The Sopranos: 10 Greatest Ever Episodes

It’s fair to say The Sopranos has its share of brutal deaths and some gruesome violence - Downton Abbey it ain’t. Yet what separates the show from its many imitators was how it captured life’s more quiet, more understated moments. The premise of Sopranos Home Movies is basically two married couples on a weekend away in upstate New York to celebrate Tony’s birthday. They eat home-cooked meals, drink wine and play board games. Imagine that in an episode of Sons of Anarchy.

Ultimately this is an episode about what it means to be a Soprano. During a drunken Monopoly game, Tony and his sister Janice take some unwelcome trips down memory lane. Janice recalls the time their father shot a bullet through their mother’s beehive hairdo. This rankles Tony, who responds in typical fashion by referring to his dear sister’s younger days performing sexual favours to men under the boardwalk. The tension escalates until Bobby, defending his wife’s honour, smacks Tony with a sucker punch and the two have an almighty brawl there and then in the living room. It's one of the best fight scenes in the show - the green Monopoly house that sticks to Tony’s face is an especially wonderful touch.

Perhaps this episode’s most influential character is none other than Livia Soprano, and she doesn’t even appear on screen. Indeed, the matriarch of the Soprano family had been dead since the third season. However, it is clear that she continues to haunt Tony, the part of his past that he can’t get away from. Like his mother, he wants to bring everyone down to his miserable level - a desire that manifests itself most extremely with his treatment of Bobby. Bobby is a good a man as exists in The Sopranos universe, which of course Tony cannot abide, and so decides to take him down a peg by ordering him to get his hands dirty and commit his first whacking. The final shot of Bobby, back from carrying out the hit, holding his daughter out to the lake is perhaps the most devastating of the entire series.