The Sopranos Returns After its Long Hiatus

THE SOPRANOS:
“MEMBERS ONLY”/ “JOIN THE CLUB”
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

I am about to give away the opening line of the new series of The Sopranos. It’s actually an old line, practically a proverbial one: “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public”. I will refrain from telling you the context in which the line is spoken and the response that it gets.

Anyway, it has to be there as a cheeky acknowledgment by the show’s creator, David Chase, of the extraordinary anomalous position his gangster-chronicle now holds on American television. The Sopranos, by making no compromises with its own intelligence, has rated that of its audience very high. It doesn’t have the numbers of American Idol, but it hasn’t gone broke; very far from it. And I’ll bet that over the years its residuals will be higher.

To see and hear the familiar title-sequence again – James Gandolfini’s Tony Soprano driving home while “Woke Up This Morning” plays on the soundtrack with its pounding refrain about getting yourself a gun – is to experience an extraordinary rush: to wonder, too, how we ever got by during the show’s long hiatus. I think it’s the best opening any TV show has ever had, clueing us in on the man and his world without speaking a word. That sequence apart, though, almost the most revolutionary thing about The Sopranos (ironically, given that title) is the way it does without music, or at least without music that would not realistically be playing in the course of a particular scene. (And even the opening song might conceivably be playing on Tony’s car-radio.) The show never brings in extraneous scoring to tell us what we are supposed to be feeling. Other cable shows have followed its example, but on the networks, it wouldn’t be allowed; it would be like doing a sitcom without a laugh-track. It must be one of the reasons Chase keeps giving thanks that the big boys turned him down.

That’s not to say that The Sopranos isn’t manipulative; all drama is. It has involved us from the start in one simple conflict; it has built a huge edifice on a single hinge. It’s usual to say that the show is constructed on a kind of pun; it’s about a man who supports, and is supported by, two separate families, the one under his roof and the Mafia. That’s true, but the main point is that within both these sets of relationships Tony is capable of behaving either well or badly. He is unfaithful to his wife, almost automatically, but he loves her and values their marriage; he is proud of, and worries about, his children. A representative middle-class man, really. He is in denial about the mother who wanted to have him killed (here we get less representative) and is recklessly, even dangerously, indulgent of the senile uncle who plotted it with her; indeed, one of Uncle Junior’s dramatic functions is to make Tony look good. Professionally, Tony can be more compassionate than one expects of a mob-boss or every bit as brutal. He can feel shock and pity at the murder of a teenage stripper in a way that mystifies his associates; he can also cold-bloodedly engineer what is, by general consent, the most shocking event in the story so far, the killing of his nephew’s helpless stool-pigeon of a girlfriend. The writers even managed to up the ante on that the following week. “We haven’t really talked about Adriana” said Tony to Christopher. We anticipated some serious soul-searching, but it turned out they only wanted to discuss how to minimize the possible fall-out.

That’s a wonderfully light-fingered example of the serious way in which the show plays with our feelings. It’s a tantalising process; we like Tony, and we cling to any signs that he may be redeeming himself, only to have them dashed the next moment. And still we keep coming back for more. It was all pre-figured in the very first episode, when Tony’s wife Carmela said to him “the difference between us is that you’re going to Hell and I’m not.” That remark has echoed down the years (Carmela apologised for it a couple of seasons later) and it comes back, hauntingly, in the new series.

All of which suggests that Chase and his colleagues are working on a very large canvas indeed. Successful TV series can go on for a long time, but few of them do more than add one similar set of incidents to another. In fact, before The Sopranos, I don’t know of any American show that did. I do know of some in Britain. Dennis Potter, Britain’s premier television playwright, realized after turning out dozens of one-off dramas, that he had a far more capacious vehicle to hand in the serial format, previously reserved for literary adaptations; the results were Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective. Alan Bleasdale wrote the uproarious, unruly GBH, a comic epic about local politics that kept throwing off new characters and sub-plots like a dog shakes off fleas. The fashion spread to more obviously popular forms; Between the Lines (shown over here as Inside the Line) was a series about police investigating other police, that managed to place individual stories within a developing narrative and was brilliant until it disappeared up its own plot-complexities. It also anticipated The Sopranos in its ruthlessness about killing off sympathetic characters. The Sopranos, though, has gone it one better by being the first crime-series not to be told from the point of view of the cops.

