I've seen the interpretation that S1 is Tony as a son, S2 is Tony as a brother, S3 is Tony as a father, S4 is Tony as a husband, S5 is Tony as a boss, and S6 is just Tony as a man.
The s1 plot where Chris and Adriana try to manage a shitty post-grunge band with some big time rapper feels like a fever dream. Especially since they just never acknowledge it again, even after Adriana gets her own music venue
A lot of the fish out of water material was the show at its weakest. The Jon Favreau episode is awkward in ways they didn't really intend. The episode about Tony's father's mistress is still hard to watch.
i kept waiting through season one for the rapper to come back and that episode plot to matter. thats gotta be the weakest episode in the series
It ends with him and Hesh threatening to sue each other, in a way that does seem to suggest some future plot. But instead the show largely ditches Hesh entirely. Probably half the episodes he appears in are in s1
Hesh is definitely a minor character who appears mostly in S1 but afterwards a decent amount. He’s the one who sells Pie O My to Ralph Cifaretto and is the connect to the casino in “Christopher.” Mainly he shows up in the worst episodes of the show lol but yeah he’s around
I’ve watched the series 3 times, and I still don’t understand what exactly the deal was with Hesh’s GF who randomly dies.
The death itself is random, but the point of that moment was that Tony's friendship with Hesh had fallen apart so much that he couldn't do anything else but give him back the money he owed and offer empty platitudes. The second half of season six shows Tony increasingly become alienated from the people he used to be closest with.
The whole process of raising a male child in that environment is interesting because Tony clearly does not want A.J. to follow in his footsteps but at the same time his whole concept of masculinity is rooted in his own experience of being a gangster. Even at the beginning of the show he has already accepted A.J.'s bad grades and his ultimate solution to find a path for A.J. is to get him close to the son of the former boss of a New York crime family.
Tony thought he was helping, but the three jobs he got for A.J. (construction company, Beansie's pizzeria, Little Carmine's production company) were all mob adjacent. Getting Finn the construction job and putting him in the path of violence and partly helping Vito get killed is what drives him away from Meadow and leads to her marrying a mob son and practicing law, where she will possibly get involved in Tony's business, instead of moving away and becoming a doctor.