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"The Sopranos" is arguably the greatest series in the history of television.

(HBO)

Something surprising happens when you re-watch David Chase's 1999-2007 Mob drama "The Sopranos": it becomes a different show. Deeper, darker, stranger.

"In outline, 'The Sopranos' is not especially original -- stepping into the shoes of two classic mafia movies, 'The Godfather' and 'Goodfellas' -- but its radicalism was in the application of this subject matter to a weekly domestic drama," The Guardian wrote in 2010.

Quite so, but the show's groundbreaking realism -- its, dare we say it, relatability -- comes from the details, which really start to pop out on repeat viewings.

What follows are 9 observations that stuck with me after recently binge-watching the entire series. Spoilers follow -- this post is for veteran fans of the show.

9. Adriana La Cerva becomes dramatically dumber

Characters sometimes undergo illogical changes in TV series for the convenience of the larger narrative. When it happens over a number of years, viewers often don't consciously notice. But when you binge-watch a show, it becomes obvious. Adriana (Drea de Matteo) is a case in point. Early on in "The Sopranos," Christopher Moltisanti's girlfriend is street-smart, independent and tough, mocking Chrissie for being a bad speller and browbeating him into stopping Tony Soprano's teen daughter, Meadow, from seeking out Ecstasy on the street. But by the time the end comes for her half a dozen years in, she can't walk and chew gum at the same time. She whines and mewls and stares vacantly -- she no longer has any identity of her own. "You said she had a nice ass!" she blubbers at Christopher, referring to her friend, Danielle, who's really an undercover FBI agent. (Christopher's knee-jerk, can't-we-just-end-this-fight response: "I was trying to say something positive!") Incredibly, Adriana no longer has any idea what her gangster boyfriend -- now fiance -- is capable of or why bad things are happening to her.

8. Bobby Baccalieri becomes dramatically smarter

Bobby (Steve Schirripa) was born into the Mob, but at middle age he's still Junior Soprano's errand boy and nursemaid. The reason: he's clearly too stupid to be out on the street. When Junior tells him a lame, racist joke -- an eye doctor tells a Chinese immigrant, "You have a cataract," and the Chinese man replies, "No, I drive a Rincoln" -- Bobby looks blank.

"What? You don't get it?" Junior says.



"I get it. He drives a Lincoln," Bobby replies. "What?"

At one point, after Tony officially displaces his uncle Junior as boss, Bobby delivers a message from Junior and, trying to impress the real gangsters in the room, says, apropos of nothing, "To the victor goes the spoils." Tony has no patience for dimwits and barks, "Why don't you get out of here before I shove your quotations book up your fat f---in' ass!"

As late as Season 4 Bobby is still a moron, telling Tony that "Quasimodo predicted all this. ... All these problems. The Middle East, the end of the world." When Tony corrects him, pointing out that Bobby meant Nostradamus and that Quasimodo is the hunchback of Notre Dame, Bobby is unfazed. "I always thought, okay, you got the hunchback of Notre Dame. You also got your quarterback and halfback of Notre Dame."

"One's a f---ing cathedral," a frustrated Tony says.

"Obviously," Bobby says, plowing mindlessly on. "I know. I'm just saying. It's interesting, the coincidence. What, you're gonna tell me you never pondered that? The back thing with Notre Dame?"

Then, late in the series, Bobby suddenly turns into a different man, capable of thoughtful meditations on life while sitting in a canoe and competent enough as an earner and strategic thinker to effectively become Tony's trusted right-hand man. Sure, he still plays with his toy trains, but even this can't mute his new brainpower. In fact, right before he buys the farm, he's buying a new model train and musing about how sophisticated life was back in the golden age of rail travel.

"If that train still ran from New York to AC, Atlantic City would be a different place today," he tells the shop owner. "It's nice to think that. Imagine, riding in that club car, sipping on a Negroni."

7. The first Barbara is better than the second Barbara

Sometimes the actors who play minor characters on shows get replaced for one reason or another. This is always disconcerting, especially for serious fans.

One key example on "The Sopranos": Barbara, the youngest child of Livia and Johnny Boy Soprano. She married a civilian, moved out of New Jersey and has never had anything to do with the family business. The original Barbara, actress/playwright Nicole Burdette, brought just the right tension to the role. She's a suburban mom far removed from the Mob world, but she still has sharp edges: you can tell she grew up in the Soprano household. When her sister Janice returns home and starts complaining to Barb about their mother's situation, Barbara shuts her down, telling her to just let Tony handle it. After 2001, Barbara was played by Danielle Di Vecchio, whose edges are as hard as pudding. She's believable as a suburban mom -- who grew up in Westchester, not Newark.

