Sunday, HBO ) returns with a crackling, typically addictive season and “The Sopranos” (8 p.m. Sunday, HBO ) begins airing its final episodes, these rich, powerful men should be basking in their worldly success.
Thank goodness their neurotic self-absorption makes for good television. There’s no question of this review influencing anyone to watch the final nine outings of “The Sopranos”: For those who have stuck by “The Sopranos” during its many ups (and a few downs) over the last eight years, they will to see how Tony’s last moments on-screen play out. The first two episodes do sprawl a bit, but this is loose, contemplative “Sopranos” storytelling at its best.
These episodes don’t meander too much or segue into pointlessness (as some episodes in the first half of this final sixth season did), though Sunday’s episode will test your tolerance for Tony’s shrill sister Janice (Aida Turturro), because most of the episode takes place at her lakeside vacation house. (In a nice grace note, there’s a brief moment in which Janice’s nanny and daughter sit outside and sing a song about ducks — “Sopranos” fans will recall the ducks in Tony’s back yard, and how their departure in the show’s first episode eventually led Tony to Dr. A peaceful setting such as that should be relaxing, right?
And that’s what Tony (James Gandolfini) and his wife, Carmela (Edie Falco), keep telling themselves they’re doing — relaxing with family. Of course the entire get-together bubbles and broils with tension that is just under the surface, and that breaks out during a riotous Monopoly game that could be a missing scene from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” Like Ari Gold, Tony can’t stand to lose — the idea of someone else having the last word, or being more of an alpha male than he is, drives him crazy.
But it’s actually a sense of mortality and fragility, not to mention dark humor that infuses these episodes. “Let me ask you something, how will I be remembered?” Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) asks in the second episode.
Fellow mob boss Sack is seriously ill and serving out a prison sentence at a grim correctional facility. But at least he’s getting medical advice from an incarcerated doctor (a well-used Sydney Pollack). The film director plays an oncologist who has been locked up for killing his wife, as well as several others, including a postman who happened by.
“At that point, I had to fully commit,” he explains. Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) looks less and less committed to the life that Tony is leading. In the second episode, Christopher’s horror film, “Cleaver,” opens; that debut involves some satirical jabs at the entertainment industry that could have come straight from “Entourage.
” Silvio’s wife, for example, is surprised to find out that movies even have writers: “The actors don’t make up the words,” she says, amazed. Another mobster realizes that editing and post-production are, in reality, pretty boring. Tony, the film’s chief investor, doesn’t like how the top mobster in the film is portrayed as a cheating bully in a bathrobe.
So the film’s writer (Tim Daly) is strongly encouraged to explain that the character was not supposed to be Tony, and that he was merely using Broderick Crawford’s mobster character from the classic film “Born Yesterday” as a model. So Tony finds a copy of the film and is disheartened at what he sees. “This is the image of me he leaves to the world,” Tony sighs to Dr.
But one’s image, as Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) finds, is a hard thing to change. And as the new season of “Entourage” opens, Gold’s own reputation as a bully has led rising star Vince Chase (Adrian Grenier) to seek new representation. Vince’s new agent is hard-charging, too, but a lot more attractive; she’s played by Carla Gugino, who has a great deal of fun with the role of the smart, sexy Amanda (if only Gugino had been cast in “Dirt.
” Ah, well). One thing “Entourage” doesn’t get enough credit for is the whip-smart electricity of its dialogue; at times, the show feels like a taut Howard Hawks comedy transplanted to post-millennial Beverly Hills. Each episode flies by so quickly that you barely have time to notice how cleverly the show is constructed.
But with comedy, that’s as it should be. Yet there are darker notes to this delightful diversion; Ari actually gets his own Dr. Melfi, or rather a brusque therapist played by Nora Dunn.
His breakup with Vince — and it does feel like the painful breakup of a romance, complete with pleading phone calls and awkward lunches — has left Ari feeling (horrors!) vulnerable. He actually comes close, at one point, to crying.
What’s next, an elegy for the ducks in Ari’s back yard? Nah. He has no time for contemplation (even on Yom Kippur, a Jewish holy day in which Hollywood is supposed to shut down, but of course Ari can’t resist the urge to make a deal).
No, what Ari wants from his therapist is advice on how to get mean again. No Prozac for this guy. And he’d be flattered if someone compared him with Broderick Crawford.
in Entourage, The Sopranos | Permalink | Comments (3) “The Sopranos,” which debuted on HBO Jan. The complicated drama about a mob boss, his family, his shrink and his crew garnered critical raves, stacks of awards and endless media coverage for an ascendant HBO. But a more salient fact for television executives was that, at its peak, Tony Soprano (played by James Gandolfini) and his crew attracted an audience of 12 million every week.
