The Sopranos

You skipped it. “Gangster show.” Understood. You’ve seen Goodfellas, you’ve seen the parodies, you know the shape of it — fat men in bathrobes shouting over gabagool, someone gets whacked, someone else cries about it. You filed it under “dad’s DVDs” sometime around 2004 and moved on with your life.

Here’s what you actually missed: the best character study ever televised. The mob stuff is the wallpaper. The show is about a man having a panic attack because he’s realised his family — both of them — are built on rot, and no amount of therapy is going to fix a person who enjoys what he does.

That’s the premise, really. Tony Soprano, depressed mafia capo, starts seeing a therapist and can’t tell her the truth about his job. Everything flows from that one structural joke: the most honest conversations of his life are happening under a set of lies so large it has a body count. And Tony is — this is the thing that gets people — likeable. Charismatic, funny, genuinely tender with his kids sometimes. The show makes you root for him, then makes you sit with what you just rooted for, then makes you do it again next week. It never lets you off the hook, and it never lectures you either. It just watches him, with a level of patience and specificity that American TV hadn’t seen before.

Because that’s the second thing: you did watch the shows this thing created. Breaking Bad is The Sopranos’ structural playbook with a chemistry teacher. Mad Men is its therapy sessions in better tailoring. The Wire, Succession, Peaky Blinders — every antihero drama you’ve enjoyed is running David Chase’s plays. Watching them first is like learning music theory before ever hearing the song. Go back to the source and you can see the seams — the episodes that are “just” family dinner, the dream sequences, the cut to black. Everyone after was imitating; Chase was inventing it live, sometimes mid-scene.

And it’s funny. Genuinely funny — Paulie Walnuts alone is worth the price of admission, a man so confidently stupid he feels like a documentary subject. The comedy isn’t relief from the darkness, it’s load-bearing. The show understands that monsters eat dinner and complain about their mothers, and that’s more chilling than any shootout.

Twenty-odd years on it hasn’t dated, because it was never really about 1999 New Jersey. It’s about self-deception — a man who wants to be a good person and isn’t, being told this by everyone around him, and choosing not to hear it. Six seasons, 86 episodes, and the final scene is still argued about because it earns the argument.

You skipped it because you thought you knew what it was. You knew the skin. The show underneath is the one everyone else has been copying for twenty-five years.

Go and watch it properly.