The Sopranos: An American Existentialism?

HBO’s series ‘The Sopranos’ has been studied academically through the various optics it invites: psychoanalytic theory, gender studies, its playful genre self-referentiality, and so forth. It can be all of those things, but here The Sopranos is viewed as if it were fundamentally a piece of existentialist philosophy. It promises a contemporary ‘American existentialism’ and suggests that middlebrow artistic culture has greater resources than has heretofore been thought – if the lessons of The Sopranos are properly learnt.