David Chase created Tony Soprano in 1999 and produced the most consequential television character of the twenty-first century by asking a question that turned out to be unanswerable: can a bad person genuinely change? Tony is a mob boss who kills people, extorts businesses, and betrays nearly everyone who trusts him. He is also a man who has panic attacks, loves his children, feeds ducks in his swimming pool, and sits on a therapist's couch once a week trying to understand why he feels so terrible when his life, by the standards of his profession, is a success.

Chase described the show in a 1999 interview as a portrait of American masculinity at the end of its usefulness. Tony is the alpha male in a world that no longer rewards the qualities he was raised to embody: physical dominance, emotional suppression, and the capacity for violence. Dr. Glen Gabbard of the Baylor College of Medicine, in his study of psychiatry on television, analyzed the Soprano sessions as the most realistic therapeutic relationship in television history, notable for the fact that therapy does not work. Tony does not change. He learns the vocabulary of self-awareness and uses it to justify the same behavior.

The Mother Who Made the Monster

Livia Soprano is the show's most unsettling creation: a mother whose emotional manipulation is so complete that her son becomes a murderer who still cannot make her proud. Tony's panic attacks begin with the ducks, but their root is Livia, a woman who threatened to smother her children, who played victim while controlling every person around her, and who tried to have Tony killed when he put her in a nursing home. Livia is not the mob. She is worse than the mob because the mob's violence is transactional, and Livia's is personal.

The Ducks in the Pool

The ducks are the show's most important symbol. Tony watches a family of ducks living in his pool and experiences genuine joy, and when they leave, he collapses with a panic attack. The ducks represent everything Tony cannot hold: family that stays, innocence that lasts, a natural world that exists outside the violence he perpetuates. Chase gave his mob boss a soul by giving him ducks, and then spent six seasons demonstrating that having a soul is not the same as using it.