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 5 looks at the lessons that TV producers took away from The Sopranos‘ success, for good and ill.
MZS: Another thing that I think people
don’t take into account when they’re thinking about how television is made is
the 24-hours-in-a-day rule is a big, big factor. When you think about, just
think for a minute: if you are writing a letter to somebody, that you want to
say something important, and you want to make sure you’re not misunderstood,
think about how much time you spend writing that letter. And then think about
how much time it would take to outline a one-hour episode of a television drama
that’s maybe a dozen, or two dozen characters’ stories, all of which need to
touch upon each other in some way in order to satisfy the audience. And then,
you’ve got two or three weeks to shoot that episode, maybe another two, or
three weeks to edit it.
Then you can’t touch it anymore. It’s gotta go on the
air.
Bunting: Then past a certain point,
you gotta trust all the other technicians to do their jobs, trust the actors
will have an ear for what they’re supposed to say. You have to trust the
costume designer not to put somebody in a distracting orange tent. You have to
think, “Ok, who’s hiding that Charisma Carpenter is enormously pregnant?
She’s just gonna be in bed, and possessed for three episodes.’ There are a lot
of things you can’t control, and then there are the things you can control. You
know, language is imperfect.
MZS: Television shows are an artistic
achievement, but they’re also an athletic event. ‘How can we get this done? We
have six months to put together a season of a show: how in the hell are we
going to do this?’
McGee: I wrote a piece in the fall [of 2012], it was
in reaction to the [second] season of Homeland, the fourth episode,
where all of a sudden, the character of Brody’s storyline took a twist that
nobody thought was going to happen in that episode. And in spite of that, I talked to a
couple of show-runners. This was inspired, I think, by [Homeland executive producer] Howard Gordon’s interview with Andy Greenwald from Grantland.
He said, ‘The only surprise they have left in the arsenal is timing.’ Because
audiences are so sophisticated now. They understand how the sausage is made
much more than even during the time of The Sopranos; that every
possibility that you can think of has probably been already put on a message
board somewhere, and been delineated, and has been executed in that way.
But one of the problems was the
factor of timing, especially on network [programming]. Bill Lawrence [William Lawrence, creator of Scrubs and Cougar Town] equated the idea of doing 22 episodes to having 22
term papers due every Sunday for 22 weeks. And there’s a beauty to it: because
if it’s bad, you just gotta let it go. But if it’s great, you can’t sit on your
laurels too much, because you have to make another one almost instantly.
MZS: Maybe we should talk about this:
what did The Sopranos do to television? What did it enable other people
to do? What effect has it had? And has that been largely positive, or have
there been some downsides?
Ryan: Well, I think the enormously
positive thing was that…I would bet that when David Chase set out to make
this, he thought, ‘Well, I’m going to make this thing that’s influenced by the
filmmaking I’ve loved. It’ll be this existential piece, but it’ll have this
candy-coated shell of mobster stuff.’ I don’t think he could have had any idea
of how culturally important it would become.
I think, in talking to people that
make TV, it was enormously freeing for them to see characters that were
that…they could be dumb, they could be vicious, they could be cruel, they
could be heartless, they could be wonderful, all at the same time.
“College” is the most cited
episode of television among people who make TV. It’s sort of like seeing the
Velvet Underground if you’re a musician in the ’60s. There’s something that was
unlocked by that that I think was incredibly helpful.
The downside is that then what people
took away from it was not, ‘Hey, we’ve unlocked this toy box,’ but, ‘Hey, we’ve
unlocked the toy box of the brain of the white male protagonist who is a middle
class guy.’
So, television is all about
imitation. It doesn’t surprise me that there’s so much of that. But I just
think there are signs that people are kind of maybe just starting to play in
other arenas. Because that other field has been farmed enough. Maybe we should
look for other things. But I think, as an influence…
MZS: It’s interesting to see what these
other shows seem to have gleaned from The Sopranos. Like, what they thought
the takeaway was. And on a show like The Shield, for example, it was the
plot, this machine of the plot. And the characters were important, but it was
the propulsive forward motion that was the thing that was most critical.
But you also see shows where it’s
also the psychology. The psychology is the main takeaway, and it’s sort of like
the story of the blind men trying to figure out that they’re looking at an
elephant. Everyone’s fixating on different aspects of The Sopranos, and
making their own show out of it. Boardwalk Empire is another of those.
Bunting: [to MZS] There’s
something you said earlier that made me think of the expression, that if you
try to make your story, or your art, very personal, and true to your personal
thing, then that lets it be universal. But if you try to do a show that’s
universal, or art that’s universal, then it sort of winds up being not for
anyone. ‘If you do it for yourself, then it’s for everyone. If you try to do it
for everyone, then it’s not for anyone.’
Whatever, I’m quoting that wrong. But
David Chase’s take on this world was extremely personal, so it happened to be
appealing to a whole bunch of different demographics: mafia fantasy people– [points to Ryan] and I really think you
should knit the hats for that.
Ryan: [laughs] I can, I can do that.
Bunting: ‘But I’m a Genovese girl.’
Just kidding; don’t call me. And then there were the film referents, both
American classics and Italian classics. There was the psychology of the
antihero.
And I think that that was the
influence I see, whether it’s Breaking Bad, Homeland. These shows
may not sound very personal, like one man’s journey. But they are.
