When The Sopranos debuted, it didn’t just change TV—it eliminated the line between prestige and pulp, between a protagonist and a problem. David Chase’s landmark HBO series ushered in the golden age of anti-heroes, replacing likable leads with morally compromised men haunted by their mothers, therapists, and the specter of irrelevance. Tony Soprano didn’t just run a mob family—he remade the family drama, giving us slow-burn storytelling, interiority-laced violence, and a generation of TV shows obsessed with power, guilt, and pasta.
Two decades later, the show’s ghost lingers everywhere—from corporate law offices in Manhattan to cartel safehouses in Mexico. Netflix in particular has cornered the market on Soprano-coded content: brooding male leads, crumbling marriages, therapy sessions that lead nowhere good, and supporting characters who oscillate between Shakespearean soliloquies and stab wounds.
Whether they’re literal mobsters or just emotionally constipated white-collar criminals, these 10 shows owe their entire vibe to North Jersey’s most iconic sociopath, Tony Soprano.
10. ‘Bloodline’ (2015)
Bloodline begins like a sun-drenched family drama, but beneath the Florida Keys’ pastel skies and slow drawl is a gothic tragedy waiting to detonate. The show revolves around the Rayburns, a well-regarded local family whose secrets unravel with the return of black sheep Danny (Ben Mendelsohn, in one of the best TV performances of the decade). Mendelsohn plays Danny like a ghost walking back into a house no one wants to admit is haunted — charming, wounded, and permanently teetering between self-destruction and revenge. Kyle Chandler’s John, the family’s golden boy, slowly becomes the show’s real anti-hero: a man so committed to the illusion of goodness that he becomes a monster in denial.
The show luxuriates in dread, with Sissy Spacek and Linda Cardellini adding layers of maternal guilt and sibling fallout, while its elliptical structure and voiceover narration create the slow suffocation of knowing the end before you arrive.
Family as Legacy, and Weapon
Like The Sopranos, Bloodline is obsessed with what happens when the myth of family collides with the rot of personal ambition. Both shows dissect the weight of inheritance — not just money or property, but the unresolved violence and emotional debts passed down like heirlooms. Tony and John both see themselves as protectors, but their attempts at control only accelerate collapse. Where The Sopranos uses therapy as a confessional booth, Bloodline uses flashbacks and voiceover like internal hauntings — reminders that no one ever really leaves the family business, no matter how clean their uniform looks. It’s a story about brothers, masks, and the lies we keep telling ourselves long after the damage is done.
9. ‘Narcos’ (2015)
Narcos dropped viewers into the blood-soaked rise and reign of Pablo Escobar, and in doing so, reframed the drug kingpin not as a caricature, but as a Shakespearean figure of ambition, contradiction, and hubris. Wagner Moura plays Escobar with mythic range — soft-spoken patriarch one moment, vengeful warlord the next. The show charts his ascent from black market dealer to the world’s most powerful drug trafficker, blurring documentary-style narration with cinematic excess.
Pedro Pascal and Boyd Holbrook anchor the U.S. DEA presence, offering procedural scaffolding, but the show’s real gravity belongs to Escobar’s contradictions — his loyalty, cruelty, and a strangely compelling domestic life set against a landscape of national decay. Narcos is as much about power as it is about the story we tell ourselves about who deserves to wield it.
Tony Soprano, Meet Pablo Escobar
Like Tony Soprano, Pablo is both a villain and a folk hero — a man who uses family, faith, and nationalism to justify his own violence. ‘The Sopranos’ made suburban New Jersey feel like the center of a moral crisis; Narcos expands that crisis to the scale of empire. Both shows hinge on protagonists who are painfully aware of their own contradictions, but unwilling to abandon them. And in both, the state — whether it’s the U.S. government or a local therapist — functions as both a mirror and a threat. Escobar’s empire may be built on cocaine instead of garbage contracts, but the internal logic is the same: protect the family, expand the territory, and pray the walls don’t close in too fast. Narcos is the globalization of the Soprano code — blood loyalty, moral rot, and legacy at all costs.
