Tony Soprano: typical boomer leader

In a broader sense, The Sopranos is about male baby-boomer American leadership in an age of irreconcilable demands and diminished expectations. As a Mob boss and a family man, Tony is caught between what he is and what he imagines himself to be. He cannot muster the stoicism the past demanded of men nor the sensitivity the present does. He whines to his therapist and "goes about in pity" for himself (the quote is from an Ojibwe proverb that Tony reads and that he believes applies only to other people), yet he longs for the days when men were strong and silent like Gary Cooper. He's a hotheaded brute who imagines himself, as he says, a cool "captain-of-industry type." He longs for the patriarchal prerogatives of bosses before him yet feels obligated to be faithful to his wife--or at least to try, kind of, once in a while. "The End of the Soprano Administration" Time