I’ve loved that line since I first heard it on […checks Wikipedia…] April 8, 2001. I remember it as a catharsis, the one time in the whole series when the show’s moral standpoint was clearly stated. Finally, thanks to Dr Krakower, Carmela was getting the cold reality treatment. More importantly, we in the audience were getting the cold reality treatment too, and we relished it. That line is quoted all over the internet as a — if not the — defining moment of the whole series. Carmela needed to be told it so that she might finally leave her parasite, monster, murderer husband. We needed to be told so that we might keep a clean conscience as we watched this charismatic guy do his evil thing. Being told that simple message was like an art novice finding an accurate nose in an abstract painting — a reassurance, a hint of ordered sense amid the chaos.

Except we didn’t really need to be told. We only needed to be told we were being told, because a sturdy, steady moralism informs every major element of the show. But it does so casually, organically, by letting the moral content of everyday life have its say.

Tony and Carmela Soprano know what it means to be a good person because they have models and examples all around them. They know it from impulses within themselves and from individual people in their lives and from the roles they each play as parent and spouse and friend. They want to be such people, and this wanting drives the entire show, but — and this is the simple moral lesson of The Sopranos — they don’t want it badly enough.

As we pass the 25th anniversary of the show’s revolutionary appearance in our culture, it’s smart not to get too clever about what it says. The show’s deftness in delivering its moral lessons, in other words, is of a piece with the simplicity and familiarity of their content.

It feels strange for me to praise David Chase for his light touch. I’ve always thought The Sopranos a great, great show, but when debates have come up about the Greatest Show of All Time, I’ve generally been a Deadwood guy, with The Sopranos in a close second place. I love how Deadwood takes, and makes good on, the insane gamble of reaching for beauty itself. It could have been an embarrassment, but the earnest poetry of David Milch’s dialogue is consistently perfect — psychologically revealing and politically subtle and just delightful on the ear. Fairly quickly it stops seeming a weird indulgence and becomes part of the natural fabric of the show’s reality. And Milch is the more open-hearted auteur. The horror and sadness come to us raw in Deadwood. What happens in The Sopranos, by contrast, reaches us through a conspicuous lens of Freudian irony. Deadwood is often funny, but it is a drama, historical and, despite the poetic dialogue, realistic. The Sopranos is often dark and deeply tragic, but it is — in essence — a comedy.

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By this I mean that a core feature of the show is that its main characters often don’t know why they’re doing what they’re doing, and they don’t know they don’t know, while David Chase knows, and we in the audience know, and this discrepancy is a consistent comic presence. In Deadwood, Milch’s voice is audible in the decoration and elaborate grammar of the speech. In The Sopranos, Chase’s comic touch is felt, more totally and fundamentally, in what we see — Tony’s pinched face shot in grotesque closeup, Carmela’s stony profile conveying fake dignity, Silvio’s ridiculous mug surrealised in fisheye framing. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’ve held this issue of genre just slightly against The Sopranos when doing those rankings in my head. My standard seems to be that Milch is expressing an organic sensibility while Chase is deploying something that — when I look back on the series as a whole — seems a little like a gimmick.

Of course I didn’t watch The Sopranos as a whole, from a backward distance of years. I watched it an episode at a time, right when the episodes came out. In researching this article, using the arduous method of re-watching episode after brilliant episode, I was able to reacquaint myself with my original perspective on the show. From this viewpoint, what later came to seem like a Freudian (or Lynchian) gimmick looks instead like what merely happens when you mix a lucrative business of criminal violence with the strictures and ambitions of regular middle-class life. You layer family emotion and bourgeois propriety over underworld murder and vice and things will get pretty Freudian on their own, pretty fast. And these conflicts are comically and dramatically fruitful not in spite of Chase’s moralism but because of it. That is, the show is funny and filled with tension because Tony and Carmela are trying to do something impossible: to raise a bourgeois family and inhabit their respectable McMansion more or less as their non-criminal neighbours do these things. They are haunted and judged by the very life they’re trying to live. It’s no wonder their psyches wear neurotic wounds like an old ship wears barnacles, abundantly and just below the surface.

