The Sopranos: Synopsis

The Sopranos is a series depicting the life and times of a crime/Mafia family living in New Jersey. It highlights the days of Tony Soprano, a family man and Mafia boss who seeks psychological guidance to help him deal with the stresses that are involved with being criminally employed and attached to an overbearing mother. The Sopranos pays close attention to the tensions created by his duality between his work and family, and also the anxiety that arises when work and family become tangled together. The show places a particular focus on Tony and his relations with his business associates and family members, all of whom find a way to contribute to Tony’s anxiety and depression. The Sopranos is a modern day story about a mob boss and the problems that he encounters in a society that is well aware of his shady business and with a family that he tries to hide his affairs from. It is a series that demonstrates the problems any prevalent Mafia boss would have to encounter in the 21st century, a time where the traditions and codes of loyalty in the Mafia are not kept as sacred as they once were in the good old days. 

      The Sopranos have been analyzed using Stefan Herrmann's article "Do we learn to 'read' television like a kind of ''language'?" According to different modes of analysis our objective is to determine whether we read television like a language, thus attempting to answer Hermann's question. Our different techniques for analysing The Sopranos are audience analysis, content analysis, genre theory, and a semiotic analysis. These different analyses will each attempt to answer Hermann's question, and subsequently show that television can be read as a language once we become familiar with the different techniques for analysing TV.

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Created by Michael Mandarino, Daanish Jaffer, Mark Rinella, and Paul Yates
York University. Toronto, Canada.