I’ve never been good at loving things halfway. When I get into something, a book, a film, even a person, I go all the way in. The Sopranos made that hard. It taught me that loving a show can be complicated and full of contradictions. I adore James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano. His performance is astonishing, and the whole show rests on him. The man he plays also disgusts me. I’d start to feel for Tony, start making excuses for his violence, start seeing the hurt kid inside the mob boss, and then he’d do something unforgivable and I’d pull away again. That back and forth is what makes the show so unsettling and so good. Everyone in it is made of contradictions.
Carmela Soprano is someone I’d like to sit with. I’d make her tea and listen to her talk about her regrets, her guilt, and the dreams she never said out loud. Her strength is quiet. She tries to be devout and moral while living on blood money inside a marriage built on control, and she’s braver than people give her credit for. I find her beautiful. Dr. Melfi, Tony’s therapist, is the other woman I keep thinking about. Her sessions with Tony are some of the best scenes I’ve seen on television. Every line is a fight over power and truth, and every pause matters. She’s smart, careful, and hurt in her own way, and the show lets her keep her dignity while showing her vulnerability. I rarely see women written that well on TV.
The scene where Melfi is raped is still hard for me to talk about. It shook me. It was shot plainly, with no music and no drama, and the silence afterward was horrible. The episode is about powerlessness and about justice that never comes. Melfi walks away from revenge even while the audience is begging for it, and that takes a kind of strength I hadn’t thought about before. That episode changed something in me. I keep watching The Sopranos because it tells the truth about how power corrupts, how love gets twisted, and how family can destroy people as much as it protects them. I think I keep coming back because I see parts of myself in its contradictions.
