The Sopranos review: still the boss of prestige TV
Twenty-odd years on, David Chase’s mob drama still shows every prestige series how it’s done. Here’s why The Sopranos deserves a rewatch, and where to stream it in the UK.
Reviewed, edited and approved by Editor-in-chief Daniel Sköld · Updated 25 October 2026
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Every few years someone at a dinner party tells me, with the zeal of a man who has just discovered olive oil, that they’ve finally started The Sopranos. I nod, I smile, and then I go home and start it again myself. That’s the problem with this series. You never really finish it. It just waits for you, like a bloke in a tracksuit outside a pork shop.
Plenty of shows have been called the greatest ever made. Very few still feel that way more than a quarter of a century after they first aired. The Sopranos does. If you’ve never seen it, or you last watched it on a creaking DVD box set, it’s time.
Premiere1999-01-10
GenreCrime, Drama
CastJames Gandolfini, Edie Falco, Jamie-Lynn Sigler, Robert Iler
Created byDavid Chase
Seasons6 seasons · 86 episodes
ChannelHBO
Rated18
Watch onHBO Max Amazon Channel, NOW
87%
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A mob boss walks into a therapist’s office
The set-up sounds like the start of a joke. Tony Soprano runs a criminal organisation in New Jersey and also runs a household in the suburbs, and the two jobs keep getting in each other’s way. His wife wants one thing, his crew want another, his mother wants everyone to suffer, and his teenage kids just want him to stop being embarrassing. So Tony starts seeing a psychiatrist, Dr Jennifer Melfi, which in his line of work is roughly as safe as posting your bank details on Facebook.
Those sessions are the spine of the series. They let David Chase do something the gangster genre had mostly avoided: look inside the bloke rather than just admire his suits. The Godfather gave us mafia royalty. Goodfellas gave us the rush. The Sopranos gives us a middle-aged man with a dodgy back, too much on his plate and the nagging sense that the good times are over. Some of you may recognise the feeling. I certainly do, minus the extortion.
That’s as far as I’ll go on plot. This is a show where surprises land hard, and I’m not going to spoil them, least of all the ending, which people are still arguing about in pubs.
Gandolfini, Falco and a cast with no weak links
James Gandolfini plays Tony, and it’s one of those performances that makes you forget anyone else could have done it. He can be charming, funny and frightening inside the same scene, sometimes inside the same sentence. You like him, then you’re appalled that you like him, and then he does something with a plate of cold cuts and you like him again. That tension is the whole engine of the show, and Gandolfini makes it look effortless.
Edie Falco is just as good as Carmela, a woman who knows exactly where the money for the kitchen came from and has decided not to think about it too hard. Lorraine Bracco gives Melfi a cool, watchful intelligence that’s the perfect foil for Tony’s bluster. Michael Imperioli is terrific as Christopher Moltisanti, Tony’s cousin and protégé, a would-be wise guy with screenwriting dreams and terrible judgement. Jamie-Lynn Sigler and Robert Iler, as the Soprano children, grow up in front of us over six seasons, which gives the family scenes a lived-in feel no amount of casting can fake.
Behind it all is creator David Chase, who made the show for HBO. It ran for six seasons and 86 episodes from January 1999, and it’s no exaggeration to say television hasn’t been the same since.
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The show that built the box set
Here’s the legacy bit, and it matters. Before The Sopranos, the American TV drama was mostly a procedural: case of the week, tidy resolution, see you next Tuesday. Chase threw that out. He gave us a hero who was really a villain, stories that ran across whole seasons, episodes that took detours into dreams and digressions, and a refusal to explain itself. He treated viewers as grown-ups who could cope with ambiguity.
Everything that followed owes it something. The antihero dramas, the cinematic budgets, the idea that a TV series could be the most talked-about piece of art of the year: all of it runs back through Tony’s front door in New Jersey. When you scroll through NOW or Netflix tonight looking for something prestigious to binge, you’re shopping in a market The Sopranos opened.
Every brooding antihero you’ve binged in the past twenty years is, in some way, living in Tony Soprano’s house.
It isn’t flawless. The early episodes look their age in places, all boxy cameras and late-90s knitwear, and the pace is unhurried by modern standards. Some storylines meander, and a few side characters outstay their welcome. If you want a plot that sprints, this isn’t it. But the slow burn is the point. The show wants you to sit with these people long enough to feel complicit, and it works.
What the critics say
The critical reputation of The Sopranos is about as settled as anything gets in television. It regularly sits at or near the top of the lists of the greatest TV series ever made, and Gandolfini’s performance is routinely held up as a benchmark for screen acting, not just TV acting. Critics in both Britain and America have spent years arguing over whether The Wire, Breaking Bad or Mad Men has knocked it off the top spot, and the very fact it’s the yardstick in that argument tells you everything.
What reviewers come back to again and again is the writing: the black humour, the grubby ordinariness of the violence, and the way it uses the gangster story to talk about family, class, therapy and the slow disappointment of middle age. Few shows have been written about so much, and fewer still have held up so well on rewatch.
Where to watch The Sopranos in the UK
All six seasons of The Sopranos are streaming in the UK on NOW, Sky’s streaming service, with a NOW Entertainment membership. You can also watch it through the HBO Max channel on Amazon Prime Video, which you add as an extra subscription on top of Prime. The series is rated 18, and fairly so: the violence is sudden and nasty, and the language would make a docker blush.
If you prefer owning things you can put on a shelf, the complete series has been released on DVD and Blu-ray box sets, which also makes a decent present for the man in your life who still says he’s never got round to it.
Verdict
The Sopranos isn’t just a great crime drama; it’s the show that taught television it could be anything. Gandolfini is extraordinary, the writing is sharp, funny and bleak, and the slower early episodes pay off many times over. Essential viewing for anyone who has ever enjoyed a prestige box set, and especially for men of a certain age who’ll find Tony’s midlife grumbles uncomfortably familiar.
Ashley Isaacs picks what's worth your evening – film, TV, streaming, music and books for men 45 and over with limited evenings and too many subscriptions. Reviews of what's new on Netflix, Prime Video, BBC iPlayer and the rest, crime dramas worth a weekend, and classics worth a second look. What's worth watching, what isn't, and where to find it in the UK.
One of Midcent's writers. Spotted something? Write to ashley@midcent.uk.
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