Tony Soprano Is A Bad Guy, And Other Shocking Revelations

Dip ya paws in my anti-hero discourse

When my brain is running on fumes, it will play the “peeps in the chili pot” scene from The Good Place for about four hours on loop. During the scene, Chidi has an existential breakdown, but in a moment of clarity, describes some of the main schools of thought on morality:

Virtue ethics - There are certain “good” virtues like (courage, generosity, kindness) and the way to live a morally sound life to act according to those virtues in every circumstance.

Consequentialism - The consequences of your actions determine their morality - if the good outweighs the bad then it’s fundamentally good, and vice versa.

Deontology - The morality of an action is are based on whether it adheres to a series of overarching rules that govern what we should and should not do.

Like many others, I’ve also been pandemic-watching The Sopranos, and Chidi’s Sparks Notes lecture on morality made me realize that deontology was strikingly similar Tony Soprano’s own moral philosophy. In one scene, Tony’s therapist asks if he thinks he’s going to hell, and Tony brushes her off, giving an entirely rule-based explanation.

“We’re soldiers. Soldiers don’t go to hell. It’s war, soldiers…they kill other soldiers. We’re in a situation where everybody involved knows the stakes, and if you’re going to accept those stakes, you gotta do certain things. It’s business. We’re soldiers. We follow codes, orders.”

Evoking wartime vocabulary, in his mind, justifies his actions. It argues that he (and the mob) are working for something larger than themselves: a cause, a sense of justice, a tradition of literally fighting for what you believe in. And for the most part, he is right. The Sopranos isn’t about a group of people killing others for pleasure. These aren’t your “some men just want to watch the world burn” kind of dudes. When a mobster does harm someone outside of the bounds of his job, it is frowned upon and usually punished. In other words, there are rules on what people should and should not do.

I really want to sink my teeth into this because the question of morality isn’t just integral to how we understand The Sopranos, it’s integral to how we understand television characters from that point onwards. The Sopranos came out when HBO was really making a name for itself in the TV landscape. TV shows weren’t just shows anymore, they were grand, cinematic, even film-like. The Sopranos pushed boundaries in terms of what it showed both in a physical sense (sex and violence) and in a storytelling sense (longer, more drawn-out plot arcs and character development). Tony Soprano was certainly not the first unlikeable protagonist, but many people see him as the template for future morally ambiguous leads like Walter White, Don Draper, Dexter, and House.

Tony Soprano is sometimes dubbed the original anti-hero of modern television, but significantly, that term denotes a moral judgment. A hero fights for good. Colloquially, I’ve heard anti-heroes defined as “characters who have good intentions but go about them in the wrong way” or perhaps “characters who try to be good, but gradually go over to the dark side”. The general idea is that the intentions behind the actions are important, but that muddies the moral questions even further. The anti-hero label attempts to give our protagonists some slack, morally, even when they do bad things.

In a more simplified sense, it helps us understand the characters in relation to the story itself. Ward Cleaver works a white collar job to provide for his family (good intention + good action= hero), Tony Soprano works as a mob boss to provide for his family (good intention + bad action=anti-hero).

But the term anti-hero is actually defined as “a protagonist of a drama or narrative who is notably lacking in heroic qualities ”, or as TVTropes.org writes:

“An anti-hero is a protagonist who has the opposite of most of the traditional attributes of a hero. They may be bewildered, ineffectual, deluded, or merely apathetic. More often an anti-hero is just an amoral misfit. While heroes are typically conventional, anti-heroes, depending on the circumstances, may be pre-conventional (in a "good" society), post-conventional (if the government is "evil") or even unconventional.”

The definition of the classical anti-hero further elaborates the history of the trope:

“In classical and earlier mythology, the hero tended to be a dashing, confident, stoic, intelligent, highly capable fighter and commander with few, if any, flaws and even fewer real weaknesses. The classical antihero is the inversion of this.”

But Tony Soprano is charismatic, confident, and certainly a capable fighter. He is definitely flawed, but even Superman has a weakness for Kryptonite. The traits that make him successful are those commonly associated with heroes. The only big difference is that our idea of a hero would adhere more strictly to virtue ethics, we expect them to achieve good deeds through good actions.

But these characters are more nuanced than that. TVTropes also has a definition of an anti-villain that could just as easily fit Tony Soprano:

“An Anti-Villain is the opposite of an Anti-Hero — a character with heroic goals, personality traits, and/or virtues who is ultimately the villain. Their desired ends are mostly good, but their means of getting there range from evil to undesirable.”

The anti-hero and anti-villain are very similar, but the difference between these labels is significant to how we see the characters in a broader social sense. Language is not neutral. The decision to call characters anti-heroes rather than, say, anti-villains changes how perceive them. “Yes they’re doing horrible things”, the anti-hero label says, “but they’re still the hero of the story”.

But by labeling people like Tony Soprano or Walter White as heroes, we in turn have to have label other people as villains. For The Sopranos, we may pin that label on the FBI trying to take down Tony and his gang, and for Breaking Bad, the target becomes Skylar White. We have to remember, though, that going against the protagonist doesn’t make someone a villain. There is another version of The Sopranos that follows a team of FBI agents who are desperately trying to reduce mob violence, keep drugs off the street, and stop illegal gambling rings. And there is another version of Breaking Bad that follows a normal wife whose husband becomes violent and malicious, putting her entire family in harm’s way and driving her to near suicide.

The Take did a video titled “The Age of the TV Antihero 2.0” which outlined examples of recent morally ambiguous protagonists - how they differ from their predecessors not only in gender and ethnicity but also in character arcs and evolution. But again, there are many characters here that I don’t want to let off the hook with the “hero” label either. Yes, many are now women rather than men, and yes, their motives and actions may be more complicated, but labeling them all as anti-heroes removes the nuance. Additionally, many are white, straight, and cisgender, and to give them a hero label sets a precedent of letting those types of people off the hook without digging into the fact that they may actually be more bad than good.

A better category for a lot of these characters, Tony Soprano included, would be what TVTropes defines as the Villain Protagonist.

An interesting twist on conventional storytelling is to make The Protagonist a villain. Sometimes (but not always), this villainous main character will even get the Sympathetic P.O.V.. On the other hand, it is not necessary for a villain to be sympathetic for them to be this trope. They simply need to be a villain whose morally reprehensible actions (however well-intentioned) are in no way glossed over or justified within the context of the story. We are seeing the story from a villain's point of view.

I like this trope because it says upfront that just because someone is the main character, doesn’t mean they are the hero. Our understanding of the character - whether we think they’re interesting to watch, find them compelling, or want to tattoo their face all over our bodies, is irrelevant to the fact that they are villains. We can try and parse out the morality of their actions without trying to force them into a hero role.

And that’s ok! It’s a far more interesting narrative when the villain has real motives rather than just violence for the sake of violence. A good villain is supposed to challenge the hero, not just on a physical, powerful level but on an intellectual and moral one as well. The only way to learn empathy is to really understand where someone else is coming from, and to see a villain as a full character rather than a one-dimensional antagonist is a much more interesting way of looking at conflict. The influx of tragic villain backstory films showcases that we want our villains to have a complex relationship with morality. We want to understand where people are coming from and why they do what they do, not only because it makes for an interesting narrative, but also because we want to know these things in our real lives.

There are a lot of characters (and people!) that exist in between the hero/villain binary, but that’s what makes them real.