Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Good riddance, Sopranos

I confess, I only watched the first several episodes of "The Sopranos." I rented a "Sopranos: Season 1" DVD at some point during the 3d season, I think, because I don't have cable and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Man, was I underwhelmed.

The premise -- a mob boss who sees a shrink -- was promising. But I like Robert "Analyze This" DeNiro, or even Robert "The Don's Analyst" Loggia way better than James "Italian Movie" Gandolfini. And the show just wasn't that compelling, to me. After viewing a few episodes, I decided that "The Sopranos" was an Aaron Spelling show, plus curse words and boobs, and returned the DVD without finishing it.

Yet "The Sopranos" was listed by TV Guide as the 5th greatest TV show of all time, behind only "Seinfeld," "I Love Lucy," "The Honeymooners," and "All in the Family." And Steven "Everything Bad is Good for You" Johnson insisted -- in an interview -- that "The Sopranos" is

the scale of a classic 19th Century novel in terms of the canvas that it's kind of painted on. Now it's more violent and it's more obscene on some level, but it's also more complex and the mind is exercised by dealing with complicated things, by solving kind of complex puzzles and piecing together complex scenarios.

Yeah -- that makes perfect sense, if you're high. Which I suspect most HBO viewers must be.

Anyway, since I didn't watch any other episodes, I'll turn over my soapbox to the brilliant writer and editor Tony (National Lampoon, "Father Joe") Hendra, who blogged about "The Sopranos" for The Huffington Post yesterday:

If there was a Sopranos formula it seemed to be: let's put Tony and his tedious dysfunctional brood in some banal and unexceptional soap-opera wringer, grind them through the predictable conflicts and then liven things up by cutting to someone getting whacked in the most gruesome and graphic way possible.

Why was the show so popular among TV critics in the MSM? According to Hendra:

The Sopranos succeeded in catching the brutal retributive mood of the nation in the first years of the century, a mood fanned and pandered to by the mobsters in the White House and their made men in an all-Republican Congress. DC in those days was a one Family town. I doubt The Sopranos would have gone anywhere much if it hadn't been for 9/11.... The left had to find some intellectual ointment to ease their vestigial non-violent organs, but it wasn't too hard. Everybody wanted to whack somebody. And the reason they loved Tony so much, wooden and grim and inexpressive as he was, was that he -- no less than those infatuated by his unreflective brutishness -- was NOT TO BLAME. Not in these very special times.

Posted by Joshua Glenn at 03:19 PM

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