You’re watching Part 6 of “Cut to Black,” a videotaped roundtable discussion about the end of The Sopranos and the future of television drama. Participants include RogerEbert.com editor and New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz, Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan, A.V. Club TV critic Ryan McGee, and previously.tv contributor Sarah D. Bunting. The program was shot and edited by Dave Bunting, Jr.
The sixth and final chapter, “The Spark, The Journey and Integrity,” deals with the show’s long-term impact on the medium.
Ryan: Right, and it’s interesting to me:
there are a couple of threads that are running throughout this entire
discussion. Like, ‘Why didn’t they have more whackings, and was that shocking
at the end?’ And I feel like, based on what we’ve been talking about, there’s
this strong desire for people to surprise us, and to keep our attention.
So how
are they gonna they do that? It’s like this whole swirling discussion of
violence in the media. And I do think that things are more violent, in general,
but that’s partly understandable because people want to keep their jobs,
essentially. And if there are more zombies getting killed, and more werewolves,
and more blood, it’s because actual life-and-death stakes matter to people.
But
we can sit here and have that discussion, and I think it’s an interesting one
to have. But something like American Horror Story…I actually think
that there’s a commonality with something like Louie in that I’m
entering someone else’s dreamspace…
McGee: Yes!
Ryan: And it’s not going to make total
sense to me, but it makes total sense to them. And I’m along for the ride,
and…
MZS: Trying to see why it makes sense to
you is part of the experience, too.
Ryan: And I don’t know what’s going to
happen. As a viewer, I want to be involved and engaged, obviously. Maybe it’s
the characters that they gave me, or maybe it’s the weird-ass tone. Like, ‘I
don’t know, what is happening right now?’ The tone can shift, and it can shift,
and then shift again.
But it all kind of makes sense together. But I like not
knowing.
And we all watch a lot of TV. So maybe I’m over-served in that regard,
and I never know too much about how the nuts-and-bolts of storytelling work. I
love the fact that there are a number of creators where I have no idea what’s
going to happen. Like the end of season one of Girls: she’s just gonna
go out to Coney Island, and sit in the sand. I didn’t expect that. And that to
me is a very personal sort of vision. That’s one way it can become…not
universally appealing, but [for] the people it appeals to, it hooks them.
Because you’re taking me on a journey, and I don’t know the destination. And
that’s exciting to me.
McGee: Yes, the flipside of that is my
least favorite phrase in all television: the mid-season finale. They build up
to these arbitrary points in December, because it has to explode, or someone
has to decompress…
Bunting: Yeah, the hero has to fall
10,000 feet? Okay.
McGee: Exactly. ‘Just because we’re going
to have to be off the air for seven weeks, we have to keep your attention until
that point.’ And that’s the least arbitrary thing in the entire world, when you
get the notes: ‘All right, in eight episodes…’
MZS: Well, that’s a factory approach.
That’s a factory approach to art.
Bunting: Well, I also wonder if it
also has to do with our perception, maybe not even consciously, that the shows
we are invested in, that we are trusting to see where they go next, even if we
don’t always get it is our unconscious perception that it is cared about
deeply. Not just by us, but by other people, not just a by [the] numbers show
like…I can’t think of a good example. Like Deception. Deception
feels very, ‘Tab A, Slot B…’ [snores] There are some zippy things in it, but
I wound up kicking it off the DVR. Because…it’s not that it was cynically
built, it’s that it was built.
MZS: Too obviously built.
Bunting: Yeah, or…
Ryan: Assembled from constituent parts
that you’d seen before.
Bunting. Or this could be good if it
has all the right parts, but that doesn’t always do it. Someone in charge,
whether it’s someone at the networks, or some creator–someone has to really
love this baby.
Ryan: And even a big show like that, like
the first season of Revenge: not all of it worked, but I’m like,
‘There’s an intelligence about how soaps work that I find amusing here.’ So
it’s not like it has to be something that was really very narrow at the start
and it’s become more and more popular. It can be a factory-produced product,
but there’s some driving force to it, I completely agree. Something that put a
personal stamp on it somewhere along the line.
Bunting: There’s the emotional
investment, and with Revenge now, I can’t even be bothered to keep track
of the various MBA twist because I don’t know what happened, what changed, but
now this deeply personal mission of hers, no matter how baroque, has been
extended to the entire cast, many of whom [snores].
Ryan: Exactly.
MZS: Well, when you lose that personal
spark…I think when a show loses that personal spark, that edge of
almost-mania, it’s over. It’s over.
Ryan: Mm-hm, that’s right.
Bunting: Even in a soap opera, okay,
it’s a soap opera.
MZS: And with The Sopranos, they
never really lost that.
Ryan: I feel like I can almost pinpoint
it for myself. The later seasons of Alias, I would write about it,
going, ‘They got the band back together, but they’re not making the same
music.’ It’s just that something isn’t there, and when something goes out of a
show, it’s very hard for me to stick with it.
