By Matt Zoller Seitz
SPOILER ALERT: IF YOU DIDN'T SEE THE MARCH 12 PREMIERE OF THE SHOW'S SIXTH SEASON, STOP READING NOW.
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Talk about starting with a bang. Last night’s “Sopranos” premiere broke with the show’s traditional slow-building intro by jam-packing two hours of plot into 60 minutes and capping the episode with one of its most startling violent acts: de-fanged, housebound and Alzheimers’-suffering ex-mob boss Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) shooting New Jersey mob kingpin Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in the chest at close range. It was vintage "Sopranos," expected yet somehow surprising, and twisted and pathetic rather than superficially exciting. You always figured Tony might get shot, but not like this. It was downright humiliating, especially when director Tim van Patten cut to a God's-eye-view shot of fat, bloody Tony lying on the kitchen floor, laboring to hoist his bathroom-scale-certified 280 pounds high enough to grab the wall phone and call 911. 
Tony can’t die, of course; at least he can’t die this soon. Series creator David Chase can go on all he likes about how every castmember is fair game, but you still know he’s not going to kill his leading man with 19 episodes left to go. So as powerful as that shooting was, it still feels a bit like wheel-spinning. (Michael Imperioli’s Chris Moltisanti survived a less embarrassing shooting incident in Season Two.) But it’s still a shocking development, one that sets the stage for Chase and his writers to indulge their David Lynch-Dennis Potter fixation by pulling Tony out of this world and putting him into another one. The lead sentence from one of my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall’s “Sopranos” preview pieces now makes sense: “There are going to be more dreams. Deal with it.”
Judging from the first four episodes sent for review by HBO, the show’s new school version of classical filmmaking craft is at an all-time high. Every camera move, shot, cut and line is charged with a sense of purpose. Watching the premiere again last night, I was struck by how deftly Van Patten and screewriter Terence Winter weave symbolic images and lines into the narrative – elements that confirm the final season’s preoccupation with score-settling, moral accountability, the necessity of confronting one’s own mortality and the realization that joining the mob means making a lifetime commitment to evil – without making a big, flashy deal of it. “The bonefish are back in season,” Tony told wife Carmela (Edie Falco), while indulging their marriage-building habit of eating together in fancy restaurants. Earlier, the show’s opening music montage – set to a dance club remix of William S. Burroughs reading fragments of his poem “Seven Souls,” which alludes to a “director” who “directs the film of your life from conception to death” – showed a bit of a Carmela dream 
in which she hung out in the bare wood skeleton of the new house she was building on Tony’s dime and smoked a joint with the ghost of Chris’ girlfriend Adriana (Drea de Mateo), who was executed last season for snitching to the FBI. It’s significant that Tony and Carmela would externalize the idea of a new beginning for their dysfunctional marriage by building a new house; it’s also significant that this house would be contaminated, in Carmela’s dream, by the appearance of a woman who was “disappeared’ for daring to go against the family, and that Carmela would later run afoul of a building inspector because the construction supervisor, Carmela’s dad, was cutting costs by using substandard material and assuming (wrongly) that he’d get away with it by calling a corrupt pal in government. Chase and company seem to be tightening the noose around every character’s neck, forcing them to consider how their crime-funded personal adventures will end. As Tony told Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) last season, there are only two outcomes for guys like him: “Dead, or in the can.” You can end up in one of those places through greed, overreaching, incompetence or bad luck, or by deciding to rat out the family, and I suppose we can expect plenty more deaths this season. Judging from the sudden, black-comedic plotzing of snitch Ray Curto (George Loros) and the revelation that Eugene Pontecorvo (Robert Funaro) was a pigeon as well, there are as many snitches in this mob family as there are straight-up gangsters.
