HBO Wouldn’t Dare Make ‘The Sopranos’ Today

“Welcome to the world. People are garbage.” ~Tony Soprano

Today, we take for granted premium cable channels and streaming services creating their own content. In the late 1990’s, this was a brand new concept, one that many people in the film and television industry had little or no faith in.

HBO took a big gamble with The Sopranos — and they hit the jackpot.

The show was a resounding critical success and connected deeply with viewers. It garnered and audience of around 11 million viewers an episode, including most viewers for a season premier with 22.6 Million in 2001[1].

What’s more, the show is seeing a resurgence and garnering a new generation of fans. The show’s creator, David Chase, attributes this to the prequel movie, The Many Saints of Newark, as well as views stuck in quarantine discovering the show via HBO’s streaming service, HBO Max[2].

I’m one of the new viewers to which Chase is referring. I have friends and family members who’ve been long time Sopranos fans. Many of them have recommended the show over the years. However, it wasn’t until this year that I sat down and began watching it.

Over two decades after the show first aired, I can finally say, holy shit, that’s good television!

Set in North New Jersey, the show follows Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), a captain in, then eventual boss of the North Jersey Mafia. The show is grounded, gritty, brutal and violent. It’s also filled with dark humor and witty one-liners. Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) has some of the funniest lines in the show. It’s also touching, heartwarming, and life-affirming as we see the characters go through relatable human struggles with their families, personal demons, and even attempts at redemption…some of which fail.

I love The Sopranos! It’s a show that excels at every aspect of visual storytelling.

But as I continue to watch, I keep thinking, “This is a show that would never get made today.”

Why?

In today’s “Cancel Culture,” it seems highly unlikely any network/production company would go near a show like The Sopranos.

Don’t get me wrong. If I had a week, I still couldn’t tell you everything I like about the show, the characters, and brilliant storytelling.

However, there are some elements of the show that would be off-putting, if not highly-offensive to modern, “woke” viewers.

Violence Against Women

It’s doubtful anyone would complain about the mobster-on-mobster violence in the show. In fact, given organized crime’s notoriously violent real-world history, a fictional show about the mob would ring false without at least some level of violence.

However, the show has an uncomfortable level of violence against women.

Most of the male characters in the show treat women like shit. They’re unfaithful to their wives, they’re verbally and sometimes physically abusive to their goomars (mistresses), and often treat women solely as sexual objects.

On one hand, this is reflective of the old school attitudes of many men involved in organized crime. To some degree, it’s done to show how flawed the male characters are and what particular inner demons they’re battling. Regardless of why it’s done, this violence and misogyny is always done to serve a storytelling purpose.

On the other hand, sometimes it seems excessive. For example, Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano), one of Tony Sopranos’ captains, beats a stripper to death in the parking lot outside the Badda Bing, the strip club owned by Tony’s conciliare, Silvio Dante (Steven Van Zant). And he does it, knowing she’s pregnant (possibly with his child).

It’s brutal shit.

We also see the rape of Tony’s therapist, Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco). Not just a flash and quick cut away so we get the idea of what happened. It’s about a minute-and-a-half long scene. It’s extremely uncomfortable to watch.

While some audience members were likely made uncomfortable or became angry at watching these scenes during the show’s initial run, I can’t recall hearing any complaints from friends, on the news, or reading about it in newspapers or magazines when the show initially aired.

That doesn’t mean there wasn’t an outcry. It means whatever protest HBO received, it wasn’t widespread or public enough for them to pull the show.

If The Sopranos was being made today, however, there is a much higher likelihood someone would watch those scenes, or, possibly who hasn’t even seen the show, but has heard about the aforementioned scenes, get offended, and launch a campaign to cancel it for promoting violence toward women. Moreover, there’s also a good chance the actors who portrayed such violence against women would be “Cancelled” for their actions on the show.

Why?

There are a frightening number of people who can’t separate fiction from reality. We live in a world in which some audience members hold actors accountable for the actions of the FICTIONAL CHARACTERS they play.

Don’t believe me?

HBO was quick to show photographs of actors Pedro Pascal and Hafpor Julius Bronsson hanging out and going fishing together after an episode of Game of Thrones in which their characters engaged in a duel to the death, resulting in Gregor “The Mountain” Clegane (Bronsson) crushing Oberyn Martell’s (Pascal) skull with his bare hands. And that was a fair fight between two armed men who knew what they were getting into, as opposed to a young woman being beaten by an older Mafioso. Yet, audience reactions to the fight scene, which was FICTIONAL, were so strong and so negative, HBO was compelled to immediately extinguish the flames of unrest burning on social media.

Never mind that The Sopranos is a work of FICTION. Or that many of the FICTIONAL men who commit violent acts toward women in the show face harsh, if not fatal consequences for their actions.

There are people who would see the show and immediately call for it and everyone involved to be “Cancelled.”

Racism/Intolerance

The Mafia is known for a lot of things.

Tolerance and racial sensitivity aren’t on the list.

Tony Soprano and the members of the North Jersey Mafia are varying degrees of racist. This is mostly expressed in the things they say. Tony and his crew make anti-Semitic, homophobic, and racist comments, often off-handedly. Moreover, they refer to Italians who hide their heritage and try to pass as white Americans as “Wonderbread Wops.”

The example which probably most demonstrates the characters’ racial intolerance is when Tony’s daughter, Meadow (Jamie-Lynn Sigler) brings home her mixed-race boyfriend. Noah (Patrick Tulley) is half white, half African-American. Tony only sees him as Black, however, telling Noah to his face that, being a “moulinyan,” he is forbidden from dating Meadow.

