I've got season 1 and 2 on DVD and I'll be getting season 3,4,5 very soon. So could regular viewres please give me their opnions on the best season?

The best are probley 1,2,3 in the "critic world" but my favs are 4,5,6 but it depends on what you want.

Many people on these boards have good views on each season.

1. Season 2
2. Season 1
3. Season 5
4. Season 6, Part II
5. Season 3
6. Season 4
7. Season 6, Part I

I aggree with De Niro 4,5,6 for me where amazing storylines

All of them is the obvious answer but i quite liked season 2. i think i was expecting it to slump after such a brilliant first series but it did'nt. It got better
I liked Richie Aprile as well..
He was a good baddie

i hated season 2 buts thats because i fucking hate Janice and i wasnt keen on Richie either

Richie was such a great character...."What's mine is not yours to give me."

I'd say seasons 2-3 are my favorites

I would say my favorite season is 2, as the trip to italy was spectacular. Also, the opening episode was great The ending of the season was good. I like season 1 a lot, and then season 5 was good.

The best ending in the whole show for me is at the end of season 1 where you find out the FBI are on to them when they having a meal together.Where all the waiters are undercover.

To me the best season is Season 1, just the freshness of the whole Mob thing in a TV show was great..
Season 2 was a little letdown, but still a good season. Season 3 is the only season, IMO that can actually matchup with Season 1, the drama in that season was very well done.
Season 4 was okay, and Season 5 was just an inch under Season 3. Season 6 Part I was shit, while Part II was amazing except "Chasing It" which was, IMO horrible.

To me, I thought the show got better as the actors fully developed their characters over the years (notice the accent differences between season 1 and 5). It added a realistic feel to the show. But, come on, its The Sopranos! All the seasons were great!

My favs are: Season 5, 4, 6 Part II, 3, 2, 1 (mainly because I don't watch it as much as the later seasons), and then 6 part 1.

Season 2 and 3 for me.Love those episodes.Just started watching it again recently.As for Richie Aprile,i agree,he was a good baddie,but the actor who played him,reminded me of a Pacino rip off for some reason.Just some of the same subtleties in his acting.

Seemed to me in Season 6b the accents got out of control! Tony especially sounded so different than he had before.

You know, Longneck, you're 100% correct. If Gandolfini had one flaw in the eight years the show was on tv, it's that his New Yaaaawk-New Joisey accent got stronger each year. It wasn't there at all in season 1.

True, I think his best accent was in season 5. In 6B, it did seem too strong (but then again, Tony lived in Jersey all his life, so wasn't it befitting of the character?).

I think that season 1 was the best season out of all of the seasons of The Sopranos.

I'm currently up to season 3 in my continuing retrospective. My rediscovery reminds me that, as far as single, self-contained episodes go, it's my favourite season.

The opener, "Mr. Ruggerio's Neighborhood", is possibly the most unique of all episodes; it probably made a lot of people gasp when it first aired ("Fuck, where's this show going?"), but it's different, well-paced and fantastic - the FBI scenes are extremely witty. "Another Toothpick", "University" and "Second Opinion" is a great mid-season run of great consecutive episodes - possibly the most consistent since the first five of season 1; "Employee of the Month" and "Amou Fou" are top rate, and "Pine Barrens" might be the best episode ever.

Season 3 is the turning point in the show: the serialised narrative becomes more disparate and fragmentary with episodes becoming more self-contained, characters coming and going, and audiences more frustrated.

I'm a sucker for it, though, because the writing becomes richer, the acting more established and confident, the humour darker and the visual style more crisp and profound.

After watching them all again over recent weeks,im changing my mind and going with season 1

After season 2 the show started to go down hill. After season 2 it turned into a sop opera.

ds

How so?

I completely disagree with you.

I thought it got BETTER as the seasons went by.

I didn't really like season 6 at all.

None of it? Not even the final nine episodes?

I think re-watches help - and watching three to four episodes at a time also helps bind plots together; when you're watching it oncea week every Sunday night you tend to find trouble linking certain episodes to the next and previous; it's genius that Chase finally in the latter seasons pulled his ambition off: making each episode a stand-alone mini-movie, and part of an ongoing serial.

I'd currently rank the the seasons thus:

1. Season 4
2. Season 3
3. Season 6B
4. Season 6A
5. Season 2
6. Season 1
7. Season 5

Oh..I meant Season 6a.It's called season 7 down here.

Too much Vito? Think of it this way...

