Tanya Gold Tanya Gold

Why The Sopranos remains the greatest gangster drama of all time

The TV show makes its original source material – The Godfather trilogy, Goodfellas – look naive

Defiantly sexy with his fat hands and dachshund’s eyes: James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. Credit: Anthony Neste/Getty Images 
issue 18 September 2021

The Sopranos is called the greatest television show in history. It is the tale of Anthony ‘Tony’ Soprano, a middle-aged man in psychotherapy who also happens to run a New Jersey crime family. Anthony means ‘priceless’; the choice of name is surely deliberate. The Sopranos is complex — all masterpieces are — but it is fundamentally about greed: for money; for sex (the crew inhabit the Bada Bing! lap-dancing club, where breasts are landscape); for alcohol; for power; for the base drug of food.

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