Still with the Tony Soprano memes? Young audiences are watching the series with fresh eyes

HBO’s latest crime drama The Penguin came with a flood of memes on TikTok, X and Instagram. They compare actor Colin Farrell’s Oswald Cobblepot to James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano.

It’s true, there are undeniable similarities between the two portrayals and shows. HBO’s official TikTok account went so far as to upload an edit of The Penguin trailer cut to the rhythm of Alabama 3’s Woke Up This Morning – the title theme for The Sopranos.

Running for six seasons from 1999 to 2007, The Sopranos is enjoying a sustained cultural relevancy in 2024 – something other prestige dramas of the same era such as Six Feet Under and The Shield have not achieved. A new two-part documentary about the making of the The Sopranos just premiered on HBO, 25 years after the show made its debut.

For the last couple of years, fans have been discovering the show and making it their own. But how does it fit the present moment?

The Sopranos as catharsis

My research and upcoming book is based on in-depth interviews with a group of new Sopranos fans all aged between 19–26. In other words, not old enough to have watched the show when it first aired.

During the pandemic, The Sopranos saw a surge in viewership and interest that outstripped its contemporaries like Deadwood.

Superficially, the show is visually comparable to COVID lockdown. Tony and his kids are regularly shown sleeping in, dressed in baggy clothes, and shuffling around the kitchen picking at cold cuts.

For those I spoke with, viewing The Sopranos wasn’t a way to escape from lockdown: it was a way to purge pent-up emotion.

For Darcy, the show became:

Like a cathartic tool, like, I can relate, this is how life feels right now […] A bit of relief, and a sense of relatability, you know? It was always comforting when things are not good.

Tom shared this feeling:

One of the cool things about The Sopranos is that a lot of the stuff is really mundane […] It’s about drudgery more than anything […] That’s what lockdown feels like – and it definitely is what a lot of daily life feels like […] it’s those moments of opening up the fridge and just eating like 20 slices of gabagool because you can’t be fucked making something to eat.

The Sopranos as nostalgia

The Sopranos is a profoundly negative show and yet it was being viewed by the young people I spoke to through quite an optimistic lens.

Alannah said:

It makes me feel nostalgic for a time when things felt a little bit like […] simpler, even though they have complications. It just seemed like a good stage of history to be in.

In a similar vein, Callum positively characterised this feeling as an “added bonus” that “drew him into watching the show”. Selina fondly remembered the fashion and music of the show.

Watching with a new lens

During its original run, The Sopranos was often lauded by scholars for its deconstruction of patriarchal masculinity. This was not so much the case for the people I spoke to.

Alannah worried The Sopranos could easily be placed in the toxic online “manosphere”:

[The Sopranos is] like Fight Club and American Psycho. White dudes will watch it and be like, ‘Yeah, this is fucking sick – that’s me man’. And it’s like, you don’t want to be these people! You have to criticise it yourself because it is not overt in my opinion.

Stuart expressed a similar concern about The Sopranos’ ability to be a dangerous power fantasy.

In his experience with online Sopranos content, he observed:

[There are fans] who see Tony Soprano as the ideal man and don’t notice that the show is supposed to be critiquing his behaviour.

These concerns about “misunderstanding” the show very much reflect current anxieties. The reporting about how the 2019 Joker film might incite violence from white men provides a salient reference point for these worries.

For the new viewers I spoke to, there was a real concern The Sopranos could combine dangerously with today’s toxic misogynistic online content. They were worried Tony Soprano could be interpreted as a celebration of patriarchal masculinity rather than a critique.

Born under a bad sign

In 2024, The Sopranos is still managing to click with new audiences. But these fans interpret the show differently and take new meaning from it. When we look at their responses, we can see how The Sopranos intersects with the attitudes and anxieties of modern audiences.

Next time you see a meme about Tony Soprano, consider what context today’s viewers place him in – and whether an audience from 20 years ago would have done the same. Today, he might be considered even more dangerous.