Television Review - 2017 (Part 6): #1 Viewing Experience of 2017, The Sopranos (Seasons 2-6)

That other television shows had to compete with five seasons of The Sopranos in these rankings really isn't fair. I don't know of anyone who's seen the full run of the show and doesn't consider it one of their top ten or so favorite shows ever, and most critics believe it to be one of the best five or so shows to ever hit the air. Many even have it as THE best show, which I'd disagree with, but not fervently so.

Watching The Sopranos for the first time in 2016-17 means that I went into it with all the hype that a TV show could possibly have. I recapped Season Two here, Season Three here, and Season Four here, before completely running out of steam. I had a little bit on Season Five, in which I did nothing more than wax poetic about Steve Buscemi's performance as Tony Blundetto, but it never went to publication. In any event, the last two seasons of The Sopranos were fantastic.

I've read a lot of debate online about the ranking of the six seasons of The Sopranos, so I'll toss my thoughts out there.

SPOILERS ABOUND!!!!!!!

1) Season Five

Season Five had the aforementioned Tony B. arc and tensions between Christopher and Tony over Adriana, who was herself battling her situation as an FBI informant throughout. With a show this consistently great, it's hard to choose one season that stood out above the rest, but I'll give the edge to Season Five's cohesive storyline, much of which is satisfyingly wrapped up by the final episode. It's also about when you can become certain that there's no redemption for any of these characters. At the beginning of the series, Tony is someone who can be occasionally influenced by Dr. Melfi, Carmela, or his own conscience to do the right thing ("right" is always relative on The Sopranos). Season Five is when it becomes clear that there will be no saving Tony Soprano -- a realization Melfi speaks out loud in Season Six. Similarly, Christopher goes back on drugs, Carmela goes back to Tony, and everyone's doomed to be stuck in their ways. A major theme of the series is these characters' inability to change for the better, despite their circumstances repeatedly demanding it.

2) Season Three

Season Three had "Pine Barrens" (the one where Paulie and Christopher are lost in the freezing woods), which for my money is one of the best few episodes of the series, and certainly the most memorable. It also introduced Ralphie, who provided strong villain material for much of the season, and had the episode "Employee of the Month", which presented an extreme test of Dr. Melfi's moral compass. Had it not been for the Jackie Jr. storyline, Season Three would be practically flawless.

3) Season One

A couple of the highlights here are the excellent "College" episode and "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano". Though it doesn't have the depth of some of the later seasons, the story was engrossing enough that I knew I'd be able to plow through the remaining 73 hours of television with ease. Tony's college trip with Meadow, in which he makes it his mission to track down and kill an FBI informant while showing his daughter around Colby College, is one of the top-rated episodes of The Sopranos and establishes the difficulty of the double-life that Tony leads. It was also enjoyable to watch Tony before he lost pretty much all sense of morality.

4) Season Six

Season Six starts out somewhat slowly, with Tony being in a coma, Christopher developing his movie, and Vito on the run from his past life, but the back half of the season makes it all worth it. The series' final nine episodes include "Soprano Home Movies", an excellent hour in which the Tony, Carmela, Bobby, and Janice adjourn to a lake house, with amusing conflicts. The violent mob war between Phil Leotardo and the DiMeo family comes to its bloody conclusion, a couple of beloved characters meet their tragic demise, and Dr. Melfi finally realizes the uselessness in treating Tony. Then there's the ending of the series finale; I think I should expla

5) Season Two

Season Two earned an "A-" grade from me, so ranking it fifth is no insult. I especially enjoyed the Pussy storyline that ran through most of the season and Christopher's foray into the movie business was still a novelty, so I enjoyed it a little more here than I did later in the series. However, there were a couple weird plot devices used (the airline tickets turned out to be much ado about nothing), Silvio and Paulie had yet to be well-developed characters, and there was way too much Janice, who is terrible.

6) Season Four

The season-ending breakup between Carmela and Tony was a long time coming and made for some excellent viewing. I also liked the added focus on Bobby Bacala, who was consistently one of my favorite characters. However, the Carmela/Furio storyline was problematic from the start and had an anticlimactic ending. Similarly, Artie's get-cash-quick scheme was uncomfortable to watch just because it was pretty obvious how it would end. This was a weird season that certainly had its moments despite a couple of weak storylines. I still gave it a B+; this show is still really good even at its worst.

The Sopranos - Season Three

The first two seasons of The Sopranos were both excellent with some notable flaws. David Chase and company turned things up a notch, however, and executed a nearly flawless third season.

SPOILER SPACE!!!!!!!!!!!

