How Would “Sopranos” Characters Handle the Pandemic?

If they’d all lived long enough to see it.

October 1 brings the release of the film The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel to David Chase’s masterpiece HBO series, and whatever one’s thoughts on the movie — early reviews have been mixed-to-positive — it is, regardless of its quality, a terrific excuse to revisit the series. The Sopranos retains its almost primal power today, 14 (!) years after it ended its run and eight-and-a-half years after the death of James Gandolfini, its central figure and otherworldly charismatic and brooding star. I’ve been rewatching the series leading up to the release of the film — while reading along with the fantastic book The Sopranos Sessions by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz — and find it just as absorbing and hypnotic as ever. The show is widely considered as the launching pad for “prestige television,” but the brilliance of the show has always been driven, for me, by Chase’s notorious stubbornness, his unwillingness to give the audiences what it wants when it wants it. He’s an entertainer — he eventually wraps up what you want him to wrap up — but with a rambunctious soul of an artist: He always makes it difficult for you, and himself, because that’s how great art is made. The show is as prickly and rambunctious and soulful and devastating today as it ever was. It remains absolutely…