The Sopranos
Overview
A mob boss walks into a psychiatrist's office. In 1999 that sounded like a sitcom premise; David Chase turned it into the show that changed television. James Gandolfini plays Tony Soprano, a New Jersey crime boss who starts having panic attacks — one hits while he's watching the ducks in his pool — and secretly begins therapy with Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). From that chair, the series sprawls across six seasons and two families: Carmela and the kids in the suburban house, and the crew — Paulie, Silvio, nephew Christopher — in a world of pork stores and back-room sit-downs. Edie Falco, Michael Imperioli and Dominic Chianese are all superb. The writing swings between pitch-dark comedy, sudden violence and dream sequences people are still arguing about, and Gandolfini somehow makes a murderer the most recognisably human man on TV. It's routinely called the greatest series ever made, it kicked off the antihero era that later gave us Breaking Bad and Mad Men, and that final scene — cut to black, mid-song — is still starting arguments at dinner tables decades later.
