With so many new series popping up on streaming services and DVD every day, it gets harder and harder to keep up with new shows, much less the all-time classics. With TV Club 10, we point you toward the 10 episodes that best represent a TV series, classic or modern. If you watch those 10, you’ll have a better idea of what that series was about, without having to watch the whole thing. These are not meant to be the 10 best episodes, but rather the 10 most representative episodes.
Some TV series have such an impact on the medium that their gravitational pull becomes strong enough to suck in other shows around them, warping and changing them in interesting ways. These series’ success—both critically and in the ratings—lead other creators to play around with the innovations they pioneer. Think of how All In The Family created a market for social-issues-based sitcoms, or how Hill Street Blues started taking the camera home to follow its cops through their personal lives. These were shows that remade TV in their own image.
In the past 20 years, no other drama has had as great of an effect as The Sopranos. It debuted modestly on HBO, promoted as a show about a mobster who had to start seeing a psychiatrist to deal with issues in his personal life. (Original tagline: “If one family doesn’t kill him, the other one will.”) Then critics quickly glommed onto the show, and audiences followed. While the show’s mob trappings—including its propensity for killing off main characters in sometimes brutal fashion—certainly helped, it was the way The Sopranos stood out from every other program on the air that made it a success. Created by David Chase, the series reflected his own personal interests and obsessions—from mother issues to Catholicism to the idea that few people are likely to change who they are on a fundamental level—and it was willing to try just about anything to explore the inside of its central character’s head. Dream sequences, psychotherapy sessions, and seemingly unmotivated character developments dragged audiences deeper and deeper into the dark heart of Tony Soprano, and the voyage proved thrilling.
As written by Chase and one of the best writing staffs ever assembled (including Boardwalk Empire’s Terence Winter and Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner) and performed by James Gandolfini, Tony Soprano is one of the best-developed characters in TV history. (Only Breaking Bad’s Walter White even comes close.) At its heart, the show is a character study, asking all sorts of questions about why Tony is the way he is, whether he can change his wrathful nature, and if there was ever a point when he could have avoided making a life through crime. The series also compares and contrasts Tony’s rise and continued rise with the America of the late Clinton and George W. Bush eras, a country blessed with prosperity but unwilling to consider just where so much of that prosperity came from. (The Sopranos’ final season made this explicit, with frequent references to the Iraq War that the characters could not be bothered to think about.) Over the course of nearly 100 episodes, the show indulged in anticlimax, asked serious questions about ethics and morality, and followed its own interests down rabbit trails, no matter how frustrated its audience became when characters weren’t getting “whacked.”
To watch even one episode of The Sopranos—and the series was terrific at building single episodes that stood on their own while still advancing ongoing plots—is to see a show far weirder and more resonant than its reputation. It’s a work of bloody beauty, setting moments of horrific violence directly opposite moments of mystery and wonder. If The Wire is a big, sprawling Victorian novel, then The Sopranos is a short-story collection, where all of the stories eventually matter, but where the author is content to wander off to explore whatever catches his interest.
Boiling The Sopranos down, then, is less about making a list of the “best” episodes and more about catching the show in its many moods. In celebration of the return of our reviews of the show today, here are the 10 episodes that best look at what the show was and how it changed television history.
“College” (season one, episode five)
Few episodes of television legitimately change the whole medium, but this one can make a good case for doing so. Five episodes into the series’ run, The Sopranos had already made a case for itself as a wonderfully acted, written, and directed series, with unusual plotting that told a serialized story but didn’t proceed at the expected rhythms. (What appeared to be the series’ central conflict was mostly resolved in episode four.) “College,” a mostly standalone episode about Tony taking daughter Meadow on a college visit, and seeing an old associate-turned-FBI informant while doing so, showed that the series was playing for keeps. Tony has to figure out how to deal with the situation, and in a series of brilliant sequences, he arrives at the only choice available to him.
“The Happy Wanderer” (season two, episode six)
The show’s first season is its most conventionally plotted. It’s a great starting point, but once it’s over, it tends to leave a mistaken impression about what the series would actually become. Better, then, to skip to a season-two episode, when the show really began to spread its wings. One of the central questions of the series is how people not in the mob world might react to Tony Soprano entering their circles, and “The Happy Wanderer” is a great example of this, as the father of one of Meadow’s friends (played by an increasingly desperate Robert Patrick) runs up a huge gambling debt and is forced to see the Tony who’s not just a jolly pal. It’s a compelling examination of Tony trying to keep his personal and professional lives separate, and it contains one of the series’ best therapy scenes.
“Funhouse” (season two, episode 13)
More than any other great drama series (other than, perhaps, Twin Peaks), The Sopranos was interested in how dream sequences could be used to unravel its protagonist’s psyche, to the point where roughly half an entire episode was devoted to one of Tony’s dreams in season five. But it’s the season-two finale, “Funhouse,” that best gets at how the show uses dreams to enlighten the audience and at how Tony uses his subconscious to realize that, say, one of his best friends has turned FBI informant. “Funhouse” features some of the first appearances of the autumnal color palette that would come to dominate the series, a harrowing hit, and one of the best musical montages the series ever did.