ABSTRACT
When considering romantic relationships, no character on an HBO series has received more attention than Carrie Bradshaw from Sex and the City. Essentially, Sex and the City is “about” relationships, both platonic and romantic, and its critical acclaim makes it easy to overlook the fact that another successful HBO series, The Sopranos, a gangster drama, is-at its core-also about relationships, especially male-female ones. The Sopranos has received much criticism for its portrayal of two groups in particular, Italian Americans and women. Some authors, especially Gilbert (2002) and Lauzen (2001), have accused creator David Chase of fostering negative stereotypes about these groups through the use of imagery rooted in retrograde cultural myths. From another perspective, however, these views seem short-sighted in that they do not fully appreciate the complexity of Chase’s method, which invokes traditional myths of many types to explore their tensions and contradictions, developing in the process a sophisticated analysis of how these stereotypes function with and against modern culture.
