The Sopranos, season 4

The economy is bad, the crews are squeezed, and the season's business is unusually literal: an HUD scam bleeding a neighbourhood, a horse named Pie-O-My, and Carmela discovering - via a forced conversation about finances - how little of anything is in her name. Her response is quiet and structural: she wants assets, protection, a stake. Watching her negotiate with Tony is the year's real action.

Ralphie opens the season as a made problem and exits it as a smaller one: a fire in a stable, a horse Tony loved more than he loved most people, and a kitchen fight that ends with a body and Christopher called in to help with what remains. Nobody is told; the crew is left to wonder.

Christopher's heroin habit crosses from private failing to family intervention, staged with folding chairs and read speeches, and it goes the way these things go. Adriana, meanwhile, has acquired a best friend who files reports - and by the time she learns it, she is in too deep to do anything but keep talking.

Everything funnels into the finale at the shore house: Irina's phone call, and the marriage detonating in a single sustained argument - Whitecaps - that says everything both of them have swallowed for four seasons. Tony moves out.