Season Three contains the two best episodes of the series that I've watched thus far. The first was Employee of the Month, which involves the moral compass of the series, Dr. Melfi, facing the ultimate test of character. Her relationship with Tony has been up and down and riddled with outbursts from the latter, but they're close enough to the point where the viewer thinks of Tony as a possible solution to Melfi getting revenge on her rapist before it's implied in the show. Seeing Lorraine Bracco get furious in her shrink's office and deliver this line was a tremendous bit of acting:

"I'm not going to break the social compact. But that's not saying there's not a certain satisfaction in knowing that i could have that asshole squashed like a bug if i wanted."

Then, she sits in her office with Tony, clearly distraught. She's still not feeling normal because of her rape, sure, but it's clear that the entire time she's fighting herself over the urge to tell Tony what happened. She knows Tony would have the guy whacked and it'd be sweet justice for her. The episode cuts to credits right after Tony asks her if she has something to say and she replies "NO", a response equally strong and painful for Dr. Melfi.

I liked what the show did with Paulie this season. His growing resentment towards Tony filters down to the way he treats Christopher. Even though it's clear Paulie's a little unhinged, the show does a good job at slowly illustrating why he's having such issues with his boss. The climax of this is Tony's decision to force Ralphie to pay Paulie a sum of 12 thousand dollars when Paulie felt he was owed fifty. However, there's an even more successful plot line en route to that moment.

"Pine Barrens" is possibly the best episode of the first three seasons and does a great job illustrating Paulie's descent. First, he reacts far too violently to the Russian, Valery, when the latter makes a relatively benign request to put his remote control back on the shelf. Then, when he and Christopher go on an adventure, lost in the snowy forest of south New Jersey with the aforementioned Valery possibly on the loose and stalking them, it's the starving, usually-furious Christopher who seems like the one who has his faculties in control and the higher-ranking, typically more mature Paulie who's really losing it.

It's a great episode for Christopher as well, whom the show has put into a great deal of effort into developing. He used to be prone to dumbass outbursts and violence, but as the show has progressed, Christopher has used his head a lot more and doesn't seem to be anywhere near as prone to stupid mistakes. "Pine Barrens" illustrates that pretty well, but most importantly, when he becomes a "made" guy earlier in the season, it's a moment that feels earned.

As a side note, I'm still bothered that they didn't tie up anything with Slava or Valery. It seems fairly clear that Valery escaped somehow, but it's not confirmed by season's end if (or how) that happened. It seems like Tony would have faced some fairly immediate repercussions if Valery's story ever made it back to Slava. Maybe they're just deferring this to Season Four.

I don't have much to say about the season-long Ralphie storyline other than that it was effective and that Ralphie filled in nicely as the "villain" for Richie for much of the season. Ralphie's a better character than Richie, though, and even though he can be stupid and a loudmouth, it's clear that he is at least trying to improve himself once Tony's forced to promote him to captain.

Even the minor characters were used very effectively in Season Three. My personal favorite is Bobby Bacala, who mostly serves as the butt of jokes and as Junior's caretaker during the season, but he's a rare thoroughly likable character on this show and the conversation he and Tony had on the way to find Paulie and Christopher in "Pine Barrens" an excellent moment.

The one storyline that didn't really work that well was Jackie Jr.'s relationship with Meadow and subsequent descent into crime. It was always at least a little clear that Jackie was a piece of shit and his inability to stay out of mob business was essentially a given from the start. He drove a lot of the action late in the season, but he wasn't much of a compelling character and Jason Cerbone delivered one of the weaker performances thus far on the series. There was nothing to root for, nor anything to surprise us here (other than an appearance from Omar!).

Despite that blip, Season Three was a riveting experience because of a compelling plot and some outstanding character work. I've gotten to the point where watching this show feels like slipping into the universe of The Sopranos for an hour. Everything feels so real in this show, and that's a testament to the ensemble cast.

Season Grade: A

The Sopranos - Season Two

The Sopranos has become the go-to show for my wife and I when we've got a free hour, so our DVR has been accumulating things like crazy. We've yet to watch a single episode of Top Chef this year, we're seven episodes behind on Modern Family (no big loss there), just one behind on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, and we've all but punted on Mr. Robot (probably for the best).  We'll squeeze in the new episode of This is Us when one comes out and the light commitment / attention span required for The Big Bang Theory usually means we can fit it in, but for the most part, The Sopranos is currently dominating our TV time.

I spent my year-end review post on The Sopranos explaining the basic premise and what it's all about, so I pretty much have nothing left to discuss except specifics of Season Two itself.  Therefore, the remainder of this post will be a....a.....