But aside from a sense of showmanship and a certain grim dramatic intelligence, is "The Sopranos" showing us anything we haven't seen in prior seasons? I wish the answer were an unqualified yes. But unlike a typical episode of "Deadwood," this season premiere doesn't deepen on second viewing; in fact, its weaknesses become readily apparent. You can see Chase and the gang playing three card monte, trying to distract you from the fact that the six season-old series is repeating itself. 
Funaro’s performance, for instance, was real and touching, and his death scene (in a sustained wide shot with no cuts) was remarkable, at once horrific and restrained. But his character’s storyline was so dumb and unbelievable – as if a lifelong mob hitman would ask if he could just walk away! – and Eugene’s kissy-happy scenes with his wife were so cornball that it was hard to shake the feeling that even the writers viewed this subplot as a big sick joke – a gangsterland version of a scene in a war movie where a grunt tells everyone in his unit how much he loves his wife and kids and how he’s only got two days left, then steps on a mine. We've been here before, with Big Pussy and Adriana and other characters.
Throughout, certain creative questions loom. In this final season, is Chase truly revealing a sense of moral accountability that was often AWOL on “The Sopranos," or just jerking our chain? In past seasons, the writers and producers responded to audience gripes about dangling plot threads by saying, in essence, “Some episodes of this show are not chapters in a novel, they’re the equivalent of self-contained short stories with recurring characters -- we’re not about plot, so get over it”; this year is Chase executing an about-face and making “The Sopranos” more like “Deadwood” and “The Wire”? Or is he just bringing “The Sopranos” in line with classic gangster tales like “White Heat” and “Scarface,” which ended with the criminal heroes suffering, the better to send us home feeling secure in our own decency? 
The next couple of episodes, which are built around images of heaven, hell and purgatory, suggest “The Sopranos” is headed toward spiritual accountability -- toward the "Macbeth" and "Munich" metaphor of violence as moral stain, the belief that evil deeds come back to haunt us. (The sight of Eugene trying to wipe a blood drop from his cheek was very "Out, damned spot!") But no matter how many creative aces Chase pulls from his sleeve, he’ll have trouble allaying my gut feeling that the show should have ended two or three or even four seasons ago. By the end of Season One, “The Sopranos,” which Chase never imagined would last more than a year, had already said most of what it presumably wanted to say about the Freudian fallout of dysfunctional family life and the moral relativism and warped “ethics” embraced by gangsters. Each subsequent season was to some extent re-inventing the wheel, finding new ways to say the same things about its characters and situations. "The Sopranos" sustained itself through sex, violence and some very effective, at times Luis Bunuel-ish black humor. More a curdled social satire than a straightforward gangster story, it is arguably the most cynical long-running series of all time, a show in which nearly every scene depicts characters being confronted with the choice between selfish expediency and a higher good, and invariably choosing Option A. From Tony and Johnny Sack (Vincent Curatola) to Carmela and the kids to the FBI agents investigating the family and the various politicians and businesspeople swirling around them, Chase's characters rarely make choices out of altruism, a sense of cosmic rightness or simple kindness. When the “right thing” does manage to get done, it’s often piggybacking on self-interest. (At the funeral, Chris says he hangs with his AA sponsor not just because the guy keeps him from falling off the wagon, but also because he’s great at forging documents.) 
Not for nothing did last night’s pilot start with the line, “Nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public.” Chase seems inclined to believe the worst of everything and everybody, including his audience (which, judging from the mail Sepinwall and I get at the paper, is more interested in fucking and whacking than in dream images and satirical jabs at American delusions). Chase shows human beings as he believes they usually are, not as they ought to be. On "The Sopranos," self-interest and appetite trump law, justice, love and friendship. Immoral characters stumble to the brink of spiritual crisis, peer down into the abyss, take a few steps back, briefly ponder their lot in life, then ask, “Which way to the whorehouse?” The only major character that’s not a moral and ethical basket case is Dr. Melfi, who could have sought vengeance on her rapist through Tony but chose not to (and even she’s no Girl Scout). Everyone else is looking out for number one, even when, especially when, they claim to be acting for the greater good of family or society. In case you missed this theme, Paulie Walnuts (Tony Sirico) spells it out in a future episode, stating that each person is really just an animal who’s alone from birth through death and must fight for every scrap he can get. In such a blatantly Hobbesean universe, it’s no surprise that characters would resist true change with every fiber of their being. Righting a sordidly misguided life must be like trying to turn an aircraft carrier around. It’s tempting to continue with business as usual while believing a line from a golden oldie that played during Junior's bloody rampage: “Nothing can be done.”