McGee: Also, it depends. If it’s a
plot-driven show, if you have a goal to which you are always going, you can
feel the delays a lot more. The shows that are about character pieces, and the
characters more organically drive the show: those can go on forever. But if you
feel like, ‘All right, they’re going to have to get off the island.’
Ryan: People did try to do that with The
Sopranos. They tried to sit here talking like David Chase is on Artist
Island. And you could tell that all of the backing, and feeling that people had
was because people felt that HBO was pulling up a Brinks truck to his house,
and begging, ‘Please make more, please make more.’
MZS: Yeah, and there were several points
where he was thinking about packing it in.
Ryan: And they just said, ‘We will give
you all of the money.’
McGee: Then they took the truck to Vito in
New Hampshire.
Bunting: Oh my God, seriously, with
another truck of Bisquik pancakes.
McGee: And the Morgan Spurlock lookalike
cook.
Bunting: We used to call those the
April Doldrums, back when TV was more traditional in its layout — that those two
episodes would air in April. And it was like the gentle splashing of
dog-paddling, trying to keep one nostril above waterline while everyone gets
pregnant, or starts shooting each other, depending on the show. Sometimes it’s
both.
McGee: But it’s fascinating to see what
people learned, people who were working on the shows. Comparing Boardwalk
Empire to Mad Men, you need to watch certain episodes as try-outs.
We were talking about this on the way here, but “Candy and Heidi”
feels like a Mad Men spec script.
MZS: It does.
McGee: Figuring out the rhythms, what
works here, how much forward momentum you have to have? How much time can you
just linger on people? At what point does it just turn glacial? At what point
is it just okay to not actually move forward, and just spend time with these
people?
MZS: Well, the fact that we can even
consider those part of the artist’s tool kit is, I think, a big part of The
Sopranos‘ achievement.
Ryan: Yes.
MZS: That you can ask that. Now you can
say, ‘Well, what if we were to just throw in a 20-minute dream sequence into
the middle of this episode? Would that be okay?’ ‘Well, yeah, we could do
that.’
Ryan: I sometimes can be a really cynical
person. There’s that really Chase-ian side of me. But I think there’s a
cock-eyed optimist buried somewhere deep within. And what I find really
interesting is I like Breaking Bad, and Mad Men, which took a lot
of their cues from The Sopranos. You might say that they were destined
to have a more niche existence. But I’ve actually talked to TV executives about
that. They put the first three or four seasons of Breaking Bad on Netflix,
and suddenly the next season premier does extremely well. These things don’t
have to be niche-ified. Or what a niche is is now actually being redefined.
So
I find it incredibly encouraging now that these very, very different, but
personally driven projects can be, not necessarily for the people that watch
them, they can really be broad. And that’s another thing: The Sopranos
proved to a major media conglomerate that something artistically, thematically,
and aesthetically ambitious can be an enormously huge hit. Lost and The
Sopranos, around that mid-aughts period, those ruled popular culture.
That’s, to me, incredibly encouraging.
McGee: The numbers that The Sopranos
were getting in season four, NBC would whack a lot of people to get those
numbers right now. [all laugh] Anything that doesn’t involve The Voice,
they’d be dying to get those numbers.
Bunting: Crossover event! Sopranos,
The Voice, c’mahn….
McGee: Turn around to Cher, and kill
somebody? Sure.
MZS: So if you could sum up in just one
word, or sentence, what do you think is the most important contribution of The
Sopranos?
Ryan: One word?! They have to go first.
McGee: Uh, integrity.
Bunting: Can I quote Tony Soprano?
‘Fuckin’ intahnet.’ [all laugh] If only I could get tattoos of sound effects.
Integrity’s good. Faith, I would say, faith in the audience, and faith in
yourself, which was borne out.
McGee: I guess I’m torn between two, but
the one I would go with ambiguity.
MZS: I’m not quite sure what you mean by
that.
Ryan: I’m not either, so I thought that
was a good vague answer. But also just complexity. I don’t think we’re meant to
have an opinion about how it ended, like an opinion. We’re meant to have as
many opinions as Chase had. Like, Tony Soprano is such a jerk, and a selfish
sonuvabitch. And he cares about the ducks, and he cares about those kids. He
tries. Is it more important that he fails, or is it more important that he
tried? I don’t know.
MZS: I don’t know. The word that I would
choose that I keep coming back to is surprise. Because all the shows that I
really, really loved have that constant sense of surprise, where every time you
heard the opening music to the show, you got a little bit excited. Because you
didn’t know what you were going to get. ‘What are they gonna do to me this
week? Where are they gonna take me this week?’
You just don’t know. And for a
long time, The Simpsons had that. And Hill Street Blues had that,
St. Elsewhere had that, a lot of the great shows had that quality, where
they’re not going to give you the same thing every time. In fact, they’d make
it a point of pride not to.
Ryan: I would say that one of the things
that unifies everything from Archer to Girls to any number
of shows that I love right now is: the creator doesn’t want to bore him- or
herself. And I think that was always true of Chase.
MZS: That sounds like a good… [Sound and picture cut out without warning.]