And, our reverence for old Dr Krakower notwithstanding, this conflict is not just apparent but explicit from the beginning. In the first episode and throughout the first season, organised religion and Freudian psychoanalysis and conventional middle-class morality team up to make the same point from different directions, repeatedly. Tony confesses his yearning for innocence by fetishising a family of ducks — the first of several instances where he displaces unhelpful human emotions onto animals. Carmela and her weird priest friend stage a searing living-room confession in which she scourges herself for “allowing what I know is evil in my house, allowing my children… oh my God my sweet children… to be a part of it”. All this as Tony, during a college visit with his daughter Meadow, hunts down a mob snitch, a man with his own sweet young daughter living a peaceful life in verdant Maine, and murders him with his bare hands.

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But Catholic Carmela is also a modern woman. She believes in the modern church of psychotherapy. In the pilot episode, when Tony confesses he’s seeing a therapist, Carmela beams with relief and gratitude. Even as she demurs that “psychology doesn’t address the soul”, she’s clearly granting this clinical endeavour a spiritual meaning beyond its Prozac remedy for his grumpy mood. Giddily she says: “This is a start.” What’s it a start to? Well, it’s a start to something that can’t really proceed, something that can’t even get started. It’s a start to honesty and transparency, a life in which what happens on the inside roughly matches what appears on the outside.

Still, Carmela’s reaction to Tony’s news is genuine and infectious. It’s perhaps the deepest moment of marital concord in the whole series, and, as such, it provides the measure of all of Carmela’s future disappointments. Somewhat cruelly, Tony’s therapy news carries the hope that her marriage can be like the other marriages in her subdivision. But Tony is not improved by therapy, brought into contact with a better version of himself over time, where, as both wife and psychoanalyst hope, his advancing self-awareness is finally incompatible with infidelity and killing. Instead, the pressures of therapeutic discussion make him more resourceful in his evasions, adding layers to his self-deception.

It’s tempting to read this depth of badness in Tony’s character and declare him a sociopath. Even within the show, Dr Kupferberg, psychoanalyst of Tony’s psychoanalyst Dr Melfi, warns her that she’s dealing with a sociopath. Sure, Tony checks several boxes for Anti-Social Personality Disorder, but much of what we see on the show contradicts the idea that he’s deeply, truly sociopathic. Were Tony a true sociopath, someone not just violent and manipulative but lacking empathy and remorse, then much of what he does would either make no sense or simply not happen. His comic displacements regarding animals, his guilty dreaming and brooding about killing Big Pussy, his sensitivity to his wife’s criticisms, his need to defend himself against them and his raging response when she hits a nerve, his consuming need to be loved by his disapproving shrink, his desire for her to know the other, better “Tony” that isn’t part of his bloody business life — all these betoken ample stores of moral yearning and intuition hiding inside Tony’s oversized person. Were he a true sociopath, he wouldn’t need to spend so much emotional energy trying to make sense of his life as a lying, violent thug of the bourgeoisie. To a true sociopath, it would already make sense.

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And if Tony were a true sociopath, his relations with his children would be very different. The show actually gives us a parent whose ways resemble those of a sociopath, his mother, and as a parent he is nothing like her. She was systematically cruel, distant, manipulative and neglectful toward her children, while Tony delights in his children, whose love for him is unguarded by any wariness about a sociopathic father’s underhanded cruelty. He’s pretty lazy as a dad, but he’s eager to satisfy the emotional claims his kids make on him. And, were he a true sociopath, he would likely resent and undermine Meadow’s achievements in school, so far beyond his own, but he happily funds and facilitates them.

The dissonance between the easy affection with which he raises his kids and the thuggery of how he makes his money is key to the show’s pathos. His relationship with his kids has much lower stakes as a clashing of archetypes if he’s already poisoned it with sociopathic abuse. Their moral vulnerability, their dwindling store of innocence in that McMansion, is much less forceful as a moral counterpoint if they’re already victims of pathological parenting. And when, as young adults, they do finally and fully ally themselves with his enterprise, when their filial love no longer functions as counterpoint and just flows into the swill of his corruption, that is a grim declaration itself, a dark change in the show’s moral atmosphere. But this story arc never happens if Tony’s fathering is sociopathic. Tony’s sisters fled their savage mother. Tony’s kids stick around.