Monday, March 13, 2006
The Sopranos Mondays: Season 6, Ep. 1, "Members Only"
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33 comments:
I think there is some sort of sick joke going on with Robert Funaro. In Season 3, he was inexplicably included in the opening credits when he had so little to do it took awhile to figure out who he played. Then, when he finally gets an episode to do something, it's his last one. I also think it's interesting that Toni Kalem (Big Pussy's widow) suddenly has received a bump up the opening credits.
The ending was a bit of a shocker -- but in a good way. I do have one question for you Star-Ledgerites -- isn't this the first season that didn't begin with the newspaper at the bottom of Tony's driveway?
One other thought: Since the FBI agents assigned to the Sopranos are the most inept and unlucky bunch in history, I was wondering in terms of legality why they couldn't use tapes from dead people, at the very least, to use as tools for further investigations or to spring surprises on potential witnesses (as the agents did to Tony in Season 1 when they played the tape of Junior and Livia plotting).
Well, if the supporting cast of THE SOPRANOS are the gangster equivalent of the red shirts on the old STAR TREK, then I'd say Toni Kalem's bump-up in status means she's going to be bumped off. I've read pieces recently (in the Star-Ledger and elsewhere) where castmembers joked that by now they were hip to Chase's M.O. -- if a character who never got many lines before suddenly gets a bunch of meaty scenes and an interesting backstory, don't get too attached to them. THE GODFATHER movies were transparent in that way, too. They kept introducing potential cannon fodder as "old friends of the family" even though you'd never seen them before or heard anyone else speak of their existence.
Regarding the show turning over old ground: television is all about repeating itself, so I see no reason to hold that against the show. Many a successful series has been built around the regular restatement of themes you're already quite clear on. The point about the characters' self interest is well taken, though. To think oneself morally "above" this series is to reject a valuable analysis of human behavior. it's not just what the characters do that disturbs, it's the way they rationalize it as something other than selfish. It's funny to hear gangsters and theire relatives apologize for evil in the same language an Oprah guest might use to wiggle out of being censured by the smugger-than-thou audience.
Edward: I haven't gone back and rewatched the whole series, and I can't see that happening right now, but I don't recall seasons four or five starting with Tony getting the newspaper. It's a love-hate relationship between "The Sopranos" and the Star-Ledger, though. They like the detailed previews and other coverage when the show is actually on the air, but they wish the paper didn't write about castmembers' personal problems, local officials hassling or evicting the crew for political reasons, defamation complaints and so forth. The relationship between Bruce Springsteen and the paper is much the same.
Also, regarding the feds, a prosecutor friend tells me they could use tapes collected by a dead informant (evidence is evidence), But not having that person around to corroborate and describe visual details of the conversation would be a definite minus.
Matt,
I’m really going to enjoy turning in to this feature every week, along with the Star-Ledger’s preview. First off, the use of “Seven Souls” as a eerie tool to bring viewers up to speed was a novel choice, reminding me of Afrika Bambaataa & John Lydon’s “World Destruction” from a previous season (four, I think). Chase and Co. really know how to pick ‘em.
And I must concur with Eugene Pontecorvo’s plotline, a character I must admit I wasn’t particularly familiar with, but noticed when I re-watched some choice episodes of Season Five afterwards. I found this development to be grating on my nerves, and it didn’t even have to do with Eugene, but his wife, who surely must have been aware of the unbreakable ties to the mob her husband would have to serve when she married him. The analogy to the fellow in the war film who describes how great life will be when he returns home was most apt.
