If your favorite episode couldn't crack the top 25, well, poor you.

September 30, 2021 12:02 PM

The Ringer’s Definitive 'Sopranos' Episode Ranking

Ahead of the release of The Many Saints of Newark in theaters and on HBO Max on October 1, The Ringer’s Justin Sayles has revisited the world of The Sopranos by ranking all 86 episodes from the show’s six seasons, while handing out awards for MVPs and best quotes and tracking who left North Jersey for that big nothing in the sky.

Other rankings:
The Sopranos: The Definitive 86-Episode Ranking
Ranking All the Episodes of The Sopranos

Fight!

posted by kirkaracha (18 comments total)

This lengthy 6500-word piece by Willy Staley for The New York Times was going to be a post to the front page but I'll just put it here now:

The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life. “The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history. Even the flight of the ducks who had taken up residence in Tony’s swimming pool — not to mention all the lingering shots on the swaying flora of North Jersey — reads differently now, in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin.

This sense of decline is present from the show’s very beginnings. In his first therapy session with Dr. Melfi, Tony tries to explain why he thinks he has panic attacks, why he suffers from stress. “The morning of the day I got sick, I’d been thinking: It’s good to be in something from the ground floor,” he says. “I came too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.” Melfi tells him that many Americans feel that way. Tony presses on: “I think about my father: He never reached the heights like me, but in a lot of ways he had it better. He had his people, they had their standards, they had their pride. Today, what do we got?”

It is full of spoilers so if you haven't already seen the show you may not want to read it. Otherwise I found it compelling and worthwhile.
posted by cgc373 at 12:20 PM on September 30, 2021 [24 favorites]

I can't weigh in on the rankings because I was too busy when it came out and can't really see committing the time to go back and watch it. But I did watch a number of episodes when my son visited and the show was not at all what I was expecting. I'd expected a gritty, dark Scorsese-style mobster series (not my bag at all) but instead I found it really funny in the fish-out-of-water way. Like in What We Do in the Shadows, with old-world vampires in Staten Island, Tony's living in a world that's passed him by. And while he understands that, he's not sure what to do about it. In one moment he's plotting a revenge hit and at the same time he's running late for a meeting with his kid's school guidance counselor or something. I could see getting into that.
posted by sjswitzer at 12:26 PM on September 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

sjswitzer: I've watched the series maybe 6-7 times, and each time I find it funnier and funnier, while maintaining its drama and pathos.
posted by Saxon Kane at 1:23 PM on September 30, 2021 [4 favorites]

Their number one episode is also my number one episode - which I really didn't expect.
posted by Paul Slade at 2:16 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

"...The Romans? Where are they now?"

Tony Soprano : "You're looking at them, asshole."

The Sopranos and I, Claudius.
posted by clavdivs at 2:40 PM on September 30, 2021 [10 favorites]

instead I found it really funny in the fish-out-of-water way

I only ever watched a handful of episodes, but I was surprised to discover that someone I went to high school with, a well-known smartass at the time, was credited as a writer on the one that really cracked me up!
posted by praemunire at 2:59 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

That's a great link, clavdivs. (Also eponysterical.)

Interestingly, Cosa Nostra and Republic (res publica) are essentially the same construct. Somehow Latin's "res" got replaced by "cosa" (via "causa") in Italian but they both mean "thing" (originally a lawsuit or case to be resolved by, um, "law.") Nostra is "ours" and Publica is "public" but the public wasn't really understood to be, you know, everyone. And the Roman senate was literally the heads of powerful "families." I mean, you could stretch things too far, I suppose, but the Roman Republic really is, for much of its history, best understood as a mafia.

Some background on res->cosa here

causa: This word forms a "preposition" of sorts, causâ, a frozen form of the ablative. It normally follows the genitive word which is attached to it, e.g. pecuniae causâ ("for the sake of money"). Note that, besides "reason, cause," causa can also mean "lawsuit, legal case." In vulgar Latin, causa eventually replaced res, the usual word for "lawsuit," and as a result, some Romance languages generalized the meaning of causa from "a legal matter or thing" to "any matter or thing," hence Italian cosa and French chose. The English word "thing" followed much the same path, arising from Old English "thing" (originally meaning "judicial assembly") to the modern connotation.

