The Sopranos and The Wire often butt heads for first place for best-ever TV drama. I just finished watching The Sopranos -- over several months. You could binge-watch it but you might lose the will to live.
Not that The Sopranos isn't good; it's excellent, but, wow, can it be intense. The seven-season show offers a bird's-eye view of one Mafia family, headed by Tony Soprano, played by the late actor James Gandolfini, who manages to imbue the role with equal measures of sensitivity and boorishness, quick intelligence and thick-headedness.
Tony is a thug, a racketeer, an extortionist, and a cold-blooded killer, but he loves his wife and kids (he also loves animals). His love of family doesn't stop him from sleeping with an endless stream of women or brutally offing relatives who've strayed from true north. He's in therapy about all this, a secret he prefers his mob associates not know.
The real beauty of the show lies in its huge cast of characters and their unfolding lives over time -- Tony's henchmen, their families, Tony's own extended family, competing crime families, and a revolving door of comers and goers (the latter often exit in pieces). Performances are great across the board.
I liked the domestic subplots the best, involving mob children growing up and independent (or not) and sympathetic mob wives and girlfriends who love their thugs and their church and the pope. The women lunch, they shop, they refuse to face the fact that their lives are entirely subsidized by blood money; all the while their men wreak holy havoc like outlaws in the Wild West except it's today and this is New Jersey.
~Ann, Adult Services
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