Bleak is the understatement of the year. We are truly knee deep in dark water here. More than I've seen before. The hanging scene was tough. Unflinching and relentless.
Like Ford or Peckinpah did with the western, Chase uses the ganster to explain America to itself. The show makes no apologies and I think that is it's strength. Dramatic non sequiturs, tough. Italians don't like the way they are depicted, deal with it.
I go back and forth on the defamation issue. I do think that if you made a list of things THE SOPRANOS is about, the word "Italian-Americans" wouldn't rank terribly high. The fact that they are gangsters seems more and more incidental as the show goes on -- just a way to get the mass audience watching -- and the ethnic identity seems subordinate to that (Showtime has a new show coming up about the Irish mob, and NBC recently did KINGPIN, about the Mexican mob). However, I can' t argue with the contention that the show does damage to ethnic identity -- or at least keeps old, cheesy stereotypes alive -- by lasting six seasons and being wildly popular. Stir in the fact that Chase and many of his colleagues are Italian, and I am not sure if there is an answer to this question that could not be considered censorious or too literal minded.
I like the show's cruel humor and unrelenting pessimism about human nature, though. A lot of great pop artists have been similarly down on humanity (Kubrick didn't exactly adopt a sunny side up attitude) so it's not unprecedented. The question is, are the show's artistic pretensions really registering with the mass audience? I mean, when viewers look at this series, do they see their country and themselves reflected back in any meaningful way, or is it all about the whackings?
Great piece, Matt. I too was struck by how dense the episode was, and how, unlike the debuts of past seasons, it felt imbued with inevitability and closure; instead of the start of a new chapter, it seemed a darkening continuation of the various stories set in motion during seasons 4 and 5.
My only major complaint is that for such a detailed episode, the writing and direction weren't quite as tight as the show has led us to expect, as though Chase didn't have a chance to fine-tune in the editing room. A number of scenes seemed to go on a few beats too long, characters were standing around more often than being shown in purposeful action, and a palpable tension never developed in the Gene Pontecorvo storyline. (Given all the pre-season hype about the big "surprise", I would have expected Chase to toy with viewer presumptions that Pontecorvo would be the one attempting to take out Tony.) In particular I'm thinking of the odd choice to insert the final parking lot exchange between Carmela and Angie Bonpensiero into Tony's struggle to dial 911 after being shot. It could have easily been put after Pontecorvo's suicide but before the shooting and preserved the tension of the final moments. The show has never previously disrupted such an important moment like that.
I've never had any problems with the free-standing episodes that go unresolved (mostly because they still contribute to the characters' overall makeup), and the show's furthered commitment to the major storylines over the last couple of seasons has, to some degree, made up for the thematic repetition. That being said, I can't help but be in partial agreement with you about the feeling that it's nothing we haven't seen before, especially after a day to think about it. My mind keeps returning to "The Wire", a show that has a more complex narrative and juggles more characters than "The Sopranos" but has also managed to become fresher and more multifacted in each of its seasons thus far, at the point when most shows start treading water. "The Sopranos" has had twice as many episodes as "The Wire" but feels like it's progressed about half as far with its story and characters. Of course, to quote Phil Leotardo, it's like comparing apples and bowling balls, since the shows traverse such different representations of the American landscape, but one wishes David Chase had David Simon's sense of purpose. As you've said, maybe he's finally getting around to it, but I'm a bit worried that it's too late to bring the show to a satisfying close. At this point, any possible resolution seems a bit anti-climactic.
Interesting post Matt - nice to have you back on THE SOPRANOS beat.
I'm siding with Arnaux here, as I don't think the show needs to reinvent itself every season. Any hopes we could possibly hold out for Tony's redemption were cruelly snuffed years ago, and we've basically been tuning in every week to watch his long, slow, rotting-from-the-inside slide into hell.
