On a quiet afternoon in June 2013, I got word that James Gandolfini, the bear-like New Jersey native that rose to prominence playing Tony Soprano for nine years had died of a heart attack.

I find celebrity deaths peculiar in this social media age. I don’t know James Gandolfini and I have no concept of him as a person beyond seeing him on a screen pretending to be someone else. But I loved The Sopranos. I felt sad when I heard the news but really I was mourning the death of Tony Soprano, not James Gandolfini.

I spent a good while Facebooking, Tweeting and watching my favourite Sopranos clips on YouTube in a way that was seriously detrimental to my afternoon productivity. Yet it still hit me as odd to see people online send condolences along to James Gandolfini’s family and friends — I get the sentiment but it’s kind of goofy. I don’t know anyone he knows. I don’t think of James Gandolfini on a regular basis. There’s nothing to mourn. Entertainment choices are abundant. Other great actors will put out other great films.

Celebrities in America are more mythic and separate than those in New Zealand. New Zealand is so small that there’s a good chance that you know someone that knows our A-listers, or you’ve run into them in public, or you even know them yourself. When Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize I realised that I knew three separate people who know her well. Our celebrities are just around. Our geographically miniature size means that you can’t escape them. When Paul Holmes died, who spent decades in the public sphere and went from annoying to endearing to brilliant and back several times, it felt like a member of your extended family had passed away.

When you write about the death of someone like James Gandolfini, you know that your thoughts merely go on to a pile of thousands of other words.

Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano was mesmerising, a study in underacting and in embodying a character rather than performing a role. To me, The Sopranos will always beat out the other contenders in the best TV ever riff, because as fun and affecting as Bunk and McNulty were in The Wire, they don’t stay with you years later the way Tony Soprano does. Bryan Cranston, who played Walter White in Breaking Bad, admitted that without Tony Soprano the character he made a career on wouldn’t have existed. The narrative structure and composition of each season of Mad Men is directly influenced by The Sopranos, largely due to the time creator Matt Weiner spent writing and directing that show.

Every great piece of American TV in the last 10 years is partly the fruit of The Sopranos tree. And what I thought about the most after Gandolfini died was how much The Sopranos nailed the modern American story in an always affecting, sometimes violent, frequently funny and occasionally very moving way.

Yeah, The Sopranos is a show about mobsters, but it’s infinitely more a workplace and family drama than it is about crime. It dealt with the breakdown of tradition, the splintering of the family unit, modern anxieties, professional frustrations, the boundaries of loyalty, immigration, the way places change, paranoia, duty and the clash between profit and ethics.

The mobsters in The Sopranos are imitations in a sense; you’re subtly aware of the characters trying to play up to the performance models set down for them by The Godfather and Goodfellas. They’re all doomed in a way too, having come along at the end of a golden era.

All this orbits Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano. There’s something so representative of the modern American struggle in his character. It’s all laid out in the opening credits, with Tony looking out expressionless, squinting into the light behind the wheel of the car, smoking a cigar, the city in the distance, passing crumbling factories, nondescript freeways, passing through an unglamorous brick suburban setting and into his home.

In 90 seconds, it accurately captures more of what America looks and feels like than anything I’ve ever seen on TV.

Tony Soprano was always trying to hold his criminal family together and keep his family united. He loved his wife, but he was unfaithful. He was dealing with panic attacks and mental illness and was mortified of how people might view him if they knew. He struggled to connect with his kids and resented his mother. He was afraid. He carried an anger with him about being the one that had to come along at the end of an era, looking back on happier times and outward to an uncertain future.

In the seven years since the show wound up, I think Tony Soprano as a stand-in for America itself is even more fitting. Like Tony Soprano, America is good yet bad, a house divided, a mixture of outmoded, conservative ideas about gender, sexuality, government and race colliding with demands for equality and fairness. The country is a slave to its lesser natures, spying on its own citizens, but craning, somewhere in there, to do good, to be right, to have it all be for something.

The Sopranos finished with Tony’s family intact but doomed, having ultimately spelled it out to the viewer that he was not a good person.

The jury’s out for America still, but the chance for redemption remains alive. Tony Soprano is a lion of popular culture and for me, he will always spur these philosophical ponderings.

What James Gandolfini was like as a man, I can’t say. But to create Tony Soprano, a character so eternal and defining, has earned him immortality.