6. The show is funnier than you remember it being

You ask people to describe "The Sopranos," they're going to say it's a Mob drama. (That's how I described it at the top of this post.) Certainly nobody's going to call it a comedy, right? But the show is consistently freakin' hilarious -- and true-to-life hilarious, not sitcom hilarious. Michael Imperioli, who plays Christopher and wrote a couple of episodes, pointed this out a couple of years ago: it's "like pee-in-your-pants funny, and in an absurd, sometimes even slapstick way, which is great," he said. He's spot on.

The original Barbara, with Tony and Janice.

The best example of the show's unique humor -- absurd and pee-in-your-pants, plus morbid and perfectly deadpan -- might be a line from Season Three's "Pine Barrens," written by Terrence Winter. Christopher and Paulie Gualtieri (Tony Sirico) are sent to pick up some money from Valery, an alcoholic Russian mobster, and they end up choking him and driving out to the woods to bury him, whereupon Valery unexpectedly comes back to life and takes off. Tony, through static-ridden cell reception, tells Paulie their quarry was a crack killer for Russia's Interior Ministry and fought in Chechnya. "You're not gonna believe this," Paulie tells Christopher after the phone call cuts out for the last time. "The guy killed 16 Czechoslovakians. He was an interior decorator." Pause. Responds Chrissie: "His house looked like shit."

5. Sharon Angela just might be the cast's most natural physical comedian

Angela, who plays Rosalie Aprile, doesn't need great lines of dialogue: her gestures and facial expressions are enough. "Nosy? Eat your mannigot," she snaps at a woman sitting nearby when Angie Bonpensiero, upset at a health crisis (and so much more), breaks down over lunch. Written down here, it's nothing, but trust me, it's funny. Better yet, re-watch the show to find out for yourself.

By the way, Angela also nails it when the writers do give her flat-out funny lines. Musing on Mob rats, she tells Adriana, spitting out the line like she's opening for Louis C.K. at the Improv, "At least Judas didn't go into the Apostle Protection Program."

4. Vito Spataore's intellectual evolution is even greater than Bobby's

Joseph Gannascoli, the actor who plays Vito, first appears as a civilian: an ordinary customer at a bakery where Christopher is getting poor service. But never mind that. He's soon cast as Vito, who is almost as dumb and useless as Bobby Baccalieri. He's low man on Richie Aprile's crew, which becomes Gigi Cestone's crew and then Ralphie Cifaretto's crew. He first comes to the fore as Ralphie's punching bag. Example: Ralphie tells restaurateur Artie Bucco to bring over his dirty chef whites. "My friend here will suck the stains out of them," he says, patting Vito like his hugely overweight subordinate is a dog.

But Vito eventually becomes a captain and, along with losing weight and taking on an interesting subplot concerning his sexual orientation, becomes remarkably smarter. In the last season he's Tony's best earner, respected across the board -- until, that is, it's discovered that he's not just gay, but prefers "catching, not pitching."

3. Series creator David Chase really, truly doesn't want you to root for Tony

You like Tony, who's played perfectly by the late, great James Gandolfini. He's sentimental, he loves animals and his children, and he goes to see the psychiatrist Jennifer Melfi because he wants to better understand himself. You like the other guys too. Paulie dotes on his mother. Chrissie tears up thinking about how he got picked on when he was a kid. Silvio always dresses so nicely.

And some of the gangsters are secretly conflicted about their chosen trade. "What, am I a toxic person?" Tony says, really wanting to know. There's a whole episode built around Tony's need to hear people tell him he's a good guy. It struck me as a dark twist on Lenny Bruce's classic bit about the Lone Ranger discovering that what he really wants, what he really needs, is to hear the townsfolk say thank you after he saves them from the villain -- and how the thank you quickly becomes more important than the courageous good deed.

Yes, you believe these characters are real human beings, with real fears and hurts. They all rationalize who they are and what they do: Christopher insists he's a "soldier," Tony argues he didn't have the opportunities that he made sure his own children have. But Chase never lets you forget these men are first and foremost murderous sociopaths who should not be admired or emulated in any way, let alone forgiven.

In the 2001 episode "University," Ralphie (Joe Pantoliano) beats his stripper girlfriend Tracee to death outside the Bada Bing, the strip club that serves as the Mob family's unofficial headquarters.

Tony and Paulie are standing over the corpse, and Paulie can tell that Tony is not happy about what has just happened. "C---sucker was way out of line," Paulie says, the anger burning him up.

"Twenty years old, this girl," Tony says.

Paulie glances down at the dead girl. "That too."

Paulie, of course, was talking about "disrespecting the Bing," a far greater crime than murdering a mere stripper.

Chase also makes clear that no one in their world can claim innocence. In another 2001 episode, "Second Opinion," Tony's wife Carmela (Edie Falco), wracked with guilt but still in denial, goes to see a psychiatrist of her own. Once Carmela makes clear that her husband is a gangster, Dr. Krakower advises her to take the children and flee.

"I would have to get a lawyer, find an apartment, arrange for child support..." Carmela says.

"You're not listening," the man breaks in. "I'm not charging you because I won't take blood money, and you can't, either. One thing you can never say is that you haven't been told."