Of course, there's more than one way to skin a cat - and I thought the brilliance of Season Five (my favorite since the first) was that Chase & Company started out operating from the assumption that Tony was the biggest, most selfish worthless piece of shit in the world - and then as the episodes wore on everyone around him revealed themselves to be even stupider and shallower than he is - so by the time T was huffing and puffing his way through the snow in the finale, I actually felt sorry for him again!
I loved being back in Chase's world again last night, and even bleated with joy to a friend at one point that "there's just nobody better at illustrating the unbelievable smallness of people!"
I don't mean this to sound like a misanthrope kick. I love these characters dearly - heck, by this point they seem more genuine to me than some of my friends. (I remember years ago, Howard Stern used to have a rule that nobody from the show was allowed to be a guest on his program - just because he didn't want to mess with his illusion that The Sopranos were real people.)
But I'd say I love these characters not in spite of, but rather because of their flaws. Tony's blindered, grotesque sentimentality, Carmela's bought-and-paid-for denial... hardly attractive qualities, but ones made so very sad and human by Gandolfini and Falco. I don't think it's possible not to see some of yourself in these people - even if they're moments you don't particularly wish to share with the rest of the class.
As per your earlier queries as to whether or not it is a good thing to have a weekly television program about a self-pitying sociopath, or what the public at large makes of the vicious satire at work here -- I have no answers.
But I do know that I can look at Tony Soprano the same way I look at Jake LaMotta in RAGING BULL - God knows I'm in hilariously different circumstances, but I'm ashamed to admit how much I understand where he's coming from... emotionally. And isn't that kind of empathy what great art is supposed to aspire to?
Man, it's great to have them all back!
I can't remember about the opening of Season 4 for certain, but I know Season 5 started with Meadow driving over the newspaper as she pulled into the driveway, since Tony was out of the house at that point.
Matt — Glad to see you wrote down my gut feeling about THE SOPRANOS — that it should have ended after the second season. And I have one reason why: Livy Soprano. The duel between Tony and Mama was the heart of the show, it was the psychological underpinning that drove Tony to Melfi. When Nancy Marchand died, the show died for me. Since then, it's all been predictable whackings of Joey Pants, etc. Livy Soprano would have wiped the floor with Joey Pants. With her alive, the show definitely would have gone in a more creative arc, in my opinion. And with her absence, they now have to talk about why Tony is still so stressed out, instead of being able to act it out in scenes between Tony and Livy. Now, I don't begrudge all THE SOPRANOS fans their pleasures. I've watched most of the subsequent seasons on DVD, and admire the show's craft and sophistication, but I've never had the same sense of satisfaction that I got from those first two seasons. It just seems to be going in a predictable cycle, and even if Tony finally gets a spell in the slammer at the end of this round, I don't think I'll care. One aside: As a Boss fan, I wish they'd give Miami Steve a little more to do. He's hilarious.
Edward: If all previous seasons began with Tony picking up the newspaper, and this one does not, does that mean Chase is admitting there's no news?
THR-HB: I was amused by Livia and Tony's relationship but while I saw it as the comic heart of the show, as a dramatic arc it seemed lacking to me. Chase's Freudian interpretation of the mommy-dominated son struck me as the show's stalest element, and I could never quite believe it when the show suggested it was the heart of Tony's problems. Not to say it wasn't important, just that for me, Tony's inability to get along with his monstrous mother never seemed directly connected to his being a gangster, which probably would have happened anyway since he was raised among gangsters
I guess what I'm saying is, the real heart of the show for me was Tony's gangsterism, and his being forced by Melfi to consider the moral and spiritual implications of the life he'd chosen. I have always felt that the show could have done with more of that, particularly with Melfi, whose therapy with Tony too often seems like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Who cares whether he got along with his mother when he's a stone killer? I feel like Melfi is treating the symptoms, but not going anywhere near the disease. Not that Tony would let her get that close anyway, but you know what I mean.