A similar weakness dogs the claim that The Sopranos is a conventional satire of marriage and family and suburban life. If The Sopranos is a satire, then the energy behind its defining dramas is unaccountable. The psychic pressure behind its Freudian comedy disappears. The show makes no emotional sense. Alas, for many people, this interpretation is irresistible. It’s a pleasing revival of one of the dull clichés that populate the minds of Western critics and intellectuals, among whom it’s been fashionable to mock the middle classes for as long as there’s been middle classes. An article in British GQ, for example, claims that the show’s portrait of Tony and Carmela is a satire of marriage as such, and that this satire is all the more potent for how reductive it is. “As we watch… Carmela… turn blind eye after blind eye – each further betrayal from Tony papered over by another piece of expensive jewellery — we understand each flame-out is only partly about emotion and more about racketeering.” Carmela is not just salved by the gifts. She stages her tantrums to get them. She’s not sad and angry. She’s negotiating. The piece goes on: “It’s a bleak worldview from Chase, but one he sticks to: we’re all just out for what we can get, any emotion to be traded on, any betrayal a tactical advantage.”

On the one hand, the “we’re all” phrasing here is unusually crude, and as part of a claim about how actual people really are, it is straightforwardly bizarre. But, on the other, it’s usefully clear in laying out the basic structure of the satire interpretation. The notional distance between Tony and Carmela’s corrupted marriage and us is merely that: notional. In reality, “we’re all” supposedly on the make. But the gaps of perception and self-understanding that Chase so richly exploits do not exist if the background archetype, the suburban family, is also an object of satire or mockery. It’s only gripping and funny, sad and appalling, because we know what they’re trying to be — and because, like them, deep down, we know they must fail in this effort. If Tony and Carmela could reassure themselves “we’re all” the same, there would be no psychic conflicts for them to manage, no basis for the show’s surreal framing. The Sopranos would not be a Freudian comedy. And I’m sorry, but The Sopranos is a Freudian comedy.

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In all this, I’m arguing against no less an authority than David Chase, sort of. In a 2021 article in The New York Times Magazine, he’s quoted as ratifying the view that the show is a parable of American decline, of which Carmela and Tony’s suburban home and subdivision are symptoms. But almost all of the larger America portrayed in The Sopranos is on screen because Tony’s crew and other Mafiosi have set themselves on some part of it, as parasites. The America we see in The Sopranos we largely see through the eyes of mobsters. Is Paulie Walnuts really a reliable diagnostician of our civic health? And much of what the article tries to portray as decline is merely evidence of change. The scene in which Paulie tries and fails to extort a Starbucks-like coffee franchise for protection money is extremely funny, and it certainly sketches a novel challenge for Mafia methods, but what this says about American decline is pretty ambiguous. This understanding of the Sopranos as a parable of decline is intellectually appealing in its pessimism, but in its details it can’t decide if the decline it’s talking about is an American thing, or just a mob thing.

David Chase may have dreamed up The Sopranos in nostalgic irritation about how much suburban New Jersey had changed since he was a kid, but in constructing it as an extended work of television art, and in giving that work a rich and complex inner life that made intimate sense to his audience, he drew on a very different set of dramatic resources. He counterposed the violence and elaborate scheming in one family with the absence of these things in the families they lived among. And he set that contrast to work. And it did work, as no other television show has worked, in no small part because it was based on differences between kinds of people that really exist.

But in his stories of the lowlife gangster milieu of the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression — the snatchers and the shooters, the dimwits and the dolls, the potatoes and the players in Broadway’s “hardened artery” — Damon Runyon invented the main character of the late twentieth century: the good bad guy.

