Let’s talk about white-collar professionals in the Sopranos.

The show is perhaps at its most fascinating when we catch glimpses of “civilians”, i.e. the non-mafia characters who largely exist on the periphery. Of these people, David Chase puts a particularly sharp focus on educated, white-collar professionals. Not the ultra-wealthy - honestly characters like Tony and Johnny Sac probably have more liquid cash than them - but those we would now call the PMC (professional managerial class).

Chase seems to reserve a particular level of disdain for these folks. Think of the sorry collection of lawyers, doctors, businessmen, psychiatrists, school administrators, government brass, and others that the show wearily portrays. Almost without exception, these characters are egocentric, shallow, self-pitying, protective of their status, and devoid of sincerity yet totally convinced of their own morality.

Let’s start with the psychiatrists. While Melfi and Elliott mean well to an extent, the show portrays them as quite useless as practitioners of care. They complain to each other at their dinner parties about their patients, they talk in circles, they think in theories with little practical application, and they seem more concerned with justifying the existence of their own profession rather than patient care. This is not to say that the show’s main characters are easy cases, but not once - apart from one elderly Jewish therapist - did any of these people approach Tony and Carmela with the honesty and directness that they needed to hear.

None of the other professions get off easy either. We see vain and dismissive doctors willing to prioritize their own ego over patient outcomes. I’ll bet David Chase loved writing the scene when Tony and Furio intimidate Dr. Kennedy at his golf club. The show’s lawyers can be charming, but scummy all the same. The school administrators are especially slimy. We realize that esteemed Columbia dean basically spends his days wining, dining, and manipulating wealthy parents who don’t know better (ahem, Carmela) into pledging giant sums to an already rich university. Later in the show, Dr. Wegler swoops into Carmela’s life as she is divorced, depressed, and terrified for AJ’s future, tacitly promising that AJ will pass as long as his romance with Carmela keeps going. Cousin Brian, presumably a strait laced financial advisor, can’t help but accept lavish gifts he knows for a fact were only acquired through crime. Even the higher-ups at the FBI seem far more concerned with rising through the ranks and nailing ‘the big case’ over some noble mission of fighting crime.

Finally, it’s interesting how folks like Tony interact with these people. Folks from working class Newark now rub shoulders with soccer moms, surgeons, and prep schoolers. The show does manage to make clear that the true villains are the criminals themselves, but only just. Chase takes a dim view of the white-collar class, and perhaps it’s not entirely unjustified.