The Sopranos

I love endings. Perhaps that reflects my innate preference for completeness and the satisfaction derived from gaining answers, but there is also something fascinating about the extent to which an ending can influence our feelings on the story as a whole. These emotions seem to be particularly heightened when it…

“A lot of the best scenes in the show revolve around this conflicted mobster, Tony Soprano (played brilliantly by James Gandolfini), who suffers from both innate anxiety and depression, along with his dysfunctional families who intend to drag him down if he can’t help doing it himself.” — ‘The Sopranos’ is one of the most highly acclaimed television shows of all-time and is not just a show about a man caught between his real family and his mafia family but also about a certain period in American life. A lot of the best scenes in the show…

I’ve had a lot of fun with this one when I lived in London and there were a lot of travelers in any given group. It was also a fun warm-up exercise for week-long training sessions and such. In the US it was only fun online with some groups. …

Although I share my birthplace of Scranton, PA with Joe Biden and the urban activist Jane Jacobs, who successfully thwarted Robert Moses’ plan to build a highway through Washington Square Park, I was barely out of swaddling clothes when my parents whisked me to the magical land of New Jersey…

But alas, Tone will forever go down in TV lore — One of the most formidable achievements in television isn’t creating a captivating premise — it’s concocting said captivating premise and sticking the landing, from start to finish. Though The Sopranos triumphed on HBO for six glorious seasons, the series finale was met with criticism, arguably leaving more questions than answers. …

A Process of Settling In a New Country Strangely Resembles Doing Time in Jail — In one of the episodes of the fifth season of The Sopranos, Steve Buscemi’s character tries to “go civilian” after getting back from jail. “Going civilian”, as you may guess, means working outside of “the family”. At one point, he describes his work with Korean immigrants, and how the Koreans…

Cruel Summer Has Announced Its Second Season, I’ll Tell You More One of the great joys of Peak TV has been that every so often you discover a gem in the place you’d least expect to find it. Sometimes people love it, sometimes you’re one of the few. …

This article was originally published by Vice Canada in June 2017. I have republished it here, on the 24th anniversary of the show premiering, because of formatting changes at the original page due to a website redesign that make it difficult to read. …

The more important part of The Sopranos ending — Dr Melfi has always stuck to her guns with Tony, believing she can understand him and help him change. She always kept her doors open to Tony despite his unsolicited advances and her potential danger. Even when she was told about that paper, she resisted. She didn’t want to believe…