We’re so steeped now in anti-heroes that it hardly seems bold or daring for a writer to dive into the beating heart of a man who kills or kidnaps for money. Badly behaved men — and they are usually men — as the half-sympathetic moral centre of a story have been a staple of serious literature since the Fifties: amoral murderers like Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley; everyman adulterers like John Updike’s “Rabbit” Angstrom; and distilled misanthropists like Joseph Heller’s Bob Slocum (“The world just doesn’t work. It’s an idea whose time is gone”).

The good bad guy moved from literature to film in the Seventies, and two decades later came into our homes on TV. You don’t have to look far to see the flowering of this quality in our culture. Indeed, it’s not going too far to say that without Runyon, there would be no Godfather, no Tony Soprano. Martin Scorsese would still be trying to think of something to make films about.

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But when Runyon wrote his stories in the Thirties and Forties, he was bringing us news, softening us up for the century to come. He made us fall for the guy who is dubious in business and negligent in his home life and his love life.

The stand-out quality of both Runyon and his characters is that they’re funny. Runyon’s anonymous narrator is a lower-rent, warier version of P. G. Wodehouse’s tireless storyteller Mr Mulliner, and indeed Wodehouse is the writer Runyon most resembles stylistically. His rhythmic patter fits Wodehouse’s description of his own work as a “musical comedy without music”.

Runyon’s narrator trades in nicknames, neologisms, mock-formality, a language devoid of contractions and a perpetual present tense. When he tells us that “when Dave the Dude takes a guy out for an airing, the guy very often does not come back”, the threat is softened by the stilted idiom — but not too much. The same goes for the cracking line, “I always take a gander at a doll’s feet and ankles before I start handicapping her”.

Comedy lowers the reader’s guard and enables the writer to slip in other things. We get unexpected moral complexity, in the story The Lily of St Pierre, in which a tragic woman suffers a death “that happens to a million dolls before and will happen to a million dolls again”. And there is a truly psychopathic viciousness in Sense of Humour, which begins with the aptly-named Frankie the Ferocious killing the family members of an associate who played a practical joke on him, and gets worse from there.

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Runyon used comedy as a balance to danger, then; his inheritors developed this, using it as a source of danger, too. In the famous scene in Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Joe Pesci’s Tommy turns laughter — “Do I amuse you?” — into blood-chilling fear. Like Runyon’s stories, like any good portrayal of the good bad guy — like any good art — it operates in multiple registers.

Connected to this is another strength of Runyon’s good bad guy: he is real. Runyon certainly knew the world he wrote about, both from his work as a newspaper reporter covering sports, politics and murder (which he called “the main event”) and from personal connections: he knew, among others, Al Capone. His portrayal of gangster culture in his stories was an exaggeration, usually for comic purposes, but it’s the authenticity that provides the frisson: Runyon’s biographer said any decent New York detective would recognise most of the crooks in his fiction, from Harry the Horse to Nicely-Nicely Johnson.

And so reading about, or watching, a good bad guy is like a rollercoaster ride: a brush with danger within a safe environment, all the more so when we are strapped to his viewpoint. We can’t help but come round to his way of thinking when we watch the serial killer’s serial killer Dexter Morgan in Dexter, or read Alex’s own words in A Clockwork Orange. After all, to paraphrase one Runyon character, many legitimate guys like you are interested in the doings of tough guys.

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The guys and dolls come and go in Runyon’s stories, but his world is held together by that constant narrator, a bystander to the action (“I am known to one and all as a guy who is just around”) who rubs comfortably alongside the criminal underworld, even if he is not strictly part of it, and gently expresses theoretical disapproval of, say, kidnapping. “Snatching is by no means a high-class business, and is even considered somewhat illegal.” (Then again, we get the sense that he would help out if they were busy, and occasionally he provides a turning point in one of Runyon’s clockwork plots.) But the intimacy of the first person narrative makes us want Jo-jo and Spanish John and Dave the Dude to succeed — because reading is an act of empathy, but also because we see them within their own community, where they don’t seem so bad at all. They are, like Puzo’s mafiosi in The Godfather, bound by their own code of honour, however twisted.

