David Chase's HBO series The Sopranos follows New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano, who runs the DiMeo crime family while trying to hold together his own household — wife Carmela and children Meadow and Anthony Jr. — and, famously, while seeing a psychiatrist about the strain of doing both. The show braids two families, the blood one and the criminal one, into a single knot.
Tony's family tree is heavy with conflict at nearly every node. His mother, the poisonous Livia, conspires with Tony's uncle Corrado "Junior" Soprano — the family's nominal boss — in a plot against Tony's life. His sisters Janice and Barbara sit at the edges, Janice endlessly scheming her way back toward the center. His father, "Johnny Boy," and the whole Soprano line hang over the show as an inheritance Tony never asked for and cannot escape.
The genius of the series as a genogram is that the family and the Family constantly overlap: nephew Christopher Moltisanti is both close kin and a made soldier Tony must eventually judge; a wife's cousin, a daughter's boyfriend, an uncle's grudge all carry mob weight. The DiMeo organization is drawn as a second family tree laid over the first, and Tony stands at the crossing point of both.
The Sopranos made its subject explicit — a man in therapy trying to map his own family, and finding the mother, the uncle and the dead father at the root of everything. Charting the Sopranos is charting exactly what Tony's psychiatrist keeps reaching for: how a mob boss's rage, loyalty and fear all trace straight back up the family line.
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