Apologies to General MacArthur: “Old mob shows never die—and they never fade away, either.” 

In case you hadn’t noticed, the American media has ‘predictably’ gone gaga over the 25th anniversary of HBO’s The Sopranos, David Chase’s fictionalized (except for the relationship between mother and son) series about Italian American gangsters in New Jersey.  I put the word predictably in quotes to be ironic. 

From the very beginning, when the show premiered in January of 1999, a well-tuned marketing campaign, similar to the one for Friends in 1994, saturated every conceivable media outlet in the country. The actors appeared on magazine covers everywhere, as well as on billboards. Its director, David Chase, was hailed on talk shows as a creative genius. 

And, perhaps most perniciously of all, TV columnists and media critics were courted with gifts and/or told by editors to push the show. The old “payola” of radio days filtered down into television. (Note: If The Sopranos had been made ten years later, in 2009, God only knows how social media would have blown it up into the Second Coming.)

It was a show that had something for everyone: violence and T&A (not “tea” and “apricots”) for the men; soap-opera for the women (“Can you believe Carmela is flirting with a priest?”); a soundtrack with both old-school classics and modern music; and four-letter words to titillate the teenagers. 

For intellectuals, however, the film had something even more: Artistic relevance. This wasn’t just some TV show about one-dimensional gangsters. It had themes. Among them was middle-aged angst at the end of the 20th century; a playful sense of self-reflectivity via the show’s mob movie and pop culture references; a hard-nosed look at America’s social disintegration; and a critique on the capitalist system, both here and even abroad (Tony and his motley crew visit Italy).  In short, Chase created the Great American Television Show. Faulkner? Hemingway? Mere pikers. 

But to use a word once used by the late, great author/professor Richard Gambino at an American Italian Historical Association meeting: “Bullshit!”  It was the same old game plan: Italian Americans portrayed via familiar Hollywood tropes—gangsters, buffoons, mob wives. Over 100 years of such stereotypes had literally numbed viewers into accepting such tripe with nary a peep. Why, this isn’t defamation. It’s real Italian America! 

To use an Olympic metaphor: Chase—like every other American (Italian or otherwise)—grew up on mob movies and internally accepted them as the norm. Coppola won the Gold for The Godfather and Scorsese got the Silver for Goodfellas. And I am sure Chase is totally tickled with his Bronze.  (One is reminded of Sally Fields’s inane response upon winning an Oscar at the 1985 Academy Awards: “They like me, they really like me!”) 

However, despite the media’s incredibly successful campaign to silence those of us who despised The Sopranos, the year 2001 did allow for some dents in their armor of censorship.  Backlash against the show actually began a year earlier in May 2000: the late Dr. Manny Alfano and his Italian American One Voice Committee awarded David Chase its inaugural “Pasta-Tute Award,” given to a famous Italian American who did the most harm to his or her heritage. Newsweek, an influential magazine at the time, picked up Alfano’s press release and it made the national news. Suffice it to say that David Chase was not happy! 

It was a rare victory in terms of breaking through the mainstream media.  Here are other highlights from 2001, when anti-Soprano activists managed to make headway: 

April 6th, 2001—A group of lawyers in Chicago formed AIDA (American Italian Defense Association) and filed a lawsuit against the show; they said that it violated the “Individual Dignity Law” of the state’s constitution. The lawsuit, like Alfano’s satiric thrust, made national, even international, headlines, though a judge ultimately dismissed the case in late September of that year. 

April 16th, 2001—In the Los Angeles Times, columnist Martha M. Lauzen wrote a piece called “Let’s Not Forget The Brutalized Women in The Sopranos,” reminding people what today’s critics seem to forget about the show’s queasy, not-quite-dissipated misogyny. To quote Lauzen: 

“As long-suffering housewives, strippers, and prostitutes, the women of the ‘Sopranos’ take a beating—literally. The show’s psychological and physical violence against women reached its peak in the April 1st episode when viewers were treated to the prolonged and fatal beating of a pregnant stripper. This episode followed closely on the heels of another in which Tony’s psychiatrist (Dr. Melfi) was brutally raped.” 

May 2, 2001—The National Italian American Foundation (NIAF) of Washington DC sponsored a symposium of the show in New York with an array of distinguished guest speakers. The event, broadcast live on C-Span, featured a packed audience, followed by a Q&A session. 

One of the highlights was a self-described “rant” by cultural critic Camille Paglia, who called the show a “pastiche” and “worthless.” In her view, it was a “one dimensional look at Italian American working-class and middle-class life. Vergogna (Shame), David Chase, shame on you!”  (Nota bene: Paglia is a huge fan of Coppola’s Godfather, praising its “dignified” portrayal of Don Vito. She conveniently ignores the fact that he’s a murderer. Does “art” transcend “stereotypes?”) 

November 29, 2001—Camille Paglia again, this time at a conference in Pennsylvania: “Libelous images of Italian Americans are being replayed, poured into the culture. Italians shouldn’t put up with this anymore.” She then noted that real Italian Americans finally got noted after the September 11 attack:  “people who have been the invisible backbone of our nation’s infrastructure—police, firefighters, janitors—are being recognized as the sexy heroes they deserve to be.” 

Despite a fairly successful year for Italian American battles, we know who eventually won the war: HBO’s The Sopranos ran for another six years, though it quickly became, to use writer (and an initial fan of the show) James Wolcott’s phrase at the New York conference, a “parody of itself.”  When it finally ended in 2007, with that “ambiguous” ending (a man walks into a diner where Tony and his family are eating, then the screen fades to black), it was only a matter of time before Gen Z would discover it, which they promptly did. 

In the September 29th, 2021 issue of the New York Times Magazine, Willy Staley wrote a front-cover piece titled, “Why is Every Young Person in America Watching the Sopranos?” Staley goes on and on, ad nauseum, for a good five or six pages, composing complex interpretations and making metaphoric connections.  Yet he glossed over the most obvious reason: COVID was upon us and the new kids on the block, stuck at home, needed to entertain themselves. 

And some things, such as giggling at gross images of Italian Americans, never go out of fashion. -BDC