8. ‘Suits’ (2011)
On paper, Suits is just another legal procedural — handsome men in expensive suits yelling about mergers. But over the course of nine seasons, it became something more: a slick, Shakespearean character drama where power, betrayal, and latent daddy issues played out in a law office that felt more like a mob compound than a workplace.
Gabriel Macht’s Harvey Specter is the emotional backbone: a man who lives by the deal and dies by the ego, navigating his own superiority complex with sharp suits and sharper silences. Patrick J. Adams’ Mike Ross is his protégé — a brilliant fraud with a memory like a superpower and a conscience like a curse. Rounding out the cast is Meghan Markle as the emotionally grounded Rachel, Rick Hoffman as the feral wildcard Louis Litt, and Gina Torres as Jessica Pearson, a managing partner who rules the office like a mafia don in Louboutins.
Power, Loyalty, and the Soft Violence of Ego
Like The Sopranos, Suits understands that control is rarely about muscle — it’s about leverage, language, and emotional manipulation. Harvey may not put out hits, but he breaks people just the same: through boardroom threats, legal strong-arming, and deeply wounded silences that say more than any gunshot. Both shows frame ambition as pathology — a symptom of something broken long before we meet the characters. Tony and Harvey are both men raised to believe that being the best means never appearing weak, and both spend most of their arcs trying (and failing) to undo that belief. Therapy may not save either of them, but it does illuminate what they’re afraid to lose: their status, their families, and their increasingly fragile grip on who they thought they were.
7. ‘Dexter’ (2006)
Michael C. Hall’s Dexter Morgan is one of the most chilling — and oddly sympathetic — anti-heroes in modern TV: a blood-spatter analyst for the Miami Metro Police by day, and a meticulous serial killer by night. What sets Dexter apart isn’t just its premise, but how intimately it invites us into his fractured psychology. Hall plays Dexter with eerie restraint — equal parts boyish and blank — a man whose internal monologue narrates everything from the logistics of dismemberment to the pangs of surrogate fatherhood.
The show walks a tightrope between grotesque violence and moral relativity, turning murder into ritual, and guilt into a ghost that haunts Dexter’s every move. Jennifer Carpenter’s Deb, Dexter’s sister, provides the heart and chaos, her profanity-laced breakdowns grounding the show in emotional realism even as the body count rises.
Therapy-Speak for Sociopaths
If The Sopranos gave us the mobster with a shrink, Dexter gives us the killer with a code — both navigating internal rot through moral scaffolding that ultimately can’t hold. Like Tony, Dexter hides behind a performance of normalcy: suburban life, family dinners, workplace banter. But beneath that mask is a man terrified of who he really is, trying to control the uncontrollable — his instincts, his trauma, his legacy. Dexter, like The Sopranos, interrogates the self-made man myth by showing what it costs to maintain the lie. It also shares Chase’s obsession with what happens when moral decay becomes routine: when killing — or cheating, or lying — stops being a crisis and becomes just another Tuesday.
6. ‘Queen of the South’ (2016)
Queen of the South charts the rise of Teresa Mendoza (Alice Braga), a poor woman from Sinaloa who transforms into a ruthless drug lord after her boyfriend is murdered by the cartel. Based on a telenovela, the show has a mythic, operatic sensibility — filled with betrayals, executions, and power grabs, but grounded by Braga’s slow-burn performance as Teresa: a woman who starts out running for her life and ends up commanding armies with quiet, haunted resolve. Hemky Madera’s Pote, a former sicario turned loyal bodyguard, adds surprising depth and warmth, and the show’s early antagonist-turned-ally Camila Vargas (Veronica Falcón) provides a brilliant counterpoint — a woman of ambition and elegance with a steel spine. It’s a story that’s not just about survival, but about reinvention — how violence and vulnerability can coexist in a single glance.
