The Sopranos Review

Chase's premise, a mob boss in therapy, could have been a sketch. Instead it became the series that taught American drama to keep two readings alive simultaneously: Tony is charming and Tony is a murderer, and the show never lets you keep only the first. James Gandolfini is why the grade is not negotiable. He plays appetite, self-pity and sudden violence as one continuous physical state, and Edie Falco matches him by making Carmela's complicity a slow accounting rather than a revelation.

The writing risks whole episodes on dream logic and still collects, and Pine Barrens works precisely because the Russian is never found. New Jersey is shot as strip malls, cul-de-sacs and back rooms, unglamorous and specific, so the Bada Bing registers as a workplace rather than a set. The dialogue catches how inarticulate men talk around what they mean, then hides the thesis in a malapropism. The cut to black, still argued about, is the only honest exit for a man who cannot change and will not stop.