The Antihero Trilogy, Part 1
Over the course of the pandemic, my husband and I have watched and/or rewatched the three antihero dramas credited with defining the Golden Age of Television: The Sopranos, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad. To state the obvious, these are great shows, some of the best ever made. Watching them in 2020-2021, more than a decade after the youngest of them first started airing, was surprisingly revelatory, even though I’d seen two out of the three before. Does the internet really need more words about any of these shows and the famously flawed white men at their centers? No. I’ve resisted writing about them for almost a year at this point, when we finished The Sopranos. I already have two failed drafts of something about Mad Men haunting my newsletter Scrivener file, unable to answer the question of why they should exist. But as the unimpeachable philosophy of the New York Times Styles section tells us, three is a trend. I’ve got the antihero hat trick now, and thus a (barely) defensible reason to indulge in writing about them. Spoilers, obviously, will abound.
First up: The Sopranos. It’s the only one of the three shows I hadn’t seen before; I was too young to have watched it from the beginning, and when my friends started catching up via DVD in college, I found the violence and machismo repulsive and didn’t join in. (They are repulsive, but of course that’s the point. Anyway, it turns out that between c.2006 and 2020, I’d seen a lot of equally bad or worse stuff on TV.) I’m not alone in this trajectory, as many meme accounts, trend pieces, and millennial/Gen Z re-analyses of The Sopranos will tell you. The ur-text of the middle-aged Baby Boomer is now speaking to their children and even younger adults.
When I started watching The Sopranos, I was immediately struck by how self-aware it is about its own time period. The gauche McMansions, the proudly gas-guzzling SUVs, Carmela’s French manicures and blow-dried bangs, the rising acceptance of antidepressants and therapy-talk in (relatively) polite company, Meadow’s nascent millennial obsession with an oppressively narrow version of success that somehow still conflicts with her parents’ even narrower one, the unthinking and nearly unconscious consumption of an endlessly replenishing supply of packaged junk food—these are themes and symbols in the show, of course, but they also viscerally evoke the ambience of white America during my adolescence. My life was almost nothing like The Sopranos, and yet watching it felt like a sense memory.
Artistically, The Sopranos almost seems like period piece made about the late 1990s and early 2000. An actual period piece, like Mad Men, naturally has a double consciousness: How the characters see their world, and how the present-day creators and audience see that world. Those perspectives chafe against each other, creating friction the work can mine for thematic and narrative tension. The Sopranos, somewhat incredibly, has the same sort of double consciousness without actually being a period piece. It saw at the time what many of us would come to recognize only in retrospect: that white America in the late 1990s and early 2000s was toxic and dangerous, to those of us trapped inside its logic and to the rest of the world forced to suffer in the name of our empty sense of comfort and security.
The Sopranos begins in 1999, the fragile peak of the so-called end of history, when the Cold War was over and the U.S. was in search of a new narrative about its place in the world. In the very first episode, in his very first therapy session, Tony says of his life in the mob, and also America, “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”
That sentiment is one reason given to explain the show’s current popularity with millennials and Gen Z. “Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral,” writes Willy Staley in The New York Times Magazine. And yeah, I can relate. We came through the end of history only to find ourselves staring down the barrel of no future. None of the things we’ve been taught to want, pursue, or dream about actually improve our lives; in fact, many of those things (status-conferring jobs, insular nuclear families, the elimination of discomfort and inconvenience, the near instant gratification of any consumerist impulse) actively make our lives, and the world, worse. In their book The Sopranos Sessions, Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall write, “This is a life where the only way to function is to not look too closely at who you are and what you’re doing.”
The Sopranos rightfully names that protective impulse as repression, and it has some empathy for how characters use it as a survival tactic. (I’m especially thinking of how Tony can and can’t understand his relationship with his abusive mother, or the scene where Meadow steps right up to the line of telling her therapist she thinks her father had her boyfriend killed but ultimately can’t admit it even to herself.) But while the show might understand why its characters go to such great psychological lengths to continue functioning in a corrupt system, it never stops judging them for it. Repression may be a survival tactic, but the complicity it breeds is immoral. Full stop, no compromises.
Again and again, The Sopranos argues that refusing to see the violence and exploitation that run just under the surface of your life—that, in fact, make your life possible—doesn’t stop them from rotting you from the inside out. Resisting it or even toying with escaping it puts you in grave danger (see: Adriana). But going along with it doesn’t keep you safe either (see: Christopher; arguably Carmela). These characters end up dead, betrayed, morally bankrupted, or all of the above. The next generation never musters the wherewithal to break away, because the values they’ve been inculcated with have destroyed their sense of self or ket them from developing one in the first place. Souls are replaced with, as Seitz and Sepinwall write, “the callous of lies and self-deception everyone in and around the Family has to build up to make it through the day.”
The historical period The Sopranos so precisely evokes, and also skewers, was one of widespread repression and complicity. It was the last moment where middle- and upper-class white America could say I didn’t know and be believed, or at least believe it ourselves. Of course, we did know. We knew about the looming threat of climate change, the continued existence of violent racism and our role in perpetuating it, the growing chasms of inequality, the crumbling of the social safety net, the force for bad our country had been and was becoming in the world. (After starting in the end of history, The Sopranos seamlessly transitions to the war on terror.) We knew the price was coming due, but we still thought that maybe, if we refused to acknowledge it, we wouldn’t have to pay.
The Sopranos’ new, younger fans no longer have the choice to live in that delusion. We (as a millennial born in 1986, I feel like I belong to both these “we”s) may still be complicit in all the same ways—maybe even worse ones!—but at least we can’t pretend we don’t know it. In that way, I find the show’s cultural resurgence rather optimistic. We aren’t watching Tony Soprano as an avatar for us and our sadness for the glorious past we’ve been denied. We’re watching him, as Luke Ottenhof argues in Vulture, as a parody: “Rather than hearing Tony’s woes and relating, a younger generation of viewers can hear them and chuckle at another middle-aged white man victimized by the systems he’s supporting, incapable of imagining an alternative.” If we can laugh (and sometimes cry) at all the ways in which Tony and his F/families are trapped in a hell of their own making, maybe that also means we can find a way out.