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This review contains spoilers of a show that ended more than 10 years ago. But yano. Some people care about that shit.

Fifteen years I’ve later finally caught up with the Sopranos. It began in Year 11 English class, sat next to Tom, a boy who would later go on to star in gay porn. One day, incredulous that I hadn’t seen it, Tom pulled the DVD out of his bag and told me to watch it. I devoured the first season. And then I watched the second, the third, the fourth and possibly at least some of the fifth. And then Year 11 ended and I practically never spoke to Tom again. We weren’t really friends, you see.

I tried to catch up with the show, but it never quite happened despite the show not airing in the UK until months after its US release. Yet despite the two years between borrowing the DVDs and the show ending, I never quite managed it. Over the next decade I kept going back, trying to finally finish it. By this point I’ve probably seen the first three or four seasons five or six times, but never further. Partly because the show demanded your attention to keep up, partly due to watching the latest and greatest new thing. And maybe partly because the ending and other events (read: deaths) had been so throughly revealed to me that it barely seemed worthwhile. Spoilers may not ruin a story for me, but apparently they do reduce some of the impetus to continue, I guess.

I was, once again, partway through season 4 when my wife saw me watching it and suggested we try watching it together again. We’d tried to do it once before too in a tiny little Brixton studio flat, but once again never made it to the end. This time though, over the course of many weeknight dinners � none of them remotely Italian, obviously � between February and May, we finally finished it!

What do you do when you finish watching something? You go and read everything you can about it obviously. Alan Sepinwall has been my TV critic of choice for a good 12 years now. Watch the new episode of Chuck? Read his recap. Watch an episode of Breaking Bad? Read his recap. Watch the latest Friday Night Lights? You get the idea.

As the years have gone by, I’ve had less and less time to devote to watching television, let alone to reading about television. The current lockdown has afforded me more time to watch new shows and it’s clear the TV landscape has changed. There’s more television � and more good television � than ever, with the bulk release of whole seasons becoming increasingly common. This may not have affected the role of a TV critic, but it has definitely affected my role as a TV viewer. Of the new shows I’ve watched recently, the only time I visited Sepinwall’s recaps was after the last couple of Better Call Saul episodes.

Despite that Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller-Seitz’s compendium The Sopranos Sessions felt like an obvious book to read after the final episode of the show. While it’s easy to articulate my feelings about the show (I loved it), the book is a trickier proposition. Two-thirds of the book is dedicated to reviews of each episode which make clear just how much happened in the first couple of seasons of the show. While these reviews form a nice little trip down memory lane, it was rare that they added much value for me despite the preponderance of thought and analysis.

Ultimately I no longer feel the need to read someone else’s thoughts on TV when I can write a less informed blog post myself. Especially when the authors� thoughts later conflict with what creator David Chase tells them in the interviews at the end of the book. While the show will no doubt be the subject of many PhD theses by now, I don’t need to analyse every theme, motif or mystery in each episode. Did the Russian survive? I didn’t care at the time and I don’t care now. Did Ralphie burn down the stable? Always felt that way to me. Did Tony die at the end? It doesn’t really matter to me.

I don’t need 30 pages of dialogue between the two authors arguing about the show’s ending. It’s kind of redundant when David Chase outlines thought process half a dozen chapters later. These interviews make up the bulk of the remaining third of the book and are amongst the book’s most interesting pieces. They also cast something of a shadow over the show. Watching them at the time, it felt that the show was treating violence against women lightly during the three episode stretch where Melfi is raped and Tracee is violently beaten, even if the show dealt with the events reasonably well. While Chase might be right that nobody complained when bad things happened to men, that’s kind of the expectation when watching a show like this.

Subverting expectations kind of seems to be a running theme, especially if you read the episode recaps. Given that it’s difficult to take Chase seriously when he says he wasn’t setting out to mess people around with the show’s ending. Either way, it doesn’t matter to me but it’s surprising to see these comments presented so uncritically in a 450 page book.

With 450 odd pages to play with there was plenty of scope to add new insights to the show. Perhaps exploring the themes of the series as a whole or a character’s progression may have been more effective. Rather than approaching the show an episode at a time, deconstructing each season may have worked better for me. Maybe interviews with the show’s cast and crew might have been worth exploring.

At any rate, the book’s highlights for me were saved until last where they did just that with a choice selection of the author’s 15+ year old newspaper articles. Okay, fine, maybe the show’s main audience wasn’t filled with people who cared about the show’s costume choices. But learning that Tony Sirico’s closet was home to the exact same shirt that the show’s costume designer picked out for Paulie to wear on the show? That’s the kind of tidbit I’m truly interested in.