Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit Discussion
In a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
Irregular Times Diaries: Unfit DiscussionIn a time of the spring, old paths are obscured and new growth begins.
The TV show The Sopranos is over, and media critics are having a festival of whining about how cheated they are out of a meaningful ending to the series.
I don’t get it. How could there be a meaningful ending to a TV series that had no meaning in the first place?
I can understand if you watched The Sopranos for one season, if you had nothing better to do, but after that first season, what was the point?
Ooh, the main character was a mobster… like in hundreds of other TV shows and movies. Ooh, he does bad things… like thousands of other TV and movie characters.
Okay, the mobster saw a therapist. That had enough interest to carry a single one-hour show - kind of like Analyze This, but without the jokes.
What was left after that? Mob goons battling for control of turf. Miscellaneous, not very remarkable personal issues.
I saw a few of the shows, sure - enough to see that there wasn’t really that much there. The only people who would keep on watching The Sopranos after the first season are the kind of people who get addicted to television, and are just desperate for something to watch because they don’t have anything to do.
The Sopranos is over. Yawn. Turn off the televison now, okay?
(148 votes, average: 3.18 out of 5)
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June 12th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I’m not a Sopranos fanatic or anything. I don’t have cable so I watch them about four years late when the videos become available at the public library.
I’ve got to say I liked it more than you did, at least at its best.
The best episodes were decent vehicles for amplifying to absurdity the kind of everyday power struggles, lies, and various other shenanigans we all engage in.
I liked the episode on Columbus Day, where Native Americans and Italians clash over issues of ethnic pride and revisionist history. A Native American woman gets right up in a mobster’s face and yells:
“Mussolini was Hitler’s bitch!”
Then the protest gets ugly, much to the shagrin of an uppity member of the Italian Anti-Defamation League, who is watching at home on television.
Tony gets tired of it all, and invokes Gary Cooper. In the movies, he says, Gary Cooper never complained, he just did what he had to do. He didn’t say, “Oh, poor me, I’m a poor Irish immigrant, I’m oppressed, I’m gay…”
“He was gay, Gary Cooper?” pipes up Christopher.
Good stuff at its best, in small doses.
June 14th, 2007 at 2:53 pm
I have always suspected the Sopranos was some sort of Guy Thing. Admittedly I don’t have cable and have never seen an episode, but I did see one of the actors from the show do a bit with Ross The Intern on Leno, and all of my information comes from that.
Ross the Intern was as ususal unspeakably cute and outrageously swish and the other actor was showing him how to be a “manly man.” The Intern aped his every gesture.
I think this is the same impulse that drives otherwise normal women to watch those modeling shows. The models don’t have three brain cells between them, but they know how to achieve a Look and they have that Fierce Walk. When I do my long health walk on the weekends, the first half hour I’m happy to be outdoors, the second half hour I notice how much easier I am moving and breathing. At the start of the second hour I’m starting to poop out and imagine myself as Tyra. Fierce walk, fierce walk I tell myself while putting one foot mindlessly in front of the other and pretending I have some kind of coordination. By the fourth half hour, I have given up trying not to stumble over the speed bumps in the alleys and have started to amuse myself with “I wonder what’s in that dumpster.”
So this is my theory anyhow, that Tyra as well as the Sopranos represents some sort of extreme in gender roles that we have a fascination with. What would it be like to give up all your brain cells and become a “manly man” gangster? By watching the show you can play out all those nuances of style. The ending doesn’t matter. The meaning doesn’t matter. It’s all process.
June 15th, 2007 at 6:42 am
I watched the first series for the ducks. That was pretty interesting, though not very.
My parents, and my aunt and uncle who live in London, however, kept on watching, saying it was getting better and better as it, in my view, became more like a soap opera. And possibly because they liked some of the famous people that appeared later on.
Didn’t know it had ended, but it’s good to know.