The novelist Howard Spring summed up this appeal by describing Runyon’s people as “jungle-dwellers, hateful and horrible men and women, who yet please us because they are alive and completely integrated.” Fictional violence, in other words, is thrilling, and all the more so when we’re made to care about the characters dishing it out. In The Sopranos, the most simultaneously beloved and bloodthirsty of Tony’s henchmen was Paulie Walnuts, who murdered more people than anyone else, but was also a comic figure, cladding his furniture in plastic and forever repeating his jokes to impress Tony. In Scorsese’s Gangs of New York, when Daniel Day Lewis’s Bill the Butcher delivers a theatrical “Whoopsy-daisy!” as he “misses” while chucking his knives at Cameron Diaz’s Jenny, we feel the same sense of uneasily disrupted danger that Runyon detonates in his darker stories.

In capturing the Broadway gangster era, Runyon created it, just as Fitzgerald did the Jazz Age — which operated at the same time but in a different world. But Runyon’s influence goes even further: he prefigures the wisecracking Noo Yawk idiom of countless sitcoms. And by offering a gangster environment that was fundamentally comic in nature, he opened a gap between his creations and the traditional villain for others to fill, and fill it they did, forming characters who flatter our appetite for complexity by being good only in parts.

After Runyon’s death in 1946 — from a lifelong smoker’s throat cancer — a plane was flown above Manhattan and his ashes were scattered over Broadway, the avenue he dusted with his own peculiar genius. It was a tribute befitting either a city grandee or a legendary crime boss — and therefore perfect for the man who in straddling both worlds created his own, and laid the path for ours.

It would be an exaggeration to say that The Sopranos whacked the kind of movies Chase loved, but it certainly helped to put television and cinema on a more equal footing. As Hollywood gave up on the once-fertile territory between blockbusters and low-budget indies, viewers found that their appetite for sophisticated storytelling could be met by the likes of HBO, AMC and, later, Netflix. Today, The Sopranos’ successors dominate the cultural conversation and provide safe harbour for fugitive movie stars and directors who are tired of scratching around for movie financing.

The days when the inner conflict of a dangerous man was sure-fire Emmy material may be over, but The Sopranos remains the Beatles of prestige TV: it was the first and, in many people’s eyes, it is still the best. In 2019, the Guardian crowned it the greatest show of the 21st century so far, ahead of The Wire and Mad Men. A soup-to-nuts Sopranos rewatch became a popular lockdown activity among a certain constituency, who revelled in the skewed black comedy, eccentric detours and endless subtleties. Talking Sopranos, a nicely timed hit podcast by former cast members Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa, has led to a book deal for an oral history. If there hasn’t been a backlash yet, there never will be.

Yet even in 2010, three years after The Sopranos’ fearless cut-to-black finale, Chase was still conflicted about his role as the godfather of prestige TV. “Look, I do not care about television,” he told Brett Martin, author of Difficult Men. “I don’t care about where television is going or anything else about it. I’m a man who wanted to make movies. Period.”

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Eventually he did make one, but his rock’n’roll coming-of-age-story Not Fade Away suffered the fate of many serious mid-budget movies. Released in 2012, it earned just $600,000 from a $20m budget. I’m sure that Chase sincerely wanted to make a Sopranos prequel (now 76, he doesn’t do things he doesn’t want to do) but I suspect that his latest project was also his last shot at the big screen. Thus The Many Saints of Newark, released this week, finds him leveraging his phenomenal success in a medium he doesn’t respect to get him back into one that he reveres. As Alessandro Nivola, who stars as dapper capo Dickie Moltisanti, recently told Rolling Stone: “For a movie like this to be made at all was an anomaly, and it was only being made because [of] the IP of the show, the brand of the show.”

Chase and co-writer Lawrence Konner offer fan service to a fault. As the movie begins in 1967, most of the cast have the tricky task of embodying unfinished iterations of some of the most memorable characters in modern television, with mixed results. Corey Stoll is deftly hilarious as Tony Soprano’s uncle Junior, a tetchy, charmless sub’s-bench gangster desperate for a level of respect that he is incapable of earning, but John Magaro gives a sketch-show impersonation of Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante, with his tonsorial slapstick and perpetual fuhgeddaboudit grimace. Michael Gandolfini excels at the emotionally gruelling job of playing the younger version of his late father James. He has the same melancholy weight, that physical unhappiness, and the sense of someone caught reluctantly, but not reluctantly enough, in the tractor beam of familial violence.

