Newsletter 141: “The Sopranos” Was the Best and the Only

I’ve decided to start putting some of the best newsletter essays here on Medium, so more people can read them. You’re still better off just subscribing. This one’s from January 2019, about how great and vital “The Sopranos” was. I loved Noel Murray’s and Scott Tobias’ ranking of HBO series so much that I thought this would be a good time to revisit it.

It was June 2004, and I had decided I’d had just about enough of New York and what tiny, jagged fragments of a career I supposedly had. I’d lived in the city for nearly five years and hadn’t made a dent in the writing world. I had a dull day job as a terrible financial journalist for a monthly magazine about stockbrockers, I couldn’t drum up any freelance work, The Black Table was a blast but not particularly (or even remotely) well-read, and I spent most of my weekends doing readings in Brooklyn for rows and rows of empty tables. I was about to turn 30 years old, out of college nearly a decade, and I had nothing to show for it but a crippling nicotine addiction, some equally frustrated friends and an apartment I was having an increasingly difficult time paying my share of the rent for.

So, like many young dreamers who had crapped out in New York before me, I decided to quit. What was the point of this? Why was I putting myself through all this? I had gone to New York to see if I could find an…