Excerpts from an Article by Jeffrey Wells

Why all the heat? The Sopranos is Analyze This with depth. We know they share the same basic setup about a gruff, middle-management, stressed-out Mafia capo — James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano and Robert De Niro's Paul Vitti, respectively — delving into his hang-ups under analysis. But this and numerous other similarities aside, the presentations are as different as Marlon Brando's performances in The Freshman and The Godfather — and I don't use the Godfather reference lightly.

Analyze This is basically schtick — a sitcom played strictly for laughs — while The Sopranos uses the exploration of a mobster's emotional angst as a way into a world. Tony Soprano's demimonde includes his wife and kids, his Medusa-like mother (an amazing performance from Nancy Marchand), his tough-old-buzzard uncle (Dominic Chianese) and a host of various soldiers and stoolies. The episodes unfold simply and unpretentiously, with canny plot turns and a growing familiarity with the characters that keeps pulling you in.

The plots are flavored with Italian goombah mythology (which is nicely enlarged upon by the show's frequent references to popular Mafia movies) and the cultural particulars of their suburban New Jersey lives, but the sum effect is a haunting reflection of America's spiritual corruption and sociological coming-apart like nothing I've seen since The Godfather, Part II. It's not just Tony Soprano fretting over the loss of tradition and the degeneration of values on HBO each week — it's his audience. The show is drama as mass therapy, and vice versa.

The fascinating result is that The Sopranos gets us to identify with and care about a bad guy — a lying, murdering sociopath — because we understand his inner fears.

Creator-producer David Chase and his team of writers deserve standing ovations, which I'm sure they'll receive in earnest come Emmy time. Special praise also for Gandolfini, who has upped his industry profile here considerably. I've been watching him play mostly thug or prole types over the past few years (True Romance, Crimson Tide, Get Shorty) with a growing respect that didn't quite include feeling excited. The Sopranos has changed all that. Clout-wise, esteem-wise, he's now on (or near) Gene Hackman's level.