There are very little clues as to exactly how much time passes between both seasons and each episode but recently I've been wondering about it. Little things like in season 6 when they return from the safehouse to find a stack of mail at the house and this is only the time between two episodes. I think it changes a lot throughout the series and I know Chase wanted to keep it current and on the same timeline as the real world but I'm wondering does anyone know the amount of time that is being skipped over in between episodes and seasons? Is it the same amount of time that is really being skipped over in between episode production? (for example, a new episode every week I'm assuming, I wasn't watching Sopranos when it was being aired on television, so then a week goes by in between each episode?)

*Edit: if someone could move this to the Kitchen Sink forum you'd have my thanks, was searching for a better forum to ask this but I didn't find it until afterwards.

losteden, generally speaking, I don't think there was ever any intent beyond making each season ROUGHLY contemporaneous with the time it would be airing (which was always within a year of filming). Important historic events would be mentioned where it was natural to do so, and those remarks provide some guide as to what year we're in (e.g., 9/11 is mentioned in the first episode of season 4 -- the first one filmed and aired after the attacks -- as an event having taken place long enough before that scene that Bobby's mother had ostensibly "gone downhill" in part because of it.) Then there are things like the "class of 2000" sign when Meadow graduated high school, so we know that season 2 would have ended in May or June of that year. We'd seen Tony's driver's license both in season 3 and season 6, and both times showed a birth year of 1959, so when his age is periodically referenced, we have that as a year reference as well.

But I don't think precision of time was ever very important to Chase. I think he just wanted to keep it in the ballpark unless story really dictated otherwise.

The rate of time passage between episodes was also not a given or fixed, but the one area of the show that offers the best sort of "clock" or calendar are the therapy sessions. They are understood to be once a week, and frequently Melfi or Tony would say something like, "we talked last week about such and such" or "you said last time that ________". When you know you heard that remark in the previous week's episode, that's an indication that real time was running parallel with show time, at least between those two reference points.

I seem to recall thinking that season 5 had progressed considerably beyond real time by its end and that season 6A was starting a number of months behind air date, making the time between the two seasons less than what actually transpired between the times the last and first episodes of each season respectively aired.

I'm sure there are other posters who've made a much more conscious and detailed study of this question, but that's my take off the top of my head.

Agree with Fly, I think there was a general attempt to make the seasons coincide with the time they were aired or filmed.

There were times that I tried to make more precise sense of the timeline of the show and let's just say that a headache was the only thing that really resulted from it, lol.

Don't look too closely is the only advice I can give you.