James gandolfini

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.

Talking Sopranos — a new weekly podcast which launched this month— is another example of a seemingly unstoppable sub-genre occupying an ever-growing slice of the podcast market: the television-rewatch podcast. The format is simple: take any much-loved yet expired television series (the kind usually prefaced by words like ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen…’) and scan the cast list until you find some former stars willing to work for an affordable rate. Record them giving an audio commentary on each episode and, bingo, you’ve got yourself dozens of hours of podcasts — and a massive fan base waiting to be converted to listeners.

This week marks 20 years in the can for The Sopranos, the TV series which almost instantly transformed into a ‘cultural phenomenon,’ although the term ‘cultural phenomenon’ is exactly the kind of cliche that most characters on the show probably would have hated. Indeed, it’s not a moniker particularly embraced by the show’s creator, David Chase, who always seemed to project a bit of depressive resignation about his role front-running the series. Asked at a panel event Wednesday night what his reaction was to the anniversary hooplah, Chase simply responded: ‘Well, confused.’ The Sopranos today has a somewhat confused legacy, because two decades later it’s firmly entered into the realm of nostalgic reminiscence.