Chase and co. took the most sinful of all Mafia practices (being a fanook) and explored what happens when it pops its ugly head up for all to see. Bringing Vito's homosexuality to the centre of the season narrative arc allowed the writers to really dig up sides to characters previously in the dark: we see complex sides to Phil, Patsy, Sil, Carlo, Paulie, Chris and of course Tony. Also the effects on the immediate family side of things. You might argue that Vito's homosexuality is unlikely to begin with - and from that stems possible "soap opera" criticism - but I don't think it is at all: a lot of gangsters are known to be at least bisexual, and Tony himself tells Carlo at one point "C'mon, we all know he isn't the first."

A lot of people are rubbed up the wrong way by seeing male-on-male kiss-scenes, tending to say they're "gratuitous" or something similar; no more gratuitous than seeing Tony kissing Carmela, or the implied blow-job that opens up his birthday in season 6B.

Vito's human too. Showing him in the scenes with Johnny Cakes shows what's really at stake, and illuminates some of the absurd and violent reactions such as those of Phil and Carlo. Of course, masculinity is a major theme in the entire series, but it comes to the fore in the last two: everybody's questioning their own identity and it's almost as if Chase and co. are questioning who these characters are too - where they are, how far they've come, where they're going. It's a predominant preoccupation for the entire sixth season: Tony in the afterlife as somebody else, having lost his identity (then recovering and having a new zest for family life), Paulie finding out his mother isn't his mother, the entire thing with Vito, and don't forget the self-reflexive movie-within-the-show plot, with Christopher and Little Carmine brushing shoulders with "real-life" people like Ben Kingsley and Lauren Bacall.

Masculinity is embodied, in its most macho form, in the "Old School" Mafiosi like Phil Leotardo (Feech La Manna too, as well as Richie Aprile). Take Richie; he was old school but he had impotent problems - he couuld only get off with a gun to Janice's head; note too the significance of where Phil Leotardo stems from in the scene where they finally catch up with Vito: out of the closet. His watching Vito get a pool cue shoved up his ass borders on sexual sadism, too: how he holds the bed-sheets as Vito gets beat up.

It's a very powerful and complex scene; Phil's reaction to Vito throughout the season is much like many viewers' reactions to the scenes including Vito. I'm not saying everyone's gay, but it's an interesting notion and very deeply embedded in its own fabric - it's very self-aware of what it's doing.

Great post Capo.

I actually don't dislike season 6a the most because of the Vito story,It just seemed rushed and a bit empty to me for some reason.I don't hate the season,just it's my least favorite.

Who knows,maybe subliminally i dislike because of the Vito shit.

I actually thought the very final season was the most rushed of the lot, full of cheap wrap-ups and narrative development. But watching it the second time, I realised how effective it is.

How many times have you seen 6A? Like I said, re-watches reward greatly with this show - especially if you find time to watch two or three episodes at a time (the length of a film).

yeah i dont know if anything is going to beat season 1 for me...

Just finished season 6A again today. Fantastic. I love the exploration of sexuality - not so much the "Vito in exile" scenes, which are there to shed humanity on his situation (and thus the severity of his murder), but the reactions in others toward his being outed.

I'm convinced, now, of Phil's repressed homosexuality. The particular anger with which he reacts to thoughts of Vito, the haste with which he denounces it as a disgrace the family, his emergence from the closet in the scene in which his henchmen murder Vito, the lingering shot of his hands gripping the bedsheets as they beat Vito to death, the clear unease he feels when there are muscled-up, virtually-naked men on TV in the aftermath of Vito's death, that shot of him lying there awake at night after Vito has been killed (really, he should have been relieved of putting an end to the family shame, not lying awake at night thinking about it).

Also: when Tony says to a bloodthirsty Carlo, re Vito being a fanook, "Carlo, let's be honest here, we all know he ain't the first". And Tony to Melfi, about him understanding men's sexual needs when incarcerated in the can... How many years was Phil in the can? Twenty. And, for all he talks of honour and not ratting anybody out, he seems especially antsy about the time he spent in there.

Anyway...

"The Fleshy Part of the Thigh" is an amazing episode. So is the season opener, and the two consequent episodes with the whole Kevin Finnerty thing, but the one straight after, with Tony now awake but still in hospital. I like the philosophy put forth in it, a slant on pantheism, with everything made of the same particles as everything else, etc. I love the final scene, where Tony sits in his garden looking at the trees, and his POV (a shot of trees in the wind) is edited as a visually flawless transition to another scene: Paulie beating up Dick Barone's son. One scene is horrific and violent, the other relieved and tranquil, and yet both are part of the same fabric.