Before Walter White, There Was Tony Soprano

 

Rewatching the first season of The Sopranos today is an interesting experience.

Of course, there are the elements everyone remembers: the mafia, the violence, the betrayals, and Tony Soprano himself. But watching it again years later, one thing stands out.

Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) feels surprisingly ordinary.

He worries about his children. He has problems with his mother. His marriage is complicated. He struggles with anxiety and unhappiness. He worries about the future and questions his own decisions.

And then, occasionally, he orders someone to be killed.

That contrast is what made The Sopranos so important. The show did not simply tell the story of a mob boss. It placed a mob boss inside the familiar structure of everyday life.

That combination did more than make The Sopranos entertaining. It helped change television.

The extraordinary became ordinary

A gangster story was not new when The Sopranos arrived. Audiences had already seen organized crime on screen many times, but Tony Soprano was different from the criminals that audiences were used to. 

He had all the problems we have. He just also happened to be in the mafia.

That might sound like a simple difference, but it changed the way television approached its protagonists. Tony wasn't presented as a distant criminal figure whose life was completely separate from our own. The audience was invited into his home.

We saw him as a father before seeing him as a killer. We saw him argue with his wife, worry about his children, and struggle with his mother.

The uncomfortable result was that we began to understand him.

Tony Soprano changed the kind of protagonist television could have

One of The Sopranos' greatest contributions was helping establish the modern television antihero.

Tony Soprano was not a good man. The series never needed to pretend otherwise. But he was also not simply a villain.

He was charismatic, funny, vulnerable, selfish, loving, violent, insecure, and deeply contradictory. The audience could be horrified by his actions and still want to know what happened to him next.

That became one of the most important lessons television learned - a protagonist did not have to be someone audiences admired.

They simply had to be someone audiences could not stop watching.

Therapy gave us access to the antihero

One of the most important and revolutionary elements of The Sopranos was sitting right there in Dr. Jennifer Melfi's (Lorraine Bracco) office.

Tony goes to therapy.

Today, that might not seem particularly unusual. Television is full of characters discussing trauma, anxiety, childhood and emotional struggles. But Tony Soprano was a fascinating person to place in that environment.

This was a mafia boss: a man associated with violence, power and a very traditional idea of masculinity. And yet, he was having panic attacks.

He was struggling emotionally. He was talking about his mother. He was worrying about his children. He was trying, although not always successfully, to understand himself.

Therapy gave the audience access to Tony's internal world.

Dr. Melfi became more than a therapist. In many ways, she became a bridge between Tony and the audience.

Through them, we are invited into his head, making him incredibly human... like us. 

A family drama with a mafia problem

The most surprising thing about The Sopranos at the time is how much of it can feel like a family drama. Tony and Carmela (Edie Falco) argue. The children create problems. Tony struggles with his mother.

There are dinners, conversations, and conflicts that could exist in almost any household.

And then, suddenly, there is a mafia problem.

This contrast is essential to what made the show work.

The violence is more disturbing because it exists alongside normality. Tony does not live in a completely separate criminal universe. He goes from discussing family problems to dealing with the consequences of his criminal life.

The ordinary and the extraordinary constantly exist together.

And this also helped demonstrate something important about television storytelling: a great story did not always need to be about something happening. Sometimes, it could be about what was happening between the big events.

Television was becoming something audiences took seriously

The Sopranos was also part of a much larger transformation within the entertainment industry.

For a long time, television had often been treated as the smaller sibling of cinema. Movies were where major stars, ambitious directors and serious storytelling supposedly belonged.

Television was entertainment.

Cinema was art.

Of course, the reality was always more complicated than that, but The Sopranos helped accelerate a change in perception.

The series demonstrated that audiences were willing to invest their time in complex, long-form storytelling. They were willing to follow characters for years. They wanted quality.

And the industry began to understand that investing in television could be worthwhile.

The small screen was no longer necessarily small in ambition.

The audience changed too

Tony Soprano forced viewers into a complicated relationship with the protagonist.

We knew he was capable of terrible things. We watched him hurt people. We watched the consequences of his choices. And yet, we kept caring about what happened to him.

Sometimes, we even wanted him to succeed.

That relationship between audience and protagonist became increasingly important in television. Shows could now challenge the viewer's morality.

They could make us root for people we might condemn in real life.

They could make us uncomfortable with our own reactions.

Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is a perfect example. Breaking Bad repeatedly asks the audience how far they are willing to follow him. At what point do we stop defending him?

And why did we defend him for so long?

But this kind of relationship between the audience and a morally compromised protagonist had already found one of its most important expressions in Tony Soprano.

The television antihero did not simply become darker. The audience became more willing to follow them into the darkness.

Tony Soprano did not create everything that came after him

It would be too simple to say that The Sopranos invented modern television.

It did not.

Television was already changing, and many writers, creators, and series contributed to that transformation.

But The Sopranos became one of the defining moments of that change.

It proved what was possible.

It showed that audiences would follow complicated stories.

It showed that protagonists could be deeply flawed.

It showed that television could be psychologically complex, visually ambitious and morally uncomfortable.

And perhaps most importantly, it changed the relationship between television and its audience.

Before The Sopranos, television often asked us whether a character was good or bad.

After The Sopranos, television became increasingly interested in asking something much more uncomfortable: Why do we care about them anyway?

That may be the real legacy of Tony Soprano. He helped create a television landscape where Walter White, Don Draper and so many other complicated, damaged and morally questionable characters could exist.

Tony Soprano did not just change what television looked like; he changed audiences.