The Sopranos & Breaking Bad Crossovers

If you asked people to name two of the best television shows of all time, chances are pretty good that they would say The Sopranos and Breaking Bad. Both are considered to be the best of the prestige dramas that have become mainstream nowadays, and both series continue to have a rabid fan base even years after the shows ended.

If you’re a fan of this channel, then you’ll know that I love both the Sopranos and Breaking Bad. They are two of the greatest television programs ever created. I love the two shows so much that I’ve actually analyzed every single episode of both shows in my Sopranolog and Breaking Badlog series, and you can find the playlists for those in the description of this video if you haven’t seen them.

Now I know I’m not the only one who enjoys both shows. Fans might go back and forth as to which show is better overall, but I think it’s fair to say that there is a lot of crossover in interest between both communities.

However it’s also very clear that Breaking Bad loves the Sopranos as well. It came out a year after the Sopranos ended, and was obviously heavily inspired by the groundbreaking work the Sopranos did. Vince Gilligan would later say that there would be no Walter White without Tony Soprano, and that he was inspired by how James Gandolfini could play both a loving family man and a terrifying criminal. Bryan Cranston would also echo this respect.

So in that spirit, I thought it would be fun to go over all the connections and references between The Sopranos and Breaking Bad.

Now you might have seen or heard about this Reddit post theorizing that Breaking Bad is a mirror version of the Sopranos. The thread was actually quoted in an article on Screenrant. But while I think it’s impressive all the potential connections the user was able to identify, like most theories I think that a lot of the connections are a stretch.

While Breaking Bad is obviously inspired by The Sopranos, there’s no way they set out to make a show solely about references to The Sopranos. That’s just not how writers and showrunners work. So I won’t be talking about literally every possible connection, only the ones that I think are intentional.

We’ll start with the obvious. The character arc of Walter White is obviously inspired by Tony Soprano. Both men are on a morale decline as they acquire power and wealth. Both alienate their families through their lies and selfishness. And both obviously survive their final episodes.

Now neither the Sopranos or Breaking Bad invented the idea of the antihero protagonist, but they did both bring the concept into the mainstream. It’s why if you asked people who the most well written television characters of all time are, chances are they are going to say Tony Soprano or Walter White.

There are also similarities in both show’s pilots. Tony and Walt both pass out and end up getting MRI’s. Tony because of his panic attacks, and Walt because of his cancer. In both shows, these events directly lead to the main premise of the shows: Tony going to therapy and Walt deciding to cook meth.

Speaking of cancer, Sam McMurray plays a cancer surgeon in both the Sopranos and Breaking Bad. In The Sopranos, he plays Doctor Kennedy, Junior’s arrogant cancer surgeon. And in Breaking Bad, he plays Walt’s surgeon Dr. Victor Bravenick. Given Dr. Kennedy’s prominent role in the episode Second Opinion, I have to think they cast him in this role intentionally.

The same is true for the character of Juan Bolsa on Breaking Bad. His name when translated into English is Johnny Sack, an obvious reference to the character of the same name on The Sopranos. Both men are similar as well, acting as intermediaries between their respective organizations: The Lupertazzis for the Sopranos and the Cartel for Breaking Bad.

Speaking of similar characters, Christopher and Jesse have a lot in common. Both are the young protoge’s to the main characters. Both are drug addicts, and both end up being used and manipulated by their mentors.

There are differences of course. Jesse is a much better person than Christopher, and actually survives the series and even gets his own movie. But the archetype of Christopher in The Sopranos seems to be an influence for how they wrote Jesse on Breaking Bad.

And now we should talk about the movies. Both series get a tie-in movie that came out years after the show ended. Breaking Bad got a sequel in El Camino, and The Sopranos got a prequel in The Many Saints of Newark. Now the reception to both movies was mixed. Some fans like El Camino, but many including myself hated it. The reception to The Many Saints was even worse, with most fans vehemently hating the film. If there is any lesson to take away from this, don’t make a film continuation of the very successful series. You’re just asking for trouble.

Both shows also have an episode in their final seasons titled “Live Free or Die”, and they are both titled for the same reason. Both Walter and Vito Spatafore from The Sopranos flee to the state of New Hampshire, whose state motto is Live Free or Die. Walter flees because he is hiding from a nationwide manhunt after he is revealed to be Heisenberg. Vito flees after he is outed for being gay, which is a death penalty offense in the mafia.

In New Hampshire, Walt is slowly dying from his cancer alone and miserable. With his family hating him, he is about to turn himself in before seeing an interview with his former business partners that angers him and spurs him to return to New Mexico.

In The Sopranos, Vito is finally free to have a relationship with another man, a loving diner owner named Johnny Cakes. However the tedium of manual work along with missing the mob lifestyle leads to Vito returning to New Jersey.

Both the Sopranos and Breaking Bad also have an iconic pizza scene. In Breaking Bad, Walt, who is separated from his wife Skyler, brings their son home with a large pizza which he hopes will fix the strain in his marriage. When she rejects this, he angrily throws the pizza onto the roof in one of the most iconic moments of the show.

In The Sopranos, Tony, who is also separated from his wife Carmella, returns his son AJ along with a large pizza as well, hoping to disprove the rumor that he slept with Christopher’s fiance Adriana. This also fails, but Tony, being a man of culture, takes the pizza with him.

Finally we have the most talked about connection between the two shows. The cringiest scenes in all of television: the Happy Birthday Mr. President scenes.

In The Sopranos, Tony meets his father’s old mistress Fran Felstein. When she was a young thot, she actually had a brief affair with JFK. She later sings “Happy Birthday Mr. President” to Tony, an ode to when Marilyn Monroe sang to JFK on his birthday.

Likewise on Breaking Bad, Skyler sings the song to her boss Ted Beneke on his birthday. Skyler would later have an affair with Ted as well, mirroring the rumored relationship between Marilyn and JFK.

Both of these scenes are considered very cringy and hard to watch. Some of it is the fact that the tone of the song is trying to be sexy, and many fans consider Fran and Skyler to not be attractive. Some of it is just the fact that people hate terrible singing, as I learned when I did the 12 days of Sopranostember.

However both scenes are meant to be extremely awkward. In Fran’s case, it’s meant to reflect her vanity and the fact that she’s living in an idealized past. The title of the episode “In Camelot”, is a reference to the administration of JFK which has become mythologized over the years.

In Skyler’s case, it’s meant to reflect the attraction between her and Ted, which is not only a destructive mistake for Skyler later in the series, it alienates her from her coworkers who view her as a gold-digger sleeping with the boss.

Now that’s it for the connections between the shows that I noticed. There may be more out there, and feel free to let me know any I missed in the comments. But the point of this video wasn’t just about some Sopranos and Breaking Bad trivia. Well I mean, it was a little bit about that. Gotta rake in those sweet sweet views after all.

But it also shows something more. Breaking Bad was obviously heavily inspired by the Sopranos, like all dramas that came after it. And I think that’s why the show turned out as good as it did. Breaking Bad is part of the legacy of The Sopranos, the same as shows like Mad Men. Boardwalk Empire, and even newer shows like Succession. They took lessons from what the Sopranos was able to accomplish, and built upon it for their own success.

I know people like to meme on how bad television is nowadays. And yeah, 99% of all shows are garbage. But the fact that television dramas are still looking back at The Sopranos as a source of inspiration, gives me some hope for the future. WIll any of them ever beat the original? Eh, probably not, but hopefully they’ll continue to build on the foundation, and we’ll get some incredible series along the way.