Why The Sopranos remains the greatest gangster drama of all time

The Sopranos is called the greatest television show in history. It is the tale of Anthony ‘Tony’ Soprano, a middle-aged man in psychotherapy who also happens to run a New Jersey crime family. Anthony means ‘priceless’; the choice of name is surely deliberate. The Sopranos is complex — all masterpieces are — but it is fundamentally about greed: for money; for sex (the crew inhabit the Bada Bing! lap-dancing club, where breasts are landscape); for alcohol; for power; for the base drug of food.

In the first episode Tony, who is played by James Gandolfini as a human devil, all need and charm (he is defiantly sexy with his fat hands and dachshund’s eyes), is almost human-looking. By the end, he is immense. He lumbers and breathes like an animal; a man returned to his original state. Food and death are very close in The Sopranos. The crew meet at Satriale’s Pork Store, where they buy food and dismember corpses. I went to Satriale’s on a Sopranos bus tour hosted by an actor whose character burnt to death in a restaurant fire. Then, in a judicious metaphor, a rainstorm came, and the bus was forced back to Manhattan. I deserved it; I was greedy.

Gandolfini was a jobbing actor when he was cast. The show’s writer and producer David Chase, a man with a cold and brilliant eye, chose him after a casting agent saw Gandolfini throw Patricia Arquette through a glass door in True Romance. ‘Stick it in me, baby, go on, stick it in Daddy,’ he tells her as she offers up a corkscrew to his gun. Gandolfini died of a heart attack in a hotel room in Rome in 2013 at 51, devoured by some of the same imperatives as his creation Tony Soprano.