Biederman argued that the show (The Sopranos) is, at its heart, about the bathetic nature of decline.

“’Decline not as a romantic, singular, aesthetically breathtaking act of destruction,’ he said, but as a humiliating, slow-motion slide down a hill into a puddle of filth. ‘You don’t flee a burning Rome with your beautiful beloved in your arms, barely escaping a murderous horde of barbarians; you sit down for 18 hours a day, enjoy fewer things than you used to, and take on the worst qualities of your parents while you watch your kids take on the worst qualities of you.’”

— from a N.Y. Times Magazine essay, written by Willy Staley

The HBO series The Sopranos premiered in 1999, just as the 20th century gave way to the 21st. While ostensibly a mafia drama, the show’s true subject was America itself – a nation at the peak of its global power, even as the contradictions of its capitalist system and imperial ambitions were becoming harder to ignore. Early marketing for The Sopranos laid this out. I remember seeing it in college but have not been able to find it online, so I am paraphrasing.

“Tony Soprano is a normal guy just like you he has problems with his business, his wife, his mistress, his kids and job. There’s just one thing different. He’s in the mob. “

Balancing the drama of the home and work life of the mob boss are therapy sessions Tony has with Dr. Jennifer Melfi where the internal violence driving the external is glimpsed. Melfi’s office, is one one half of a fulcrum where the external behaviors that drive the psychological mechanism of the show are weighed against the internal projections that create them. The collision between the sacred space of therapy and the profane realities of Tony’s reality are part of the nuance that gives the show a timeless quality. The other factor that drove the show’s cultural endurance might be the unintentional extended metaphor  the therapy room creates.

Freudian psychoanalysis is largely useless for Tony, but as he doesn’t change, he analyzes, rationalizes and repackages that process of NOT changing. This became a familiar reality that, still I would argue, drives new viewers into the shows orbit even in syndication and reruns. As Tony failed to change, his rationalizations and repackaging of his old arc as a new arc with intellectualization and introspection became the same route America was taking. As Tony unburdened himself, spin-doctoring his sins and wrestling with his demons, he laid bare the corrupt foundations and corrosive hypocrisy of modern America. Few viewers made this connection directly but it is largely responsible for the familiar quality that so many people get sucked into while watching a show about a culture and now a decade that is unfamiliar to them.

Arguing that this uncanny element of reality in America made the show popular through an unconscious mechanism is a pretty Freudian trope. All this in the middle of a show that might be about how Freudian therapy doesn’t work to create change, but it might point to a diagnosis that still might be right. Just like Tony’s sessions with Melfi, the beauty of the show might be in sitting with the reality of the description and not in finding a cure.

For once young viewers my age especially, the Sopranos’ depiction of the brutal inner workings of an organized crime family felt truer than the official narratives emanating from Washington and Wall Street. If politicians draped imperial adventures in the rhetoric of human rights and democracy promotion, the Soprano crew’s enterprises unmasked the naked logic of power. If corporations camouflaged the human costs of globalization behind slick PR and celebrity endorsements, Tony and his lieutenants laid bare the zero-sum arithmetic of winner-take-all capitalism.

In Tony’s sessions with Melfi, the political became personal. The dilemmas of a mafia don – how to wield power, manage an organization, balance family obligations with professional demands – doubled as metaphors for the challenges facing the nation’s leaders. And Tony’s inner turmoil – his panic attacks, his depression, his self-doubt – echoed the anxieties of a superpower confronting the limits of its potency and the contradictions of its creed.

More than any other character, Melfi embodied the dilemmas of the educated elite in an age of eroding social trust and metastatic greed. Caught between her professional ethics and her fascination with Tony’s lurid tales, Melfi was a stand-in for the “respectable” classes, who maintained a fastidious distance from the dirty work of empire while quietly profiting from its spoils.

By that final season, as the real-world “war on terror” spiraled and the subprime mortgage bubble swelled, The Sopranos had cemented its status as a cultural touchstone, a work that captured the spiritual unease of a nation adrift, a superpower starting to glimpse the abyss. And the genius of the show was to locate the roots of this malaise not in any one policy or president but in the primitive drives and material interests that animated the whole imperial project.

More than any other motif, it was Tony’s “busting out” of businesses that served as the central metaphor for this critique. In the Soprano universe, a bust-out was the systematic defrauding of a company – the racking up of huge bills, the stripping of assets, the discarding of the hollowed-out husk. But as the series drew to its ambiguous conclusion, it was clear that Tony’s enterprise was itself heading for a bust-out of cosmic proportions. And the question that echoed, as the screen cut to black, was whether the American empire he personified could escape the same fate – or whether, bankrupted morally and fiscally, it too risked devouring itself from within.

In the end, the most enduring legacy of The Sopranos may be this: its insistence on confronting the shadows – personal and political – that many would prefer to ignore. In an era of end-of-history hubris and weapons-of-mass-destruction deceit, the show dared to suggest that the real threats to the American way of life came not from foreign foes but from the delusions and contradictions hidden deep in the national psyche. Whether we met them in the darkness of Dr. Melfi’s office or the cold light of geopolitical day, they remained what they had always been – a call to self-examination in a nation desperate to outsource its demons.

Tony’s inner turmoil – his panic attacks, his depression, his self-doubt – echoed the anxieties of a superpower confronting the limits of its potency and the contradictions of its creed. Just as Tony and his father saw mom-and-pop shops like Satriale’s as piggy banks to be raided, major banks and hedge funds treated companies as nothing more than vehicles for quick profits. The audience was and is increasingly on the receiving end of the “busts outs” from  leveraging debt and skimming off the assets of companies responsible for the recessions the audience lived through.