The highest-ever ratings for a first-run “Sopranos” episode was nearly 13.5 million viewers for the fourth-season premiere in September 2002. In today’s fractured media environment, that is a very respectable figure for a program on a broadcast network.
For a show on cable — and premium cable, at that — that figure was, and still is, jaw-dropping. Most cable dramas would kill to pull in half (or a third) of that. Television executives didn’t have to be rocket scientists to take away the following lessons from the success of “The Sopranos”: Dark, challenging storytelling can draw a large number of viewers and a torrent of critical praise.
Using film-quality production values and top-notch writing will garner more good press than any ad campaign can buy. Casting less famous but gifted actors can not only save money but also pay off during awards season. A risk-taking, successful, buzzed-about show will not just rake in high-income viewers and the advertisers who chase them, it can brand a cable network and put it on the cultural map.
But what show, before or since, put an entire industry on notice and said, in effect: “Pursue moral ambiguity. Make your lead character charismatic but deeply flawed and capable of great brutality. Oh, and if you want to indulge in dream sequences, long talks in a psychiatrist’s office and meandering storytelling that imitates the essentially random nature of real life, go for it.
” Those weren’t exactly the marching orders for the TV industry before “The Sopranos” arrived. The television writers, directors and actors who chased that kind of ambitious vision were a minority, and embattled at that. They’re still a minority, but those capable of even above-average work are more hotly pursued — and richly compensated — than ever.
Even CBS, the most staid and safe of networks, is hunting for the next challenging, complex, buzzed-about drama: It’s developing “Skip Tracer,” a show created by former “Sopranos” staff writers Robin Green and Mitchell Burgess; it’s adapting the cult British series “Viva Blackpool” (with Hugh Jackman as the show’s singing lead); and it’s even commissioned “Swing Town,” a partner-swapping drama directed by Alan Poul (“Six Feet Under,” “Rome”). At a meeting of television critics in January, CBS Entertainment President Nina Tassler talked about “throwing out the rule book and really trying new kinds of shows, new kinds of storytelling.” “We wanted to find shows that are going to be talked about,” Tassler said.
“So we are really experimenting.” Whether Tassler succeeds or not, that experimentation is a direct result of what HBO set in motion years ago: By assuming that a huge chunk of the TV audience is as intelligent as the consumers of the finest films and novels, the writers and executives responsible for “The Sopranos” helped usher in the current golden age of television. “‘The Sopranos’ demonstrated what could be accomplished with continuing story lines that grew organically out of three-dimensional characters,” said David Weddle, a “Battlestar Galactica” supervising producer.
“The show demonstrated … that by following the lives of characters over a period of years, one could fashion an epic narrative with all the textured complexity of an epic novel such as ‘War and Peace.’ Feature films cannot even begin to approach narratives of this scope and complexity, so it put to rest once and for all the notion that television is an inferior medium.” All this from a program whose opening image is of a man sitting in a psychiatrist’s office, waiting to talk about his crippling panic attacks — which began when the family of ducks nesting in his back yard took off for good.
That small moment set in motion a wrenching reassessment of Tony Soprano’s supposedly contented suburban life. Rewatching that first episode of “The Sopranos,” you realize how much of it had nothing to do with mobster lore. Tony’s tenderness toward the young ducks in his pool was an outgrowth of his own desire to be taken care of, to preserve some innocence in what he knew to be a cold and cruel world.
If “The Sopranos” had been about a Mafia boss who whacked people and hung out at a strip club, it would have lasted a season or two, if that. Creator David Chase was far more interested in exploring how a man with a volcanic temper and a bewitching degree of power could hang on to some kind of ethical code, all the while battling the negativity emanating from his black hole of a mother and a world that expected mere violence and materialism from him. “When you look at shows like ‘The Sopranos’ … I feel like they have explored storytelling in a different way, where something will happen in an episode, and you may not see it again for three episodes or five episodes or the next season.
It’s like life that way,” says Jason Katims, executive producer of “Friday Night Lights” and a veteran of “Roswell” and “My So-Called Life.” Even when it did delve into the world of the mob — admittedly, one of the attractions for some viewers — “The Sopranos” upended expectations. Adriana La Cerva, fiance of mobster-in-training Christopher, could have been just another stereotype — a big-haired, big-mouthed Jersey girl sporting fake nails and tight pants.
But thanks to Drea de Matteo’s impassioned performance and the show’s commitment to building real, nuanced characters, the murder of Adriana near the end of season 5 ranks as one of the most wrenching deaths in TV history. Continue reading "Why 'The Sopranos' is the most influential TV drama ever" in The Sopranos | Permalink | Comments (19) Sunday, HBO ) returns with a crackling, typically addictive season and “The Sopranos” (8 p.m.
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