Before watching Many Saints Of Newark, get all the Sopranos background you need in 5 episodes
Here are five Sopranos episodes to get you up to speed for The Many Saints Of Newark
TV Lists The Sopranos
The Sopranos, The Many Saints Of Newark Screenshot: HBO Max
The Sopranos is back this week, sort of. With The Many Saints Of Newark finally making its way to theaters and HBO Max October 1, there’s not much time to do a full-on reunion with New Jersey’s first family of waste management and disposal. But since it’s a prequel, you don’t need to do much homework anyway. In place of a full-on rewatch, we’ve selected five episodes to help ease you back into the world of tracksuits, gabagool, and existential dread. These aren’t necessarily the best episodes—though they are all crushers. All five deal with Sopranos history and will hopefully provide context for the film. After all, as Dr. Melfi puts it, “Understanding root causes will make you less vulnerable to future episodes.”
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Also watch “Pine Barrens” just because
He killed sixteen Czechoslovakians. The guy was a interior decorator!
His place looked like shit!
“We shoulda stopped at Roy Rogers.” “Yeah and I shoulda fucked Dale Evans but I didn’t.”
Whew, no “Christopher”, the episode I haven’t seen.I never really cared for Sopranos or Mad Men. I’ve heard them both as being inspired more by short stories than serialized storytelling, but I’m fine with episodic anthologies.
If you’ve missed “Christopher,” no need to go back and watch it. As was pointed out in the AV Club’s long-ago review, it’s the worst episode of the series by far.
I think there’s a lot more thematic continuity in The Sopranos than Mad Men. It helps that Tony and his journey are very much the center of gravity throughout and that the various relationships and subplots are all pretty closely entangled—unlike Mad Men where you just have (eventually) a handful of main-ish characters all going.In other words, I could see Mad Men as a collection of short stories, novellas, or poems. It’s hard for me to see The Sopranos as anything other than a novel—a big sprawling novel that may break away from the main plot for weird ruminative meditations on c. 2000 American identity, perhaps, but then again, there plenty of those.
The roast cutting in “Fortunate Son” is great. The thing looks disgusting.
Fortune Son is a bloody brilliant episode. Season 3, as a whole, is incredible given what they had to do in terms of rewriting in dramatically.
One of the best episodes of the entire series. Definitely top five.
I meant this to be a response to the post about “Pine Barrens”.
You could also make a case for including “College” (Season 1, Episode 5) on the list. I think it’s the first time we see Tony straight up whack a guy with his own hands, while on a trip with his daughter to visit colleges. A great example of the tension between his family life and his other “family” life. Brilliant episode.
Tony Sirico waxing poetic:
I have not seen the movie but I have to admit I was today years old when I realized that “Many Saints” = “Moltosanti”.
The argument wasn’t about leaving the life behind in “Down Neck,” right? It was about whether or not they should move to Las Vegas like other mobsters, who of course ended up incredibly wealthy while the Sopranos ended up still puttering around in Jersey.