You Wouldn't Ask Me...
to give my thoughts on the Sopranos. But here goes. I never became a consistent Sopranos watcher. Sure, I would have liked to become a regular viewer. Excuses? I have tons of them. Either I didn't have HBO, or my hands had a book in them, or I was with a lovely young woman who doesn't believe mayhem and degradation is entertainment. Oh well.
But I did watch sometimes - catching a season here or there. I loved how the show captured the look and feel of northern New Jersey. Of course, it did so by filming there. In fact, the last scene was filmed in Holsten's, an ice cream parlor in Bloomfield, New Jersey - the town in which I spent the first twelve years of my existence.
Of the story cycles I saw, I disliked the "Vito is gay and eating flapjacks" bit. Did anyone think the humor attempted at the expense of white ethnic "homophobia" was all that funny? I mean, it was kind of funny. But only because Paulie Walnuts is the second best character ever created for television. (You-know-who is the best)
I don't think the series ever topped the scenes where Christopher discovers that Adrianna has been informing the feds. My reactions to this scene were physical. My guts churned. Afterward I paced around the house. Excuse the language - but Michael Imperioli is superb when the character's "motivation is: "You're fucked." It was just one of those performances where you think to yourself: am I as good at anything as this guy is at acting? No, you're not.
But there always seemed to be something - I dunno - snotty about the show's fans in the media. I could never put my finger on it. So I was glad Galley Slaves reminded me of Andrew Ferguson's fantastic 2001 piece about the show. Worth quoting at length below the fold.
On any given night in prime time, 80 million Americans or more will be staring at the television in a futile attempt to obliterate the piled-up frustrations and petty resentments and failed dreams that constitute their pathetic little lives. Or maybe they're just watching TV to pass the time. Whichever. The important point is, not many of them are watching The Sopranos, which on a typical Sunday will be seen by roughly 8 million viewers -- or one out of ten of the total.
This makes it a great triumph for HBO, but only a middling success measured against the standards of network commercial television. For network TV, a smash superboffo megahit -- excuse the technical terminology -- would be Survivor, the sadistic reality show that will sometimes snag
40 million viewers or more. On its face, then, The Sopranos's 8 million looks like small potatoes.
But what potatoes! Among the couch spuds will be (it's safe to say) the entire combined editorial and business staffs of GQ, Newsweek, the New Yorker, and so on, and the staffs, excluding paperboys, of every sizable newspaper from the New York Times down to the New Orleans Times-Picayune. And all of them (likewise safe to say) seem oblivious to the possibility that anyone else is not watching. They continue to write their stories about their particular entertainment obsession, all of which assume that The Sopranos is a mass phenomenon on the order of, say, the televised Olympics or a runaway hit movie like Titanic. But of course it isn't.
The saturation coverage of The Sopranos is another instance of a cultural development that has become increasingly un-ignorable, though still stubbornly ignored. Along with the rest of the American elite -- "the top one percent," to borrow a useful figure of speech -- the mainstream organs of opinion and news have detached themselves from the common life to a degree we haven't seen in many years. It should go without saying that just about every subject television touches it renders idiotic -- think of politics brought to you by Hardball, high finance brought to you by CNBC, even weather brought to you by the hysterics on the Weather Channel -- but once upon a time you could say this in its defense: TV created a kind of shared experience for the country at large. We all trusted Walter Cronkite, we all laughed at Laugh-In, we all accepted Ed Sullivan's taste. The wealthy and the working class, the banker and the baker: They all watched the same crap.
Not any more. The Sopranos is the entertainment equivalent of the gated community. The well-to-do now retreat to their own corner of the television world, with the obliviousness that has always been a hallmark of the rich and privileged. Tony Soprano may be fun to watch, he may even be great TV, but he's no Ed Sullivan. - Andrew Ferguson
Michael Brendan Dougherty
in Culture
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