Centred around mob boss, Tony Soprano, the show examines every aspect of his life – professional and private – in unflinching detail. The show is not afraid of silence, of making the viewer feel truly uncomfortable and of showing violence in a real, extremely unsettling fashion. Both of Tony’s families – and the lines where they begin and end are often unclear – beset his life with troubles and pain. While television often makes for episodic viewing, watching the Sopranos is literally like dipping into a moment of life; the beginnings and endings are not often clear and sometimes, just when you forgot about something, it comes roaring back into view over the horizon once more.

Possibly what makes the Sopranos so compulsive is its ability to hold a steady mirror up to reality. While very few of us are hopefully involved with organised crime, the relationships between the characters become uncomfortable for the viewer sometimes as they seem aspects of themselves echoed. Tony’s simultaneous love and hatred for his mother is exaggerated, but also familiar to many of us on a more micro level. We cannot let go of our mother or stop loving her but she cannot allow us to change, to grow or to do what we consider to be the right thing and this often leads to friction and conflict but hopefully not on the level at which Tony and his mother escalate to.

His wife and children as well exist on a real level. While Carmella and Tony clearly love each other, there is that aspect of them that cannot stand the other. Carmella struggles daily with her knowledge of who Tony is and what he does outside of their home. She has no other recourse to deal with her situation than to blame Tony, a man she would love if he was someone else entirely.

Anthony Junior and Meadow, Tony’s children, are growing up and finding their feet. Meadow is realising what her family is and the future that she feels she cannot escape. So she rebels in the ways she possibly can; dating Noah (a black kid) in Season Three she is deliberately feeding her father’s prejudice against her dating anyone who is not Italian. Even when she dates Jackie Junior, this is a form of rebellion as she knows he is bad news and that eventually her father will have to decide whether what’s more to him is his daughter’s well being or that she be dating another Italian.

AJ’s changes over time as well are realistic. He’s the young son at the beginning, naive and content in his own world. But then as he realises the truth about his father he begins to panic. He’s going through a normal teenage rebellion but he can’t cope with it.

Even Tony’s other family are a pain in the ass. Christopher’s downward spiral always seems to reach its lowest ebb and then one more. Even when we’re laughing at his description of a vision of hell as an “Irish Theme Pub” we’re sensing that for him that truly was hell and he knows he’s headed there. How does he escape a fate he knows in his heart to be predestined?

Pussy, Tony’s friend and confidante, is a family man who knows he’s done wrong and yet can’t reconcile it with the only life he knows. Turning Government witness, you can’t help but wonder if he wanted Tony to know about it. Was his execution a blessing in disguise for the big fat man with the bad back and conflicted conscience?

But it’s not all doom and gloom. As in real life there are moments where you literally laugh out loud. Silv’s impressions of Al Pacino in “Godfather III” (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”), Paulie’s belief that he and Christopher are hunting down a Russian Interior Decorator with military training (He was actually part of the Russian Interior Ministry) in “Pine Barrens” and even psychotic little Ralphie’s obsession with the Gladiator movie are all moments which make you smile and laugh. But the show pulls off an impressive trick; managing to turn these situations of their head so that while you’re laughing you realise that suddenly the situation has turned for the worse, that with the laughter has come also that heart stopping moment of crushing despair that often characterises life.