You’re watching a chapter from “Cut to Black,” a roundtable discussion about the ending of The Sopranos and the show’s effect on the development of TV drama. Participants include RogerEbert.com editor and New York Magazine TV 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 series was shot and edited by Dave Bunting, Jr.
Chapter 4 deals with The Sopranos‘ sense of satire, and whether it’s possible for a TV show to have “a plan” and stick to it.
Ryan: What came through to me when I was
rewatching the series recently is these people are stuck on a nexus. It’s
almost a Hieronymous Bosch vision. They can’t…they make these efforts to
break free, but by the end, you’ve got Meadow saying, ‘Well, I’m going to work
for this kind of law, because Italians are oppressed.’ And she knows that
everyone around her is incredibly corrupt, and violent! And Carmela has made
endless compromises. Give A.J. a BMW, and suddenly, all the world’s issues
aren’t as important. And so these people…
MZS: The greater the betrayal of Tony’s,
the larger the present he gets her.
Ryan: Exactly!
MZS: And she’s fine with that.
Ryan: It’s all about, “Are we fine with
the compromises they make?” There are people who are not willing to engage, or
who are not comfortable with engaging with the fact that a lot of the show is
an indictment of the lies people tell themselves about the compromises that
they make. That’s hard to bear. So that’s the reason the show was a hit for six
seasons, because he took this trope of the mobster thing, and used it as a
subversive vehicle to get in all this existential stuff…
Bunting: We are all of us trapped in
our own mafia…
MZS: I was going to say, to what extent
are we all in bed with the mob, in some sense? We all have different versions
of it, probably.
Ryan: And there’s an incredible darkness
to that. But I do think I have revised my view of how Chase viewed the people,
or viewed the situation. Sometimes he views them with a kind of bemused
fascination, and sometimes he views them with a kind of disgusted pessimism.
And so, you can’t boil that down to one thing. But he’s always got a certain
detached view of them. It can be amused, or it can be sad.
MZS: It is, it is. And it’s a tone that
reminds me of certain filmmakers who also have that sensibility, like [Luis] Bunuel,
or Todd Solondz. A lot of The Sopranos reminds me of Todd Solondz,
like a Welcome to the Dollhouse, Happiness sense of humor.
Bunting: Fonder though, I would say.
MZS: Yeah.
Bunting: Particularly Meadow, who we
are meant to understand. I mean, Chase has a daughter. She was on the show,
usually as a fuck-up.
[all laugh]
MZS: Right.
Bunting: She does show up in the last
two episodes, and she’s pulled it together.
Ryan: She’s in med school.
Bunting: Yeah, she’s in her second
year of med school. But there is a certain fondness that he has for some
characters, and I think there’s also something about Paulie that is like
vibrating on a different frequency.
MZS: Yeah.
Bunting: I can’t say why.
Ryan: This is my favorite moment in the
finale. This guy, over the years, he’s been…Paulie hates that stupid cat that
they somehow acquired when they were on the run.
But as a filmmaker, Chase just
sort of gets it. In Alan [Sepinwall]’s book [The Revolution Was Televised] and elsewhere, [Chase] makes these references to
classic Italian films, and the New Wave, and all this kind of stuff. And to me,
what makes it all so worthwhile is…well, it’s a lot of things, the affection
for the characters.
But there’s a moment in the finale where Paulie’s sitting
outside with his little sun reflector and the cat just flops down on the
pavement. He just holds the shot. I think he is conflicted. He’s conflicted about
the audience, he’s conflicted about how much he cares about these people. But
there’s some aspect of this world that he really loves. He just lingers on that
shot for a minute. I kinda just enjoyed the hell out of that.
Bunting: And then the shot previous to
that, where he’s about to broom the cat with that guy Walden? He’s like, ‘Leave
it, who cares? It catches mice.’ And, ‘This animal leaves today!’ He’s got the
broom. Tony comes in [makes hand gesture to mime Paulie hastily putting his
broom away]
MZS: I think, because it is such a dark,
violent show, that we do tend to forget that it is, at its heart, a comedy with
a very strong satirical streak. And it manifests itself in these tiny, tiny,
almost throw-away, fast-forward sight gags.
I think it’s in the last episode
where you see Chinatown. And anyone that’s lived in New York knows that Little
Italy has been basically taken over by Chinatown. And there’s that tour bus
that is rocketing through Little Italy. And you hear the tour guide talking
about Little Italy, but it looks like they’re doing 45mph, because there’s
nothing to see. [motions to McGee] Which sort of plays into your idea about the glorious past that never really
was.
McGee: Sure. I also tend to give shows
more slack about how they end things, because of all the mediums–we’ve talked
about film, we’ve talked about books–it’s the hardest to control every aspect
of. Who knows what the show would have done if Libby Soprano had been around
longer? Things like that. You can look at it one of two ways. Art should not
reflect life. It should be a cleaner version, or it should say something. Or,
it should reflect the messiness of it.
