Mob Movies and TV Series: Why Their Ratings Soar

In one of my favorite scenes from HBO's The Sopranos, Tony Soprano hungrily scarfs down a plate of sushi. There's no shootings, no expletives, no violence, just raw hunger.

Later, after a few business transactions, Tony gets home and asks his wife, Carmela, where she'd like to eat for dinner. "This is going to sound crazy," she says, "but what about Nori again?"

And it dawns on you that when Tony was scarfing down sushi at their favorite restaurant without his wife there, he was effectively cheating on her. And in a much more emotional way than all the one legged Russians and property salesmen from other episodes of the Sopranos.

Since practically the beginning of film, mob movies and television shows have taken advantage of this type of juxtaposition; the completely normal with the ultraviolent and immoral, a comparison of extremes. Soprano didn't have to physically cheat on his wife to betray her, and somehow the act of inconsiderately choosing his lunch was more of a slap in the face than his various affairs. Mob movies are able to put a lot of power behind very simple revelations, and they've secured a massive place in most film lovers' collections.

I know that might come off as an overstatement--Mafia movies aren't all artistic, but if the Sopranos and the Godfather are any sort of indication they've got more potential than nearly any other type of movie, provided that the right people are working on them. Why is it that the Mafia's so artistic on screen?

The greatest ground for drama is a setting that can show the normal as abnormal and the ludicrous as a perfectly every day occurence, and that's what mob movies are able to do. There's the traditional Italian love of the family and the grim Mafia traditions of busting knees with a bat--how can you get more perfect than that? What's more accessible than watching a guy strangle someone with piano wire one minute and worry about what college his kid's going to get into the next? It's a great way to be ironic and meaningful at the same time.

And maybe it's a bit more mundane than that. Maybe the real-world troubles of Mafia men strike a chord that us common folk can relate to, and the ultra-violence of their craft makes us think that somewhere deep down inside of us, we'd have the capacity to be the same degree of ultimate bad ass. Either way, there's something undeniably powerful about well-written mob drama--from the Godfather to the Sopranos, there's art in all of the bloodshed.