https://www.amazon.com/Sopranos-Sessions-Matt-Zoller-Seitz/dp/1419734946
Essays on every episode, interviews with David Chase (1 per season), very insightful and added a lot of behind the scenes stuff.
For example, David Chase confirms that Ralphie did start the fire, and the shot of the goat was meant to symbolize Ralphie as the devil who caused it.
I watched it for the first time a few years ago and I read Sepinwall's book at the same pace (the book goes episode by episode, and then has a season wrap up with an interview with Chase). I highly recommend the book as a companion piece. Also, as a bonus Chase accidentally gives away a closely guarded purposefully unresolved plot secret without realizing it.
https://www.amazon.com/Sopranos-Sessions-Matt-Zoller-Seitz/dp/1419734946
I have a resolution to read more, so I went on Amazon to look at books and found they just dropped a book on the history of The Sopranos and I am all over this.
It counts as reading even if you are reading about your all time favorite TV show
I listened to a few episodes and the bullshit/good content ratio was too high for it to be worth my time.
Do yourself a favor and read The Sopranos Sessions instead.
You should check out The Sopranos Sessions
https://www.amazon.com/Sopranos-Sessions-Matt-Zoller-Seitz/dp/1419734946
​
The author very much examines the show in the way you are referring, even doing an episode-by-episode breakdown.
Item | Current | Lowest | Reviews |
---|---|---|---|
The Sopranos Sessions | - | - | 4.8/5.0 |
^Item Info | Bot Info | Trigger
Assuming you’re gonna buy the book: The Sopranos Sessions https://www.amazon.com/dp/1419734946/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_IkfoDbRRQR0G5
“SOPRANO HOME MOVIES” SEASON 7/ EPISODE 1 WRITTEN BY DIANE FROLOV & ANDREW SCHNEIDER AND DAVID CHASE AND MATTHEW WEINER DIRECTED BY TIM VAN PATTEN Boardwalk Hotel
“You Sopranos! You go too far!”—Bobby “Is this it?” Carmela asks Tony early in “Soprano Home Movies,” after waking up to the sound of cops beating on their front door. No, it’s not quite “it”—if by “it,” you mean the point where Tony’s bad deeds finally catch up with him. He’s rich enough to buy a good lawyer, and the charge that prompts his latest arrest is old and weak (possession of a handgun and hollow-point ammunition—fallout from the end of season five, where Tony fled from the Feds’ arrest of Johnny Sack and chucked his piece in the snow, where it was discovered by a dumb suburban teen). But in another sense, yes, this is “it”—the final stretch for The Sopranos, the series. To answer one Carmela quote with another, from the season four premiere, “Let me tell you something: everything comes to an end.” The opening sequence of this episode—an off-kilter prologue, really, with an alternate narrative of that “All Due Respect” chase scene that opens like a hypertext link—also echoes the lyrics of the show’s theme: “Woke up this morning / Got yourself a gun.” But this time, it’s a gun Tony that didn’t have anymore—and damn sure didn’t want. The charge, though not quite resolved, looks like it won’t stick, so it counts as a close call—one of many that Tony has endured over six seasons, the most drastic of which was his shooting by demented Uncle Junior. “Soprano Home Movies” is largely a demonstration of Tony’s inability to escape being Tony even when escape is the whole point. He and Carmela try to flee the anxiety surrounding Tony’s gun charge and the irritation of AJ’s new situation1 by heading to Bobby and Janice’s lake house to celebrate Tony’s forty-seventh birthday. It’s a spectacular place to visit, and large chunks of the episode involve some combination of the four adults simply basking in the calming sights and sounds of the lake, with one scene dissolving peacefully into the next. But whether a Soprano goes to Naples, Paris, Miami, or an alternate reality, they are still a Soprano, and rot follows them. While Tony and Bobby sit on a boat in the middle of the lake, for instance, the conversation inevitably turns to business. The two men speculate on what happens if you get whacked. “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?” Bobby wonders. The talk shifts to how Bobby has never actually killed someone on the job (“ My pop never wanted it for me.”), and Tony suggests that Bobby may be a more reliable number two than guilt-ridden junkie Christopher has turned out to be. (Chris appears for only a few seconds in this episode—trying to wish Tony a happy birthday before T hangs up on him—which is long enough to establish that Tony has yet to forgive him for Julianna Skiff and any number of other offenses.) The episode’s most important set piece takes place indoors, as we spend a long, drunken evening with the Soprano siblings and their spouses, first