And sometimes, you think there’s going
to be a build up to something, and it dissipates before you can even get there.
How you view television in that way is obviously going to affect how you view a
show like The Sopranos, which was interested a lot of times in these
very small stories that maybe added to something whole. But if nothing else,
they just filled out the world, and that was okay.
MZS: There’s also…when I talk to
people about television who maybe don’t know as much about how television is
made, there’s a set of misconceptions about storytelling on TV. They think that
it’s like a movie, or a novel. And when you get a show that has a lot of
tightly interwoven plotlines, and they’re wondering how are these going to pay
off, they say, ‘Do you think they have a plan? Do you think they know what
they’re doing, or are they just making it up as they go along?’ And it’s like:
‘If you know how TV is made, you know that they are making it up as they go
along.’
But maybe they go into it with a plan. Maybe they go into it with a
general outline: they’ve got 10, or 12, or 22 episodes mapped out, and they
know, ‘Well, we want to start here, and end here.’ But then things happen.
Maybe they cast a particular person in a part that’s not working, or they
realize, ‘We gotta get rid of this guy, let’s whack him.’ Or, ‘Let’s have him
go to prison, and we’ll replace him with another character.’ Or, ‘Maybe this
antagonist we’ve chosen is not as interesting as we thought,’ which is what
happened in season three of Breaking Bad with the cousins. They
were simply not interesting enough to be at the center of an entire season of Breaking
Bad. And so they had to make a change. And it took them in a more
interesting direction.
Bunting: The Good Wife just did
that this [past] season. And that goes back to what we were talking about before, with
how much input viewers should have. Because my non-carnal work spouse Tara Ariano [co-founder, with Bunting, of the web site Television Without Pity] were talking
about it, and she’s like, “Look, I’m happy we’re talking to get rid of
Kalinda’s husband, Nick. He’s just not working: the actor’s not good, it’s not
credible that she’d be in this guy’s sexual thrall.’ Or anyone’s. She is the
thrall. [everyone laughs] She’s everyone’s thrall. But Tara was like, ‘But
while the end result is good, I’m not comfortable with the stated reason, which
is that the viewers aren’t really responding to this, and are writing him off.
If that’s the reason, great. But don’t give people ideas. Don’t tell us that.
Don’t make us think we have control over it.’
So you have to wonder how often
that’s the motivation for getting rid of various characters, and we never hear
about it. Who was the guy on Sopranos who couldn’t learn his lines
and…
MZS: Robert Loggia.
Bunting: …and they were like, ‘We’re
gonna violate his parole.’
MZS: Right, because, ‘This can’t
continue.’
Bunting: What was that one scene where
he’s speechifying at the card table? Apparently, it took them three days to
shoot it because it was just impossible.
MZS: Right. And you run into these
problems. And in a way, making a television show is like making a Mike Leigh, or
Robert Altman movie in that you sort of know what the story is, but you’re also
sort of finding it.
McGee: The flipside of what your saying
is: if you overplan, you don’t allow yourself to find the happy mistakes.
Ryan: And this is what frustrates me about,
‘Well, you’re just making it up as you go.’ Isn’t that the best possible
answer?!
MZS: It’s awesome! It’s awesome.
Ryan: Because then you get to season five
of 24, and it’s like, ‘We’re just going to do the Nixon White House.’
And they’ll be like, ‘Let’s just do that!’ And sometimes you can just hear the
machinery go… [makes grinding noises]
MZS: Well, that’s what makes TV so
exciting.
Bunting: Like a cruise ship trying to
turn. I think there might be a sort of…not class resentment, exactly. But I
think if enough people know how TV is made, they’d know that everyone is
getting paid a lot more than we proles are to watch it. But, ‘I want to know
that you have a plan, and that you are working 19 1/2 hours of your day on your
plan. I want to hear some valid excuses.’
Ryan: You wonder how many different
things have an impact on that plan. If you’re David Chase, and you’re HBO, your
plan is the plan. If you’re David Simon, your plan is the only plan. If you’re
anyone else–maybe David Milch. The three Davids; holy trinity. They can just
do their thing. But even Milch’s most recent show, Luck, they changed
the plan fairly regularly. They weren’t just allowed to hand actors script
pages hot off the presses. But anyone else, you have the studio, you have the
network, you have…
Bunting: Agents, any number of
practices…
Ryan: There’s this auteur theory of
television, which is great, and Alan’s book goes into in some detail. But even
there, it becomes clear that in some extremely rare outlier cases, there is an
auteur who controls most, if not all, aspects of things. But that is incredibly
rare. And they live in this echo chamber…
MZS: I was going to say that I disagree
with that, though the only word I would disagree with is, “control.”
Because in a lot of instances, they’re more like impresarios. Or
they’re presiding over accidents.
Ryan: Absolutely.
