Meadow and AJ on the Sopranos
I'm rewatching the Sopranos from the beginning and I noticed that in the end of episode 6.1, they based a rare episode around AJ and his stumbling toward a maturity by dating a Dominican woman with a kid and even giving up his bike to make her life easier. What made the episode stand out for me was the fact that "Meadow is away in California" and how much of a relief that was because if an episode is an AJ episode, forcing the audience to have to deal with Meadow at the same time is just not going to do it.
Critics at the time were complaining about how Meadow and AJ were just relegated to the same snotty brats that they were in the first season, but I don't think that's fair to the writers who were trying to work with what they had and they didn't have much.
Maybe it's not fair to compare those actors to James Gandolfini and Edie Falco and Aida Turturro (who was a HORRIBLE human being but an amazing character) but in a show full of sociopaths, murderers and amoral raging assholes, it is amazing that Meadow and AJ were the ones that were the hated ones. Granted, we watch mafia shows because we love to live vicariously through amoral characters but still Chase was trying very hard to make Tony Soprano as horrible as possible and still Jame Gandolfini found enough sensitivity in the character to make the audience like him.
With Meadow and AJ, the actors were terrible and their awfulness meant that they had limited shelf life. In the first season, they had a purpose as the bratty kids who were giving Tony headaches and the points where Meadow would call Tony on being in the mafia were pretty great.
Yet as the show wore on, their limitations became more apparent. The third season was a watershed moment in which Meadow's college adventures took on most of the thing (complete with the whacky roommate and the unbearable boyfriends - sadly only one got killed) and Tony was talking about saving AJ from becoming him but there's no way that AJ would become him because AJ was still just the same lazy kid as before.
I think that the third season was the last season when the writers stopped trying to write the characters as interesting and compelling characters and realized that they were stuck with what they were stuck with. So suddenly Meadow starts claiming that "there is no mafia" and whining at Finn (who got a great episode in the fifth season) and AJ becomes more and more of an idiot.
That's not to say that the writers completely wrote them off. There was a nice moment in the sixth season when AJ tries to kill Junior and gets yelled at by Tony who has a great line of "You're a nice guy! This isn't you!" and it's one of those great moments in television where Tony actually sees something of worth in a character who basically just served to be lazy and stupid for six seasons. He might be a non-productive dweeb without job prospects or ambitions but at least he's NOT a killer.
Sadly, there were really no moments like that for Meadow and at a certain point she just grated every time she ended up on the screen. And by the end of the show, she somehow forgot that her dad was in the mafia even to the point where she wouldn't even mention it in private conversation.
I guess I contrast these characters with Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. Jesse started out as a useless drug addict and in the five seasons, he has become the moral center of the show. The actor was up for the challenge of this shifting allegiance and moral awakening of the character and so the writers kept writing him (and they were supposed to have killed him off in the second season). By contrast, you could see the writers wanting to give AJ and Meadow more compelling stories but eventually they just gave up and realized that it wouldn't have worked.
Critics at the time were complaining about how Meadow and AJ were just relegated to the same snotty brats that they were in the first season, but I don't think that's fair to the writers who were trying to work with what they had and they didn't have much.
Maybe it's not fair to compare those actors to James Gandolfini and Edie Falco and Aida Turturro (who was a HORRIBLE human being but an amazing character) but in a show full of sociopaths, murderers and amoral raging assholes, it is amazing that Meadow and AJ were the ones that were the hated ones. Granted, we watch mafia shows because we love to live vicariously through amoral characters but still Chase was trying very hard to make Tony Soprano as horrible as possible and still Jame Gandolfini found enough sensitivity in the character to make the audience like him.
With Meadow and AJ, the actors were terrible and their awfulness meant that they had limited shelf life. In the first season, they had a purpose as the bratty kids who were giving Tony headaches and the points where Meadow would call Tony on being in the mafia were pretty great.
Yet as the show wore on, their limitations became more apparent. The third season was a watershed moment in which Meadow's college adventures took on most of the thing (complete with the whacky roommate and the unbearable boyfriends - sadly only one got killed) and Tony was talking about saving AJ from becoming him but there's no way that AJ would become him because AJ was still just the same lazy kid as before.
I think that the third season was the last season when the writers stopped trying to write the characters as interesting and compelling characters and realized that they were stuck with what they were stuck with. So suddenly Meadow starts claiming that "there is no mafia" and whining at Finn (who got a great episode in the fifth season) and AJ becomes more and more of an idiot.
That's not to say that the writers completely wrote them off. There was a nice moment in the sixth season when AJ tries to kill Junior and gets yelled at by Tony who has a great line of "You're a nice guy! This isn't you!" and it's one of those great moments in television where Tony actually sees something of worth in a character who basically just served to be lazy and stupid for six seasons. He might be a non-productive dweeb without job prospects or ambitions but at least he's NOT a killer.
Sadly, there were really no moments like that for Meadow and at a certain point she just grated every time she ended up on the screen. And by the end of the show, she somehow forgot that her dad was in the mafia even to the point where she wouldn't even mention it in private conversation.
I guess I contrast these characters with Jesse Pinkman in Breaking Bad. Jesse started out as a useless drug addict and in the five seasons, he has become the moral center of the show. The actor was up for the challenge of this shifting allegiance and moral awakening of the character and so the writers kept writing him (and they were supposed to have killed him off in the second season). By contrast, you could see the writers wanting to give AJ and Meadow more compelling stories but eventually they just gave up and realized that it wouldn't have worked.