After the crazy violence and nudity of Watchmen, you’d think perhaps we’d go for something a little more … safe for next time around.

Nah.

The Sopranos.

It’s one of the best rated TV shows of all time (on IMDb, only Breaking Bad (which I watched just before I started reviewing TV series), Avatar: The Last Airbender (it’s great), and Game of Thrones (pre Season 8) are rated higher among fiction). It’s a mob story set in late 90s New Jersey produced for HBO and has all the sex, violence, and language you’d expect from that combination. It’s … quite a show. Dealing with family, the moral complexity (at best) of mob life, and mental health issues… and that’s just season 1. Oh it’s a show.

Some episodes particularly worth commenting on:

• Pilot: Starting the show out with therapy as a way to deal with the sex and violence (for the characters and the viewers) is a great way to set things up.
• College: A collision between Tony’s home and mob lives and daughter Meadow Soprano’s introduction to the darker world.
• Boca: How does the mob deal with a soccer coach they don’t want to leave–and then things get darker. Mob and normal life rubbing against each other is great.
• Isabella: Oh things really got complicated… family and mob are tied up in all sorts of terrible wonderful ways.
• I Dream of Jeannie Cusamono: Continuing the previous plotline and another mob/life collision with friend Artie Bucco’s restaurant.

There’s a reason this show is so highly rated and I can’t wait to see where it goes from here.

Warning: NSFW. Like… really NSFW. It’s very HBO.