James Gandolfini: Tony Soprano Set the Mold for the Modern TV Anti-Hero

Somewhere between the world of good guys and the world bad guys lies the grayish, foggy, morally challenged world of the anti-hero. The best definition I ever read of “anti-hero” comes from the great critic Pauline Kael who wasn’t talking about a movie or TV or literary character but about Mick Jagger. She called Jagger “the man you hate to love.” A play on the famous old line “the man you love to hate.”

Jagger may have seemed a rock and roll anti-hero in the ‘60s. A guy who made naughtiness feel delicious and seductive. But Jagger as far as I know never shot his own cousin to death with a shotgun. For that kind of anti-hero we must turn to the world of fiction. The world of The Sopranos.

David Chase’s TV classic was revolutionary in many ways. First and foremost, it kicked off the era of great cable dramas. An entire multi-verse of brilliant groundbreaking fiction opened up in the wake of The Sopranos. There was The Wire on HBO itself, and Deadwood and Treme. On AMC there was Mad Men and Breaking Bad. On Showtime there was Dexter (until that show petered out) and Homeland. Justified and Sons of Anarchy on FX.

At the center of David Chase’s rich and slyly satiric TV world lay the beefy gangster Tony Soprano, played by James Gandolfini with equal parts charm and menace. The brilliance of The Sopranos – and Gandolfini’s performance – lay not just in the fact that it made us want to live vicariously through Tony Soprano. We felt that in some way we already were Tony Soprano. And that was the show’s master stroke. Showing the gangster’s life not just as a series of wackings but as a succession of domestic and work-related misadventures occasionally interrupted by incidents of horrific and sometimes morbidly hilarious violence. His life was our life. Except for the shotgun murders.

Chase didn’t want to just tell the story of a gangster. He wanted to stage a critique of modern American life with a gangster poised ironically at its center. And he created in Tony Soprano a perfect vehicle for conveying his themes. Soprano was conflicted in ways that might be familiar to any average affluent middle-aged American male. He was in therapy for panic attacks. He was worried about his rebellious daughter and slothful son. He cheated on his wife and may have been slightly guilty about it.

But this guy wacked people. With his own two hands. Unlike the typical American male, he was willing to not only bend the rules but break them utterly. And no matter how bad he got, we never stopped loving him. We never stopped being seduced by his charms.

Certainly this was all part of Chase’s conception to begin with. But in Gandolfini’s hands the idea took off beyond conceit and into the realm of classic tragicomic fiction. Gandolfini’s performance lent the character a richness and fullness that could not have been there on the page alone. Gandolfini was himself seductive, despite being big and sweaty and bald. Tony bedded a lot of women on that show, and sure he was rich, but you believed he would’ve gotten the women anyway even without the money and power. So strong was Gandolfini’s sex appeal. His unapologetic alpha-dog charisma.

We may have been repulsed by Tony’s acts but we were always attracted by Tony himself. Dr. Melfi, the female psychiatrist who provided Tony his foil and mirror for self-reflection, became our representative within the show. She wanted to have sex with Tony. And she thought he was a monster. Was she attracted to him because of his monstrousness or in spite of it? She never worked it out. Neither did we.

Tony Soprano soon became more than just a cult anti-hero, he became a full-on pop culture phenomenon. Television took notice. The next ten years would see an endless succession of brilliant cable dramas inspired at least in part by The Sopranos. Cable TV would come to be dominated by the male anti-hero, following the model laid down by David Chase and James Gandolfini.

You see it in all these guys we hate to love. Don Draper: the charming rake who somehow gets away with doing all the terrible things we wish we had the guts to do but know we never will (unless we suffer the kind of brain damage that leaves libido intact but destroys all sense of moral restraint). Dexter Morgan: the violent murderer who also happens to be a loving if somewhat hapless family man. Walter White: a superficially chumpy average guy who lives a second life as a steely-eyed and relentless criminal.

Those are the most obvious examples. The great modern day TV characters clearly modeled in some way or another after Tony Soprano. But even the characters not obviously following the Soprano paradigm have more than a hint of that Soprano-esque ambiguity about them.

At first glance, Brody from Homeland would not seem to be especially Tony Soprano-like. But don’t we feel conflicted about him too? Don’t we find ourselves almost rooting for him even though we know he’s a terrorist (all the time recognizing the way the show plays with the whole meaning of that loaded word “terrorist)? The moral code of the terrorist seems twisted to us, as does the moral code of the gangster. Yet we are drawn in, we see the logic, we accept.

Isn’t Raylan Givens of Justified a sort of inverted Tony Soprano? Instead of a vile murdering gangster with a seemingly contradictory (but not really contradictory) ordinary streak, Givens is the righteous lawman with a not-at-all-contradictory twisted streak. Justified, in its own way, plays with the line between “good guy” and “bad guy.” And ultimately obliterates the distinction in any meaningful way.

Ditto Sons of Anarchy. They are bad-ass bikers, shooting it out with Mexican gangs at night, getting in all sorts of highly relateable domestic entanglements during the day. And how about The Wire? Tell me you weren’t hoping for Stringer Bell to get away with it. Tell me the hitman Omar Little, with his unshakable code and furious self-belief, wasn’t ultimately the most sympathetic character in that entire massive cast?

A Rogues’ Gallery of killers, meth-cooks, thugs, shameless adulterers, identity thieves and terrorists. And you can trace their origins back to one guy. The big bullish lisping New Jersey mobster with the mommy issues. Tony Soprano set the stage. He set the mold. The rest of TV has just been following along. Swimming around in the pool David Chase and James Gandolfini filled to overflowing with insight and brilliance and pure entertainment.

RIP James Gandolfini, co-creator of television’s greatest character and the most indispensable of all modern-day fictional anti-heroes. Where would TV be without you?