The episode  “Unidentified Black Males” episode aired in 2004, the same year photos of American soldiers abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib shocked the world. Tony’s anguished reaction to the episode’s central crime – the brutal beating of a Hasidic man by two of his soldiers – felt like an uneasy reflection of debates roiling America about the conduct of the war on terror. Yeah we want to win and scare them but what do we look like after we do that? Did the violence, as one of Tony’s men insisted, just come with the territory? What was America’s territory anyway? Geopolitical hoods seemed to change has fast as the mobs.

In the show’s final season, as subprime lenders targeted low-income homeowners with predatory loans, Tony’s crew hatched a scheme to use a crooked appraiser to inflate home values and con buyers . The scam was a small-scale version of the speculative frenzy that would soon bring the global financial system to its knees – another case of unchecked greed masquerading as business as usual.

Throughout the series, the Soprano family’s lavish lifestyle – the spacious suburban mansion, the luxury cars, the designer clothes – served as a funhouse mirror of American aspirationalism. If the acquisitive impulse was the engine of the consumer economy, The Sopranos suggested, it could just as easily shade into a sociopathic materialism unmoored from any higher values or collective responsibilities.

More than any other character, Melfi embodied the dilemmas of the educated elite in an age of eroding social trust and metastatic greed. Caught between her professional ethics and her fascination with Tony’s lurid tales, Melfi was a stand-in for the “respectable” classes, who maintained a fastidious distance from the dirty work of empire while quietly profiting from its spoils.

Yet if Melfi was seduced by Tony’s charisma, she also became, as the series progressed, the vehicle for Chase’s most scathing social commentary. When, in season three, she turns down Tony’s offer to exact vengeance on a rapist, she rebukes not only his lawlessness but the vigilante ethos of a nation that has repeatedly used extrajudicial force to impose its will . And when, in season seven, she finally terminates his therapy, she delivers a stinging verdict on the bankrupt values of a society that venerates sociopathic selfishness .

By that final season, as the real-world “war on terror” spiraled and the subprime mortgage bubble swelled, The Sopranos had cemented its status as a cultural touchstone, a work that captured the spiritual unease of a nation adrift, a superpower starting to glimpse the abyss. And the genius of the show was to locate the roots of this malaise not in any one policy or president but in the primitive drives and material interests that animated the whole imperial project.

The Sopranos shone a light on the shadows haunting the American psyche at the turn of the millennium. His psychodynamics with his mother Livia cast a Freudian gloss on a culture still working through its unresolved maternal issues – its love-hate relationship with the motherland, its need to break free and dominate. The Madonna / whore complex informed the way we chose enemies and allies and then allies and enemies again. Each decade the CIA would need to overthrow the last regime it had propped up, and these mafia politics made a show about he family politics of the mafia familiar in a way that was not noticeable to America.

In Tony’s semi ambivalent marriage to Carmela, the show found a metaphor for the fraying social contract of the post-war years – the crumbling of the middle-class American Dream under the weight of infidelity, consumerism and moral compromise. And through his escalating panic attacks, it captured the nameless dread of an era when the old certainties were fast slipping away, and all the Prozac in the world couldn’t allay a gnawing sense that the center might not hold.

Tony’s struggle was that of a nation in the throes of a spiritual crisis – a collective nervous breakdown of a society addicted to violence, in thrall to greed, endlessly chasing the dragon of the next big score. His crimes were an exaggerated reflection of a culture that had lost its moral compass, his rationalizations a dark echo of the euphemisms and equivocations of the political class.

What made The Sopranos so unsettling, and so enduringly relevant, was its unwavering gaze into the heart of American darkness. In an era defined by self-congratulation and willful blindness, the show dared to suggest that the truest threat to the American way of life came not from without but from within – from the corruption and hubris and untrammeled appetites of those who sat at its pinnacle of power.

By framing its critique through the lens of Tony’s therapy, The Sopranos made its case in the most intimate, and most devastating, of ways. In the troubled psyche of its protagonist, it found a mirror held up not just to one man’s soul, but to the soul of a nation. And in the harrowing self-examination it demanded of viewers, it offered a stark challenge to a culture all too adept at living in denial.

In the final accounting, The Sopranos still resonates because the shadows it illuminated have only grown longer in the intervening years. The contradictions and hypocrisies it laid bare have only become more glaring, the spiritual malaise it diagnosed more acute. In an age of fake news and reality TV politics, its insights into the intimate entanglements of psychology, power and capitalism seem more prescient than ever.

Like Tony’s therapy itself, engaging with The Sopranos can be a disturbing experience – a confrontation with the uglier aspects of our nature and our society. But it can also be a transformative one. By holding up a mirror to our collective psyche, the show invites us to reckon with hard truths we might prefer to avoid. It challenges us to ask what kind of people we want to be, what kind of society we want to build.

That may be The Sopranos’ greatest legacy – not just as a landmark of television, but as a tool for national psychoanalysis. In Tony’s journey into the depths of his own psyche, it maps a path for a society in desperate need of self-reflection. And in its unflinching portrait of an empire in the throes of moral and spiritual decay, it offers a warning, and perhaps a way forward, for an America at a crossroads.

Read another Sopranos article: Looking at The Sopranos Through a Jungian Lens.