Starring the late James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano, the series showed a hulking New Jersey mobster who was so violently, effectively intimidating that even as a viewer you were nervous of him, felt a strange need to be in his good graces and were flush with relief at the humanity he occasionally exuded. He represented a masculinity that was morally obsolete and yet enviable in the power he was able to wield. Women were his playthings and yet powerful women broke his balls – his ogress of a mother, Livia (Nancy Marchand), like some foul creature who would eat her own children, and who despite Tony’s desperation to please her, co-conspires to have him killed. Then there was wife Carmela (Edie Falco), no Lady Macbeth, apparently not wishing to know all the grisly details of how he provided for his family, but a formidable domestic partner nonetheless. Finally, there was Dr Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), with whom he seeks therapy following a panic attack and in whose sessions his vulnerable sense of supreme male security is exposed and queried.The Sopranos Season 1-6 Download.
Tony Soprano, a man so violently, effectively intimidating that even as a viewer you felt a strange need to be in his good graces. Photograph: Channel 4
If The Wire, the only series worthy of being bracketed alongside The Sopranos, reminded of 19th-century novelists like Dickens and Balzac in its extensive depiction of societal layers, then The Sopranos was Shakespearean.
Creator David Chase didn’t seek to examine the social and political structures of New Jersey the way The Wire creator David Simon did Baltimore. His creation was of a different order. Tony Soprano is a huge creation, tragic, comic, a man of appalling vice yet solemnly bound by his code, awe-inspiring and deeply flawed, excessively human, inhuman, a giant orb around whom minor but brilliantly conceived characters revolve, including protege Christopher, the ever-sensitive Paulie Walnuts and Silvio, played with deadpan excellence by Steven Van Zandt, aka Bruce Springsteen sidekick Little Steven.