PS -- Steve van Zandt gets a lot more to do in the next three episodes.
I don't know, I guess it's really an individuals take on ethnicity. I think if you come from an Italian-American background you understand the language. Being proud of it is one issue. Being in denial is another. There are little moments on the show that run so deep into growing up that way you can't believe someone incorporated those details because it definitely wouldn't fly on network television. Those moments have nothing to do with violence or being mobbed up. The truth is America loves stereotypes. It makes it easy for us to identify someones ethnicity with a simple assessment. It's as deep as racism in this country.
The show deals with some very primal, sometimes base themes with a little black humor thrown in for good measure. This is nothing new. We've been entertained by murder and meyhem for centuries. The show doesn't work because strippers get beaten to death in a parking lot or because a crew member is giving a construction worker a blow job. It works because it's willing to lift up that rock and see what's under it.
Pedro writes, "In particular I'm thinking of the odd choice to insert the final parking lot exchange between Carmela and Angie Bonpensiero into Tony's struggle to dial 911 after being shot. It could have easily been put after Pontecorvo's suicide but before the shooting and preserved the tension of the final moments. " I agree, and that decision seems even stranger if you watch the episode a second time. I suppose it could just be a matter of the filmmakers WANTING to cut the tension, diminish the horror and emphasize Tony's helplessness at that moment. But I still wanted to stay in the moment and experience the horror without being pulled away from it.
While I loved Livia, I think The Sopranos proved they could flourish without here with season 3 where they knocked nearly every episode out of the park. Keith Olbermann postulated an odd theory last night that I don't buy: that the premiere was actually the final episode and much of the remaining episodes would go back in time to show what led to that.
Edward: That's an interesting theory, and one I'd love to see play out. It would take David Chase's Dennis Potter fixation to the next level and bring in time-shifting elements from movies like THE KILLING.
Unfortunately, Olbermann's theory suggests that he has only seen the first episode and not the next three (which were sent to critics on watermarked DVDs). The next three episodes play a few clever structural games, but for the most part they move the narrative along in a linear fashion. No chronological scrambling to speak of.
For reference's sake, my Star-Ledger colleague Alan Sepinwall compiled a thorough but concise guide to every episode of the show's first five seasons. It's available on the Star-Ledger's web site. If you haven't gone there before, you might have to punch in a zip code and a couple of other bits of info, but as newspaper websites go, it's fairly painless.
The link is here.
Regarding the defamation issue, discussed above, the Star-Ledger reporter Katie Wang did a story on that subject that was published last week in the Ledger, the Trenton Times and various papers that subscribe to Newhouse News Service (an arm of the paper's parent company). It was one of the more original takes on the subject, and I say that as someone who wrote about it often when I was on the "Sopranos" beat during the first three seasons.
Without diminishing the legitimacy of complaints against the series, it pointed out that Italy itself has long been on the receiving end of art that depicts extremes of human behavior. To reference Orson Welles' famous speech in THE THIRD MAN, dramatists seem to gravitate toward it as a setting because it has such a colorful, often bloody history, and because the world has long thought of Italy as a place where passions run high.
"The stereotypes," Wang writes, "...predate Tony Soprano, Paulie Walnuts and Silvio by hundreds of years. She then quotes William J. Connell, professor of Italian studies at Seton Hall University: "'The stereotypes for Italians have a really old history...That goes back to Shakespeare's plays set in Italy. Italy is where crazy things happen, where you have lots of selfish, maniacal people. It is where individual family honor is more important than a town's honor.'"
"In other words," Wang writes, "Italy is a natural stage for great drama, which explains why 13 of Shakespeare's plays had some ties to Italy. And in many of those plays, such as 'The Merchant of Venice,' 'Othello' and 'Romeo and Juliet,' said Connell, the characters scheme and plot, much like Tony Soprano does."
For the full text of the article on the Trenton Times website, click here
FYI: Season 4 opens with Carmela reading a New York Times article to AJ followed by Tony picking up the Star Ledger from the driveway. I had to know!