If you’re unfamiliar with the term, “moulinyan” is the Italian version of the N-word.

Again, Tony’s racist attitude reflects the racial intolerance of the mob. At one point, during an argument with Meadow, he yells, “Outside, it’s the year 2000. In this house, it’s 1950!”

Tony and his crew have rear-facing outlooks on life, often harkening back to their parents’ or grandparents’ generation. Their racism is an unfortunate side-effect of their longing for the glory days of old, before things like modern surveillance technology and RICO laws.

Never mind that Meadow repeatedly rebukes her father for his outdated, racist views, and the she often serves as the voice of modern day tolerance and racial equality.

Were the show to be made today, there are people who would argue it promotes racism and must be erased from existence, and how DARE HBO put such hate-speech on the air?

Fat-Shaming

Several major characters on the show are overweight. Bobby Bacala (Steve Schirripa), Sal “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero (Vincent Pastore), and Vito Spatafore (Joseph R. Gannascoli) are all obese. And everyone on Tony’s crew points it out.

These men are constantly referred to as “fat fuck” and “beached whale.”

As awful as it may sound, that’s just guys breaking balls. As men, we often show affection through joking insults. I’m not saying it’s healthy, I’m just saying we seem to be wired that way.

However, no one is given more shit for their weight than Ginny Sacrimoni (Denise Borino-Quinn). Wife of Johnny Sacrimoni, an underboss for one of the New York Families, Ginny is the butt of fat jokes by Tony’s crew. Ralph Cifaretto jokes that she could have a 95-pound mole removed from her ass and not notice.

If HBO aired this today, I’d wager there would be a very vocal contingent of people up in arms about the fat-shaming Ginny endures.

Never mind that Jonny Sack gives a touching monologue about how much he loves Ginny, that he finds her beautiful and “rubenesque,” and that her weight isn’t an issue to him.

Someone cracked a cruel fat joke at her expense. Therefore, the show must be taken off the air, all copies of it destroyed, and the offending actors’ careers must end.

There are other elements of the show that people could take offense to, and likely would if the show were being made today.

What bothers me about all of this, and cancel culture in general, is the people who look for something to take out of context, get offended over it, and blow it out of proportion as loudly and publicly as possible. In doing so, they miss the point of why these unsavory aspects of the show were included in the first place.

Contrast.

The show works so well and is still finding a growing audience because the characters and stories are multi-dimensional.

We see Tony being angry, violent, and racist in one scene. In the next, we see him being a good, loving father. We see him caring for his uncle with cancer. We see him expressing kindness and compassion to animals (a family of ducks plays a prominent role in the first season).

His kind and positive behavior doesn’t erase or excuse the hateful and negative behavior. But the contrast between the two shows a wide range of thoughts, emotions, and actions he’s capable of, making him an interesting and engaging character. Moreover, this makes him relatable. While few people would engage in the kinds of violence and racism Tony openly displays, we all fluctuate between happiness and anger, thoughts of violence and thoughts of peace, and between hate and love, intolerance and compassion.

Seeing the real-life issues with which Tony struggles also makes the show compelling. On the street, he’s the boss of the North Jersey Mafia. Powerful. Respected. Feared.

In his house, he’s father and husband…and no one puts up with his shit. His wife, Carmella (Edie Falco), is a formidable match for him. She’s not as big and physically imposing, but she’s a strong woman whose presence is just as big. We see Tony struggle with his marriage, often as a result of his own impulsive actions. We see him struggle to do the right things as a father and often fail. We see him want to do right by his family, something he sometimes fails at due to his own tumultuous upbringing.

Yet, the “woke” contingent would disregard all of this, focusing only on the aspects of the show which they find offensive and would call for its immediate “Cancellation.”

I’m not defending the problematic aspects of The Sopranos. I wholly understand people not liking certain things they see in the show. I’ve witnessed all of the aforementioned problems in real-life, and I find them inexcusably abhorrent.

What I’m arguing here is that we keep in mind that The Sopranos is a work of fiction.

That the people we see on screen are actors playing characters. That their words and actions don’t reflect the views of the writers, producers, or actors.

I’m advocating for people taking in the experience as a whole, rather than passing judgement on individual elements taken out of context.

And if you watch the show and don’t like it, that’s perfectly fine. No one is forcing you to continue watching if you don’t want to.

Just keep in mind there are others who enjoy the show, warts and all, as it were. And their enjoyment of the show isn’t an endorsement of things with which you may take issue, nor does it invalidate your feelings about it.

Sadly, there are a lot of people today who take someone else’s enjoyment of something they disapprove of as a personal attack on them. And the uproar and resulting bad publicity of offended audiences is why a show like The Sopranos would be unlikely to get made today.

It’s just not worth the headache.

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References:

[1] Schaal, Eric. “Was The Sopranos the most popular show in HBO history?” Showbiz Cheat Sheet (cheatsheet.com). Jan. 30, 2019. https://www.cheatsheet.com/entertainment/was-the-sopranos-the-most-popular-show-in-hbos-history.html/ Nov. 18, 2021

[2] Huver, Scott. “The Sopranos Boss on the Mob Drama’s Popularity Amid the Pandemic and Prequel Film.” Variety (variety.com). Jul. 16, 2020. https://variety.com/2020/tv/features/sopranos-david-chase-prestige-tv-pandemic-interview-1234707842/ Nov. 18, 2021.