Tony Soprano’s shadow looms large over 21st-century America. Illustration by Jimmy Turrell; reference photograph by Matt Carr/Getty Images.

Once upon a crime, a mound of a man lumbered outside in a bathrobe to feed a family of ducks in his backyard pool. What joyous delight he took in their playful splashing. It was our deceptively genial introduction to Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), mobster, suburban dad, cheating husband, henpecked son, sullen brooder, and volatile bruiser who was larger than life at the start and grew ever larger, until his beasty breathing could be heard across the room, like a Minotaur biding its time. The on-screen couplings, rubouts, beatdowns, and Jungian dreamwalks of Gandolfini’s sumo mafioso on HBO’s The Sopranos would climax 85 episodes later in an enigmatic cut to black, whose meaning remains a topic of grassy-knoll interpretation and metaphysical debate—was it finally lights out for Tony (the hit man cometh) or was the shock edit an arbitrary em dash to nowhere, like ending a novel in mid-sentence? The irresolution of Tony’s fate keeps him alive as legend, his final, expressionless glance an inscrutable tease. Created by David Chase, whose previous TV credits (The Rockford Files, I’ll Fly Away, Northern Exposure) gave little hint of the depth charges he would detonate here, The Sopranos ushered itself from inception into the gangster saga’s royal line of succession that originated with Scarface and The Public Enemy and was raised to opera morte with The Godfather movies—an early meeting of Tony’s crew at the Bada Bing strip club was bathed in sacristy shadow and painterly light in homage to Godfather cinematographer Gordon Willis, whose name is invoked in the same episode—and Goodfellas, whose cast included future Sopranos fixtures Michael Imperioli (as Tony’s rash nephew Christopher), Tony Sirico (the natty-dressing, malapropistic Paulie “Walnuts”), Frank Vincent (gang boss Phil Leotardo), and Lorraine Bracco (Tony’s shrink, Dr. Melfi).

The Sopranos soon moved beyond mere invocation and sly homage. It became its own flexing organism and powerhouse. The show made stars of its mostly little-known cast, racked up ratings and Emmy Awards, built the DVD market for Quality TV and the inevitable lavish boxed set, provided a launchpad for writer-producer-directors Terence Winter (who went on to do Boardwalk Empire) and Matthew Weiner (mastermind of Mad Men and The Romanoffs), raised the television recap to a state of exalted exegesis, and fertilized a small library of Soprano studies (The Sopranos: Born Under a Bad Sign, The Sopranos and Philosophy, Tony Soprano on Management), whose latest thumper is The Sopranos Sessions, a 20th-anniversary tribute to the series, written by noted deep-sea-diving television critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz, and bearing the heft of a family Bible, if your family likes to gather around the hearth and share fond reflections of how and when Big Pussy got whacked.

Interviewed by the authors for a long postmortem (it reads like an extended commentary track), David Chase takes the Marcus Aurelius long view of the transience of human endeavor, denying that The Sopranos will have any legacy, destined to join the stardust that yawns ahead. In the fullness of time, perhaps so, but in the lousy here and now The Sopranos retains a deep, admonitory hoofprint and, forgive the word, relevance. It “holds up” as quality crime drama and soap opera and its violence—at its worst overly florid and sadistic—still has the clout to shock even when you know what’s coming. But other series are re-watchable and influential without wielding lasting diagnostic abilities bordering on the prophetic. Depicting how things were then with evocation and a keen eye and ear for entropy, The Sopranos shows how we got to where we are now, a country stewing in its own stale juices.

Coming at the ragged end of the Bill Clinton era and sticking around through most of the Bush presidency, The Sopranos records and preserves the cusp of the pre-9/11, post-9/11 atmospheric shift, when national confidence had the wind knocked out of it and terrorism superseded organized crime as the chief preoccupation of the feds, the red needle on the fear gauge. It pulls back the tarp of the underlying malaise afflicting white America, a malaise compounded of postwar nostalgia, creeping age, waning virility and vital purpose, and a nagging belatedness (Tony himself: “Lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over”). The gong of decline is tolled at the outset. The rackets aren’t bringing in the money they used to, the minorities are taking over . . . Why can’t things be the way they used to be when young snots respected their elders, made men didn’t cut deals and rat out associates but took the full rap, and they played Jerry Vale on the radio?

It’s the MAGA mentality in its dormancy, Trumpiness on training wheels.

Way down the line (in episode 80), Tony, tired of listening to Paulie’s nattering on about the glory days, silences the dinner table with a dismissive “‘Remember when’ is the lowest form of conversation.” But that reflects Tony’s irritation with Paulie’s lack of an off-switch on his mouth more than a revulsion at reminiscing. Remembering when is an irresistible tug and drug on The Sopranos, its characters as mired in the monochrome past and the thickets of family lore as the residents of William Faulkner’s fabled Yoknapatawpha County. What Chase and his writers grasped is that the nostalgia of Tony and company isn’t a soft cotton-candied wistfulness of the way things were. There’s a hard edge to it, an anger simmering beneath, a bitter entitlement looking for an excuse to lash out. It’s the gripes of wrath.