One of the best and most influential television series of all time, The Sopranos represented a leveling-up of American dramatic television that was unheard of in the first few decades of the medium’s existence. The series was darker and more violent than anything audiences had frequently seen on television, bringing the mob story brutality of films like The Godfather and Goodfellas into people’s homes.
One of the things that made The Sopranos such an important step in the evolution of television was its more experimental nature when creator David Chase and the show’s writers would play around with formats and filming techniques. The best example of this is in the series’ dream sequences, which often give audiences a deeper glimpse into Tony Soprano’s subconscious.
Tony’s Mob Friends Come to Dr. Melfi’s Office
Dream sequences draw back to the earliest episodes of one of the best crime series on television, when The Sopranos began plumming the depths of Tony’s psychological issues by using his dreams as a way of seeing what he was really feeling, even as he lied to Dr. Melfi and everyone else. In “Meadowlands”, audiences got their first look at the ways that the series would use these dreams to tell us how Tony was feeling and mess with the film language that the show used.
Tony Tells Dr. Melfi He Wanted to Kill Christopher and Others
One of the most devastating deaths, in a series that saw many of its main characters eventually die in their life of crime and violence, came toward the end of the series, when Tony brutally kills his nephew Christopher after the two get into a car accident that was caused by Christopher being high. Tony never reveals to anyone that he killed Christopher, allowing people to believe that he died instantly in the crash.
Tony Gives Into His Complicated Feelings and Has a Sexual Encounter With Dr. Melfi
The first season of The Sopranos focuses a lot of time on Tony’s complicated relationships with women in his life, namely his wife Carmela, his mother Livia, and his therapist Dr. Melfi. As Tony begins to open up to Dr. Melfi more and more in his therapy sessions, underlying feelings that he buried long ago start to come out and manifest in how he thinks about Melfi herself.
Tony Encounters Gloria Trillo After She Has Already Died
Tony Soprano has many extramarital sexual relationships over the course of the series, from the young Russian woman Irina to the art dealer Valentina to the real estate developer Julianna, which help cement the character as a morally bleak person who doesn’t care about maintaining a good relationship with his wife. Tony’s most notable relationship is with the character Gloria, a car dealer who Tony meets at Dr. Melfi’s office.
Tony Rides A Horse In His Living Room
Tony Soprano’s fragile and volatile emotional state meant he was often unable or unwilling to express his feelings, especially any degree of genuine empathy or kindness toward other people. Oftentimes, Tony was most vulnerable when it came to animals, especially the racehorse “Pie-O-My”, which Tony gets so attached to that he kills mob associate Ralph Cifaretto when he thinks that Ralph had something to do with the horse’s death.
Tony Takes the Backseat in His Father’s Old Car
Much of Tony Soprano’s struggles throughout the series, and the series overall themes about how the ideas and rules of the mafia butt heads with a modernizing world, come from his old-school ideas about gender identity and gender roles. This is on display countless times over the course of the series, especially in how Tony polices what his wife and daughter are and are not allowed to do.
Tony’s Foreign Exchange Student Neighbor Isabella Isn’t Real
Tony’s lack of a positive maternal figure, and his oedipal feelings that cause him to sexualize the idea of a woman that would act in a caring way toward him, are most apparent in “Isabella”, where Tony has a series of incredibly realistic dreams. In these dreams, Tony believes that his neighbors are out of town and a young Italian student named Isabella is house-sitting for them.
Tony Sees The Ghost of His Dead Mother
“Calling All Cars” is an episode that features several dream sequences that are important to understanding Tony’s way of thinking, but the more interesting of the two is one that features an apparition of his mother. Livia Soprano, one of the greatest antagonists in the history of television, is the driving force of the first season of the show, with her biting criticism of Tony being one of the key things that drives him to therapy.
Tony Realizes His Associate is an Informant When He Has Food Poisoning
In addition to being one of the best dramas in the history of television, The Sopranos could often be one of the funniest shows on TV, peppering in slapstick humor and dark jokes that helped to sell the reality that its characters were bumbling morons pretending to be high-status cool criminals. “Funhouse” is an episode that encompasses all of these tones, featuring both an incredibly dramatic character death and strange ADR fart sound effects.
Tony Lives in an Alternate Universe After He Falls Into a Coma
As The Sopranos continued on, David Chase dove deeper and deeper into more abstract storytelling ideas, using the success of the show to experiment with the television medium as much as he could. When Tony is shot and falls into a coma, he dreams that he is a man named Kevin Finnerty, a salesperson who has no ties to any kind of life of crime.
The coma dream sequences show Tony the potential of a world in which he is a more normal guy, in which James Gandolfini uses his real accent as opposed to the more over-the-top New Jersey accent he puts on for the character. In the end, Tony wakes up and swears that he will change his ways, before very quickly falling back into the cycles of violence and anxiety that shape the character’s life and the themes of the series.