 Some British critics grumbled about “the death of the single play” but they should have been celebrating TV’s discovery of its own greatest potential, the development of a narrative scale unavailable to theatre or movies. It had, however, been grandly exploited in the past by another form combining the highest quality with the highest popularity, the nineteenth-century novel. This too usually came out in instalments, and made great use of cliff-hanger endings; Charles Dickens’ motto was “make ‘em laugh, make ‘em cry, make ‘em wait.” It was also, like The Sopranos, obsessively concerned with sex and violence. (What else is there to write about?) And if the sex in those novels is discreet, sublimated even, the violence is up-front and ferocious. Dickens in England, Dostoevsky in Russia, wrote murder-stories, frequently about people being battered to death.

One thing Dickens didn’t go in for, that the TV practitioners do, was sequels. But other Victorians did. Anthony Trollope, underrated until recently, wrote giant sequences of novels, and if his bishops and politicians seem decorous on the outside, their in-fighting is as merciless as any criminals’. These writers used the long form to create fierce social panoramas, and their descendants do the same. The Sopranos, like the Godfather movies which dealt with a more grandiose criminal era, presents the business-ethic carried to its logical extreme. That isn’t the most interesting thing about either work, but it is important.

Chase has said that he originally wanted each episode of The Sopranos to be complete unto itself. We must be grateful that he either decided or was forced to orchestrate a novel on video. He also says, somewhat contradictorily, that he has always had the total arc of the series in his head, though he famously refuses to tell anyone including the actors what it is. But while keeping us waiting for the pay-off, he has managed to create something extraordinarily complex. The characters, surely the best written and best-acted bunch in TV history, keep expanding, keep playing off one another. Some become icons that their actors can’t shake off; Gandolfini in his movie roles always seems like Tony Soprano playing dress-up, while Edie Falco has been able on stage and screen, to become someone else entirely, though she never sheds Carmela’s crinkled grin. The point is not that one kind of acting is better than the other, but the show has been able to accommodate both (and I may have imagined it but I think there’s a subtle, almost unearthly, shift in their styles to accommodate a new development in the upcoming series). Themes echo, symphonically; Christopher, almost quitting the gang, plays out the one thing we want Tony to do and know he never will. Perhaps the best-loved episode of all and certainly the funniest – Pine Barrens, in which Christopher and Paulie get lost in the woods – can afford to keep Tony on the sidelines, though he’s still the controlling presence; the series trusts its minor characters, even if their boss doesn’t.. And we’re kept aware throughout that Tony’s Jersey mob is only part of a wider criminal world. Everyone’s expected to knuckle under to New York.

This awareness of a broader context is one thing that has made it more exciting than its most notable successor, Six Feet Under, which, for all its brave qualities, remained a brittle domestic soap. (And undertaking is a business more inherently limiting than racketeering, though one obviously feeds the other.) The influence of The Sopranos has of course extended beyond cable; 24 wouldn’t have been able to take the long-range risks it has without that example. It also has a conflicted hero though Jack Bauer’s personal issues, unlike Tony’s, always seem to be more alluded to than dramatized.

The first two episodes of the new season are as accomplished and audacious as any that have gone before; they certainly took me by surprise. They also demonstrate a learning-process; an ambitious idea that didn’t quite work in the last batch has been refined and perfected. It’s depressing that this, even though stretched out over two years, will be the last of The Sopranos but encouraging too.  Long-form is a great thing; too long is deadly. Chase obviously knows when to stop; and I trust him when he says he knows how.