The Weight of the Crown, and the Corpse Count It Took to Get It
Where The Sopranos gave us the burden of inherited power, Queen of the South examines the trauma of earning it from nothing. Like Tony, Teresa is never truly safe — not from her enemies, not from her memories, and not from the version of herself she left behind. Both shows are fascinated by ascension as tragedy: the closer the character gets to their throne, the more alone they become. Teresa, like Tony, learns to see trust as a liability, love as a weakness, and morality as a currency that devalues the richer you get. Queen of the South takes the emotional framework of The Sopranos — self-destruction masked as destiny — and gives it a distinctly feminine and global lens. The result is just as bloody, and just as profound.
5. ‘Griselda’ (2024)
Griselda tells the story of Griselda Blanco, the Colombian drug queenpin who ran the Miami cocaine trade with ruthless efficiency and terrifying poise in the 1970s and ’80s. Sofia Vergara sheds every last shred of her sitcom persona to embody the “Black Widow” as something colder and more complex — a woman whose maternal instincts are matched only by her capacity for violence.
Vergara doesn’t just play Griselda as fierce; she plays her as haunted, moving through neon-lit danger with the wary grace of someone who knows exactly what men think women can’t do — and does it anyway. The show is a kinetic, stylized descent into the underworld, with stylings that flirt with excess but always circle back to character: ambition, betrayal, grief. It’s a rise-and-fall narrative about a woman who refuses to ask permission — and who weaponizes family as both shield and sword.
Matriarchal Mayhem and the Soprano Blueprint
If Tony Soprano is the template for the postmodern anti-hero, then Griselda is the genre’s long-overdue matriarch — equally manipulative, equally magnetic, and even more aware of the cost of power. Both characters lead with family while quietly orchestrating destruction, wielding respect through fear and charisma. What connects Griselda to The Sopranos is not just crime — it’s the emotional calculus of leadership: how to command loyalty, how to live with guilt, and how to survive intimacy when your life depends on strategy. Like Tony, Griselda is shaped by trauma but unwilling to be softened by it. And like Tony, her rise is not a triumph — it’s a tragedy in slow motion, punctuated by beauty, betrayal, and silence.
4. ‘Ozark’ (2017)
Ozark opens with accountant Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) relocating his family to the Lake of the Ozarks after a cartel money-laundering scheme goes sideways — and what unfolds is one of the most finely tuned slow-motion collapses in TV history.
Bateman plays Marty with dead-eyed calm, as if he’s trying to hold the entire world together using only Excel spreadsheets and denial. Laura Linney’s Wendy, however, is the show’s secret weapon: a political strategist turned criminal tactician who pivots from panicked spouse to puppetmaster with terrifying grace. The Byrdes aren’t just laundering money — they’re laundering morality, convincing themselves that survival excuses everything. The show’s palette is washed in grays and blues, its violence abrupt, its calm threaded with dread. It’s not a crime thriller; it’s a domestic horror story disguised as a business plan.
Married to the Game (and Each Other)
What makes Ozark so deeply Soprano-coded is its obsession with control — and its understanding that family can be both motive and excuse. Like Tony, Marty is a man who intellectualizes his way through depravity, convinced that being methodical makes him moral. And Wendy, much like Carmela at her most manipulative, uses maternal instinct as a tool of empire-building. The kids — increasingly drawn into the operation — reflect the same tragic erosion of innocence seen in Meadow and A.J., as morality trickles out of reach, one rationalization at a time. Both shows frame family life as a negotiation with rot: what are you willing to destroy in order to protect the people you love, and what does it mean when love becomes indistinguishable from ambition?
3. ‘Peaky Blinders’ (2013)
Set in post-WWI Birmingham, Peaky Blinders follows the rise of Thomas Shelby (Cillian Murphy), a decorated soldier turned gang leader whose charisma is rivaled only by his nihilism. Murphy plays Tommy with the slow-burning intensity of a man who’s already seen the end — every movement controlled, every sentence a blade. The ensemble is formidable: Helen McCrory as Aunt Polly is both maternal and Machiavellian, Paul Anderson’s Arthur is a barely suppressed scream in a human body, and the show’s style — from its anachronistic soundtrack to its razor-sharp coats — turns its violence into something operatic. The series unfolds like an epic poem written in gunpowder and grief. It’s about class, legacy, trauma, and what happens when ambition becomes your only god.
