This 92% Rotten Tomatoes HBO drama got the Mafia right like no other

HBO has given us some pretty iconic shows over the years. But nothing comes close to The Sopranos. When it first hit the screen, it changed television forever and left every other crime drama scrambling to keep up. With a whopping 92% score on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s still widely considered as one of the best shows ever.

The brilliance of The Sopranos was in how it pulled you into the mind of a mafia boss who also had panic attacks, family drama, and a very human side. You weren’t only watching Tony run the mob; you were watching him wrestle with his inner demons. And all of this as he figured out life with his family too. The character driven storytelling was what it did best.

It’s been over two decades since it premiered and yet people are still talking about it like it just came out last week. The Sopranos is probably the only show to get the mafia right. It dug into the psychology, the contradictions, and the messy reality of living in that world. Above the ceiling, above the sky, whatever you want to call it, this was television history in the making.

HBO got the mob life shockingly close, says former Mafia boss

If there’s anyone who can spot the difference between Hollywood’s idea of the mob and the reality, it’s someone who belongs or belonged to that world. The former Colombo crime family member, Michael Franzese, has his own YouTube channel where he had reviewed The Sopranos.

With all the experience of someone who’s been on the inside, he went through the show and gave it a verdict. It’s obviously not 100% accurate (it’s still TV), but HBO actually nailed a lot of the small and gritty truths of mob life.

Franzese shared that The Sopranos wasn’t even meant for HBO in the beginning. It was pitched to Fox first. But Fox passed and HBO swooped in. He also revealed that series creator David Chase once reached out to him, though Franzese didn’t take the meeting because he had just gotten out on parole and wanted to keep a safe distance from anything mafia-related. Still, he suspects Chase’s interest might have had something to do with his own family, specifically his mother. According to Franzese, Tony Soprano’s mom in the HBO show could have been loosely inspired by his own, based on recorded conversations from his home back in the day.

One part Franzese really focused on was Tony’s secret therapy sessions in the HBO show. He confirmed that in real life, a mob boss seeing a psychiatrist would be a big no. Because you’d essentially be handing over the deepest and most dangerous secrets of your life to someone outside “the life.”

"Many people have asked me about that role. Is it real, Michael? What would happen if he was going to a psychiatrist? I’ll tell you this, and I’m going to prove it a little bit later on in the series, if a mob boss was ever seeing a psychiatrist, he would be in deep trouble. Why? Because what would he be doing there? He’d be revealing secrets, talking about his innermost thoughts. You can’t do that with somebody outside of their life."

He continued:

"Now, somebody will throw back and say, Frank Costello was doing that. He did it for a very limited period of time, and when his psychiatrist told him he had to walk away from the life, Costello got rid of him. Nothing happened to Costello after that, you know the story. He eventually got out of the life. But you cannot be visiting a psychiatrist and be in that position in life. You would not last. You’d end up in the trunk of a car, maybe with the psychiatrist. Trust me on that."

Franzese also said the HBO show got the “dysfunctional family” angle spot on. He said his own was riddled with tragedy and mess. He said:

"Tony is dealing with these psychological problems, like with many mob families. Look, my family was totally dysfunctional. There's no question about it. Sister died from an overdose of drugs. You know the story of my brother: drug addict, eventually turned informant. My mother and dad separated for all those years. My mother was kind of neurotic in that regard. I had my own issues at that time. Definitely dysfunctional, and many families of the mob were like the Sopranos, in that they were dysfunctional."

He also said at one point in the video:

"Episode 1 and 2, I thought were pretty realistic and really did set up the show."

He added:

"A lot of people have this image of mob wives just sitting there, never mentioning anything to their husband. Just closing their eyes to everything. Not so. I mean, my mother certainly wasn't like that. She stood up to my dad in every which way possible. Carmela does the same with Tony Soprano. She stands up to him, in every which way. And I think that was depicted in this first episode, in episodes 1 and 2 actually."

The Sopranos was a layered and strangely relatable portrait of a man balancing two very different worlds. And when someone like Michael Franzese, who’s lived that life for real, gives HBO credit for getting so much of it right, you know it was a great show. And honestly, that’s the kind of legacy most shows can only dream of.

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