I believe The Sopranos is the single-most influential work of art of the last decade. It's influence can be seen in every form of entertainment that has been created since 1999.
Tony's relationship with his mother--and his inability to come to terms iwth it--has been one of the major keys to his personality. Her ruthlessness has made the leader that he is, but her God-like powers of manipulation have caused him to unfulfilled. He's ability to deny the horrible things he has done is directly related to his mother's ability to see things only through her narrow viewpoint. For example: Tony's affair wiht Gloria Trillo (Anabella Scoirra) in Season 3 is a prime example of him claiming he's happy because she makes him feel good. His His justification for his happiness allows him to ignore the emotional pain he's inflicting on Gloria and Carmela. When things start to go bad he can't understand why. This is all based on his mother's relationship with him.
Matt: I love your episode write-up, but I think it's a little naive to say this show should've ended after Season 2. Chase is fully aware of shows that outstay their welcome. This is why I think he's ending it now. It feels like the right time. The show has been remarkable in reflecting the emotional state of America back to itself. It's not Chase's fault--or responsibility--if the majority of viewers only tune in to see who's gonna get whacked this week. These are the same kind of viewers who wanted Melfi to tell Tony about her attacker, or didn't like most of Season 4 (the show's quietest season). This is the "When are Mulder and Scully going to fuck?" crowd. My friend Owen Gleiberman--the biggest Sopranos fan I know of--once told me, "The tuest fans of that know that the real drama isn't who gets whacked, or whether Tony and Carmela are are going to stay together, but in how it all unfolds, moment to moment, as filtered through the happy, furious, and anzious ripples of Tony's mind."
BTW: The scene between Carm and Angie is crucial. Angie delivers a "shot" to Carm's stomach when she tells her she "paid" for hernice car. The look on Carmela's face upon hearing this is why I watch the show. That's what she gets for going around pretending to be friendly in order to just show off her new car.
I fully agree with Aaron's previous comment about the cutaway at the end to Carmela's car conversation.
And what's more, to expand on his point: from the perspective of editing strategy, it is useful to consider WHY they would deliberately make this edit, besides the reasons stated earlier: it creates a juxtaposed and therefore heightened MEANING about where Carmela is in life, with and without Tony. Nothing of Carmela's is truly her "own," not the car, not the spec house she is trying so desperately to get realized, or anything else. And the man who gave her those things could be gone at any moment, for a variety of reasons (note the repeated hints that Tony's physical health is yet another worry, and I don't think it's merely a red herring).
All right, you guys convinced me. The cut kills the momentum but amps up meaning. I can go for that.
Tony gets the paper at the start of season two (Pussy's at the end of the driveway), three and four (the one with "World Destruction"). Season one opens with Tony in Melfi's waiting room, and season five spoofs the whole paper ritual by having Meadow's car run over an unclaimed Star-Ledger.
In case you all hadn't seen it, the supporting characters are throwing a fit that they are trying to count this divided season as one, depriving them of income. The story is here
Maybe they can take it out of the money HBO earns from product placement. There's an obscene amount of it.
According to Phil Rosenthal's column in today's Chicago Tribune, HBO takes no product placement money for the show.
Alan: Thanks for the link. It still seems incredible to me that no money is changing hands at any point. The product placement on "The Sopranos" is as overt as what you see on "Survivor." There's a satirical bent to it, but it's still an ad.
xyI honestly can't believe they have never taken money for product placement. It doesn't surprise me about that they don't take money for the big bling-bling product names, like Porche or Armani or Mercedes or whatever-- adds to the realism-- but in previous seasons the fetishing of showing Coca Cola and Coca Cola products on the dinner table and just about everywhere else has been really, really distracting.
When Livia died, a lot of the gas went out of the "I, Claudius" series: another mother-trouble saga with another mother of the same name. What a coincidence.
