The Sopranos, season 1

HBO On Demand has the first five episodes of The Sopranos available, so naturally I've been watching them.

It's amazing how good this show is, and I'd forgotten how great Tony's domineering mother Livia Soprano was. She's so effortlessly and unconsciously cruel and manipulative and also laugh-out-loud funny at the same time. And she's a great example of how complex and interesting the characters on the show are.

She gives Tony a constant guilt trip about putting her in a "nursing home," yet everything she does (from setting her kitchen on fire to running over a friend with her car) makes placing her in a home the only possible solution. She clearly takes a perverse pleasure in making everyone's life miserable, including her own.

One thing that distinguishes The Sopranos is that it forces its audience to figure out what going on, it draws us in because we have to pay attention to make the crucial connections. Moreover, much of the energy of the show comes from the discrepancies it creates between what we know and what the characters know. This leads to rich situational ironies.

Take for example the fifth episode of the series "College." Here we see Tony taking Meadow on an interview tour of several colleges she's applied to; along the way, Tony spots a former mobster who turned state's evidence. Near the end of the show, Tony strangles him. Now most shows would end there, but then we see Tony and Meadow riding home. Meadow becomes suspicious and is just on the verge of realizing what Tony has done. So Tony pulls a guilt trip worthy of his mother, telling Meadow how his feelings are hurt that she doesn't trust him. This emotional black mail is every bit as vicious as the execution, but only we are in a position to realize that.

One of the things that really makes the show work is that Tony is always on the verge of self-knowledge but constantly shys away from it. This turns a structural problem for any TV series into a dramatic strength. TV characters can't change too drastically, they can't have the turning points or epiphanies that are crucial for most dramatic characters. But this show focuses on the conflict between Tony the mob boss and Tony the middle-class guy; the two fight to a stand still, and so while Tony never quite achieves the kind of insight that would lead to genuine change (either to reject evil or to embrace it), we, the audience, do. A neat dramatic trick that.

The Sopranos, season 1 (1999)
GRADE: A