James Gandolfini’s sudden death this summer prompted me to do something I’d long put off: watching The Sopranos. I didn’t have HBO back when it aired originally and (full disclosure) it had never interested me enough to really commit to seeking it out and watching it in the years since. Turns out I know my own tastes, because while The Sopranos had some great storylines and some phenomenal performances in its six-season run, I didn’t really like it all that much.
Part of my distaste likely comes from the fact that I did wait so long to consume it. Visually, and in some ways thematically, The Sopranos did not age well. Everything is extremely dated, from obvious things like technology and fashion, to intangibles like the overall style and demeanor of the show, to broader, more pervasive cultural trends like the attitudes toward therapy and medication, not to mention homosexuality and, of all things, cunnilingus. No doubt the show is still reflective of attitudes that persist in this country, especially in entrenched, insular communities like the one Tony Soprano lives in, but the country as a whole — particularly the country as reflected by television — is a lot more accepting of these changes in our society.
Another side of that same coin is that, while I can see how this show was very new and different in its time, at this point in the television landscape it is neither new nor all that interesting to meet another family man with a dark side, despite him being the first. Indeed, by the time I got around to seeing what everyone else had already seen and referenced and drawn inspiration from, it was largely tiresome. As renowned TV critic Alan Sepinwall says in his book The Revolution Was Televised, “That’s the danger with coming to a classic late: if a work is good enough, the rest of the entertainment industry will strip-mine it until the original work somehow seems derivative of the others that blatantly copied it.” Despite the fact that my perspective has been skewed by the subsequent fifteen years, however, I’m still not sure I would’ve liked The Sopranos even if I’d seen the first run.
There’s been a lot of talk around the Internet, and in books like Sepinwall’s, about this rise in television of the anti-hero: Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Don Draper, Walter White — angry, complicated men with loose morals and outrageous anger issues. They are charismatic and compelling and utterly calculating, but to me they’re just awful. Vic and Walt are corrupt, egomaniacal murders with no real concern for anyone or anything except their own selfish motives, no matter what their excuses and justifications may be. And Don is a scoundrel, misogynistic and self-involved, concerned with absolutely nothing except his own interests, but Don is the character I find least interesting in Mad Men. He’s tired and old and boring, doing the same crappy things year after year after year, with no end in sight. What keeps me coming back, then, are the others. I care about Peggy Olsen and Sally Draper and Joan Harris. I care enormously about the fate of Jesse Pinkman, despite his role in Walter White’s illegal enterprise. But I didn’t really care about the supporting characters on The Sopranos. To be fair, most of them are violent criminals, and while the show went to great lengths to show Tony’s caring and charismatic side, it didn’t really delve into the members of his crew. Paulie, Ralph and Christopher are sociopathic, cruel and sadistic. Any family life they’re shown to have (not a lot for Paulie, some for Ralph, and a great deal for Christopher) is filtered through the prism of their own egos. With Big Pussy and Silvio, the effect of family is so little in the show, I didn’t even realize either of them were married until well into the series.
As for Tony’s actual family, they’re also incredibly self-involved and not a little vindictive and cruel in their own right. Livia Soprano is mean and awful; Janice is a manipulative disaster; Meadow is selfish and whiny; AJ is a useless jerk; and Carmela likes to think she’s the moral center of the clan, but really she is complicit in every single thing that Tony does because she likes the lifestyle it affords her, and when she has her brief affair with AJ’s teacher (David Strathairn), she lashes out with threats after he ends it. As parents, Tony and Carmela are indulgent of their spoiled, ungrateful children, and despite Tony’s ruthlessness in business, he and Carmela are largely impotent when it comes to disciplining the kids. And while character likability is not necessary to make a quality show — as I said, there was some top-notch storytelling and performing on display from time to time throughout the series’s run — it does make it lot harder for me to be personally invested. Why should I care about these horrible people and their privileged, criminal lives?
The only really redeemable character of the lot is Dr. Jennifer Melfi, but it takes her the entire six seasons to realize that Tony is neither interested in nor capable of self-improvement and that cutting ties with him is the only way to go, making me honestly question her abilities as a therapist. Couple that with the fact that a big portion of her sessions with Tony, interpreting his dreams, was yet another aspect of the show that feels dated now, in addition to being an extremely lazy narrative device that the show relied on far too often. The effect is a lack of any true connection, or interest, or investment, in the lives of these characters. It’s six seasons where a lot of things happen, but nothing really changes, no one moves forward or grows, and nothing is learned. That might be the point of the whole thing, that people don’t change, but it can be extremely frustrating to watch.
The Sopranos was undeniably groundbreaking. It brought a style and an aesthetic to television that never existed before, and characters such as Don Draper and Walter White would probably not exist without Tony blazing the trail. In addition, it offered up some amazing, groundbreaking performances by Gandolfini, by Drea de Matteo (as Adriana La Cerva), by Nancy Marchand (as Livia Soprano), and especially by Edie Falco (as Carmela). Ultimately my personal opinion about the show is irrelevant, when the show itself was intentionally not trying to appeal to everyone. According to Sepinwall, “[Creator David] Chase not only never worried about having a likable main character, he didn’t need a likable series,” and that’s certainly true. But in July writer Emily Nussbaum wrote in the New Yorker that Sex and the City, the other flagship, groundbreaking show of HBO’s lineup in the late 90s and early 00s, had lost some of its acclaim over the years due to the increasingly perpetuated and largely false perception that its only asset was its raciness. It was, as Nussbaum says, “downgraded to a guilty pleasure,” and that, “even as The Sopranos has ascended to TV’s Mt. Olympus, the reputation of Sex and the City has shrunk and faded.” Her point, obviously, is that Sex and the City was so much more than it’s remembered as now. Isn’t it possible that the inverse is true of The Sopranos, that despite being groundbreaking, it wasn’t quite as great as its current reputation would suggest? I say yes.
/jessica
Viable Option 