledged not only by the series, but by its characters, as important predecessors. Indeed, one of the most postmodern aspects of The Sopranos is its performativity, a key element of which involves the extensive attempts of its gangster characters to conduct themselves in ways that they seem to have learned by watching gangster films.
Chapter 6 discusses the extensive use of comedy in The Sopranos, including the ways in which the comic elements of the series enter into dialogue with specific genres of comedy (such as the television sitcom or absurdist drama), thus producing a sort of history of American comedy as a whole. This chapter also discusses the way in which the mixture of serious and comic elements that is a crucial part of the texture of The Sopranos is also typical of postmodernist culture as a whole. On the other hand, the comic elements of the series often make serious satirical points in their own right, while at the same time providing reminders that The Sopranos is just a television series, constructed largely for entertainment purposes, and should not be taken too seriously as a statement about anything.
Chapter 7 explores the treatment of religion in The Sopranos, which can often be quite irreverent (and quite comic). The characters themselves, almost all self-declared Roman Catholics, often tend not to take their religion very seriously, other than making a token effort to at least acknowledge their Catholic backgrounds. At the same time, they bemoan the decline of religion in the contemporary world, which they regard as a central aspect of the general collapse of authority in that world and as a key part of the general narrative of loss and decline that is so central to the series as a whole.
Commentators such as Philip Rieff have noted this historical decline in the role of religion in day-to-day life in modern America, arguing that much of the role formerly played by religion has now been assumed by various forms of psychotherapy. Chapter 8 discusses the important role played by psychotherapy in The Sopranos, noting that the emphasis on this motif in the series is closely related to the history of psychotherapy in the United States as a whole. Meanwhile, this chapter explores the significance of the fact that a character such as Tony Soprano, who needs and seeks psychotherapy, is also skeptical of it, seeing its growing prominence in American life as a sign of overall social and cultural decline.
In many ways, the central motif of The Sopranos is family, and the parallel depiction of Tony’s life as boss of a crime family and patriarch of a domestic family is perhaps the single most obvious distinguishing structural feature of the series. Chapter 9 investigates the centrality of this double family structure to the series. In both cases, the series depicts the conventional family structure as being in a serious state of decline, the traditional bonds that have held both types of families together being seriously strained. In one of the central postmodern paradoxes of The Sopranos, in fact, all forms of group affiliation are under threat, even as individuals seem to find it harder and harder to function apart from some sort of group identity.
One key aspect of the breakdown of family structures in The Sopranos involves challenges to traditional patriarchal structures and conventional gender roles. As noted in chapter 10, the gangsters of the series are almost all male and almost all are devoted to performing their masculine identities. Organized crime remains a macho world in The Sopranos, but these performances of masculinity are becoming less and less convincing in a postmodern world in which both the definition and even the value of “masculinity” are in question.
This uncertainty over what it means to be a man in America at the beginning of the twentieth century only makes the gangsters of The Sopranos try all the harder to exert their masculinity, which often involves an attempt to assert their superiority over the non-masculine. Sometimes this project takes the form of an extreme homophobia; sometimes it takes the form of misogyny, though feminine roles in the series are also in flux. Chapter 11 notes the importance of women in The Sopranos, which often allows them a prominence that was seldom available in the previous history of gangster narratives. Psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi is the obvious case of a successful professional woman who embodies the new roles available to women, but women throughout the series are exploring new possibilities and performing new identities that have only recently become available to them.
Chapter 12 explores the way in which, if The Sopranos produces a sort of history of organized crime in America, it also produces a history of crime fighting, especially via its representation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI struggles throughout the series to gather evidence against Tony and his fellow gangsters, driving several of them to ruin in ruthless ways that call into question any easy moral distinction between the activities of the FBI and those of the criminals they pursue. The depiction of the FBI in the series provides a venue for exploring a number of key contemporary issues, such as the increasingly panoptic pervasiveness of surveillance, especially in the post-9/11 years. Meanwhile, the diversion of FBI resources late in the series from pursuing gangsters to pursuing terrorists poses key questions about changes in America’s official priorities in those years.
In chapter 13, we look at the treatment of issues of race and ethnicity in The Sopranos, whose gangster characters tend to rely in such a central way on their identities as Italian Americans. Indeed, one of the crucial strategies of the series is to set these Italian Americans in opposition to other ethnic/national groups, such as African Americans, Jews, or Russians. Most of the gangster characters in The Sopranos are virulently racist, and the gradual erosion of ethnic boundaries and identities is one of the most important narratives of loss and decay about which they worry so much. At the same time, business is business, and the series’ central Italian American figure, Tony Soprano himself, is sometimes willing to put aside ethnic prejudices if they get in the way of his profit margin.
Finally, chapter 14 confronts the issue of class, perhaps the most confused and repressed of all categories of group identification in American culture. The issue is especially confused for someone like Tony, who has risen from “working-class” origins (his father was a gangster, but a much less affluent one, and his immigrant grandfather was a stonemason) to his current affluent status. However, the means by which he attained that status (accompanied by the unpolished exterior that he still shows to the world) ensures that he will never be accepted as an equal by most of those of similar financial standing, even if they themselves are Italian Americans. Tony thus identifies neither with the working class nor with his affluent suburban neighbors, whom he regards as pretentious phonies in their attempt to fit in with mainstream upper-class America. But Tony and his fellow gangsters may be just as phony, just as pretentious in their attempts to act out their criminal roles, even if they themselves believe they are being entirely authentic.
The Sopranos may be contradictory and inconclusive, but it is consistently so. Thus, while it treats all of the issues noted above within the overall arc of its historical narrative of decline from the Golden Age of the 1950s (and before), it is highly suspicious of its own narrative, always aware that this narrative itself might be disingenuous and that the Good Old Days might not have been all that good to begin with. Thus, the older ways of living that the characters of the series so often idealize never function as any sort of alternative to the late-capitalist present. In the meantime, The Sopranos views the advance of late capitalism from the 1950s onward with considerable suspicion and skepticism, but seems to regard this advance as inevitable and irresistible, never proposing anything in the way of a genuine future alternative. Aesthetically, the sheer quality of the series points toward a bright future for commercial television programming, demonstrating a potential that goes well beyond the wasteland to which television viewers prior to 1999 had become all too accustomed. Politically, The Sopranos presents some strong criticisms of the American society at the beginning of the twenty-first century, but it seems to have few ideas for genuine changes that might lead to a better future.