June 19, 2007
…Sic Transit The Sopranos…
The best thing written about the end of The Sopranos came from The New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier. Wieseltier’s meditations are usually over my head, but he identifies in The Sopranos a kind of ashcan realism that contrasts with the entertaining but too-highly-polished facades that characterize Aaron Sorkin series like The West Wing, Sports Center and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (Wieseltier’s piece is hyperlinked below.)
The only thing I’d add has to do with the way The Sopranos portrayed the moral duality that is in all of us but that is rarely captured by TV drama. I am a recent convert to the series. I watched a few episodes when it first began, and found myself overwhelmed by the explicit depictions of violent and sexual degradation. I have returned to the show this year in its tamer A&E reruns, and have discovered that the X-rated scenes distracted me from what I now see the program as being about.
Especially on TV, both dramas and documentaries seem to find it almost impossible to portray moral duality. Characters are portrayed either as good, with occasional missteps out of character into evil; or as evil, with occasional missteps out of character into good. The difficulty is compounded by character development. The more we find out about a character’s upbringing, family life, motivation and so forth, the more we identify with him, and the easier it is to excuse his transgressions. Take Vic Mackey, the violent and corrupt cop who is the lead character in FX’s The Shield series. Yes, he has robbed, blackmailed and killed, but only in the service of law and order or to protect his family, and his victims were either criminals themselves or crooked police. As each season has brought a fresh threat to Mackey’s enterprise (almost always from corrupt, incompetent or self-serving higher-ups) viewers find themselves hoping that Mackey will survive—which, being the star of the show, he always has.
Of the TV series I can think of, The Sopranos has done the best job of avoiding this effect by interweaving the warp and woof of its main characters’ lives so that you see that they are neither good nor bad, but good and bad, inextricably. I found this the most striking in an episode in which Tony Soprano takes his daughter on a college tour that was familiar to any parent of a college-bound son or daughter. The vibe between Tony and his daughter, Meadow, is good. She is clearly excited by the prospects that lie ahead of her, and her father is excited for her and proud of her—as what father wouldn’t be? One night, however, he accidentally glimpses a local travel agent and recognizes him as a former colleague who ratted the mob out and entered the witness protection program. The next morning, Tony smilingly drops Meadow for a campus tour, then finds the travel agent and strangles him with his bare hands, and returns, in no worse mood, to campus to pick up his daughter.
His pride in his daughter is as real as his rage at the man who betrayed his enterprise. They are both him, just as the good and bad in all of us are equally real, and equally us.
