The Sopranos: Season 1 (1999)

It’s hard now to look back on The Sopranos, let alone the first season of The Sopranos, with any kind of objectivity. More than any of the other series that ushered in the recent resurgence of television, it’s become mythical, more prophetic than it could possibly know. What’s perhaps most unusual about returning to the first season after all this time, then, is how quiet and assuming it all is, so elegant and efficient in its ambition that it feels positively modest compared to everything that followed. In part, that’s because the first two seasons are much more suburban than the last four, more entranced and incredulous at the peculiar hush of Dr. Jennifer Melfi’s chambers, or at the sheer fact of suburbia concealing anything as mysterious as a psychiatric practice. That hush radiates out into Tony’s home, and from there into his New Jersey backdrop, creating a loose, drifting sense of introspection that makes the transitions between waking and dreaming life feel particularly porous, and the dream sequences themselves more convincing than in the later seasons. Where they seasons had a mission and a clear trajectory, here everything is suffused with a kind of inquisitive, playful curiosity, caught up in the delicate game of transference and counter-transference, as if poised at those first few seconds on the therapist’s threshold, when you know that you’re leaving something behind, but might also discover something you can’t even conceptualise yet. Add to that the fact that there’s a lighter palette than the rest of the series, more bright skies and clear days than seasons four to six combined, and the tone is almost wistful, a kind of swansong for the nostalgic gangster films of the 90s. For all their revisionism, those films were old-fashioned male melodramas at heart, macho weepies that seemed more and more willing to embrace that emotional kernel as the decade progressed. Certainly, they continued to do so after The Sopranos started to air, but David Chase nevertheless managed to gather a lot of their melodramatic momentum, distilling it into a gangster whose main gripe was an excess of emotion, an affective affliction that left him continually on the verge of panic attacks, haunted every time he felt himself feeling something. A few years later, 9/11 would leave a whole new wound culture in its wake, but Tony was already there, somehow dealing with its legacy before it happened, coming to terms with being the first great television character of the twenty-first century.