HBO
I Soprano

THE NEW YORK TIMES: "The greatest work of American popular culture in the last quarter century."

The first cognitive distortion comes from a basic yet significant concept: the audience's bloodthirst.

We've often realized this. The Wire, first, and The Shield and True Detective, later. Once again, with Narcos, we faced something that only fiction can overturn and desecrate: the vision of death. Scorsese taught us that bloodshed is absolutely nothing spectacular. It is something ancestral, a sort of savage ritual, that reeks of the otherworld and damnation, stains the body, and putrefies the soul. The celebration of crime and, especially, its preparations, most of the time represent not only the culmination of the story but, in fact, the only raison d'être of the narrative in its entirety.

David Chase, the deus ex machina of The Sopranos, after destroying every single chance of a plot twist for five consecutive seasons, decides to deliver the final blow to the exhausted and disillusioned crowd in the sixth and final part of the show. In the last fifteen minutes of the penultimate episode, the much-coveted war between the New York and New Jersey gangs finally breaks out. Phil Leotardo's hitmen riddle the car with Silvio Dante and Patsy Parisi inside, in the parking lot of the nightclub managed by the Soprano family. During the escape, they cut off a motorcyclist who falls and is run over by passing cars. The group of people that had gathered outside the club, having witnessed the shooting, flees in a panic.

That’s us...

The Sopranos remains the opus magnum of Television, the show par excellence, the most revolutionary and imperfect among novels. Yes, because The Sopranos is like a novel, "The greatest and most violent American novel."

Before and more than Lost, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, above everything and everyone, where the air is rarefied and there is space only for the cursed gods, higher than the ultra-violent motorcycle crime drama mixed with Shakespeare’s King Lear and Macbeth, the Sons Of Anarchy by Kurt Sutter, who in vain tried to escape from the tentacular shadow of David Chase's stoic narrative construction, even higher than the bland and monotonous Gomorra, a noisy and flashy fiction, scribbled on a dirty sheet as useless as a hole in the back of the neck.

No guide is needed to understand The Sopranos, just watch symbolic and ultra-violent episodes like Whoever Did This and University, the iconic moments of The Long Term Parking or the ordinary hypocrisy and domestic brutality of Soprano Home Movies, you must carefully follow a series that reveals new details and unimaginable resolutions with each new viewing, as if everything autonomously changes, time after time.

This is a work not to be missed for any reason in the world, even at the cost of missing work, being late to your wedding, or your own funeral. Because it's not just about the mafia as we had never seen it told, but an intertwining of criminal and everyday life more true than truth, more real than reality, a bandit coming-of-age novel, the great American novel we all awaited in print, and which instead aired on television.

The immense showrunner David Chase explores the social dynamics of the low-level workers of organized crime, exposing them down to the smallest details: a descent into hell that doesn’t even end at the last episode. We witness the gradual and precise definition of the metropolitan underground, the postmodern underworld fueled by drugs, gambling, and any other racket capable of moving large amounts of money, the million-dollar conservation of the street empire, but with the constant paranoia of family safety and an apparently normal life, the distorted lens of a hallucinatory reality that leads to the gates of a gruesome depth where everything is stretched, extreme, brought to the darkest consequences.

Despite the premature farewell of the giant James Gandolfini, we are led to believe that Tony Soprano is alive, somewhere out there, between New Jersey and Miami, in New York as in Los Angeles, or hidden in a bare house, with the AR-10 rifle received on the day of his 47th birthday, afraid to go out, the fear that the FBI might break down the door and drag him away in handcuffs to sentence him to life imprisonment, or the terror that someone might shoot him in the head, without seeing the face, without even knowing one of the many, too many reasons.

After the blood, the sweat, the flesh, and the lead, we force ourselves to believe that Tony Soprano is inside each of us, maybe that’s exactly it. And we are all dead...