And I agree that this middle class
white male becomes sympathetic, with some humor thrown in. That field has been
plowed enough for now, and needs to be allowed to lie fallow. But then you have
something like Girls, which gets a ton of flack, but it’s like, ‘You’re
right: this is really me. This is almost no one’s experience.’
MZS: She’s describing the inhabitants of
a particular zip code, for the most part.
Bunting: I think [Girls creator
Lena Dunham] is quite a bit less successful than some other examples at
universalizing these personal stories because they feature such privileged and
obnoxious behavior. But I respect the effort. I think that’s clear that that’s
what’s trying to happen. So, I don’t know, if we can get that sphere of
influence translated to a more diverse…
MZS: I’m intrigued more by– [points to McGee] you talked about timing being the
only surprise. I’m more intrigued by form now. The Sopranos was sort of unusual in the way it split the difference
between a short story, and a novel. But there are a lot of show on the air that
are taking a lot of chances with form. Either the way that they structure a
story over the course of a season, like American Horror Story, the idea
of doing an anthology series, where instead of doing a particular episode as a
self-contained story, it’s a season. I like that.
Bunting: And that guy [American Horror Story co-creator Ryan
Murphy] is the most ruthless planner. There are a lot of balls in the air, but
he knows exactly at what altitude they’re at.
MZS: And then you’ve got something like Louie,
which is like the most stylistically bold show on TV, hands down. Because it’s
the first really significant show I’ve seen that does not delineate between
what really happened, and what might be figurative, or a dream.
And they do that to some degree in
almost every episode, and you don’t know if you’re seeing a dry documentary-style
representation of this guy’s life, or if it’s the kind of hyperbole you’d get
from a stand-up comedy routine where he’s exaggerating. Like, Richard Pryor’s
crack pipe is talking to him: obviously the crack pipe didn’t talk to him. Louie
finds ways to cinematically do that, that kind of exaggeration. And then you
get something like the New Year’s Eve episode, which starts off as a part
standard stand-up comedy type account of Christmas with my kids. And then it
suddenly becomes this nightmare, like Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.
[all laugh] You kind of don’t know where
the dream begins…
Bunting: Wow, that was the most
obscure reference. Deep cuts, folks.
MZS: He falls asleep three different
times, and it’s almost like they’re deliberately telling you, ‘You don’t know
if this is a dream or not, and if so, where it started. And it doesn’t matter!’
And it’s the, ‘It doesn’t matter,’
part that excites me so much. Because if you think the ending of The
Sopranos is frustrating for the way it rips you out of the story. I think
that New Year’s Eve episode of Louie is ten times more frustrating if
you’re not used to that kind of ambiguous or artful way of telling a story.
Because we want to know: is this a dream or not? We want to know that. We’re trained to want to know that, and this show is
telling us, ‘You don’t know that, and you shoudn’t even want to know that. It doesn’t matter.’
That’s really bold.
McGee: What I love about Louie–I
had it as my favorite show of last year–is I said that in ten years, we’re
going to see that we’re coming out of the Golden Age of television, and we’re
going into something else right now. A year ago, I had a piece at the AV Club.
And I didn’t title it, but the name everyone read was one people yelled at me
about in the comments: ‘Did The Sopranos do more harm than good?’
MZS: Yeah, I remember that piece. I
almost left an angry comment, too.
McGee: That’s right!
MZS: And then I read the piece!
McGee: Nostalgia for what was lost: what I
think pulled out of The Sopranos, the critical love of it, was that
novel-ization. And The Sopranos is not a novel, as a show. You want to
know why? There’s lots of short stories in there. But the perception that there
was this long journey told over there.
So what did people do? They got their flash-forwards,
they got their five-year plan before the [first] episode was even shot, they
thought about the plan before thinking about a character.
And Louie is a show that forces you to lie within the episode itself,
hermetically sealed. You can take them as a whole, as an expression of an
artist. But you don’t need to have watched the past ten episodes to get what’s
going on in this particular one always. And this glut of, ‘Well, do I want to
spend five years catching up on Breaking Bad? Or do I want to jump in on
three-episode arc where [Louis CK] is taking over for Letterman?’
And again, with the auteur theory:
what can you do? What can you get away with? How many hands can get into the
pot, and at what level can people just be left alone to express themselves?
MZS: And you have to gauge how far you
can go, too. Because if you’re trying to go too far every single week,
eventually, people get tired of you.
Bunting: Well, it starts to feel a
little cynical. I didn’t track the response to the New Year’s Eve episode, but
I do feel like it was kind of polarizing.
MZS: It was, very.
Bunting: But do you think that ending
of The Sopranos has dulled our reactions to this kind of thing? Not to
ambiguity in general in art, but that feeling of dislocation? Because I wasn’t
aware if people felt that was a really bold episode of Louie, or if
that…
MZS: Well, I think Louie trains
you to be okay with it. I think one of the wonderful things about that show — and
I wish other shows would be reassured by it — is that the very nature of Louie
is so experimental that not everything is going to work. And there are many
episodes of it over the course of any season that really don’t do it for me. But
I know that that’s the way he works, and I know that it’s not going to all come
out perfectly, or please me. There may be other people that really liked the
thing I didn’t like. And that’s okay.
