Awesome TV: The Sopranos

All the new streamers want to make great TV, but HBO nailed it in the late 1990's, and still slays. Let's hope they can keep it up.

As I am increasing my media collection, one series that I didn’t watch live (I didn’t have HBO) but that I first discovered in the streaming era was The Sopranos. It was probably 2012 when I first tuned it in¹, and I was just hooked from the first episode. It reaches out and grabs you by the gonads, sucking you in to the story, and oh, what a story it is.

Late-stage Mafia, across the Hudson in Jersey, the local capo - Tony Soprano - struggles with the changing of an era, where the world of wise guys is being undone by the rise of the modern “data” era, more aggressive law enforcement, and a lot of bad people doing bad things that no longer is tolerated.

The arc of the story is everything that a Godfather and Goodfellas fan would want. Hell, it is practically a works program for the actors from Goodfellas. Watching the series over the 6 seasons, you see familiar faces, but also some shorter arcs with big names like Steve Buscemi popping in for a few episodes.

Make no mistake about it, it is brutal, gritty, and the characters are in no way sympathetic. In fact, unlike The Godfather that almost mythologized the mob, this is more like a shitty job, a grind that is not rewarding.

There are some brutal scenes. The tale of the gambling addict who shoehorns his way into a high stakes game (and gets big in debt to Tony) who destroys his life and family. The stripper from Bada Bing that Ralphie² beat to death, and the race horse that he killed that sealed his fate.

But the story is compelling.

One can compare HBO’s “The Sopranos” to some of the dreck that the streamers produce. I already commented that any Netflix Original starts with two strikes, but even the huge players like Amazon (their WoT series is just garbage), and Apple’s huge spend on serializing the epic Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy (seriously, I barely made it through 2 episodes before just being disgusted.)

Nope, nobody else has bottled the HBO magic. Alas, I suspect with all the HBO/MAX/to MAX as part of Warner/Discovery, the era of great content from HBO is now over.

Anyway, another spot bonus at work has allowed me to just pull the trigger to add it to my collection. It now resides on my Plex server, and I am on a nostalgia tour of the early episodes.

Delish!

1. I think it was on Netflix - back when they were the only game. Now, Netflix just makes a lot of mediocre garbage content under the aegis of “Netflix Original” - barf

2. The actor is Joe Pantoliano, who also played Cypher in The Matrix, a dirtbag there, a dirtbag in The Sopranos. His archetype!

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