Here’s a weird admission: I think about The Sopranos every time I get out of my car.
While I was never the makings of a varsity athlete, shall we say, I did play rugby in college. Even back then I was never the most graceful or limber cat, and I’ve become even less so over the years. When I enter or exit an automobile, I tend to go about it less like The Dukes of Hazzard and more with just a little bit of care.
We’ll get to The Sopranos and car doors in a wee bit, but first let’s take a quick side quest.
Back when my now wife and I lived together in our first apartment in the Bay Area, we didn’t have a ton of excess cash. As a lifelong TV nerd, it’s wild that we didn’t pay a dime for cable television for a few years.
What I mean is that when we turned on our television set, we literally had a few channels with any reception, one with “not that much snow” and a few others with mostly blizzard conditions.
To paraphrase Rusty from National Lampoon’s European Vacation, “All we’ve got is cheese and snow!”
It seems quaint and anachronistic now, but the early Netflix days, when you could pay a modest monthly subscription and receive selected DVDs in the mail (snail mail!), were a revelation for people in our situation.
If nothing else, the daily mail delivery became exciting – far more than it is on the whole these days. Most of us have a paradox of choice when it comes to entertainment options today, but awaiting the next arrival of two or three DVDs in the mail was a big deal back then.
Keep in mind that prioritization, strategy, and negotiation were all crucial. My wife and I have different tastes in pop culture, with specific kinds of TV shows and movies that overlap. Therefore, setting up our Netflix queue just so meant maintaining the peace on the homefront while optimizing to satiate my voracious appetite for TV and movies.
Also vitally important: DVDs would hold three or perhaps four TV episodes maximum apiece. So on a Netflix subscription tier where you’re allowed to hang onto up to three DVDs at any given time, the name of my game was the following: burn through those TV shows lightning fast and get those DVDs back into the mail post-haste (pun intended).
This was how I was able to throttle through shows like The Wire and Six Feet Under and The Shield. I have memories of looking out for the mail delivery truck by our apartment in Richmond, hoping and waiting and thinking to myself, “I don’t know what I’m going to do if I need to wait another day to watch The Shield’s Season 1 finale!”
But above and beyond those other shows was The Sopranos. As a Long Island native and one-time NYC resident, I’ve always been drawn to stories that take place in New York and what we call the tri-state area. So in some ways, it’s no surprise that The Sopranos and Mad Men are near the very top of Pop Thruster’s best 100 TV shows ever.
I couldn’t get enough of The Sopranos back then, and the same remains true to this day – even with our modern day “good problem” of the paradox of choice. But back then, getting a Netflix DVD of The Sopranos – three or four precious episodes at a time – was an event, a gift, an oasis in a relatively arid pop cultural clime.
Part of the allure of throwing a DVD on was the home screen, where you’d see your content options, some key art, and hear music associated with the TV show or movie. It helped to get you in the mood for the viewing experience, kind of like that feeling of settling into the movie theater before the show.
Even in thinking about the DVD home screen for The Sopranos, the hypnotic “Woke Up This Morning” by Alabama 3 starts playing in my head.
That’s the theme song for the show’s opening credit sequence, of course, and that brings us all the way back around to Tony Soprano getting out of his SUV as the song punches out its electric conclusion as The Sopranos title card displays.
There’s a weight to Tony Soprano the character, both a heaviness to his spirit and a gravitas to his persona as the North Jersey mob boss. The performance is so specific, and it’s brilliant. And on top of that, my feelings about the character are compounded by the tiny yet arresting ways that I’m reminded of my stepfather.
Here’s what I wrote years ago, just after James Gandolfini passed away:
I grew up on Long Island, New York, among a broad swath of Irish, Italian, and Jewish families, many of whom emigrated out of the deeply ethnic ghettos of New York City. And not “The City” of Sex and the City and the like, but the New York of Brooklyn and The Bronx and Staten Island.
My stepfather was one of those guys, a tough Jewish kid with a big nose who literally bludgeoned his way out of the sweltering hell of The Bronx, escaping his own brutal father, a butcher, and into the relative luxury of the Navy, lying about his age to enter the military at the tail end of the Second World War. If not for Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my stepfather would have bludgeoned his way into Japan from the tail gun of a naval fighter.
Something I’ve never written about before is how much James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano reminds me of my stepfather at times. It’s the little things. The raise of an eyebrow, a thick guttural roll to an expression, the sarcastic and dark twinkle behind a joke that could well be anything but, the dark brown eyes under thick eyebrows that always seem to sigh, “So what do you want from me?”
As I’ve gotten older, all of these memories somehow merge together when I enter or exit my car: of loving The Sopranos, of Tony Soprano himself and my own strange grief regarding both Gandolfini’s death, of my own stepfather and the complex relationship I had with him, and perhaps my own recognition of my very mortal body beginning to age with the passing of the years.
It all gets tied up together in that tiny action – the movement of my body and the movement of a car door – that takes place countless times during a lifetime.
That shift brings it all back in some small but powerful way.