December Talking Meme 12/10
Top three reasons why @waltzmatildah should stick with The Sopranos
My usual answer to this question is that, you know, life is short, if you don’t like something then there’s tons of good shit out there. Black Mirror’s pretty good, have you checked it out? But if you’re on the fence about sticking out The Sopranos, there are very good reasons why you should:
My usual answer to this question is that, you know, life is short, if you don’t like something then there’s tons of good shit out there. Black Mirror’s pretty good, have you checked it out? But if you’re on the fence about sticking out The Sopranos, there are very good reasons why you should:
- We think of Tony as the first in his class of grimdark television antiheroes, and if you’ve seen the first couple of seasons you understand how that works. But I think you have to see at least some of the later seasons (though ideally the whole show) in order to get what has ended up being the most interesting thing to me, was this kind of….preeemptive deconstruction of the television era that David Chase unknowingly set off. In the Age of the Antihero, I think The Sopranos is the only truly amoral narrative. BB was a morality play about an immoral protagonist. Dexter was all about the character wrestling with whether he can or should embrace morality. The Wire is about the apathy and hopelessness that keeps the world an immoral place. Tony stubbornly refuses to experience ambition or desire redemption, which are the main drives which push an antihero up or down his path. And even without that conventional narrative crutch, the show itself never stagnates. It remains different from everything I’ve seen, even its many imitators.
- I’d also say that 9/11 meant one thing in the National (and therefore International) Media Narrative, but a very different thing for the NY and DC metropolitan areas, which means that the people most directly affected have ended up talked over in our cultural memory of the event. S4, while not explicitly about 9/11 (IIRC it’s not mentioned directly), is in a lot of subtle ways about and by turn-of-the-millennium New Yorkers. I mean, I know that’s not as big a thing for non-Americans as it is for Americans, but if American media is part of your popular culture consumption, I think that engaging with something authentic might make a little bit more sense of us.
- If you’ve gone seven years without having the iconic series finale spoiled for you, I’m certainly not going to do it. But I don’t think I’m giving away any breaking news when I say that the finale is an experience.