doing karaoke (Carmela has rarely seemed less guarded than when she’s belting out “Love Hurts”), then playing an epic game of Monopoly that results in hurt feelings over the use of the unofficial Free Parking rule (when Bobby insists that the Parker Brothers put a lot of thought into the game as it should be played, his own wife snorts, “Fuck the Parker Brothers!”), over Janice telling an embarrassing (to Tony) but funny (to everyone else) story about Johnny Boy firing a bullet through Livia’s beehive hairdo, and particularly over Tony’s inability to stop making jokes about Janice’s old ways. The scene is the most purely theatrical thing the series has done since “Whitecaps,” a wiseguy riff on The Man Who Came to Dinner. It ratchets the tension and discomfort until Tony is warbling a version of “Under the Boardwalk” whose lyrics are about the sex acts Janice might have performed there. This is too much for Bobby, who has already insisted that Tony is a guest in his home who should not be insulting his wife, and he sucker-punches his own boss, leading to an ugly, clumsy brawl that’s like a sad comic mirror of Ralphie’s death. Tony has always had the physical advantage in any fight we’ve ever seen him get into, but Bobby is younger and healthier (he hasn’t been shot in the last year, at least), and is powered by a more righteous fury than the indignation Tony musters at the thought of one of his guys daring to strike him. In a shocking upset akin to Buster Douglas knocking out Mike Tyson, it’s Tony who winds up on the canvas at the end of this bout, 2 though it’s Bobby who then tries to run away, aware of the potentially fatal consequences of what he’s just done. “Tony is not a vindictive man,” Carmela tries to reassure Janice the next morning. We know otherwise, and the events that follow prove her sadly wrong—albeit not in the way either she or we might expect. Tony has never been a gracious loser, and he stews over the various reasons Bobby had an unfair advantage, but he never seriously entertains killing his brother-in-law. That would be a Johnny Boy move, and as season five’s “Cold Cuts” reminded us, it’s Janice who inherited more of that form of the Soprano temper (witness Richie), where Tony is more like his mother than he’d ever want to admit. Janice killing Richie for punching her in the mouth (presented in a sad, funny alternate history to Carmela) was more a Johnny Boy reaction than a Livia one. Livia wouldn’t have shot Richie. She would have henpecked him to death, or found something he loved and taken it from him. What Tony does to Bacala is exactly the kind of dish Livia would have served with cold cuts, where Johnny Boy and Janice both would have gone straight to blood. A brother-in-law gets killed, but it’s someone else’s: while negotiating a deal with a Canadian crew, Tony offers to murder the troublesome ex-husband of one of their sisters, and insists that Bobby be the one to do it. This goes against Bobby Sr.’ s wishes, and against Bobby’s own gentle nature, but Bobby’s in a vulnerable position where he can’t say no to the boss. The hit mostly goes as planned, but the victim reaches out and rips open Bobby’s shirt as the second bullet is fired, exposing his broken heart for all of us to see. In the world of the Mob, Bobby has just improved his standing. From any other perspective, he’s damned himself, and he knows it, judging by the look on his face as he returns to the lake to see Janice, baby Nica, and some friends all laughing and playing like they’re in a laundry detergent commercial. 3 This is the life he wants, the one he will go to extremes to protect, but the cabin will be forever soured, because he’ll remember the fight that happened here and what it forced him to do. On The Sopranos, when a character compliments another character on bettering themselves, or simply changing, it’s usually a sick joke. “The credit goes to you,” Janice tells her brother, noting how mellow he’s become. “You’ve really changed.” 4 Of course neither Tony nor Janice has really changed—they’ve just become more powerful and loathsome over the years, and more tragic because of the glimmers of self-awareness that keep getting snuffed out. The sense that Tony had a chance to really change but missed his moment is indicated, subtly, when Carmela spots a jumping fish (probably the most important animal on this show, even more important than Tony’s season one dream ducks) and Tony looks up too late to see it. “You’re a young man,” Bobby tells Tony. “We both are. The world’s still in front of us.” But the episode’s real message can be found in another Bobby line, when he tells Tony that he’s glad he never had to do a hit because DNA evidence makes it so hard to get away with crime these days. You cannot escape your identity.