"I see," Carmela says.

Needless to say, Carmela doesn't see -- not really. The comforts of the easy life, the fruits of Tony's murderous labor, are too great.

The greatest moment of clarity comes not from Carmela but from Christopher, who battles with drug addiction throughout the series. "That's the guy Adriana, my uncle Tony," he says. "The guy I'm going to hell for."

2. Tony's most telling, and relatable, relationship is with Janice

"The Sopranos" ultimately is about Tony and his interactions with the people he hate-loves (the only kind of love he's capable of). On first viewing you might decide that his volatile relationship with Carmela is the one to hang our hats on. Or maybe his fraught give-and-take with his poisonous mother, both before and after her death. But the one that resounds the deepest on repeat viewings is his relationship with his older sister Janice, played by Aida Turturro.

Tony and Janice's difficult, suspicion-filled sibling rivalry perfectly captures the dynamic in the Soprano family. (Tony gets angry when Janice tells Carmela and Bobby about an incident from childhood when their drunk father pulled out a gun and fired a bullet through their mother's beehive hairdo, because it makes them seem like "a dysfunctional family.")

Bobby's kids get dinner and a show.

He tells Dr. Melfi that the way the teenaged Janice fought back against their mother was "heroic s---."

"She stuck up for you," Melfi says.

Tony gives her a disappointed, annoyed look. "Please," he says. "It was every man for himself in that house."

When the conversation turns to how Bobby, now Janice's husband, took care of Junior for years, Melfi muses on loving acts of kindness in families. Tony responds, bitterly: "Janice only does acts of Janice."

At least he sounds bitter. Tony understands his sister, and he likes her this way. Her selfishness is no greater than his own, but it allows him to feel superior, because she ran off to an ashram in her youth while he stayed in New Jersey and was "the good son."

The key episode for their relationship is Season 5's "Cold Cuts," where Janice goes to anger-management class and quickly shows signs of actual growth and personal happiness. Standing in her kitchen, Tony tells her he's happy for her. It's a tender moment. But of course it doesn't last long. In the end, Tony can't abide his sister's newfound contentment, because she's his mirror image -- they grew up under the same roof, after all -- and contentment has eluded him despite years of therapy. So he must prove to himself that her happiness is a fraud, a mask that can be easily yanked away. Sitting down to eat with Janice, Bobby and Bobby's two young children, Tony starts cheerfully needling Janice about her lost grown son, Harpo. He pokes and pokes at her until finally she snaps and comes at him with a steak knife. Tony strides out of the house with a big smile. He has proved his point: no one changes, not really.

1. David Chase wants it both ways with the ending -- and that's OK



Chase spent years saying the famous -- and famously reviled -- cut-to-black ending of the final scene is not about Tony getting a bullet in the head in that kitschy diner, with his family -- that is, his nuclear family -- around him. Instead, it's about, as Christopher once put it, the "ordinary-ness of life," even when you're a Mob boss. Chase says he built the scene around the Journey song that plays throughout it, "Don't Stop Believing."

"I love the timing of the lyric when Carmela enters: 'Just a small town girl livin' in a lonely world, she took the midnight train goin' anywhere,'" he said earlier this year. "Then it talks about Tony: 'Just a city boy,' and we had to dim down the music so you didn't hear the line, 'born and raised in South Detroit.' The music cuts out a little bit there, and they're speaking over it. 'He took the midnight train goin' anywhere.' And that to me was (it). I felt that those two characters had taken the midnight train a long time ago. That is their life. It means that these people are looking for something inevitable. Something they couldn't find. I mean, they didn't become missionaries in Africa or go to college together or do anything like that. They took the midnight train going anywhere. And the midnight train, you know, is the dark train."

Tony, Carmela and AJ in the diner.

So it's about life going on, day after day, and Tony and Carmela never being happy, because they took that metaphorical midnight train. But as much as Chase has protested the interpretation, it's also about the end coming for Tony, right here. We see that tough guy enter the diner, a guy we've never seen before. And then Chase keeps cutting back to the tough -- as he sits at the counter, as he looks over his shoulder (apparently at Tony) and then as he heads for the bathroom (perhaps to double-check his weapon in private). While all this is going on, the tension is ratcheted up all the more by repeated cuts to Meadow parking -- why do we see her trying and failing to parallel park, over and over, if it doesn't mean something? -- and then she rushes across the street to the diner, looking grim.

Chase says it's all about the Journey song. "The biggest feeling I was going for, honestly, was don't stop believing," he said. "It was very simple and much more on the nose than people think. ... There are attachments we make in life, even though it's all going to come to an end, that are worth so much, and we're so lucky to have been able to experience them. Life is short. Either it ends here for Tony or some other time. But in spite of that, it's really worth it. So don't stop believing."

All of that is interesting, but you don't need to know it to recognize that the scene -- like the entire remarkable series -- just works.

-- Douglas Perry