The Sopranos

It's the best series on television, end of story.

Was it worth the wait? Was it ever!

Maintains the quality viewers have come to expect.

The show is back in magnificent form, with all its humor, psychological thorniness, and bleak tragedy intact. It remains the highest peak of series TV.

Masterful.

The first four installments supplied for review have moments of artsy overindulgence, to be sure, but largely remain true to the show's roots in darkness and absurdity while carving out fresh story arcs that are as compelling as any the writers have ever crafted. It's like peering at a series of train wrecks as rendered by da Vinci.

[It] may be the most creative and richly imagined [season] yet: it begins by going over old ground and yet something new and totally surprising happens.

This is The Sopranos at its best -- and that's just about as good as TV ever gets.

This season's "Sopranos" is quite simply dazzling in its inventiveness, its reach, and one other aspect -- its capacity to pound audiences emotionally as the series has never before done.

Television's greatest drama series has only gotten greater.

Mozart wrote finales for his operas by focusing on a theme sounded in the opening notes, then expanding and building upon it through repetition and the amplification of other voices for a glorious ending. So is David Chase, creator and executive producer of The Sopranos, writing the finale for this landmark TV series - and if this isn't art, then neither is Mozart.

The more leisurely pace allows for some singular moments. [17 Mar 2006, p.101]

Not all "The Sopranos'" flights of fancy pan out... but it never fails to fascinate, creating a completely organic world in which it's easy to forget the art and artifice that go into realizing Chase's vision.

The thing about "The Sopranos" is that strands of character detail -- Carmela Soprano's fingernails, the way Tony breathes through his nose when he eats -- stay with you long after you've forgotten whose cut of a garbage route has precipitated a beef between which wiseguys.

What begins as the usual artistic season premiere shivers and sways with unexpected jolts, one of which irrevocably changes the course and feel of the series. Everything blurs, and nothing, and no one, seems true.

There's enough classic "Sopranos" action -- some of it involving extreme physical violence -- to remind the average person that where the Sopranos are is not where most of us want to go. Yet at the same time, these episodes repeatedly return to the ways in which the Soprano clan, in its desperate, sometimes twisted and sometimes touching way, seeks to embrace family values.