The Godfather Meets The Sopranos In 5-Part HBO Series Produced By Martin Scorsese

Published Aug 17, 2026, 2:00 PM EDT

Cathal Gunning has been writing about movies, television, culture, and politics online and in print since 2017. He worked as a Senior Editor in Adbusters Media Foundation from 2018-2019 and wrote for WhatCulture in early 2020. He has been a Senior Features Writer for ScreenRant since 2020.

While “The Godfather meets The Sopranos” is an absurdly high bar for any creator to attempt, HBO’s five-season hit proves that Martin Scorsese is the perfect man for the job. There are many great gangster shows, from the Power universe to Gangs of London to more realistic and nuanced takes on the crime drama genre, like HBO’s The Wire. There are also plenty of great mobster movies, from Brian De Palma’s Scarface to 2008’s Gomorrah.

However, HBO’s modern masterpiece The Sopranos remains the first name in gangster shows, much like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather trilogy remains the greatest mob movie series ever. While The Godfather Part III is far from perfect, even its ignominious reputation couldn’t undo the outsized adoration of the first two movies in the endlessly influential series. Similarly, the ambiguous ending of The Sopranos may have left viewers who prefer a traditional wrap-up frustrated, but no one could question the show’s immeasurable impact on TV history.

The Godfather trilogy’s morally complex gangsters paved the way for Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas, Casino, and The Irishman, as well as Donnie Brasco, The King of New York, and many more genre classics at the multiplex. Meanwhile, The Sopranos humanized its criminal antiheroes and, in the process, made The Wire, Breaking Bad, and even the Yellowstone franchise possible. Thus, a show claiming to blend the two would have quite a high bar to clear. Still, that’s exactly what Martin Scorsese’s HBO hit Boardwalk Empire managed when the period drama debuted in 2010.

Boardwalk Empire Blended The Period Setting of The Godfather With The Sprawling Scope of The Sopranos

Running for 56 episodes across five seasons, Boardwalk Empire was loosely based on author Nelson Johnson’s 2002 non-fiction book Boardwalk Empire: The Birth, High Times, and Corruption of Atlantic City. The show followed the infamously corrupt Atlantic City treasurer Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, played by a career-best Steve Buscemi, as the underworld kingpin navigated complex relationships between the city’s various mobs, its police force, its political elites, and its ordinary citizens.

Eventually incorporating famous real-life historical characters like Al Capone, Boardwalk Empire could easily have felt too glitzy and glamorous to do justice to its dark subject matter. However, Scorsese’s show instead treads a tricky line between fact and fiction, humanizing its criminal characters without romanticizing them. Unlike FX’s The Shards, the show doesn’t use its real-life inspiration as a launching pad for a story that is more dramatic, gruesome, and sensational than the real history it's based on.

Instead, Boardwalk Empire paints an immersive portrait of a city emerging from the era of Prohibition to become a national hotspot, and shows how the gangsters of the era shaped its history. Infused with the same plaintive, unsentimental perspective as Bruce Springsteen’s iconic ballad Atlantic City, Boardwalk Empire provides viewers with a compelling, poignant, and often brutal image of a pivotal moment in US history.

Boardwalk Empire’s Success Changed Gangster Shows Forever

Via MovieStillsDB

While Boardwalk Empire was a tremendously expensive series, setting records with its big budgets at the time, HBO’s historical drama was soon overshadowed by Game of Thrones season 1, whose unprecedented budget was matched only by its huge mainstream success. However, while the mature fantasy TV boom that followed the success of Game of Thrones is well documented, Boardwalk Empire’s similar impact on the gangster series has gone under the radar.

Netflix’s Peaky Blinders and Narcos both borrowed Boardwalk Empire’s combination of period drama and crime thrills to become massive sensations, while Godfather of Harlem lasted seven years thanks to its critical popularity. The Italian series Gomorrah and the British contemporary crime thrillers Top Boy and Gangs of London, alongside the Irish classic Love/Hate, proved that Boardwalk Empire’s successful mix of The Godfather meets The Sopranos revived the gangster show genre worldwide.