From an Article by Lee Gardner published in the City Paper Online - Television, 3/14/99

HBO's The Sopranos Breathes Life into Mafia Genre

It was the ducks that did it.

In the debut episode of HBO's new weekly series The Sopranos, suburban-New Jersey Mafia boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) is first seen entering his backyard swimming pool at dawn to swim with a family of ducks who have been nesting nearby. But the ducklings, fledged and ready to fly, soon take off, leaving Tony-a murderer, a made man who inspires fear in his neighbors and envy in his underlings-looking at the sky with a sense of sadness that he can't defeat.

As the episode went on to show, Tony had been having anxiety attacks brought on by stresses in his family life as well as his other family, and he secretly begins seeing a psychotherapist to sort it all out. This brash conceit proved to be just the opening gambit in what has developed into a complex series of plots and subplots, cracklingly well executed under the auspices of series creator and executive producer David Chase. But somehow it was the ducks and their use as a symbol of Tony's Cheeveresque midlife angst that put the episode over the top and made it one of the most indelible TV series debuts since the first episode of Twin Peaks.

Admittedly, the idea for a TV series based on workaday Jersey mafiosos does not seem like a recipe for quality television. Mob movies have become almost as omnipresent in the '80s and '90s as Westerns were in the '50s. In fact, the Mafia has been so thoroughly mythologized and then demythologized that tales of familial infighting and offers you can't refuse can come off shopworn and too familiar. After the blue-collar thugs of Mean Streets, the imperial Dons of the Godfather series, the marquee mobsters of Bugsy, and the mutts of Donnie Brasco, it's hard to imagine how yet another representation could possibly turn up new angles or stand comparison.

One of The Sopranos' neatest tricks is that its mobsters live and work in the same mob-sick world as the rest of us. Though the name Gotti never comes up, Tony Soprano and his crew clearly realize they are living in the twilight of the Mafia's power and influence-in one episode they fend off a Russian gang looking to move in on a previously sacrosanct garbage-hauling contract. Worse still, the younger crew members have gotten most of their mob schooling from the same romanticized sources as the audience and find themselves frustrated with the truck hijackings and petty drug deals that make up most of actual organized crime. When budding earner/TV-baby Christopher (Michael Imperioli) tries to think of a course of action, he's just as likely to reference Scarface's Tony Montana as Tony Soprano.

While this post-mob effect strips away any potential for the high notes of Scorsesean Mafia opera (or the highly stylized Wiseguy TV series), it brings the characters further into our world. Tony is, in many ways, just as much a struggling average Joe as any other character on television-a deadly Ralph Kramden with a modest mansion and an FBI file. He is successful, but it doesn't make him happy. His marriage to Carmela (Edie Falco) seems strong, but it is not without its problems-including Tony's infidelities and Carmela's relationship with the Church and worldly priest Father Phil (Paul Schulze). Tony loves his kids, but finds himself as puzzled as any father at his daughter Meadow (Jamie Lynn Sigler) and her teenage rebellion, or his son Anthony Jr. (Robert Iler) and his prepubescent awkwardness. Factor in the headaches brought on by Tony's aging mother Livia (Nancy Marchand); his scheming, power-hungry mobster uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese); and the stresses of running a criminal enterprise which is by turns life-and-death and mundane, and you have a rich cast of characters as well as a dozen reasons why Tony might need a little talk therapy and a course of antidepressants.

Tony reluctantly spends part of each episode trying to unburden his considerably burdened soul to Dr. Melfi (GoodFellas' Lorraine Bracco). These sessions don't expose Tony's inner life so much as they remind the audience that Tony has an inner life, and that knowledge illuminates everything else he does. The bearish Gandolfini, a veteran character actor who has given stand-out performances in such recent films as Get Shorty and A Civil Action, does an exquisite job with his role as a polo-shirt-and-slacks-clad mob skipper-even his belly-leading walk bespeaks the kind of quiet entitlement one can back up with violence. But Tony is wrestling with trying to be a better, happier person while he's professionally obligated to be a bad man, and that crucial tension pushes Gandolfini's performance into the sublime. He is able to make Tony believable, sympathetic even, as a well-meaning husband and father who is capable of ebullience at life's little pleasures as well as running down an errant debtor with his luxury sedan.

Gandolfini heads a uniformly excellent cast of little-known actors (though Lou Grant vet Marchand sometimes threatens to eclipse the ensemble vibe with her sly turn as Tony's dotty-yet-wily mother). But a cast is only as good as its material. Chase and his writers have cooked up a series of scripts that send story arcs and character development boldly looping out across the episodes while sprinkling humor all along the way. Although each character gets a fully formed life to live through the action (most notably the female characters), and the plot features all the ups and downs of a soap opera, Chase and company occasionally drop everything so that a couple of Tony's old-school Mafia soldiers (Vincent Pastore and Tony Sirico) can steer the story through a delightfully wry fish-out-of-water bit in a Starbucks.

Like the pioneering Hill Street Blues before it, the show also refuses to let things conveniently drop. When Tony makes peace with his ambitious Uncle Junior and accedes nominal control of the crew, it makes for a nice episode-ender. But thanks to Tony's unthwarted ambition to run things regardless, and the rhythm that the series has established, the viewer just knows the issue is far from dead, and that like almost any action in any given episode, it will come back around and bite someone on the ass a few shows later. That kind of TV chutzpa rewards and tantalizes regular viewers. The Sopranos is an entirely different enterprise than HBO's late, lamented weekly series cornerstone The Larry Sanders Show, but it has every bit of the same compulsive watchability.

In one unfortunate respect, the show proves once and for all that HBO series are every bit as formulaic as network fare in their own fashion. Every episode of The Sopranos goes out of its way to include a gratuitous shot of a bubble-breasted stripper or hot-tub skinny dipper, as if the entire 18-to-35-male demographic would throw down its remotes and refuse to watch the show without weekly nipple exposure.

Clearly The Sopranos is made of finer stuff as well, however. Calling it literary might be going a bit far, but the series certainly doesn't go wanting for ambition as it unspools its la Cosa Nostra agonistes amid the Jersey wilds. Weeks after the first episode, Tony strangles a mob rat he inadvertently stumbles across while driving his daughter around New England on a college-visitation trip (it's that kind of show). As he stands over the body, another death on his hands and his soul, he looks up to see a ducks flapping across the sky in V-formation, and you know that the story of The Sopranos is far from over.