Tony Soprano opened “The Sopranos” with this lament: “It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know. But lately I am getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.”

If you decide to check in on “The Sopranos” for the first time tonight, you will probably have a similar complaint. But to get even the late-comers in the mood, let me suggest a couple of ways to look back while looking ahead.

First, Alessandra Stanley has a review of both the show itself and its role in changing television — and pop culture as a whole. Although she attempts to temper some of the critical enthusiasm that has greeted the show over the years (pointing out its many predecessors, for example), she does give it high praise:

The series lowered the bar on permissible violence, sex and profanity at the same time that it elevated viewers’ taste, cultivating an appetite for complexity, wit and cinematic stylishness on a serial drama in which psychological themes flickered and built and faded and reappeared. The best episodes had equal amounts of high and low appeal, an alchemy of artistry and gutter-level blood and gore, all of it leavened with humor.

To me, though, the wonder of the show in its early years was the way it put its sense of irony at the service of a very poignant social commentary on, above all, the trappings of masculinity in modern American culture.

In one of the inaugural pieces for PopPolitics — “Just When Men Thought They Were Out …” — Bernie looked at how “The Sopranos,” along with many other texts (remember the 2000 election!), uses “the spectacle of violence” to displace a growing insecurity over increasingly contradictory definition of manhood: “One of the chief preoccupations of ‘The Sopranos’ will be men’s feelings of inadequacy, and those feelings are considered a reflection of a long-standing national struggle.”

Once you start feeling bogged down in all that weighty, analytical stuff, though, check out the “Seven Minute Sopranos” video (see below) — which provides one of the quickest and funniest recaps of a television series you will ever see. Virginia Heffernan has the back story behind the creators.