SPOILER SPACE!!!!

There's two primary mob storylines in Season Two. The first involves Richie Aprile (brother of former boss Jackie Aprile) getting released from prison and his rough integration back into the DiMeo crime family. The second is essentially a season-long arc for Pussy as he's torn between spying on Tony's crew for the FBI to reduce his sentence for selling heroin and his lifelong friendship to Tony.

I have to admit, when it was revealed early on in Season Two that Pussy actually was a rat in addition to Jimmy getting capped, it definitely registered as a surprise. They had set it up well to let the audience believe that Vin Makazian's tip from Season One was flawed and that he'd fingered the wrong guy. I'm glad The Sopranos decided to go this route because there were some excellent character moments from Pussy during his season-long struggle. The episode in which Pussy serves as A.J.'s confirmation sponsor gave us a good glimpse into just how much his deal with the FBI is tearing him apart. He says all the right things to help A.J. along the path and doing so makes him break down, understanding just how much Tony's friendship meant to him over the years. Even the scene at season's end in which he gets shot by Tony, Paulie, and Silvio was made to feel sad. I really wanted there to be some other way for Tony and his gang to allow Pussy to live, but you knew that wasn't happening.

Richie served as a decent villain for the season as a vile human being with some serious anger problems. He was thoroughly hateable, perhaps excessively so. The only real nuance to his character was his relationship with Tony's sister, Janice, which seemed to be pretty genuine. Unfortunately, Janice was a pretty unlikable character as well, so even though it gave the character a softer touch, seeing Richie shack up with another detestable human being further validated everything we know about him. There was enough backstory between Richie and Janice for the relationship to ring genuine and not purely as a power play against Tony, so that was good. However, I wonder how that would have played out long-term had The Sopranos not killed Richie off. Just before his death, he's pretty awful to Janice and it's the first moment we see him as anything but good to her. That made Janice's decision to shoot him the most shocking moment on the show so far, both from a plot and fit standpoint.

One of the more interesting subplots of the season for me was Tony's relationship with the father of one of Meadow's friends at school. It's clear that Tony has something of a soft spot for him, but when he enters Tony's executive poker game (against Tony's advice) and runs up debt on Tony, the friendship seemingly instantly dies. Tony doesn't quite issue the ruthless beating that he does to other debtors that he can't pay, and he does the man a courtesy of roughing him up himself rather than handing the job to one of his violent flunkies. Though the beating is minor, the message is clear: don't mess with Tony's business. Meadow's friendship with the boy, Eric, is collateral damage.

One of the weird tangents of Season Two is Christopher's side plot in which he tries to get into acting and promote his screenplay. I have to say, I never expected to see Jon Favreau playing himself on this show, but watching his discomfort grow as Christopher gets really play-aggressive with a gun in a hotel room was both tough to watch and a great, memorable scene. We spend a lot of time on this subplot in Season Two and while it's nice that the show continues to flesh out Christopher, I wonder whether they would have been better served to spread the love around. Among Tony's crew, Paulie and Silvio get slightly more development but they're still largely flunkies who are defined by their relationship to Tony. Furio was recently introduced, but there's not much known about him besides his country of origin and his capacity for violence. There's four seasons left of this show and I'm hopeful that The Sopranos will show greater interest in these supporting players down the road. While interesting, they spent way too much time on this subplot that didn't connect much to the story beyond a test of Christopher's commitment to the crime family.

Carmela's arc also continues to frustrate. She's obviously getting increasingly pissed with Tony's infidelity, the way his life of crime affects their family, and his persistent disinterest in her as a wife and sexual partner. She doesn't seem to ever do anything about it, though. I'd like to see her make a stand at some point, and maybe that's coming.

I also will voice a slight complaint about the stolen airline tickets. This is set up to be a big deal, as when Pussy actually drops a remotely useful nugget to the FBI, they make a point to say that Tony won't use the tickets himself and a connection needs to be made. The camera shot is detailed enough that when Tony gives Livia the plane tickets, observant viewers are quick to pick up on the possibility that this is going to be Tony's huge mistake that costs him his freedom. Livia gets caught at the airport, but the aftermath makes it feel like the whole affair wasn't much more than a speeding ticket for Tony. The plot device felt like a waste of time.

I'll criticize and nitpick until the cows come home, but few shows I've watched have been this consistently compelling. Tony constantly gets put into stressful predicaments and his responses to these situations are the perfect blend of anger and thoughtfulness. He's one of the best television characters I've ever seen, and I'll never tire of James Gandolfini issuing the trademark, "How you doin'" (which is sometimes friendly and sometimes chilling). There were weird subplots and way too much Janice, but overall, it was a great season of television.