The Mob as Myth, the Family as Weapon
Like Tony Soprano, Tommy Shelby is both king and casualty of his own empire — a man who leads through fear while privately drowning in memory and regret. Both men walk the line between self-awareness and emotional repression, and both are obsessed with legacy: not just survival, but remembrance. Their families are their mirrors, magnifying every failure and compromise. ‘Peaky Blinders’ doesn’t mimic The Sopranos so much as it echoes its structure — the dual allegiance to personal history and public dominance, the therapy substituted for whiskey-fueled monologues, the quiet tragedy of power that isolates. Watching Tommy manipulate, mourn, and self-destruct is like watching a sepia-toned Soprano saga — with sharper tailoring and just as many ghosts.
2. ‘Breaking Bad’ (2008)
When high school chemistry teacher Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is diagnosed with cancer and decides to start cooking meth to secure his family’s financial future, the transformation from desperate man to criminal kingpin unfolds with surgical precision. Breaking Bad is often heralded as the gold standard of television storytelling, but what’s most striking is how intimate it remains, even as the stakes escalate. Cranston’s performance is a masterclass in moral corrosion — he evolves from meek to monstrous so subtly you forget when you stopped rooting for him. Aaron Paul’s Jesse Pinkman becomes the show’s conscience by proxy, while Anna Gunn’s Skyler remains one of the most unfairly vilified characters in TV history — the woman who dares to survive while refusing to play wife to a fantasy.
From Gabagool to Blue Meth: The Prestige Crime Inheritance
Breaking Bad shares more with The Sopranos than just genre — it shares a worldview. Both shows are obsessed with moral entropy: the slow, almost imperceptible slide from human to hollow. Tony and Walt begin their stories insisting it’s all for their families — and end them destroying everything they touch. The real genius of both series is their understanding that crime isn’t just a plot device — it’s a philosophy. And like Tony, Walt believes that being good at something makes it worth doing, no matter the cost. The journey from breadwinner to monster isn’t sudden; it’s a series of small, justifiable sins. Both shows ask the same question: What happens when the person who claims to protect you is the one you should fear most?
1. ‘Lilyhammer’ (2012)
Lilyhammer wasn’t just Netflix’s first original series — it was a slyly meta return for one of The Sopranos’ most beloved lieutenants. Steven Van Zandt, resurrecting his mafia mannerisms with a comedic twist, stars as Frank “The Fixer” Tagliano, a New York mobster who flips on his associates and enters witness protection, choosing the sleepy Norwegian town of Lillehammer as his destination because he once saw it during the Olympics.
Van Zandt is brilliant as Frank: the same stone-faced enforcer we remember from Newark, now applying mob logic to Nordic small-town politics. The comedy is dry, the satire precise, and the show’s fish-out-of-water premise allows it to explore masculinity, authority, and identity with far more nuance than its snow-covered visuals suggest.
Silvio in the Snow
What makes Lilyhammer feel unmistakably Soprano-coded isn’t just Van Zandt’s casting — it’s the worldview. Frank, like Tony, operates on a private moral system built from loyalty, intimidation, and a need to dominate every room. His old habits — leveraging fear, bending institutions to his will, demanding respect at all costs — don’t dissolve in exile. Instead, they become absurd, and then quietly poignant. Like Tony, Frank is a man who refuses to change even when the world around him demands it. While The Sopranos asked whether a mobster could ever be truly introspective, Lilyhammer wonders what happens when that mobster simply changes his zip code and calls it growth. It’s not a sequel — it’s a spin-off of the soul, wrapped in fur coats and deadpan humor.