Let's put together a few things. See if we can figure out what David Chase has up his sleeve, re. Tony's denouement.
First of all, here's Paulie Walnuts being invited to do a little deep sea fishing with Tony on their trip to South Florida.
Holy crap!
Holy crap, as in: what *immediately* registers on Paulie's face when Tony proposes that they go deep sea fishing? Answer: fear!
And when they shove off from the marina, what are the images, what's the flashback that goes through Paulie's mind? Answer: Pussy getting whacked.
Someone previously offered the observation that Tony is making calculations as to who should live and who should die. Paul, at first, should die, but then, after some thought ... naaaah! What the hell, Tony figures, let the bum live.
Christopher, on the other hand, is not so lucky. Tony's calculus convinces him that Christopher has to be amongst the dearly departed.
Now, I ask you ... is it lost on Paulie that Tony invited him out to sea so that he could be murdered, and then, for whatever reason, changed his mind? ... No way. Paulie didn't last this long in the Mob by being dumb, however comical he may at times appear. He's as cold and as calculating as the next goodfellow.
There's no way Tony's murderous intentions, albeit aborted at the last moment, were lost on Paulie. In fact, Tony is now to Paulie what Christopher was to Tony: a liability to be disposed of at the first opportunity.
OK, in light of what I just wrote, consider the following ...
In the episode where Doc Santore gets whacked, Paulie comes over to Tony's house uninvited. In entering the house and bringing Tony his front lawn newspaper, Paulie says: "Excuse the ambush, Skip."
What a strange thing to say. What a curious metaphor. ... "Excuse the ambush?" ... What ambush? Just because Paulie didn't call before coming over to Tony's house, this is an "ambush"?
Moreover, in that scene, as Tony and Paulie are talking, we hear in the background on Tony's kitchen television a reporter describing the Doc Santoro hit as an "ambush."
Holy Pie-O-My crap! Now come on, homicide fans, that CAN'T be a coincidence!
Either Tony is going to get ambushed by Paulie or else Tony is *NOT* going to get ambushed by Paulie - just so David Chase can get his rocks off throwing us a false clue! ("Oh, the tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.")
Therefore, if it turns out that Paulie DOESN'T ambush Tony, David Chase can always say: See, I told you upfront, everybody in this production lies, even me, with my cockamamie clues.
Also ...
I thought it was interesting that right after the showing of "Cleaver" Carmela opens her big mouth and tells Tony that it's obvious that the lead in "Cleaver" is based on him.
Tony pooh-poohs the idea, giving us the clear impression that up to that point he's ok with the movie.
Then, to make matters worse, Christopher tells his writer-pal, the "pal" he later shoots in the head (hey, what good's a pal if you can't occasionally take a head-shot at him?), to go over to Tony at the Bing and tell him that it wasn't his (Christopher's) idea to create the lead in "Cleaver" as it eventually came out on the screen.
So the writer does just that, only to at that point *CONVINCE* Tony that Carmela is right: Chris is mocking him via "Cleaver."
To mock a boss. This is, without question, over the line.
Do you remember what Johnny Sacks asked one of his associates right before he died: How will I be remembered "on the street." Street cred, street image, how I look to "The Others" is vital to a boss, and so I think that when Tony is certain that Christopher is mocking him in "Cleaver," it's at that key moment that his calculus tells him: Christopher must die!
And so, again, I ask what I believe is a key question ... Will Paulie simply *forget* that Tony made him almost drop a crab in his pants when he invited him to go deep sea fishing? No way. (Would you?)
Paulie is no doubt doing some calculus of his own.
Finally, as all good Soprano-junkies know, Tony Sirico (Paulie) had it written into his contract that his character would never rat anyone out to the cops. That being the case, let's say Tony rats out pehaps the two Arabs to the Feds, or perhaps someone actually *in* the Mob ... this would not only get Paulie Walnuts upset, think how Tony Sirico would respond to such a revolting development!
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