Season Grade: A-

Television Review - 2016 (Part 3): #4 TV Experience of the Year - The Sopranos (Season One)

4) The Sopranos (Season One)

I intended to binge The Sopranos, thinking I could get through it in a month or two. This was folly. Folly!

There are 86 hour-long episodes of The Sopranos. That's about 26 more hours of television than The Wire, which took my wife and I a great deal of time to chug through even before we had our daughter. This is not a short project.  We only got through one season before the end of the year starting in late November and if we manage to finish this off by mid-March, I'll consider that a pretty good success.

I mention The Wire because there's plenty of parallels to that show. Season One of The Sopranos is about organized crime and the various factions and power struggles that can exist within drug gangs as well as between them. There are few people, if any, on the show that we'd consider to be universally good. All of the major characters are very well-drawn and have at least some endearing qualities (in varying amounts) to make us feel for them despite all the muck.

All of that said, it's not fair to hold any show up to The Wire's standard or premise, so that's where I'll cut off the similarities. The Sopranos is much different in that it has a main character in antihero Tony Soprano, portrayed extraordinarily well by James Gandolfini. Tony has what you would otherwise call a normal family unit, with his wife Carmela, daughter Meadow, and son Anthony Jr. They go through a lot of typical bumps in the road you might see in televised marriages and parent-child relationships with one pretty significant exception; Tony is an underboss in the largest New Jersey-based mafia crime syndicate.

A lot of Season One focuses on how Tony manages his relationship with his children and works through their problems. Both kids understand (or come to understand) that their father's in the mob, but neither has a good sense of all that entails. It's a struggle for Tony to be any sort of positive role model in light of his work. The community seems to understand what Tony's business is all about as well, and that affects how others interact with Meadow and A.J.

Tony Soprano lives in a constant moral gray area. Even within his mob activities, Tony is faced with situations that test him to do the "right" thing. Usually, these situations initially cause him rage, but often he comes down on the side of loyalty and (relative) justice, which helps us root for him a lot despite how despicable he can be. It will be interesting to see later in the series whether Tony stays on that side of the line or whether he'll become even more corruptible a-la-Walter White.

Another thing making Tony unique is the fact that he's seeing a psychiatrist. That's a pretty revolutionary idea for a mob character, going each week to spill one's guts to someone for mental health purposes. As you might imagine, a crime syndicate might be uncomfortable with one of its leaders talking in-depth to a civilian about his life. Tony's relationship to the woman, Dr. Melfi, grows increasingly complicated throughout the season and it's fascinating to watch the varying levels of openness and honesty he brings to their sessions.

The other characters are interesting to varying degrees. Carmela is compelling as a wife who seemingly simultaneously condones and disapproves of Tony's criminal activities. The two are only occasionally good together and it's a pretty damaged relationship, in no small part because Tony's cheating on her all the time. Tony's mother, Lyvia, is an absolute monster of an older woman whose bitterness and self-centeredness wear heavily on Tony emotionally -- and later tangibly.

The most interesting and well-developed of Tony's underlings is Christopher, your classic junior member of the crime syndicate who wants more respect among his peers. Christopher is much younger than the rest of Tony's gang and gets himself into trouble with his impatience and temper. Early on in the series, his loyalty to Tony is tested and he chooses the faithful path despite his apparent standing within the group.

Throughout most of the season, Tony's in a power struggle with his "Uncle Junior" a man full of hubris eager to lead the mob and command respect. Junior often makes rash decisions and it's usually on Tony to sway the gang in a more sensible direction without giving off the appearance of stepping on Junior's toes. It's a volatile dynamic that drives most of the conflict in Season One.

I'll list a couple of problems I had with this season. The first is that the word "fuck" (and its variants) are beaten to death so hard that by the third episode, the word contains about as much forcefulness as "toaster" or "grapefruit" or "the". Second, there is a scene involving a hit on Tony that is so poorly executed by the would-be murderers that it comes off as comedic rather than the heart-pounding climax of the episode it was meant to be.

Despite those flaws, the first season of The Sopranos is an addictive TV show and has a satisfying plot with some rich characters. The show does a good job with its supporting cast and there's so much depth to it that they have plenty of room to flesh out the ensemble over future seasons. I'm excited to see how this one will unfold. Only 73 more hours left!

Season Grade: A-

Essential Episodes: "Meadowlands" (s1.ep3), "College" (s1.ep4), "I Dream of Jeannie Cusamano" (s1.ep13)