Hall Of Faces

Twenty years ago, a little mobster show by the name of The Sopranos premiered on HBO, and hit the pop culture zeitgeist harder than a plate of rigott' pie hurled at your face. David Chase's layered, presentational, deeply complex prestige drama didn't just help establish the network as the home of serialized, critically acclaimed dramas; its telling of the story of New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) and the delicate balancing act he walks between his life of crime and the domestic travails of his family was a triumph of long-form storytelling, and helped cement TV as a medium to be taken seriously.   On the surface, it was GoodFellas meets The Honeymooners; dig deeper, and you'll find volumes of intriguing remarks on American culture around the turn of the millennium, the precarious nature of masculinity, and man's impossible tug of war against its own worst instincts. (In concert, of course, with jokes about Big Mouth Billy Bass and mobsters complaining about poison ivy.)   So much of The So