I'll add that the parliament of Iceland of is still called the "Althing" (Alþingi). The common denominator, historically, is for the ruling clans to get together and establish "law" and, when necessary, deliver "justice."
posted by sjswitzer at 3:12 PM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

That Willy Staley piece is The Year's Best Essay - it's a spectacular work of insightful cultural criticism and gorgeous writing.
posted by PhineasGage at 3:12 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

I enjoyed the show when it was on (except for the last season), but tried a rewatch and quit. One of the themes of the show is that nothing changes, which means AJ and Meadow will always be annoying, and Carmela will enjoy the fruits of Tony's criminal acts. And I had blocked out how much I hated Janice.

Also, the main plot of at least two seasons was mob guy you never heard of gets out of jail, stirs up a lot of trouble, and Tony kills/has him killed in the end.
posted by kirkaracha at 3:13 PM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

This looks like a good list. The top 3 are definitely on point, bc I went in specifically looking for where they put the Pine Barrens. The article was really carefully articulated & does a great job expressing the painful ambivalence I felt when the show was airing. We used to watch it every Sunday night as a family. But I always felt it was really hard to watch. It was hilarious but also I hate seeing people suffer and this show is almost nothing but suffering and funny wisecracks. Which is I guess what makes it so relatable because that's just what a day is like.
posted by bleep at 3:19 PM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

10 Best Episodes (longtime Sopranos scribe Matt Zoller Seitz for Vulture)
10 Best Episodes (his The Sopranos Sessions coauthor Alan Sepinwall for Rolling Stone)
posted by box at 3:33 PM on September 30, 2021 [1 favorite]

The English word "thing" followed much the same path, arising from Old English "thing" (originally meaning "judicial assembly") to the modern connotation.


I'll add that the parliament of Iceland of is still called the "Althing"

I have never been to Iceland and I grasp very little of the language, but every time a friend posts vacation photos from Reykjavik of themselves standing in front of the Althing, I can rarely restrain myself from commenting, "WHAT IS THAT THING?!?"

My friends are understanding because they know I am a dad.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 4:01 PM on September 30, 2021 [5 favorites]

Nthing comments that the buried lede here is the stunning NYT article about The Sopranos. Virtually every part of it is worth reading, but this bit here, particularly the ending remarks by Chase, is extraordinary, and by far one of the most interesting things that he (typically a very interesting interviewee) has ever said in print.

As I continued to ask him about his dim vision of American culture and society, Chase shared a memory from his boyhood. He thinks he was in fifth grade, and he was reading an illustrated textbook that explained how water sanitation worked. “There were pictures in the book of how the water comes from here, it goes through a pipe, it goes to a place where it’s filtered, then it flows to a lake where it comes out of a fountain, and then the sun hits it,” he said. “And I remember thinking, God, America — we do that, we purify that water.” He was so proud of it. And obviously, he conceded, we still do that stuff. Then he trailed off. Maybe it was the birth of his daughter, he offered, and his sense that she would live in a country unrecognizable to him.

I was about to change the subject when he hit on something. “Have you noticed — or maybe you haven’t noticed — how nobody does what they say they’re going to do?” he said, suddenly animated. “If your sink gets jammed up, and a guy says he’s going to be out there at 5:30 — no. Very few people do what they say they’re going to do. There is a decline in goods and services that is enormous.” I asked him to elaborate. Near his home in Santa Monica, he said, there are five expensive mattress stores. “To me,” he said, “that’s a sign of decline in some way.” He actually went into one of these stores, he said, looking to buy one of these expensive mattresses. “And it was difficult, over five days, to get anyone to tell me the full story of the mattress.”