This embryonic rogues’ gallery revolves around the most important new character introduced by the prequel, Nivola’s Dickie, the doomed father of serial fuck-up Christopher Moltisanti. He foreshadows Tony’s agonies of leadership far more than Tony’s own father, played by Jon Bernthal as a dim, swaggering thug. By comparison, Dickie is a Shakespearean figure whose attempts at operating by a moral code (well, by Mafia standards) are ruptured by uncontrollable outbursts of violence and poisoned by guilt.

Casting Goodfellas’ Ray Liotta as Dickie’s monstrous father, whose laboured grunts through the bedroom wall are somehow the most disturbing sound in a film that also features a hideous bit of freelance dentistry, is much more than a mob-movie in-joke — but it adds a layer of irony, given that the Mafia depicted here is pre-postmodern. The mobsters in the TV show were shaped by seeing themselves on screen, as if performing a wise-guy routine for an invisible audience. Would they have behaved in quite the same way before The Godfather? Tony has a famous line in the pilot episode — “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over” — which suggests that he grew up in the glory days; now those glory days are on the big screen, but the only thing more glamorous about them is the wardrobe. There’s already the stink of decay.

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What’s genuinely new for a franchise that previously confined people of colour to supporting roles is the introduction of Newark’s black population, specifically Dickie’s runner-turned-rival Harold McBrayer (Leslie Odom Jr.). The movie uses the famous riots of 1967 both to cover up a crime and to spur Harold into demanding more than scraps from the table. Once it snaps into the 1970s, we see how the growth of radical black consciousness filtered into organised crime and glimpse the white flight that turned the Sopranos into suburbanites, although there’s a sub-plot for Harold which unpleasantly plays into the Mafia’s racist paranoia.

This conflict between the declining Italians and insurgent black gangsters invites unflattering comparisons to Fargo’s similarly themed fourth season, which has enough time to give both sides of that war equal attention, and much more besides. Harold’s transformation relies on clumsy shorthand (ballooning afros, a Last Poets concert) in lieu of scenes that might have given him real depth and agency. He is less a person than a symbol of the social change that the Moltisanti/Soprano empire can’t even understand, let alone halt, and his arc is wrapped up in a mid-credits sting which feels like a mildly insulting afterthought. Vera Farmiga as Livia, Tony’s mother and master of mindfuckery, also smoulders with untapped potential.

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I have no bias towards television. Some potentially great movies have been fattened into slow-moving miniseries solely because that’s where the money is. But it’s hard to watch The Many Saints of Newark, entertaining though it is, without wondering why it needed to be a movie. Solidly directed by Alan Taylor, whose spotty CV ranges from some of the best Sopranos episodes to the absolute worst Marvel movie (Thor: The Dark World), it’s neither as strange and grubby as the TV show nor particularly cinematic. With its ensemble cast and myriad sub-plots, this is a narrative that could have done a lot more with six hours (at least) than with two, and ends with Dickie’s story concluded but the adolescent Tony’s just beginning. Had it come out as a stand-alone movie in 1997, we wouldn’t be wondering about these alternatives, but our viewing metabolism has changed, and it was The Sopranos that changed it. Like Tony, Dickie and Harold, we want more.

“Someone once said that movies are a cathedral, and I do still feel that,” Chase told Brett Martin. “A cathedral is big. It’s epic. It’s intense.” It’s almost tragic that Chase made a watershed TV show that was as big, epic and intense as any movie and then refused to accept it. Now he’s made a movie that feels smaller in every way. I want to tell him that he built his cathedral years ago.

This second life of the acclaimed HBO series, which ran from 1999-2007, has been given further energy by the anticipation of The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by Sopranos creator David Chase, originally scheduled for last month but postponed until September. The film stars Michael Gandolfini, son of the late Sopranos star James, as the young Tony Soprano.

