Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’?

Willy Staley wrote a piece about The Sopranos and captured why it’s so gosh darn good:

Biederman argued that the show is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline. “Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,” he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. “You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.”

Sweet Christ. On a lighter note, I also watched The Many Saints of Newark this week—it’s a prequel film to The Sopranos—and it has flashes of tension and familiar brilliance in it but by the end it ultimately goes nowhere. So by the time the credits rolled, it felt just like any old gangster flick.

But also sweet christ.