Sopranos, The - Seasons 1-6 (DVD)

This is the first time that all episodes of writer-producer-director David Chase's extraordinary US television series The Sopranos have been brought together in one box set, which is a seminal event for any fan of the series.

The Sopranos is nominally an urban gangster drama, but its true impact strikes closer to home, chronicling a dysfunctional, suburban family in bold relief.

And for protagonist Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), there's the added complexity posed by heading twin families, his collegial mob clan and his own, nouveau riche brood. The series' first season was built around what Tony learns when, whipsawed between those two worlds, he finds himself plunged into depression and seeks psychotherapy--a gesture at odds with his midlevel machismo, yet instantly recognizable as a modern emotional test.

With analysis built into the very spine of the show's elaborate episodic structure, creator Chase and his formidable team of directors, writers and actors weave an unpredictable series of parallel and intersecting plot arcs that twist from tragedy to farce to social realism throughout six spellbinding series.

While created for a smaller screen, they enjoy a far larger canvas than a single movie would afford, and the results, like the very best episodic television, attain a richness and scope far closer to a novel than movies normally get. Alternately seductive, exasperated, fearful, and murderous, James Gandolfini's Tony is utterly convincing, even when executing brutal shifts between domestic comedy and dramatic violence.

28 Discs