Widely considered by critics to be one of the greatest television series of all time, a recurring question for fans of The Sopranos has revolved around Tony’s moral character.

“Is Tony Soprano a hero or a villain?” as Michael Imperioli asked in one of the first episodes of the podcast, to which Schirripa replied, “I think he’s both.” The fundamental tension of good and evil contained within the same man captivated audiences throughout the show, and is fundamental to its popularity.

“Tony Soprano,” Schirripa explains, “was the first lead character to be a bad guy who did bad things, yet the audience chose to root for him. He’s a murderer, he’s a drug dealer, he’s a thief, he cheats on his wife, he hits all the sins. Yet, for whatever reason, the audience likes him.”

Throughout the series, people who entered Tony’s orbit met their demise. A classic story plot is a man who makes a wager with the devil, but The Sopranos was the first series to get the audience to sympathise with the devil rather than the man. Throughout the series, Tony kills or orders the murders of a number of people: his best friend, the son of one of his close friends, his cousin, his nephew’s fiancé, and then his protégé nephew. Yet creator David Chase, in collaboration with the immense talent of actor James Gandolfini, got viewers to root for a monster. Tony is clearly not a hero. Instead, the question should be: “Is Tony a villain or a victim?”

Tony was the first mainstream television character to portray what villainy looked like from the point of view of the villain — and what we learned is that no one is the bad guy in their own story. He attempts to be a good father and, to a lesser extent, a good husband — and as reprehensible as Tony was, he was still a better man than his own father. During one of Tony’s sessions with his therapist Dr Melfi, he describes how “the belt was [father’s] favourite child development tool.”

These therapeutic sessions were an ingenious way of giving audience members an insight into the mind of a monster. Initially, Tony visited Dr Melfi because he suffered from panic attacks. Dr Melfi traced the origins of these attacks to a dormant memory: as a child, Tony secretly witnessed his gangster father chop off a guy’s finger for not paying off his gambling debts. Dr Melfi also discovered that when Tony was a child, his mother, Livia, threatened to stab his eye out with a fork. In another flashback scene, Tony’s father suggests to Livia that they relocate to Nevada. Livia loudly replies, within earshot of young Tony, that she would rather smother Tony and his sisters with a pillow than move.

Livia’s random explosions of rage cultivated inner turmoil in Tony. She would lose it over inconsequential mishaps and Tony felt like he had to avoid landmines. “You definitely don’t want to get her started,” he coolly says to Dr Melfi.

The American psychologist Thomas Achenbach made a distinction between “internalising” and “externalising” behaviours for how children cope with stress. Internalising symptoms include depression, social withdrawal and eating disorders; externalising symptoms include drug use, aggression and violence. Tony loved his mother so, as a child, could not carry out externalising behaviours. Instead, he responded to stress at home with internalising behaviours such as panic attacks and depression — a fact acknowledged by Dr Melfi in her explanation that “depression is rage turned inward.”

As an adult, Tony’s unacknowledged, barely contained rage against his mother was portrayed in a key scene early in the series. Today, it might be seen as a little too on-the-nose, but in 1999 its subtlety was novel for television. During the episode, Tony learns that Livia has difficulty with her phone’s answering machine. Later, Tony observes one of his employees having difficulty with an answering machine — just like Livia — and Tony beats him senseless. This is meant to indicate Tony’s true feelings about his mother, feelings he turns against himself or directs to other targets.

Tony’s panic attacks later serve as harbingers of fear or violence on the horizon. For example, in season two, Tony attempts to reintegrate Richie Aprile into his crew after Richie is released from prison. During a particularly heated conversation between them, Tony unconsciously realises that Richie will never be satisfied working for him, and that he will likely have to dispose of Richie. After their conversation, Tony suddenly experiences an attack and collapses.