You can write this off as the curmudgeonly thoughts of a TV writer in Santa Monica, or you can take it as an opportunity to look at the mattress situation anew. Over the last few years, many nearly identical mattress brands have crowded into the same direct-to-consumer market with the same business model, which involves shipping mattresses directly to people’s homes and offering full refunds if they’re not satisfied (thus sending tons of perfectly fine mattresses to the landfill). Now, probably because there are so many of these companies, they have begun opening storefronts to showcase their mattresses — because people do like to try mattresses out before buying them — even though the entire point of the business was to not have a storefront. So now Chase lives in the midst of an investor-funded mattress-marketing battle where there could be, I don’t know, anything else. But some combination of greed and sloth and wastefulness had made it this way — and he still couldn’t get a straight answer about the mattresses.

We all have to live this way, in a landscape vandalized by increasingly inane and powerful flows of capital. Chase told me the real joke of the show was not “What if a mobster went to therapy?” The comedic engine, for him, was this: What if things had become so selfish and narcissistic in America that even the mob couldn’t take it? “That was the whole thing,” he said. “America was so off the rails that everything that the Mafia had done was nothing compared to what was going on around them.”

David Milch is the Original HBO David who gets the most credit for gnomic statements about reality, and David Simon was always the one who got the most credit for saying things about the modern world, but Chase has such a gift for taking what feels like a minor gripe about the world and extrapolating it out until it suddenly feels rather profound.
posted by rorgy at 7:47 PM on September 30, 2021 [18 favorites]

MetaFilter: almost nothing but suffering and funny wisecracks
posted by kirkaracha at 8:34 PM on September 30, 2021 [3 favorites]

I liked the one where they killed that one guy.
posted by spitbull at 4:20 AM on October 1, 2021 [1 favorite]

I like the one where they did that cool glamorous thing like in that movie about the Mafia, but instead of being cool and glamorous, it's kinda shitty and it ruins some minor character's life.

(I also like the one about Columbus Day, and when Anthony Jr. briefly becomes Goth.)
posted by box at 10:12 AM on October 1, 2021

The show is so damn rich I've felt for a while now that I should watch it again. But I kinda can't, when we first watched it, well, the world that it was set in was neither far nor unfamiliar - and for that all the more poignant - (and somehow the pause they made after 9/11 - and the emotional heft of so much of it (Tony and Carmela's argument when they were going to split up for the first time was one so many people talked about, "It was just like hearing my parents again" : it's hard to explain but it kinda summarised so much of what I felt in that place and at that time. To watch it again wouldn't I just spend all my time pining for the past? Like if someone you loved lived in a specific part of town then you broke up and you rarely maybe even never go there - then years later you find yourself there and the yearning overwhelms you, enough that you forget why you are even there. I don't know if I could bear watching it again. People saying it was funny makes me think, maybe yeah, and the lists also make me think, yeah that episode was great wasn't it? It's a curious thing - when I think about art works that have moved me - even somewhat brutally (I'm looking at you, Pert and Mahler... and that stupid Road novel that I've read more than twice ('was it really that horrid? Yes, yes it was...') I don't have them anywhere near as tightly connected to a time and place.

The characters were all so damn familiar - it was eerie and funny but also sad as shit. And I don't know if I need or want that sad. Though I do kind of want to see Janice fucking kill Richie again because I really did fucking hate Richie. But Adriana - I mean... I just don't know if I can do it.
posted by From Bklyn at 8:51 AM on October 2, 2021 [1 favorite]

One thing I'll belatedly throw in here is that I, too, am a Sopranos latecomer who became A Loud Media Enthusiast Enthusing, just like that article mentions. And I mostly don't regret only getting into the show in 2019 or so, because it's kind of nice to be in a place to appreciate it without wondering whether my prior experience or nostalgia colors my opinion of it. It holds up damn strong these days.

(That said, while I'm sure "Employee of the Month" and "University" are both stellar in their ways, those two episodes happening back-to-back did have me seriously throw the show aside in disgust for a week or two. I'm not sure whether they hold up these days and will have to wait for a someday rewatch to decide, but at the very least, lumping them that close to one another felt gratuitous and gross to me. And I'm saying this as someone who liked the new Twin Peaks!)
posted by rorgy at 11:55 AM on October 7, 2021