A key reason Tony Soprano stopped having panic attacks was that he used his sessions with Dr Melfi as an avenue to relieve the stress and guilt he experienced from his violent actions. Therapy allowed him to feel better while continuing to be a violent criminal — but his conscience was never fully unperturbed. Throughout the series, it is implied that Tony is wracked with self-reproach from his criminal activities. There are two ways he can manage this guilt: by changing the actions that give rise to it, or by reinterpreting his actions so that they no longer produce guilt. Throughout the series, Dr Melfi tries, in an unbiased and nonjudgmental way, to guide Tony to change his actions. But often Tony’s sessions merely enabled him to justify himself and continue his criminal acts.

Gradually, thanks to therapy and medication, Tony’s panic attacks subside. But they resurface near the end of season five. Tony is playing golf with New York underboss Johnny Sacrimoni. Johnny says something that leads Tony to subconsciously realise that he has to do something horrible: murder his beloved cousin to prevent a bloody gang war. His body responds with extreme guilt and stress. He collapses.

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Yet armed with an  understanding of Tony’s origins, the viewer can’t help but feel for him. Of course, Tony is also presented as a relatable — a distant cousin to “likeable” — husband and father, under pressure at work with his employees, trying to fit in with his neighbours and caring for his elderly mother, despite her mistreatment of him. But is this enough to understand why the audience roots for such a reprehensible character?

One reason viewers might excuse Tony Soprano’s misdeeds is because we have sympathy for his plight. In fact, researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University have suggested the existence of a “Virtuous Victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than non-victims who have behaved in exactly the same way. People are inclined to positively evaluate those who have suffered. The audience understands that Tony had a terrible childhood, so when we see him do reprehensible things, such as commit violence or cheat on his wife, we find ways to excuse or downplay it.

More intriguingly, recent research suggests that Dark Triad personality traits — comprising narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism) — are highly correlated with victim-signalling. In other words, people with dark personalities are more likely to broadcast or feign their victimhood, perhaps to gain sympathy and other rewards, while also getting others to excuse their transgressions.

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Does Tony view himself as a victim? He does. In the pilot episode, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he sees himself as a “sad clown, laughing on the outside and crying on the inside”. He characterises himself again as a “sad clown” in season four, but this time Dr Melfi is sceptical, replying “I’ve never seen it.” She explains that his wife, in a couple’s therapy session, also gave a very different perspective about Tony. Although Tony believes that he responds to inner sadness with outer humour and gregariousness, he in fact expresses his emotions with rage and compulsive eating. Tony views himself one way, but those closest see him as someone completely different.

Sprinkled throughout the show are other indicators that Tony believes he is a victim. In season four, his best friend from high school, Artie Bucco, is in the hospital after a suicide attempt. Tony visits and asks Artie to imagine Tony finding Artie dead, and then asks: “How am I supposed to feel?” He seeks pity from his suicidal friend.

In the following season Christopher, his nephew, accuses him of trying to seduce Adriana La Cerva, Christopher’s fiancé. He tells Tony that he knows Tony was in a car with Adriana alone at night, and that they were going to buy drugs together. Tony becomes enraged and shouts, “So what! I can’t relieve stress every once in a while? I don’t got enough f*****g problems?” Tony’s crew is holding Christopher down, and Tony has a gun in Christopher’s face. Even here, Tony pities himself, and urges Christopher to sympathise with his plight.

Tony is not a sad clown putting on a cheerful face. He wants people to sympathise with him, even as he inflicts violence on them. In a chilling scene, Tony beats up the college dropout son of his late friend Jackie Senior. Tony punches Jackie Junior and tells him: “All I ever did was tell your old man what a good kid you were, and all you do is f******g hurt me.”

By the final season, Tony is even more morally compromised and monstrous than he was at the beginning of the show. But he has fewer panic attacks. Does this mean his treatment was effective? Dr Melfi, in the penultimate episode of the series, terminates therapy with Tony. He responds with dismay: “I think what you’re doing is immoral.”

In The Sociopath Next Door, author and psychologist Martha Stout explained how some people weaponise pity to manipulate others: “More than admiration — more even than fear — pity from good people is carte blanche. When we pity, we are, at least for the moment, defenceless… All in all, I am sure if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”